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Lee Berry, a member of the Black Panther Party who was indicted within the largest case introduced in opposition to that militant group, and whose private plight helped encourage one of the vital notorious New York social gatherings, a fund-raising party for the Panthers on the dwelling of Leonard Bernstein that was mercilessly satirized by the author Tom Wolfe, died on March 7 in a hospital close to his dwelling in Laurel, Md. He was 78.
The trigger was anoxic mind harm, his daughter Afeni Berry mentioned.
Mr. Berry was one of many Panther 21 — 19 males and two ladies who had been charged in April 1969 with plotting to explode Midtown Manhattan department shops, police stations and the New York Botanical Garden within the Bronx.
The case collapsed spectacularly two years later with the acquittal on all fees of the 13 defendants who had been dropped at trial. The District Attorney’s workplace had primarily based its case on the testimony of undercover police informants, together with a detective who had opened the Harlem department of the Black Panthers in 1968.
Mr. Berry’s case was severed from that of the opposite defendants as a result of he was in Bellevue Hospital when the trial started in February 1970.
It was his private travail that prompted Felicia Bernstein, the spouse of the New York Philharmonic maestro, to ask 90 visitors to the couple’s Park Avenue house on Jan. 14, 1970, to lift cash for the Panther 21 authorized protection fund. Mr. Wolfe, a luminary of what was being referred to as the New Journalism, wrote his takedown of the high-low soiree in New York journal beneath the headline “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
He devoted many phrases to the canapés (“little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts”) handed by liveried waiters to Panthers in Afros, darkish glasses and black leather-based coats, all mingling with the director Otto Preminger, the band chief Peter Duchin, the socialite Cynthia Phipps and different A-list liberals within the Bernstein dwelling, a 13-room penthouse duplex.
But the party may by no means have occurred if Ms. Bernstein had not been at an earlier Panther fund-raiser the week earlier than, on the dwelling of the director Sidney Lumet, the place Mr. Berry’s spouse, Marva Berry, spoke about her husband’s ordeal behind bars.
An Army veteran, Mr. Berry, then 24, was being handled for epileptic seizures at a Veterans Administration Hospital when he was indicted. After his mom instructed him that the police had been searching for him, he referred to as to inform them the place to seek out him. Officers rousted him from his hospital mattress in handcuffs and took him to the Manhattan Detention Complex, often called the Tombs, in line with the account Ms. Berry gave on the Lumet dwelling.
“It was this assertion, which went on to allege that her husband was overwhelmed within the Tombs, denied correct treatment and held for seven months earlier than being transferred to Bellevue, that prompted Mrs. Bernstein to seek the advice of with some civil rights attorneys after which invite buddies in to listen to extra in regards to the case,” wrote Charlotte Curtis, a society reporter for The New York Times, who coated the Bernsteins’ party.
“I used to be shocked,” Ms. Bernstein instructed The Times about Ms. Berry’s account. “I couldn’t imagine anybody may have been handled so inhumanely.”
At one level in the course of the party Ms. Berry tried to consolation a wealthy white girl who frightened that she and her capitalist husband could be killed when the revolution got here. “Oh, no,” Ms. Berry mentioned. “You sound as in case you’re afraid. Now, there’s no cause for that.”
In a federal lawsuit over the Panthers’ pretrial confinement, protection attorneys claimed that Mr. Berry was overwhelmed by a jail guard for refusing to face for a prisoner depend and was denied therapy for his epilepsy. The Department of Correction denied the accusations.
Mr. Berry was transferred from the Tombs to Bellevue Hospital in November 1969. After a listening to within the hospital, his bail was diminished from $100,000 to $15,000 in April 1970, and he quickly walked free.
The fees in opposition to him had been ultimately dropped.
Leo Stanley Berry was born on Jan. 16, 1946, in Brooklyn to Leo Berry, who had moved north from Georgia as a part of the Great Migration of African Americans looking for a greater life, and Elizabeth (Rizer) Berry, who had moved from Florida. His father left the household when Lee was 6. He was raised within the Cypress Hills Housing Project within the East New York neighborhood and attended Lane High School.
Mr. Berry joined the Army in 1964 and spent two years in Germany earlier than being medically discharged due to a seizure dysfunction, in line with his household. He married and had a daughter, however the couple quickly separated and later divorced.
Mr. Berry met Marva Kirton in Brooklyn in 1968, simply earlier than the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After Dr. King’s homicide, founders of the Black Panthers from the West Coast visited the campus of Long Island University to arrange a New York Panther department. Mr. Berry was an early recruit. (Another early member was Afeni Shakur, one of many two ladies indicted with the Panther 21; she was the long run mom of the rap star Tupac Shakur.)
“That was a pivotal second when individuals had been feeling a really sturdy lack of hope,” Ms. Berry, who turned a public-school teacher in New York and Washington, recalled in a latest interview. “Lee and lots of people after Dr. King was killed, they’d had sufficient.”
Before becoming a member of the Panthers, Mr. Berry had demonstrated in help of Black native management of the general public faculties within the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn, after directors there fired 12 Jewish academics, triggering a citywide academics’ strike.
The nationwide Black Panther Party was based in 1966 in Oakland, Calif. Its early members carried loaded rifles to guard in opposition to police brutality, whereas additionally demanding, in a 10-point program, jobs, housing and faculties “that expose the true nature of this decadent American society.”
The Panthers’ militancy was met by an F.B.I. marketing campaign to destroy the group, partly by pitting factions in opposition to one different. Violent encounters with the police and with different Black nationalist teams within the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s claimed quite a few lives.
During the Panther 21 trial, the house of the presiding judge, John M. Murtagh, was firebombed, inflicting injury however no accidents.
Two of the Panther 21 defendants had been later convicted of roles within the infamous 1981 theft of a Brink’s armored automobile in Rockland County, N.Y., which left a guard and two law enforcement officials dead.
One of the lads, Donald Weems, also referred to as Kuwasi Balagoon, died in jail. The different, Edward L. Joseph, also referred to as Jamal Joseph, served 5 and a half years in jail and is now a professor at Columbia University.
Mr. Berry turned a industrial photographer with a storefront enterprise in East New York. He and his spouse and their quite a few youngsters had been recognized of their neighborhood, the place they drove a yellow station wagon, because the Berry Bunch. The couple divorced within the Nineties.
In addition to his daughter Afeni, Mr. Berry is survived by six different youngsters, Nicole Hall, Jemyl Lindsay and Safonia, Shaka, Chad and Niger Berry; seven grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a brother, Tom.
A grandson, Christopher Lindsay, dramatized Mr. Berry’s imprisonment in a play, “Songs of a Caged Bird,” which was carried out on-line in 2021 whereas Mr. Lindsay was a graduate scholar at Brown University.
Despite the mockery heaped upon the Bernsteins and different wealthy New Yorkers who feted the Panthers in 1970, Marva Berry mentioned that she had not felt condescended to, and that the evenings raised consciousness of the Panther 21 when not many individuals had been paying consideration.
“It was a really welcoming occasion,” she mentioned of the Bernstein party. “It was a altering time in historical past, the place individuals had been shifting from one stage to the following.”
