It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Chapter 20
My Trial, 1973
By the time I went to trial, in 1973, the Black Panther Party had long been
struggling. COINTELPRO had done so much damage to the party across the
country: incarcerating Panthers, killing Panthers, pitting Panthers against one
another, planting fake evidence, demonizing the Panthers to society, and
threatening Panthers’ family members. The young organization never had a
chance to resolve philosophical differences and internal struggles while it was
under constant attack. Party leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver split
in 1972 and Cleaver left the country. Panthers all over the country started to
go underground for their own survival; some had been under constant
surveillance.
After our indictment in 1972, Malik Rahim gathered New Orleans
Panthers and other activists at his mother’s house and started a support
committee for us called Free the Angola 4. Chester Jackson and Gilbert
Montegut were not members of the Black Panther Party, but to the outside
world they were linked to us as Panthers. In June of that year we were written
up in the Black Panther newspaper. The New Orleans Panthers held events to
raise funds to hire lawyers and circulated flyers about us. New Orleans
Panthers Marion Brown, Althea Francois, Shirley Duncan, and others, many
of them college students, visited us. As support for us grew, local activists
Harry “Gi” Schafer and his wife, Jill, a white couple, joined our support
committee and quickly took on leadership roles. They had been heading the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on LSU’s New Orleans campus
since 1969. One of them volunteered to be the treasurer of our committee.
Black lawyers from Baton Rouge came to Angola to meet with us. A young
white lawyer named Charles Garretson, recently out of law school, also
visited us.
By the time my trial came up in 1973 our support committee was

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nonexistent. The fund-raising had stopped; the money disappeared. To us,
inside, it seemed that everybody had moved on. Not until 1975, when
someone sent me an article about Gi and Jill Schafer, did I learn the Schafers
were FBI informants who deliberately broke up our support committee. They
were paid $16,000 a year to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the SDS at LSU,
acting as spies and agents provocateurs, making up stories to create mistrust
among the students and antiwar protesters, and shaming many of them into
taking more extreme actions than they wanted to, which led to their arrests.
As a side project, they took on the Angola 4 support committee and played a