Young Black activists Ericka and John Huggins arrived in Los Angeles around Thanksgiving 1967. They secured employment at an automobile factory in rural Los Angeles and moved into an inexpensive studio apartment in Venice Beach. Shortly after they arrived and before they joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), they learned of a “Free Huey” rally in the Shrine Auditorium organized by the BPP communications secretary, Kathleen Cleaver.
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The rally was part of a mass movement to free BPP co-founder Huey P. Newton, who was caged at the Alameda County jail on felony indictments for murder, assault, and kidnapping. Attending the rally again brought back the same emotions she had as a teenager at the March on Washington. She vividly recalled that Huey’s mother took the rally stage. Her words, full of love and care for her son, assured Ericka that she was on the right path, following her calling.
In their effort to find the BPP headquarters, Ericka and John drew upon their memories of a brief trip to New York, where they saw members selling the Black Panther, the organization’s newspaper. Because of this, they knew they would eventually find Black Panther members doing the same in Los Angeles.
They soon came across a male BPP member selling the newspaper, which they purchased; then they asked him the location of the BPP headquarters. “They are in a building called the Black Congress in South Central Los Angeles,” he replied.
They quit their factory job and settled in Los Angeles to work full-time for the Southern California BPP chapter, founded by Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. A week later, they arrived at the Black Congress Building and a member quickly put them to work selling the BPP newspaper, cleaning the BPP office, answering the phones, typing material, attending political education classes, and watching over the office because of police surveillance. The BPP recognized operational tasks, manual labor, and administrative tasks as valuable activist work.
BPP members requested the same tasks from men and women in the Los Angeles chapter.
John was adamant about justice and equity. Bunchy asked John to help him lead the Southern California BPP chapter in Los Angeles. They became close comrades, and as co-leaders of the LA chapter, they embraced a leadership style undefined by gender. BPP members requested the same tasks from men and women in the Los Angeles chapter. Eventually, Ericka even served as a spokesperson for the chapter, just like her male counterparts.
Ericka and John struggled to financially survive while working for political change. Within the following year, Ericka became pregnant with her and John’s child, Mai. As BPP members, Ericka and John lived communally in a two-level apartment on West Century Boulevard in Los Angeles with other comrades, including fellow BPP member Elaine Brown.
Spencer-Antoine explains that this intertwined living and activist environment served as a “collective structure” that enabled “the total commitment of its membership.” In doing this, she writes, “they attempted to meet the needs of its cadre for food, clothing, and shelter.”
They regularly shared clothes. They made money where they could, for example, selling BPP newspapers, but for Ericka, John, and others in their communal household, it was still not enough. Their unwavering dedication to the people took a heavy toll on their personal needs, necessitating more funds and resources.
The harsh reality was that the state did not allow those without much money to survive and support their families, prompting a need to increase their food supply. Ericka applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare), which enabled her to purchase groceries. Her welfare check became the primary source of income for the household, but it was still not enough to feed everyone.
In Point 10 of the BPP’s Platform and Program, the Black Panthers demanded the right to “land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace.” These core values did not align with those of a capitalist society; for that reason, John and Ericka needed to adopt innovative methods to survive. John believed in the BPP’s political ideology of the human right to quality food.
Ericka and John often frequented Safeway, the local grocery store, sometimes with others. John did not want Ericka and their baby to be without food. He wanted to protect and provide for them, so he would graze and steal food as he and Ericka walked down the grocery aisles with growling stomachs.
“Nobody should have to pay for food. Nobody should go hungry. Eat this. Safeway’s not going to struggle if you eat this food,” Ericka remembered he said to her. “So that’s what we’d do.” He taught Ericka to be fearless in the expansion of her political consciousness.
For the BPP, community support was another critical aspect of survival. While in Safeway, Ericka and John came across a friendly Black woman cashier who knew them from their regular visits. They would attempt to purchase $150 worth of groceries for their communal household with Ericka’s welfare check.
Since they did not have enough food stamps, the clerk rang their groceries up at a lower price of only five dollars as she softly made eye contact with them and smiled to communicate compassion and understanding.
“All of us ate off of my welfare check, not including the food that John stole,” Ericka remembered. John eventually stopped stealing once the clerk offered them assistance. Support from the community helped BPP members sustain themselves and the people they served each and every day.
Communal living involved shared responsibilities and total commitment to BPP tasks. A typical day of communal living included heading to the BPP office after breakfast to “do whatever work it took.” This included advocating for the release of BPP members from jail and cultivating relationships with people in cafés, local stores, and barbershops, and on the streets of Los Angeles.
In 1968 Ericka served as a BPP spokesperson with others, attending high-profile celebrity events to seek support from Hollywood progressives and fundraise in the evening. Because of their presence, community engagement, and service to the people, the community embraced the BPP.
