A Panther Passes On

The state tried to frame George Edwards and lock him up for life. His fellow revolutionaries tortured him and tried to kill him.

They didn’t know whom they were messing with.

He survived — and kept at his Black Panther mission for another half century, long after generations of fellow fighters left the theater.

It was kidney cancer that finally claimed the life of George Edwards. He died late last Friday in Connecticut Hospice at the age of 85.

Until his final months, he remained one of New Haven’s most visible and engaging voices, challenging power and supporting grassroots social justice crusades. Perhaps the most spied-on and messed-with political activist in New Haven history, he combined theatrical training with an unshatterable suspicion of government power to speak out wherever people gathered: on city buses, at library gatherings, at outdoor protests. You may or may not have agreed with his assertions about imperial power, CIA connections to Yale, black helicopters or the moon landing. It was impossible not to listen. Or to appreciate the man speaking.

Edwards also possessed a gentleness and kindness that endeared him to people whether or not they shared his intense convictions.

“He lived a full life,” said his daughter, Elizabeth Dickerson, who had a standing Sunday pancake breakfast date with her dad at the Hamden IHOP in his later years. They always sat at the same booth.

Edwards grew up in Goldsboro, N.C., where he engaged in his first protests with fellow high school students demanding that officials comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board desegregation ruling.

He worked on B‑52 bombers as an engineer for the U.S Air Force from 1955 through 1961, when he was unceremoniously removed for his role in antimilitarism protests. He later said a recording of a speech by Malcolm X had made him question his service to the United States: ​“I had a serious confrontation with history, politics, racism. I was becoming conscious of the world. This man had shown a light to the darkness of my brain.”

Yale School of Drama brought Edwards to New Haven, where he became a stalwart performer in the local Black Arts Movement.

When the national Black Panthers opened a chapter here in 1968, Edwards was one of its first members. Local cops and the FBI under its deadly COINTELPRO spying-and-disruption initiaive were already keeping tabs on him. He appeared on the FBI ​“Agitator Index’ and ​“Rabble Rouser Index.” His FBI file #124 – 310G would expand to 1,000 pages. It revealed how, if Edwards went to the store for a quart of milk, an agent made sure to follow. If a friend called about a broken stereo needing fixing, cops listened in on the call and took notes. COINTELPRO aimed in part to convince Panthers like Edwards that unseen people were out to harm them, that they couldn’t trust anyone.

That ruse became fact in 1969, when a New York Panther named Alex Rackley was brought to New Haven for a show trial in the basement of an apartment at the old Ethan Gardens Coop on Orchard Street. The apartment served as New Haven Panther headquarters. The Panthers accused Rackley of being a government informant involved in disrupting the New York chapter; it would later turn out that government informants indeed infiltrated that chapter (as well as New Haven’s), but Rackley wasn’t among them.

The Panthers tied Rackley to a chair and beat him and poured pots of boiling water over his body until he could come up with a story about serving as an informant. Edwards refused to participate in the torture. So they tied up Edwards too. With a .45 pointed at his head, he was ordered to ​“confess.”

Edwards was able to flee the apartment. He went into hiding. The Panthers secured Rackley for days to an upstairs bed, where he lay in his own waste. 

On the evening of May 20, an order came to drive Rackley to a spot out of town, where he would be murdered. Another Panther, Warren Kimbro, who had participated in the torture, was told to contact Edwards in order to take him on the murderous ride, too. Kimbro said he couldn’t reach Edwards.

New Haven police, aware of the Panthers’ every move thanks to informants and what was believed to be the nation’s largest per-capita illegal government wiretapping operation of dissidents, followed the car as it pulled out of the block. Rackley was inside. The other ​“discipline” target, Edwards, was not. The police chief was made aware of every move in real time. At some point police claimed they lost sight of the car as it traveled north on I‑91. Rackley was taken to the banks of the Coginchaug River in Middlefield, where he was shot dead.

