Harlen “Lamb” Lambert sat attentively a year ago as Daniel Michael Lynem, a former Black Panther, spoke about his life during a small gathering at the Heritage Museum of Orange County in Santa Ana.
“Sir, you are under arrest as a suspect for the murder of a police officer,” he informed Lynem, before reading the Panther his Miranda rights.
He announced “Badge of Color: Breaking the Silence,” a memoir about the racism he faced while an officer with the Santa Ana Police Department during the 1960s, was finally forthcoming after much promise.After the event, Lambert approached the former Panther turned pastor and embraced him. Born in Louisiana, Lambert grew up in Pine Bluff, Ark., during Jim Crow segregation. He came to Santa Ana by way of Chicago, to ready himself for a professional basketball career almost within reach.
Santa Ana’s small but active black community vocally pushed for inclusion in the ranks. By 1965, the OC Congress of Racial Equality demanded a police oversight board and the hiring of black officers on the city’s force to improve relations. O.C.’s NAACP chapter echoed the latter call as well.Police Chief Edward J. Allen told the press his department had done outreach in southwest Santa Ana, albeit with a caveat.
Nothing about Lambert’s historical task at hand came easy. The prologue to “Badge of Color” painfully recalls Officer Verlyn Powers, whose real name was changed in the book, driving to a dark street and ordering Lambert out of his patrol car. Powers, a field training supervisor originally from Mississippi, sped off, later reappeared, called Lambert the n-word, and told him to get back in the car — but not before accelerating each time he touched the door handle.
On one occasion, someone stuck a knife on the front door of his house, pinning a KKK business card to it. Others routinely called with threatening messages, including one calling him a “[n-word] pig” following a promise to rape his then-wife. “I got off at 11 o’clock that night,” Lambert recalls. “I had already put on my civilian clothes when the department called me.”
As the Sasscer murder case unfolded, Lambert watched two Panther brothers under protective custody who served as key witnesses for the prosecution. That’s when he learned of the party’s hit against him.The department took the threat seriously enough to take Lambert off the case as requested. She didn’t survive. Thanks to Lambert and the second cop arriving on scene, all three children inside the home did.
By then, his wife, who had moved back to Chicago with their son after the Panther death threat, wanted a divorce. Inside the department, he witnessed police planting drugs on people before arresting them and using excessive force. Chief Allen retired later that year. By then, Sgt. Brandon Webb, whose real name was also changed in Lambert’s memoir, had long picked up where Powers left off.
He kept himself preoccupied with a business training security dogs that became successful during his suspension from the police department. Harlen “Lamb” Lambert, 83, and wife Sharron, 73, smile for a photo at their home in Fullerton. Sharron helped her husband complete his memoir about his time as the first black cop in Santa Ana called “Badge of Color, Breaking the Silence.”
Self-published in September, Lambert is happy to finally tell his story. His efforts to build a bridge with a badge didn’t prove to be all in vain.
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