The BPP developed friendships with many people, from the mothers, fathers, and grandparents who often kept Ericka and other pregnant BPP women well-fed, to teachers, grocery owners, state workers, teenagers, and high-profile entertainers in Hollywood. Ericka recalled a Hollywood actress and friend giving her a crib that overflowed with baby clothes.
Ericka and John agreed to raise their daughter, Mai, born in December 1968, as a married couple, although they never lawfully married.
At the same time, communal party relations seeped into their partnership. Like many BPP members, they engaged in nontraditional sexual relationships. Against the backdrop of the “free love” movement, the BPP experimented with sexuality and shared relationships.
For Ericka, sexuality was a way for her to imagine a fuller life. Her simultaneous relationships with both men and women reflected the cultural moment. She recalled that some men were unable to release hypermasculine ideas about sexuality, which prevented them from being open about their male lovers. On the other hand, Ericka recalls women being more forthcoming about their intimacies.
Her experiences support social and cultural studies scholar of education Ronald K. Porter’s analysis that “the excavation of homosexuality in the context of the Black Panther Party reveals ‘a whole host of characters and actions adding both breadth and depth to the Black and LGBTQ experience in America. Historian Tracye A. Matthews’s scholarship echoes this sentiment about sexuality and employing alternative relationship structures.
These sexual pleasures and freedoms were sometimes fraught. “The fact that they viewed themselves as revolutionaries engaged in a war against injustice complicated matters of sexuality and gender relations,” Matthews argues.
For some, their everyday battles with political repression and fear of death intensified their need to find pleasure and explore eroticism. At times, their approach to sexual freedom led to arguments, infighting, sexual exploitation, or even sexual abuse.
BPP member Elaine Brown recalled that John gave her a hatchet to protect herself against unwanted sexual advances by BPP men. In arming Elaine to fight her assailant, John advocated against male chauvinism. He was progressive about gender politics and empowered women to protect themselves against male violence. He believed that women should have their own agency.
Ericka was fully committed to the BPP and worked around the clock even while pregnant. She recalled, “I was nine months pregnant and couldn’t get around as easily. Pregnancy did not slow down the work of BPP women. There wasn’t anything I wasn’t being asked to do.” By this time, she was surrounded by an increasing number of other women who had joined the BPP.
She soon met Angela Y. Davis, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, who became a dear friend and comrade in the struggle. Angela was initially a member of the Black Panther Political Party, a group whose “role was to develop theoretical analyses of the Black Liberation Movement, as well as to build structures.”
The Black Panther Political Party was a separate organization from the BPP founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and was part of a consortium called the Black Congress, which contained many groups, including the BPP, Maulana Karenga’s US organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the Community Alert Patrol, among others. The Black Panther Political Party reshaped itself into the Los Angeles Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (LA SNCC), which would function to support the student-driven civil rights organization.
Despite having SNCC’s name attached to it, it was independent of the national organization. Once LA SNCC dissolved, Angela joined the Communist Party USA (CP USA) and the Che-Lumumba Club, a Black cadre within the Communist Party. She also joined the BPP, where she met Ericka and John in 1968.
Initially, she felt a closer comradeship with John than with Ericka because of the day-to-day organizing that Angela and John conducted out of the same office. John persuaded Angela to run the political education program and the liberation school. Angela helped develop the curriculum with John and taught young people in the neighborhood.
The curriculum included studying texts such as Vladimir Lenin’s State and Revolution, which explored the relationship between the state and the proletariat revolution. In the text Lenin explained,
Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress, crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for emancipation.
As an educational text, Lenin’s ideas represented how the BPP thought about the state and the power of the proletariat and workers in the revolution. In recalling these experiences, Angela reminisced about the steadfastness of an illiterate Black male teenager who had an intense desire to read Lenin.
With his persistence and Angela’s guidance, he learned how to read. The heartening experience let her know that the “joy of learning is something that has to be awakened in people” and is not always found in formal education.
Upon meeting Ericka, Angela instantly connected with her and was impressed by her undeniable passion for political activism. Angela remembered thinking that Ericka possessed a remarkable amount of inner strength. She admired Ericka’s natural qualities, such as her goodnatured spirit and love for people.
Their friendship endured even after the BPP told those with membership in other parties to choose between the organizations. Angela decided to leave the BPP and remain in the CP USA; however, she remained active in the defense of the BPP.
Greater participation by women in the BPP prompted discussions on male chauvinism and sexism, and women’s vocal protests advanced the BPP’s position concerning gender.
By 1968, the BPP membership consisted predominantly of women. According to BPP scholar Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, by this time women “represented approximately sixty percent of the Party’s membership.” Greater participation by women in the BPP prompted discussions on male chauvinism and sexism, and women’s vocal protests advanced the BPP’s position concerning gender.
