On this day in 1968 the Black Panthers staged a twelve man nighttime raid on the Oakland Police. The raid was in ostensible retaliation for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who of course would not have approved of the same. The raid turned into a siege and after about 90 minutes the besieged Panthers, led by Eldridge Cleaver, surrendered.
What happened from there isn't clear. Cleaver claimed that the police shot Hutton during the surrender. The police claimed that 17 year old Hutton attempted to escape and was shot as a result of that.
Cleaver, for his part, went on to have a very unlikely biography before dying at age 62 of pneumonia. Fleeing for a time to Algeria due his activities and a pending murder charge, he later became a born again Christian and attempted to revive the codpiece in the form of his "virility pants" he called "the Cleavers". He'd ultimately come back to the United States, go through a series of religious conversions before converting to Mormonism, and politically becoming a conservative Republican.
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