The cops raided the Orchard Street headquarters the next night. They arrested a group of Panthers and charged them with Rackley’s murder. They went looking for Edwards, too. They found him. And they charged Edwards in the murder, as well — the murder in which he refused to participate, the murder in which he was supposed to be one of the victims.

The case became a national cause as well as the spark for a Mayday 1970 protest that brought radicals from around the country to New Haven for a protest rally that shut down Yale and the city. (Click here and here to read stories about that.)

Eventually, the charges were dropped against Edwards. Battered but as determined as ever to fight the power, Edwards returned to a life of activism in New Haven.

He also had scores to settle. Like: Who truly held up the banner of revolution when it counted, and who continued to do so. He kept his beret on his head and proudly declared himself a Black Panther decades after the original party collapsed, during new iterations that sporadically popped up.

Another score concerned file #124 – 310G and others like it. In 1983, New Haven agreed to pay 1,238 citizens a total of $1.75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its massive illegal wiretapping operation. Victims were each awarded between $1,000 and $6,000 depending on how often they were illegally surveilled. Edwards, of course, got the full $6,000.

The money helped. Edwards never made a lot of it. He had day jobs working as a technician for Southern New England Telephone, as a staffer for New Haven government’s pioneering needle-exchange program during the AIDS crisis.

He was mostly known as an omnipresence on New Haven streets, in settings formal and informal, with stories to tell and points to make. When activists built a shantytown to push Yale to divest from apartheid South Africa, Edwards was there to help build the structures. When activists joined politicians to elect the city’s first Black mayor in 1989, Edwards was in the trenches.

“He said his job was the community,” daughter Dickerson recalled.

Another score to settle was with fellow Panther Warren Kimbro. One night in 2006 Kimbro spoke at the Yale Bookstore about a book detailing the Panther period and his subsequent life in prison for murdering Rackley, as well as his post-prison life developing the model reentry agency Project MORE.

Edwards listened to Kimbro speak. (He listened to me, too; I co-wrote the book.) He listened as attendees asked Kimbro questions.

Then Edwards stood up. And the bookstore became his stage.

“After 37 years, five months tomorrow,” he told Kimbro, ​“I want a public apology for having been tied up in that basement at gunpoint, under orders of [out-of-town Panther] George Sams, a .45 to my head.”

You can watch his full statement in the below video. (Apologies for the quality — this was the dawn of online local media video, with rudimentary tools.)

Kimbro began with an explanation, claiming he had saved Edwards’ life. Then he gave the apology for which Edwards had waited all those years. You can watch Kimbro’s response in the videos above and below.

Daughter Dickerson, a nurse by training, noticed how much difficulty Edwards had getting up the stairs one Sunday earlier this year when she picked him up for their weekly IHOP pancake breafkast. His condition had been declining for a while.

“I said, ​‘Dad, it’s time.’ And he turned around and looked at me: ​‘No it isn’t. Because I’m not finished.’ 

“I had to wait until he was weaker. While he was still a little ambulatory I knew he wasn’t going to hospice. I had to wait until he couldn’t walk anymore.”

“If ever I met a man in my life other than my father that helped me and groomed me to have character, strength, wisdom and pride for myself and for my people, it would have been George Edwards,” said former West River Alder Yusuf Ibn Shah, a close friend who had a regularly weekday breakfast routine with Edwards in his final years.

“His consciousness, his leadership in the Black Panthers, is only a pinprick of who he was as a human being and as a man in this community. He has done so much more in this community to be honored and expressed.”

Edwards was predeceased by two sons, Che Farmer and George Browne. He is survived by daughter Angela Brown, daughter Elizabeth Dickerson and her wife Susan Baim, and former partner Elise Browne, mother of two of their children; by siblings Hilda Pate and Hazel White; and grandchildren Taivarr Divine-Brown and Jenaya Browne. He was predeceased by siblings Gloria Raibon, James Edwards, and Eddie Foxworth.

Shah and Dickerson are organizing a memorial gathering to express that honor and celebrate Edwards’ life, to take place at the Stetson Branch Library at an as-yet-undetermined date. A clothing drive for the needy is also planned in his memory.