Ericka Huggins & the Black Panther Party

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Ericka Jenkins was born on January 5, 1948, the oldest of three children. Her parents were both federal clerks in Washington, DC. At just 15 years old, in August, 1963, Ericka attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, which was organized by leaders of six of the most prominent civil rights groups of the time, drew a quarter of a million participants. It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his now famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Ericka, who attended the march alone, against her parents wishes, saw the march as a turning point in her life, motivating her toward political activism. In 1965, after graduating from high school, Ericka enrolled in what was then called Cheyney State Teachers College, now the Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the nation's oldest historically Black college. After a year, she transferred to Lincoln University, another HBCU in Pennsylvania. There, Ericka witnessed racial violence. She also attended listening sessions where Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton read from their co- authored book, "Black Power: The Politics of Liberation," which they wrote at Lincoln while Ericka was a student there. Across the country, in Oakland, California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College, formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense on October 15, 1966. They wrote a 10 point program which included such things as demands for full employment, decent housing, the exemption of Black men from military service, and an end to police brutality. In 1967, Ericka saw a story in a left leaning political magazine, that discussed Huey Newton's arrest for the shooting of an Oakland police officer. It showed a picture of Newton strapped to a hospital gurney with a bullet wound in his stomach. The inhumane treatment of Newton drove Ericka to take action. She and her future husband, John Huggins left Lincoln University in November of 1967, and drove to California to join the Black Panther Party. Ericka and John quickly became involved in the Southern California Chapter in Los Angeles, with John becoming a co-leader of the chapter with Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter. In 1968, Ericka gave birth to their daughter, Mai. Tragically, in January, 1969, John and Bunchy were shot and killed by a member of the Black nationalist group, US Organization at an event on the UCLA campus. The FBI had infiltrated both groups, and it's likely that they had purposely stoked divisions that led to the murders. In the wake of the murders, Ericka and Mai moved to John's hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. And Erica opened a chapter of the Black Panther Party there, where they started a free breakfast program and a health clinic. In May of 1969, Black Panthers, Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas, under the direction of George Sams brutally murdered New Haven Black Panther Party member Alex Rackley, whom Sams had led them to believe was an FBI informant. Ericka and other members of the New Haven chapter were arrested, as was Bobby Seale, who was in town for a talk on Yale's campus. Ericka was incarcerated at the Connecticut Correctional Institution for Women in Niantic on Thursday, May 22, 1969. Ericka was kept with the other Black Panther Party women, until they were all released. On November 9, 1970, Ericka was finally moved in with the general population, and it was then that she and a couple of other prisoners started the Sister Love Collective. Finally, after a lengthy trial for Ericka and Bobby Seale, including four months just on jury selection, on May 25, 1971, two years after k was first incarcerated, the charges for both were dropped, after the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Ericka was finally reunited with her daughter. After her release, Ericka returned to California with her daughter and became a writer and editor for the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. From 1973 to 1981, Ericka directed the Black Panther Party-run Oakland Community School, where her daughter was also a student. In 1974, she gave birth to her second child, a son named Rasa, whose father was a member of the Black Panther Party funk band the Lumpen. While incarcerated, Ericka had written poetry, and in 1975 with Huey Newton, Ericka published a book with City Lights titled "Insights and Poems." Around the same time, she became both the first woman and the first Black person to be appointed to the Alameda County Board of Education. In 1979, Ericka completed her bachelor's degree at Antioch University West, later completing a Master of Arts degree in Sociology at California State University East Bay in 2010, with the thesis titled, "Countering the Effects of Multi- generational Race and Gender Trauma: A Prescriptive Educational Model," which looked at the Oakland Community School. In 1981, Ericka left the Black Panther Party due to sexual violence she had experienced. The Black Panther Party itself only survived a short while longer. Ericka was married for six years to a Dutch English man. Their son, Yadav, was born in 1987. In the 90s, Erica supported women and children with HIV AIDS, with both the Shanti Project and the AIDS Project of Contra Costa County. Erica also taught Women and Gender Studies, Sociology and African American Studies at various California colleges in the 2000s. According to her website, Ericka is currently a facilitator with World Trust, an organization that uses films to foster conversation about race and all structural inequities. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Mary Frances Phillips, an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins." 

