Who is Danny Bakewell, the Black L.A. power broker named in the Nury Martinez audio?
This is my first write-up of this week’s latest Danny Bakewell saga. Nury Martinez, a former L.A. Galaxy player and current radio personality in Portland, Oregon, has been talking for quite a while about Danny Bakewell, who was a prominent Black Panther on the West Coast during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his latest podcast, Nury describes Bakewell’s racist behavior toward an African American woman in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and on the playground (the latter, I understand from Nury, involved baking a birthday cake for a boy). Bakewell, it seems, was also involved in sexual relationships with black women during this time.
Nury’s claims are detailed in an audio clip that went viral this week. He began the podcast by describing how he talked with the former Galaxy player about Bakewell’s alleged racist behavior with a black woman, and how Nury was told the story by members of the former Black Panther group he had been a member of while he was in college in Illinois.
“They told me the story. They told me why he left the Panther Party,” Nury says.
He goes on to detail that several of his friends from the Black Panther chapter in Chicago, where Nury went to college, told him in various interviews that Danny Bakewell was a racist.
Nury then went on to say that he had been working with several of the former black Panthers to have an interview in which he could ask Danny for a comment. As he said on his podcast, “And one of my closest friends said he told me that Danny Bakewell was in a black women, he just did a story on two black women back when he was a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.”
“And I said, you know, that’s interesting. I’m surprised to hear that, because I haven’t read his books. I’ve never read a black Panther Party manifesto,” Nury added.
Nury then went on to describe