Elmer Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt

Let us remember one of our own. Elmer Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt. How many men do you know are willing to sacrifice their freedom and live for a cause they believe in? I personally don’t know very many. Geronimo represents the fighter gene in the DNA of African Americans. The fight that was bred in us when were living out our lives in Africa. The fight that has since started to die a slow steady death. Now it has been replaced with sagging pants, misogynistic lyrical content, hood rats, high drop out rates, staggering rates of incarceration, single mothers and serious black on black violence. If was born during the time of the Black Panther movement I would’ve been right in the thick of it.


But like many other political fractions the Black Panther party allowed power and outside influences to be their demise. But for awhile they grabbed the bull by the horn and started to take control of their schools and neighborhoods. Did y’all know that Geronimo was Tupac’s god father………how awesome is that. I would have loved to have all that knowledge and revolutionary spirit around me.

If you want a brief history lesson read about our brother Geronimo below. Trust me it’s worth it. Of course I’ve added my own commentary.


In 1968, five of his siblings were living in Los Angeles, and they convinced Pratt to enroll at UCLA, which had initiated a "High Potential Program" intended to help minorities pursue a college education. That fall, Pratt began to attend classes at the Westwood campus. There, he met Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, ( Is it me or did you have to have a cool nick name to join the Black Panthers) who had also grown up in Louisiana and was one of the original members of the Black Panther Party--a group that Pratt soon joined. It was Carter who gave Pratt the nickname "Geronimo," to honor his fierce commitment to the party. "Being fresh from Vietnam, plus being from the South, opened my eyes to a lot of things," Pratt was quoted as saying in Race and Class Magazine.

After Carter and another Panther leader were killed by a rival organization, Pratt was quickly promoted in the party hierarchy. By 1969, at age 22, he had become the party's deputy minister of defense--bypassing 36-year-old Panther Julius Butler, and causing a rivalry between them. That rivalry would become important later, when Butler became a key prosecution witness in Pratt's murder trial.
As defense minister, Pratt got into trouble with the law several times over the next few years: he was arrested for possessing a pipe bomb and for assault with a deadly weapon, though neither charge stuck. In late 1969, he was ordered by Huey Newton to "go underground" to build a "revolutionary infrastructure" in the Deep South. Pratt spent the rest of that year travelling around Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, gathering weapons and fortifications for Newton's latest directive for the party: a separate nation for blacks.
By 1970, Pratt was under surveillance by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Attorney's Office. Although it wasn't known at the time, both offices were in contact with the FBI; according to FBI documents released in the late seventies, Pratt was one of the "key black extremists" that the FBI wanted to "neutralize

On December 8, 1970, Pratt was arrested in Dallas, Texas, and extradited back to California, charged with involvement in a 1969 shootout. Later, he was indicted as one of the two suspects in the unsolved "tennis court murder." Two years earlier, on December 18, 1968, Caroline Olsen and her husband, Kenneth Olsen, were about to begin a game of tennis on a Santa Monica court when two men, described as black and in their twenties, robbed them at gunpoint. During the bungled robbery, which netted just $18, Caroline Olsen was shot to death and Kenneth Olsen was wounded.
"At the time that I was indicted, it was just another charge that they threw in to maintain a no-bail situation...," Pratt told Race and Class Magazine in 1992. "Eventually, it became more and more obvious to us that the murder charge was something that they were really going to try and press."


It was something that they were really going to try and press."
Pratt contended he was at a Black Panther meeting in Oakland, 400 miles away, the night of the shooting; but his alibi was substantially weakened when many high-ranking Panthers refused to confirm it. By 1970, the party was split by a bitter feud which would eventually destroy it. On one side were Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who renounced violence; on the other were Eldridge Cleaver and his followers--including Pratt--who favored more militant methods. While Eldridge Cleaver's wife, Kathleen Cleaver, and two other Panthers testified in support of Pratt, Huey Newton ordered members of his faction not to testify at the trial. More damaging piece testimony came from Kenneth Olsen, who identified Pratt as the killer.

The final piece of evidence came from Pratt's rival, Julius Butler, who testified that Pratt had confessed the murder to him. Days after Pratt had expelled him from the Panthers in 1969, Butler gave a contact at the Los Angeles Police Department an "insurance letter," to be opened only if he were killed. In the letter, Butler implicated Pratt in the unsolved murder--the first time Pratt had been tied to the crime. Later, allegedly under pressure from the FBI, Butler authorized the LAPD to open the letter.

Between the unconfirmed alibi, positive identification, and alleged confession--which Pratt denied to no avail--the prosecution's case was convincing. At the end of the 1972 trial, Pratt was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison



In 1976 in November Pratt’s wife Sandra, eight months pregnant, was murdered – shot five times at point blank range and dumped alongside an LA freeway (perhaps by US militants – the murder was never seriously investigated)., he married Asahki Ji Jaga; his first wife, Sandra, had been murdered in 1971 by the Newton faction of the Black Panther Party.


Pratt spent the first eight years of his sentence at San Quentin, in solitary confinement; but after Amnesty International took up his case, a jury determined that keeping him in solitary confinement was illegal. Several years later, he was transferred to Folsom. By the time he was finally released, Pratt was being held in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, Amador County, California. In his 27 years in prison, Pratt was turned down for parole 16 times, because he refused to admit guilt or renounce his politics.

Shortly after Pratt was jailed, the case against him began to unravel. First, it came to light that Kenneth Olsen had originally chosen another man out of a police line-up. In his sworn testimony, Olsen had claimed that he had positively identified only one suspect--Geronimo Pratt.

Next, the FBI's role in Pratt's conviction came to light. In 1975, a congressional committee released its explosive findings about the FBI's covert counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO. During the sixties and seventies, the agency deliberately tried to disrupt political groups that it deemed too radical--authorizing illegal phone taps and IRS audits, using informants, and trying to cause dissension within the groups. By 1968, the committee discovered, the Panthers were COINTELPRO's primary target; FBI documents explicitly called for Pratt, along with other leaders, to be "neutralized."
The most significant piece of evidence, however, surfaced in 1980. According to FBI documents, the key prosecution witness, Julius Butler, had acted as an FBI informant--and had denied it under oath during Pratt's original trial. During the trial, neither jurors nor defense attorneys were told of any FBI involvement in the case.
And finally, after Huey Newton's death in 1989, six Panthers came forward to testify that Pratt had indeed been present at the 1968 meeting in Oakland. "It has been on my mind all of these years that I should have testified," Bobby
March 1996 hearing, his case had become a cause drawing support from Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, several members of Congress, Coretta Scott King, and Nelson Mandela. Even members of the original jury that convicted Pratt had joined his defense

On June 10, 1997, in front of a courtroom packed with 1960s activists, Judge Dickey ordered Pratt to be released on $25,000 bail. He had spent 27 years behind bars. "It's the most satisfying victory in my career," Cochran was quoted as saying in Jet. "I've been fighting for this for 25 years."
Pratt was released in time to watch his son, Hiroji, go through his eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Later, he returned to Louisiana to see his 94-year-old mother, Eunice Petty Pratt, whom he had not seen since 1974.
Pratt's stood completely vindicated when in 2000 the city of Los Angeles agreed to pay $2.75 million and the U.S. Department of Justice $1.75 million to settle a lawsuit for false imprisonment and violations of his civil rights. As Pratt's lawyer, Johnny Cochran, told reporters, "This case shows that you can fight city hall and win."

Geronimo passed away on Thursday, June 3, 20011, at age 63 in Tanzania. Pratt has lived in a small village in the country f