Hi, Mary. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  10:35  
Hello. So wonderful being here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:38  
So I was really excited to read this book and to learn about Ericka Huggins. I'd love to hear how you got interested in her story and decided to write a book about her. 

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  10:50  
Yeah, so thank you for that question. So I have been always really interested in the Black Panther Party. My interest in the organization actually dates, dates back to my undergraduate years as a student at Michigan State University. I was taking what was called, back then, a specialization in Black American Diaspora Studies, and took a whole host of courses on African American history of culture, and when we would get to the section on a Black Panthers, I was very curious on what the experiences of women were. Who were these women? What did they contribute to the organization? And I wanted to learn more, and so I kept that in the back of my head. And as I continued with my schooling, and, you know, began the doctorate, when I got to that phase in my program. I knew for certain that I wanted to write my dissertation on the Panthers and I wanted to write about women in the organization. And when it was a couple different ways that I was kind of looking at that through a couple different entry points, at the time, I was looking at the works that was already out there. We have Elaine Brown's autobiography out there. We have Assata Shakur autobiography out there. So those were my my starting points, just to kind of get a landscape from the perspective and insights of women in an organization. As I started researching and digging and making connections and presenting some of my early work at conferences as a graduate student, I started building community with other Panther scholars. And, you know, I got in touch with Ericka. I remember a mentor, a friend, who said, "Hey, have you heard about this person in a Black Panther Party? You need to really meet her. You need to learn her story." And it was Ericka Huggins, and we had our initial conversation, and I was just blown away at her story, her experiences, how she got in the organization, her experience with political repression, how she survived incarceration. And so I had did my dissertation, a dual biography, and she was one of the people that I featured in the dissertation, and I decided for the book, the story was so powerful that I wanted to go ahead and do a biography of her. And so that's kind of how I decided to write the book on and you know, she really offers us a different lens into the Panthers that's not often explored, that looks at spirituality, that looks at the role of self care and wellness that wasn't being talked about. And so you know her, that's what makes her story really fascinating.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:44  
So it's kind of a tricky thing, right, to write about a living subject, someone who you interviewed a lot, talked to a lot, got to know. Can you talk some about the challenges of that, the opportunities that are there as you get to know someone, learn deeply about their life? What? What is that like?

