“North Side Revolutionaries in the Civil Rights Struggle”
by Bruce Fehn and Robert Jefferson
The Annals of Iowa 69 (Winter 2010)
Excerpt:
“During fall 1968 and spring 1969, as racial tensions intensified in Des Moines schools and elsewhere, Charles Knox became the militant face of the Des Moines Black Panther Party. Knox first came to prominence when, on October 10, 1968, a spectacular fire destroyed the Jewett Lumber Company on Des Moines’s east side. Five African Americans, including Knox, Joeanna Cheatom, and the latter’s 16-year-old son Marvin, were arrested and charged with setting the fire. Furthermore, while he was still under indictment for arson in the Jewett Lumber case, police arrested Knox in Good Park on April 13, 1969, for defying orders to stop speaking over a portable address system. On that day Knox and other Black Panther Party members had attended a rally at the park to promote a free breakfast program for impoverished children of the near north side neighborhood.50 The rally proceeded smoothly, and nearly came to a close, when about 12 police officers moved in to arrest participants on charges of unlawful assembly and resisting arrest. Des Moines police sergeant Ed Harlan told reporters that when police ar- rived at Good Park, Knox “turned his attention to the officers and advised the crowd to ‘rise up and strike out’ and to turn on the Des Moines pigs.” As police moved to arrest Knox, BPP member Charles Edward Smith came to the aid of his fellow Panther by trying to pull Knox from the clutches of arresting officers. At the same time, boisterous groups moved down University Avenue, hurling rocks and bricks at squad cars and passing vehicles, smashing windshields in the process.51 By nightfall, University Avenue had taken on features of a war zone, with Forest and University avenues closed to traffic and patrolmen stationed at every corner…