According to Ericka, the work was not divided by gender in Los Angeles; however, there was significant gender inequity in some other chapters. Ericka described an incident at a meeting while visiting the Oakland national headquarters with other BPP members from northern and southern California during her pregnancy.
Women were in the kitchen cooking. After preparing the food, a woman announced, “Brothers, you can eat now.” Ericka did not understand what the woman meant, so she asked the person next to her for clarification when the announcer stated, “Sisters, brothers eat first.”
Ericka was famished and pregnant. “Oh no, please excuse me while I go in the kitchen and fix my plate,” she declared.
Ericka’s interruption was necessary because she refused to delay taking care of her body and her child’s needs. The other woman’s request demonstrated internalized sexist and misogynistic ideals that placed women and children beneath men. It took stamina and courage for Ericka to openly defy the cultural norms in the room and assert her humanity and that of her unborn child.
Ongoing debates on the reproduction of gender norms within the BPP broadened the organization’s reach. LeBlanc-Ernest noted that “as the Black Panther Party expanded in 1968, so did women’s participation in Party activities.” The BPP shifted its tactical analysis to one that prioritized community programs and de-emphasized armed self-defense during this period.
“The Panthers had boldly and legally picked up the gun—and had been forced to lay it back down,” argues Spencer Antoine. The BPP expanded its community programs, including free programs that served the social, economic, political, educational, healthcare, and medical needs of Black and poor people in the United States.
In response to the shortcomings of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, these initiatives provided Black communities with crucial access to essential services and resources. Johnson’s legislation “established the vision for the subsequent research and analysis of minority poverty.” The War on Poverty, according to sociologist William Julius Wilson, failed because “the emphasis was mainly on environments of the poor. This vision did not consider poverty as a problem of American economic organization.” The federal government’s management of economic difficulties and the institutionalized forms of oppression against people of color were fundamental problems inherent in 1970s racial politics that the War on Poverty did not address.
Impassioned by the 1960s assassinations of nonviolent civil rights leaders, the BPP saw its radical display of community service as another form of self-defense to challenge institutional violence and police terror within Black communities. Its message was one of community empowerment and community protection. Its revolutionary spirit coupled with its community programs made the BPP a target of ongoing government assault and violence from programs such as COINTELPRO.
External forces, notably the FBI, played a significant role in shaping the gender dynamics within the BPP. In 1969 political repression had a profound and devastating impact on the BPP; ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill emphasized that the “Black Panther Party was literally sledgehammered [by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program]. Of the 295 counterintelligence operations the bureau has admitted conducting against Black activists and organizations during the period, a staggering 233, the majority of them in 1969, were aimed at the Panthers.”
The police and other government forces gained information on the BPP to destroy, distort, and misrepresent the BPP to the public. Because of sexist and racist ideas, FBI agents often targeted male BPP members. Amidst the intense governmental repression of that era, the BPP adopted a strategy of closing ranks and implemented quality control measures, resulting in the expulsion of numerous members.
Notably, women were placed in more leadership positions. As LeBlanc-Ernest noted, “Expansion of female participation became critical for the organization to function effectively.” Women became central to the BPP programming.
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Political repression soon hit close to home for Ericka as the FBI claimed the lives of both John and Bunchy on the campus of UCLA. Leading up to the tragedy, members of the UCLA Black Student Union (BSU) requested support from John and Bunchy to assist them in a highly charged meeting concerning the directorship of the High Potential Program, an equal opportunity program.
John served as the captain and later deputy chairman of the LA chapter, and Bunchy was the deputy minister of defense and a UCLA student. The BPP revered Bunchy. He educated himself during his time in prison, politicized and organized the Slauson gang, and recruited many of them into the BPP. The BSU with John and Bunchy were in discussions with another group, Maulana Karenga’s US organization.
Ericka remembered Bunchy as always well-dressed, projecting a regal nature and strong sense of integrity. He was a grassroots intellectual who taught political education, emphasizing a pedagogy of community love. Ericka, who was highly attuned to care politics, was particularly moved by his teachings, which emphasized that care work did not reproduce gender norms within the organization.
John and Bunchy were fearless BPP leaders who considered women equal partners in the struggle. On January 17, 1969, tension reached its zenith at a meeting in Campbell Hall when John and Bunchy were shot. Ericka contended that the FBI infiltrated the BPP, the US organization, and the UCLA campus, and murdered John and Bunchy. The FBI strategically leveraged the differences between the BPP and US into a major conflict.
The scholarship of Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall on COINTELPRO illustrates the kind of FBI memos, cartoons, and letters fabricated to prompt tension between the BPP and the US organization. They shed light on a 1968 FBI internal memo by J. Edgar Hoover that directs offices “to fully capitalize upon the BPP and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension.”