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  14:06  
Yeah, yeah. So Ericka and I, so you know this, this is a project that is very much embodied in our experiences and what we bring you know. I learned that my race and my cause and my gender as a historian mattered in ways that I had not considered. We ended up building a trust in a relationship over time. Because her records are not placed in one particular archival site, there's scattered parts of her life all over the place, and there's gaps in the archival information that's out there. I had to talk to her for parts of her life that only she would know. And so you know, that proximity that some scholars, oftentimes, you might hear about scholars having with your subject, you know, I, I didn't have that with my with my subject. I wanted to actually read an excerpt of it that I think really speaks nicely to these kind of challenges and opportunities that it opened, if I could. "This book makes an intervention in Black women's biography and methodology. To research and write a personal feminist political biography of Ericka, I employed an interdisciplinary methodology that combines deep and creative archival research with oral history and sustained conversation. This book is my rendition of Ericka's life as a political prisoner, with close consultation from her, but it also gives insight into my research journey. I refer to this transformative methodology as interwoven oral history, which documents, claims, recovers, analyzes, illustrates and amplifies voices that have been marginalized under the pretense of neutrality, and centers their narratives to expand the historical canon with theory and empathy. Interwoven oral history is a framework that encompasses multiple interview sessions that intricately intertwine the personal, political and professional aspects, borrowing the terminology coined by scholar Eula Taylor in her 2008 essay, 'Our relationship is personal, because for me, it is impossible to do this work and tell these stories without self investment.' My fondest memory of Ericka is when she called me when my father passed away in 2020. Although my father was a predominantly absent figure, I experienced complex feelings and emotions about his untimely death. Still, Ericka called me with words of comfort. She routinely showed me that she cared about my personal well being. Since then, Ericka and I have had many conversations, sat on panels together, broke bread together, guest lecturing courses together, and there were other times when I asked her questions that she did not want to answer. I knew that she was being evasive or vague. It took time for both of us to open up and share more of our lives. Ericka shared not only her life, but also contacts with me and the many people in her network. I turn to others, including Ericka's friends, colleagues, lawyers, former Black Panther Party members, publish all interviews in autobiographies archives to provide more context and color to challenging times in her life. My interwoven oral history with Ericka was unlike interviewing a family member, a politician or an artist.She is a Black Panther Party veteran and former political prisoner. Given this fact, there were political consequences to our continued conversations. The limited oral histories and collections of radical Black women on the fringes of society who survived incarceration required me to develop a close relationship with Ericka. As I write this, there's no singular collection exclusively on her life history." So, you know, I talk about it in the book. I wanted to read that excerpt, just to kind of give you some color on some of the challenges, you know, that we had. To expand on that a little bit, there was also some challenges in how she envisioned her life, and my interpretation of the sources of her life through my lens and my training as a professional historian. And so in that process, I had to constantly negotiate respect for her privacy and her resistance at times, to let the world see her unguarded, right? Sometimes, you know, of course, you have to pick and choose what parts. You can't write about everything. So you have to pick and choose what parts you want to include in a book. And oftentimes, you know, she might have been uncomfortable with that part of her life being revealed. And so some parts, there was a request, right? And that in deciding, you know what parts to to cut, you got to make some important decisions. I think also perhaps there was also some fear on her part to write her in the history, according to my historical interpretation, not hers. And so those were some of the biggest challenges writing about a living person very much invested in in this biography, in this work that was being produced on her life. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:14  
Yeah, wow. So let's talk some about the Black Panther Party itself. I think there's a lot of popular conceptions about what it was, what it might have been, but let's talk about what it what it actually was, what the the goals of the Black Panther Party were, and and why Ericka was then drawn to the party, what, what she was hoping to get out of her association with it both before and then after her incarceration.

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  20:43  
Yeah. So the Black Panther Party was a coalition building organization that developed parallel institutions, right? They were working towards the liberation of Black and brown oppressed groups, right, oppressed individuals, and in their development of parallel institutions or community survivor programs, they most people know about these programs. They know about I think the probably most popular one is the breakfast program for children. But there are well of over a dozen other political community survival programs, the health clinics, the free food programs. They had a free ambulance program which so many people don't know about. They had an elementary school, the Oakland CommunitySchool, bussing to prison program, a free plumbing, a free maintenance program. I can go on and on and on, but they were really trying to meet the everyday needs of Black and brown people, right of of the community to serve their basic bread and butter needs. You could come to the Panthers and you can get some food, you can get some clothes, you can get supported, right? And so that was part of their transformative work. And Ericka wanted to be a part of this movement building. I mean, the Panthers were literally knocking on doors. And what do you need in developing programs to meet the needs? And as society was shifting and changing, they were also meeting that need right, constantly studying as well. So they were combining theory and practice in the work that they in, the grassroots mobilization work that they were doing, and were building coalitions with other groups as well. And Ericka joined when she was a student at Lincoln University. She came across a Ramparts Magazine, which is an underground at the time of underground political left leaning magazine. And she saw an article that discussed the charges of Huey P. Newton, co- founder of the Black Panther Party, for the murder of an Oakland police officer. And she was so inspired and moved by the article and the image that was in the magazine that she dropped out of Lincoln University and drove down and joined the organization, and got immediately to work selling Panther newspapers, surveilling the headquarters of the Black Panther Party home, you know, attending political education classes, what have you, and really becoming critical, a critical component of that work. As all Black Panther Party members, she came in as a rank and file member and rosethrough the ranks, ultimately becoming director of the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School and part of the central leadership of the organization.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:45  
Could you talk a little bit about the the ways that the movement that you're talking about is is, obviously, there's a lot of amazing good that it's doing, that, you know, the the breakfast and the ambulance programs, and that you know that there's a lot of community building, a lot of really important work that it's doing. But the popular conception, both at the time and what has come down in history, is often one of a violent movement, right, or one that is against the society or something. Can you talk about the the ways that that perception of the Black Panther Party was, like, how that perception came about, the ways that that the misinformation was spread purposefully so that they would be vilified?

