He was an Attorney who represented social and political radicals, including members of the Black Panther Party and Vietnam War protesters.

BEFORE FAME
While growing up and facing discrimination for his ethnic Armenian roots, he was inspired to dedicate his life to help the similarly downtrodden.

TRIVIA
He was hired as the chief counsel of the Black Panther Party, and defended their member Huey P. Newton in a police officer murder trial.

FAMILY LIFE
He was born Garabed Robutlay Garabedian in Bridgewater, Massachusetts to Armenian parents that had escaped the genocide in Turkey.

ASSOCIATED WITH
In addition to defending Bobby Newton for the Black Panthers, he later represented the party chairman Bobby Seale during the trial of the Chicago Seven.

Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts to Armenian immigrant parents who had escaped the Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire, Garry grew up in a farm town in California's Central Valley. He worked his way through law school at night at a cleaning shop and was a Great Depression-era socialist who began his legal career defending militant trade unions. Like many in his generation, Garry earned his law degree without attending college, and suffered difficulty with spelling and syntax. An avowed Marxist lawyer, Garry earned a reputation of fighting for underdogs. He insisted on a full truthful disclosure from those he represented, and had a sign on his desk that read "the only clients of mine who go to San Quentin are the ones who lie to me."

In 1948, Garry was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Garry declared that he was both a Christian and a Communist and, in response to queries regarding the denial of God by Communists, Garry responded by saying, "Mr. Chairman, what the Communists do for their God is their own business. What I do for my God is my own, and none of yours!" In the 1950s, Garry represented other alleged Communists before the HUAC and refused to answer questions himself stating, "I told them to kiss my ass."


In 1977, amidst media scrutiny and potential litigation, Garry began representing the controversial Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, in a number of suits, including several by and against Timothy Stoen. Garry's political philosophy meshed at least to some degree with that of the Temple, a communist organization, and many felt that Garry's representation added credibility to the Temple as a political organization. Garry believed that the Temple had managed to establish in Jonestown what Garry himself referred to as "paradise." Garry believed that the Temple picked up where the Movement of the 1960s left off, and that Jonestown was like "socialized society."

After listening to Temple members discuss the history of the case, Garry initially announced on September 8, 1977, that "[w]e've come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy by government agencies to destroy Peoples Temple as a viable community organization." After further experience with the Temple, including reviewing the results of several Freedom of Information Act requests, Garry eventually changed his conclusion to the belief that there was little government interest, let alone a conspiracy.

Throughout his representation, Garry argued with members of the Temple. Garry had a tumultuous relationship with another Temple attorney, Mark Lane, because Garry felt that Lane repeatedly interfered in Garry's areas of representation and made too high profile the Temple's claims of a conspiracy against it.

Garry and Lane accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan and his delegation on their investigation of Jonestown in November 1978. On November 18, 1978, Garry and Lane escaped potential harm at Jonestown by talking their way past Temple security at a house to which they were sent that was located some distance from Jonestown's pavilion. That day, 918 people died in Jonestown and Georgetown, which comprised the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the incidents of September 11, 2001.[In addition, five people were murdered by Temple members at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Ryan, who became the only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in United States history.

Later life Edit

Garry continued to practice law after the Jonestown incident, his clientele changed and his chance for further national acclaim had passed. His post-Jonestown press conferences of November/December 1978 served as his final public acts. Garry served as President of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice in 1979. Garry died of a stroke in August 1991, at the age of 82 in Berkeley, California.

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Charles R. Garry
17 Mar 1909 • Bridgewater MA

Residence
1910 • Bridgewater, Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA
Age: 1; Marital Status: Single; Relation to Head of House: Son

Birth of Brother Harvey Garabedian(1914–2003)
14 Nov 1914 • Fresno, California

Birth of Brother Charles Garabedian(1917–1988)
9 Jun 1917 • Massachusetts

Birth of Brother Haig Garabedian(1919–2005)
20 Jul 1919 • Selma CA

Death of Sister Louise Garabedian(–1925)

Marriage
09 Nov 1932 • Alameda, California, USA
Louise Edgar (1910–1993)

Residence
1935 • San Francisco, San Francisco, California

Residence
1 Apr 1940 • San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States
Age: 31; Marital Status: Married; Relation to Head of House: Head

Military
3 Sep 1943 • San Francisco, California
Age: 34

Death of Mother Varthouie (Elmas) Rose Garabedian Garabedian Bannaian(1888–1951)
12 Jul 1951 • San Francisco, CA
1951
42
Death of Father Hagop (Harry) Robutlay (Bagdasse) Garabedian(1877–1973)
17 Nov 1973 • San Francisco, California

Death of Brother Charles Garabedian(1917–1988)
24 Dec 1988 • Bridgewater, Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States of A

His Death
16 Aug 1991 • Alameda, Alameda, California, USA
Age at Death: 82
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Huey Newton Slain
August 23, 1989
Ex-black Panther Huey Newton Slain
August 23, 1989|By Bruce Buursma, Chicago Tribune. Tribune reporters Joel Kaplan and Gary Marx contributed to this report.


