Black Panthers' "field marshal" and "arms expert" Donald L. Cox died last month in France, the NY Times reports today. Cox had been living in exile since the early '70s after he fled the U.S. to evade a warrant for his arrest; he'd been charged as a conspirator in the murder of a Black Panther member who had been a police informer in Baltimore. But before he was indicted, Cox was a guest at a fundraiser for the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein's apartment in the Dakota in 1970. This party was made famous by Tom Wolfe's New York magazine feature "Radical Chic," in which Wolfe recalls Cox's speech to the posh people in attendance:

"The pigs, they say the Black Panthers are armed, the Black Panthers have weapons . . . see . . . and therefore they have the right to break in and murder us in our beds. I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves if somebody came in and attacked them or their families . . . see . . . I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves . . ."

—and every woman in the room thinks of her husband . . . with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas . . . ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing—

"We call them pigs, and rightly so," says Don Cox, "because they have the way of making the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim. So every Panther must be ready to defend himself."

Charlotte Curtis of the NY Times was also on the scene, and reported that the event raised $10,000 for the legal defense fund for 21 New York Panthers who had been indicted on charges of plotting to kill police officers and blow up several sites around NYC. (They were all acquitted the next year.) She described one priceless exchange between Bernstein and Cox:

Mr. Bernstein: “Now about your goals. I’m not sure I understand how you’re going to achieve them. I mean, what are your tactics?”

Mr. Cox: “If business won’t give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.”

Mr. Bernstein: “I dig absolutely.”

Cox, who was born in Missouri in 1936, is survived by his second wife Barbara Cox Easley, and by a daughter, two sons, five grandchildren, and a great-grandson. His wife told the Times he lived a "very comfortable" life in France, but toward the end the isolation had begun to wear on him. She declined to say what the cause of death was.