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  24:38  
So Warren Churchill talks a lot about this in his books about the history and the role of state repression, and the FBI's counter intelligence programs on the Black Panthers. And so the FBI did so many violent acts  to destroy the organization, to the point where some of these include arresting Black Panther Party members as they were selling the Black Panther Party newspaper. They would visit businesses and try to convince them not to contribute or donate any food to the Panthers for the Panthers' breakfast program for children. They literally would sell lies to the media so the media could, this, this distortion that is out there about the Black Panther Party as this violent hate group that I have heard comes from these lies right that the FBI fed to the to the media. They will stop coalitions, initiatives between the Panthers and other progressive organizations. They would elevate tensions that might have been within the group, writing false letters, right, having Panthers believe stuff that was not said, you know. And you know, one thing that most of us know about is the infiltration of the organization, the raiding of headquarters and offices, arresting party members, assassinating party members, which many of these assassinations have been well documented. For example, if we look at Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, that has been very well documented in a documentary as well as you know, I know there's a Hollywood movie that kind of talks about that a little bit. And so every single way you can think of, the Panthers were literally sledge hammered with attempts to destroy the organization and really promote this, this, this kind of violent rhetoric about the organization, to stop much of their progressive coalition work that they were trying to do.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:09  
So Ericka herself was arrested, and the time that she spent in prison ends up being a real turning point in her life. She discovers this practice of self care that you write a lot about. So can you talk some about that? This, this self care practice of hers, how the self care then connects to community care, and how she puts that into practice while she's in prison?