587
OAKLAND — Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party and a revolutionary icon for the nation`s black power movement in the 1960s, was shot to death Tuesday in an impoverished west Oakland neighborhood, only two blocks from the original Panther headquarters.

The 47-year-old Newton was gunned down just before dawn. Homicide detectives said they had no suspect or motive for the slaying of Newton, whose defiant espousal of armed resistance gained him an anti-Establishment following in the years his now-defunct political party was at the height of its influence.




As word of Newton`s death spread through this hard-scrabble city across the bay from San Francisco, scores of mourners streamed to the sidewalk where he was found dying, scooping up his blood in plastic cups as a memento and leaving bouquets of gladiolas and carnations against a fence there.

``He was one of the few who did more than talk,`` said Leo Alderson, who described himself as a follower of Newton`s. ``The man was a man. He didn`t fear nobody.``

Newton was a contradictory figure, a person defiled as a gangster and hailed as a leader with deep humanitarian motives. He earned a doctorate but spent years of his life in prison and courtrooms, overcoming two murder charges but convicted of lesser crimes.

He was shot shortly after his release from San Quentin, where he was serving time for a narcotics-related parole violation.

In Chicago, Ald. Bobby Rush (2d), a former Black Panther leader, called Newton a man who ``had the courage to be an original thinker, an individual who did not compromise his intellectual integrity.``

``Huey developed an organization that captured the imagination of urban youth,`` Rush said. ``He represented poor and oppressed people throughout the world.``

But Alameda County Assistant District Atty. Tom Orloff called Newton ``a gangster`` who never deserved his mythic status.

``I think it`s all a form of entertainment,`` Newton said in a jailhouse interview in 1987, reflecting on his life. ``Sometimes we choose a horror show.``

Oakland Police Lt. Mike Sims said patrol officers, responding to an anonymous call reporting gunfire, found Newton unarmed and unconscious. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

A nearby resident, Audrey DePalm, told reporters later that she heard four shots fired in rapid order, but Sims refused to disclose the number of wounds or the caliber of bullets used in the fatal attack.

He was living several miles from the area where he was shot, an area now plagued by gangs and drug-related violence. The police said they had no reason to believe the murder was drug-related.

Huey Percy Newton was born in Louisiana in 1942, the youngest of seven children. His father, a New Orleans minister, moved the family to Oakland a year later.

Newton attended public schools and said he became aware early of white teacher prejudice against black students.

In time, he said black students learned to deal with white authorities by fighting them or outmanipulating them or skirting their rules, and that led to bitter confrontations with the police.

A devotee of China`s late Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Newton embarked on a self-imposed exile to Cuba for three years in the mid-1970s.

His former attorney, Charles Garry of San Francisco, called his onetime client the ``greatest theoretician in the revolutionary movement, higher than even Lenin or Marx. He brought out that black Americans had dignity and the right to defend themselves.``

But Garry also noted that Newton`s importance in the civil rights movement had sharply faded in the past decade. At the height of the movement, the Panthers claimed more than 2,000 members in more than 30 cities.

Newton, who co-founded the Panther movement with Bobby Seale, said the party was renouncing ``the rhetoric of the gun`` in 1972, and during his exile in Cuba the party began operating an inner-city school, a health clinic and a children`s breakfast program.

But by 1982, soon after Newton earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, the organization ceased all operations amid charges that Newton had used state grants to the school for his own benefit.

At that time, he lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland and drove a Mercedes-Benz.

Author Peter Collier, who chronicled the `60s and `70s in ``Destructive Generation,`` said the party ``collapsed in Newton`s megalomania`` and he termed Newton`s demise a kind of ``odd and bizarre poetic justice.``

Ronald Newton, 24, who said Huey Newton adopted him after marrying his mother, disputed the perception that his father was a violent revolutionary.

``He was never a violent person. He never preached, `Go out and kill people,` `` said Newton, who recently moved to Chicago from Oakland and works at a hair salon on East Walton. ``I remember times people would try to provoke him into fighting, and he wouldn`t do it.``

Black Panthers Reconsidered
February 28, 2000

Style Overwhelms Black Panthers' Story
June 5, 1996

Former Panther Cleaver Dies At 62
May 1, 1998
Eldridge Cleaver, the fiery Black Panther information minister whose prison book "Soul On Ice" became a seminal work of the Black Power movement, died Friday at age 62. Cleaver, who after a shootout with police and exile in Algeria returned to the United States and traversed the political spectrum, died at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. Spokeswoman Leslie Porras declined to provide the cause of death, citing the family's request. At times a convict, political candidate and author, Cleaver was one of the original Black Panthers, formed in 1966 in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Later, he denounced his past stance, joined the Republican Party and became a born-again Christian.

Newton Eulogized In Spirit Of The `60s
August 29, 1989