Biography
Flores Forbes joined the Black Panther Party in San Diego as a teenager in 1968 and rose to assistant chief of staff, part of the security cadre around Huey P. Newton. In the first week of August 1974 he was arrested with Newton and six other Party members at the Fox nightclub in Oakland; Elaine Brown told the press that Forbes and Newton were beaten so severely while handcuffed that both needed hospital treatment, and that the announced charges — conspiracy to possess weapons, assaulting police officers and resisting arrest — followed a fight that never happened. In October 1977 he led the botched attack on the Richmond home of a witness against Newton in which fellow Panther Louis Johnson was killed and Forbes himself was wounded; after three years underground he surrendered in 1980, was convicted, and served four years, eight months, and nine days in California prisons — principally Soledad, with part of the term at San Quentin. After his release he earned a masters degree in urban planning, became a New York City planning executive and Columbia University administrator, and told his story in the memoir Will You Die with Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party (2006).
The custody chronology, assembled from the appellate record (People v. Forbes, 175 Cal. App. 3d 807, case A024602), a Colorado College biography prepared for his 2016 lecture, and his own account: he surrendered around October 1980 after three years underground, was indicted January 29, 1981, and was sentenced September 7, 1983 to six years for second-degree murder plus a consecutive two years for firearm use. The conviction was specifically for the killing of fellow Panther Louis Talbert Johnson under transferred intent — not attempted murder, as some later biographies state. He served exactly four years, eight months, and nine days, which — if his recollection of an October 1980 surrender is right — places his release between June 10 and July 9, 1985; the exact admission and release dates await his CDCR External Movement History, and only the year is entered until that record is located.