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  27:42  
Ericka is arrested for a crime she didn't commit, spending two years incarcerated, separated from her daughter, separated from her family, and so she turned to inner work. She turned to practices that she needed to fill her spirit. She went to one of her lawyers, Charles Garry, who was a yogi. He used to do head stands before he went into court, and she said, "Look, I need a book on yoga," and he gave her a book on yoga, and she taught herself how to meditate, and she did the yoga postures that was in a book. She didn't have a lot of time to do it while she was incarcerated, right? Because she's on borrowed time, and so usually, as I talk about in the book, she'd only have like 30 minutes to try to go ahead and squeeze time to do those postures, those yoga postures, as well as her meditation practices, and so that was fulfilling for her. She was also isolated with several other party women. They kept them separated from the general population, and they would engage in care practices to take care of one another, and so that helped fill her as well. So Ericka is engaging in her own self care practices, as well as doing everything she can to help the other Panther women that are that are separated in a ward together, right? One of the women that she was incarcerated with had really bad arthritis, and the cold cement floors flared up her arthritis, and so they will come together to literally help take care of her. Sometimes they had to help her get out of bed, or they had to help move her around. There was another party woman who was pregnant, and they will give her the better scraps of their food, right? And so they engaged in these care acts to keep each other's spirits up, to support each other and to really in a system that is designed to literally be violent towards you, they had to turn to each other for sources of of support. Once Ericka, so Ericka was the, out of all the party women, she was incarcerated the longest. When she was transferred to a general population, she know, she knew that she needed to extend that work, right, and so that attention to self she extended to her large the larger community, and started building with those in the general population. So she started to understand that self care was just as critical to community activism, and she did this with the with the women that she was incarcerated with. And she did this in a multiple in multiple ways, writing letters to get other women the things that they need, starting a hair salon right, under the watch of some of the correctional officers, and they had no idea that the salon and at the after women were doing their hair, they're politicizing. They're talking about liberation. They're talking about freedom. They're talking about, you know, "Oh, you need a lawyer? Okay, let me write a lawyer, let me write my letter and contact my lawyer to try to get you a lawyer." "Oh, you need some money for this? Let's start a women's bail fund, right?" And so it was a way for her to find out the needs of the community, and let's all build together to help each other out. She would connect families, right? Write letters. In the book, I talk about some letters that she wrote to a journalist, Jan Von Flatern, and Jan became an extension of the Sister Love Collective that the that Ericka developed when she was in incarcerated. She became an extension to the outside world. And so when there would be an incarcerated woman who needed to be connected with her family for whatever reason, she would write to Jan and say, "Hey, Jan, this is the profile of the person. This is who the person is. Can you go and connect with her family? And these are the times you know, can you get them to come, you know, on this day, or what have you, or so, and so hasn't been feeling well, can you reach out to her mother and have her mother give her a visit, right?" All kinds of those things or so, and so needs a lawyer. This is, you know, the profile of her case, or what have you. And so Jan would be out there doing all of this work and these letters were transferred from Ericka through her attorney, Catherine Roraback, back to Jan Von Flatern. And so at times she would give her like a stack of 20-30 letters, and Jan would be off to work, right? And this became critical. So all of this development work and movement work is happening. They also refashion their prison uniforms, right? And they use play in really inventive ways, not just with the refashion of the prison uniforms, but they would make up was banned, and so they would use whatever they could to put designs on their faces or what have you. You know, it was really about, how do we lift our spirit? How do we feel ourselves and keep our mind in a really good place until we get out of here, so that we can come out of this prison whole and still in one piece? And so these are, these are how these wellness practices kind of extended from just the self care work Ericka was doing on why she was incarcerated.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:54  
You mentioned earlier that Ericka was separated from her daughter, her daughter who was very, very young at the time, and that there was another one of the Panther women who was incarcerated, who was pregnant. I think this, this theme of of motherhood and pregnancy, it goes really throughout the the book. And, you know, I think it connects with something you said earlier, that when you were in college and first learning about the story of the Black Panthers and wanting to know, like, what about the women, you know, what was the story of the women, that that seems like a story, at least I haven't heard a lot about is, you know, what was the story of motherhood and children in the Black Panther Party? So I wonder if you could talk some about that with the story about Erica tells us about mothers and motherhood and the Black Panther Party. And you know what, what else there is then for us to to learn and to know about that?

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  34:55  
Yes, yes. So Ericka was very intentional about maintaining a relationship with her daughter while she was incarcerated. John Huggins' mother will bring her daughter to visit her on Saturdays, and she had about an hour to spend time with her daughter. And Elizabeth Huggins brought her every single week to help cultivate that relationship and keep that mother daughter bond. That was important, because when Ericka got out of prison, right, she went to get her daughter and was able to really build and develop and as best she could try to be present as a mother in her daughter's life. I think what Ericka experienced is similar to what other civil rights leaders have discussed but mentioned and that's balancing movement work while also trying to be a present mother. It was challenging for Ericka. It wasn't easy. You know, I think at times she did the best. Of course, she did the best she could, but there were times when she wasn't as as present as she wanted to be. And I think she desired to be the kind of mother that John's mother was. This was a fear. She worried about it, you know, had a little bit of anxiety. Can Can I be, can I give my daughter what she deserves, and as much love as her grandmother was able to give her, and that was an ongoing challenge for Ericka, right, considering how far she ascended in the organization. And she admits that she never quite got it right. She struggled with it a little bit. When she had her last child, she was no longer a member of the organization, so she was able to be present with him in a way that she was not able to be with her other children. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:18  
You mentioned earlier that that Ericka ends up being the director of the Oakland Community School. After that, she does other work within education. Could you talk some about how this is sort of, in many ways, kind of a natural continuation of the spiritual wellness practice work, the political activism work?

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  37:39  
So that work, that spiritual work, stayed with Ericka. So even after she got her freedom, she continued to engage in those practices. She also wrote poetry. While she was incarcerated, she would write poetry as birthday gifts for others that was incarcerated with her. She kept all of these practices. In fact, most people know about the book of poetry that she co authored with Huey P. Newton, "Insights and Poems." She brought her yoga practices to the party's Oakland Community School at times, bringing in yoga experts as well, as meditation was a practice that was at the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School that students participated in after lunch. And so she was very intentional in making sure this is part of the curriculum of the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School. When she left the organization, all of that spiritual work that she was engaging in, those wellness practices, was so useful for her as she was doing the kind of HIV work that when she was, you know, essentially talking with people who were battling HIV AIDS. It helped her kind of work through that. It helped her have these conversations, you know, with the people that she was talking to, to give them some kind of peace of mind, to help them understand things, to give them a new outlook, to think about things in really deeper ways. It was that spiritual work that she had cultivated in prison, and so that is really a turning point in her life. It allowed her, it really opened her eyes in these really deep innovative ways, and allowed her to have an outlook on life that was critical in helping us really deal with violence, anti-Blackness, right and all these other kinds of aspects that are really oppressive on our bodies and on our minds and on our spirits as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:50  
 You talk in the book about why you use Ericka's first name as you're writing. And I struggle a lot as someone who is writing a lot about women and women's history in kind of, how to, you know, do you use first name? Do you use last name? And, you know, often, of course, women change their last names frequently. And so I just, I wonder, since you had written about that and written about that very thoughtfully, I wonder if you could talk some about that. 

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  40:07  
Yeah. So, you know, there is a practice within academia to use last names, which I totally understand, where that comes from, but with the kind of book I was writing, with the relationship that I developed with Ericka, right insights. So one thing about my conversations with Ericka, that wasn't one sided. There was an exchange. She learned just as much about me as I learned about her right. Our conversations, I'm talking about things that's happening in my life at the time as well. She's talking about things that happened in the past as well as things in the future. There is a real exchange, and there's a relationship, and for both of us, we agreed on this, that the kind of last name really represent this kind of Eurocentric masculinist framing that did not apply to our relationship, to the sisterhood that we had, we were cultivating and that we have. And I wanted to use first names in a book to represent that sisterly energy and friendship and relationship that we were, that we had. I think it also offers a read of the book that is more intimate, that really takes the reader into Ericka's life in nuanced ways. I wanted my reader to be able to feel, see, hear, really, experience the texture of what Ericka was experiencing. And for me, the last name was a barrier to that. And so that's, that's, that's also part of the reason why I decided to use first names. And it's not just whith Ericka. Almost every person in the book I identified by first names or their full name, right? And so that was important. That was important, but it was a part of my writing style, but it was also, I should say, my creative writing style, but it was also important because of our relationship as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:15  
Can you please tell listeners how they can get a copy of this book? 

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  43:18  
Yes, so you can get a copy of the book at your local bookstore, at any online book selling platform. That could be Amazon, that could be the New York University Press website as well, that could be Barnes and Noble. So it is literally everywhere, in stores, everywhere.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:44  
Mary, thank you so much for joining me. This was such a pleasure. 

Dr. Mary Frances Phillips  43:48  
Thank you so much for having me. I had a wonderful time.

Teddy  44:02  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode of suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!