In doing this, offices were then instructed to produce a biweekly letter on the “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” COINTELPRO’s efforts to violently dismantle the BPP were illegal, intricately planned, and ghastly.
Ericka recalled that two weeks before the FBI killed John, she had a dream in which the state had taken him away. Dreams are described by Chicana feminist writer and scholar of cultural and queer theory Gloria Anzaldúa as a “form of experience, a dimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.”
In the event that Ericka’s dream “experience” foretold what was to come, she immediately told John about her dream as soon as he walked in the door. “They took you away,” she said as she embraced him tightly. He “peeled my arms off of him and held me and looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m here now. Where’s the baby?’”
His poignant reply, “I’m here now,” conveyed the profound realization that they had to embrace the present moment, acutely aware that death was looming. “It was in the air all around him,” explained Ericka.
She directed him to the room Mai was sleeping in; he closed the door so he could be alone and held Mai for hours, as if pronouncing his final goodbye. They never mentioned the dream to one another again. They deeply sensed “a knowing” about what was to come. Ericka always listened to her intuition, which she learned from her mother.
John felt called to attend the meeting on UCLA’s campus that day. His intuition warned him of the potential life-threatening consequences. Nevertheless, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make for the cause.
Ericka was at home with her three-week-old daughter when she learned of the shooting. Soon thereafter, other traumatized BPP members gathered at her house.
“Ericka Huggins left the world then, it seemed,” according to Elaine. “I watched her stand at the kitchen sink, her long, thin body surrendered, her eyes glazed.” Ericka did not even have time to grieve the loss of her husband because within a matter of hours, the police arrived at her house to arrest her and the other BPP members.
As police were preparing to arrest Ericka and the BPP members, other comrades, including Angela Y. Davis, had begun arriving at the house to offer support and solidarity. Walter Bremond, the head of the Black Congress consortium, who was also with the group of comrades, took Mai into his care.
Walter was the only person Ericka could think of at the time to call to take Mai overnight, although she was unsure how long she would be gone. She trusted him and his wife to care for her baby. Ericka recalled of the police, “They booked us on something ridiculous. They wanted us off the streets. They treated us like members of a gang.”
In concert with the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the local police used whatever tactics they could, including anti-gang tactics, to disband the organization. Although women were less likely to be targeted by the FBI, both men and women remained under surveillance. Their gender did not preclude women, such as Ericka, from experiencing COINTELPRO repression.
As a target of the state, Ericka encountered intimidation, violence, and harassment. In this instance, police ordered her and the other BPP members out of the house. One officer even pointed a gun at baby Mai while she was in her mother’s arms, as recalled in the introduction of this book. Once Ericka was able to calm the officer down and get him to lower his weapon, the two male officers put her in the backseat of a police car with a white officer.
The police transported all the other BPP women in one vehicle to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. The men traveled in another car. Ericka assumed that they were taking her to the police station, but they stopped at the morgue first to taunt her and did not even allow her to identify John’s body.
“We’re gonna make sure your husband’s really dead. Okay, Huggins?” one of the male officers said. Then they verbally abused her by racially insulting her daughter. She remembered that the woman police officer never said a word or tried to stop her colleagues from being violent toward her.
Experiencing the weight of individual and institutional cruelties, the now widowed Ericka was confined in jail in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. For the first time, she allowed herself to weep.
Ericka described the FBI infiltration she saw while detained at the police station. She watched agents who had posed as members of the US organization interact casually with the Los Angeles police department.
We were sitting at the Seventy-Seventh Street Police Station in Los Angeles at that time. Two men in African print shirts who Party members knew to be members of the US organization came into the police station, not in handcuffs like all of us, not escorted in for questioning like us, but freely walking….[They] stopped to answer the police.
Ericka was now certain that the FBI wanted to destroy the BPP. In the midst of tragedy, glimpses of policing agencies’ orchestrated acts against the BPP emerged. Hours later, a group of comrades and family members, including Angela, Ericka’s brother-in-law Evan, and the husband of one of John’s sisters, bailed her out.
As her comrades offered aid, support, and their deepest sympathies, Ericka looked at their long faces and asked, “Why is everyone so sad?” She reminded them that they “needed to find the courage to stand up and fight because there would be a great deal of struggle ahead.” Unbelievably, Ericka’s spirits were high. At that moment, Angela considered Ericka “the strongest Black woman in America.”
We know this sentiment because it is captured in Angela’s personal, published letter, which was designed to interrupt the official script and official archive. In her 1971 letter to Ericka, she described what it was like to see Ericka unbroken and ready to take on the world:
You had been immediately arrested on a manifestly fabricated charge— conspiracy to retaliate, or something equally ridiculous. We were hurting with your pain. While we watched your approach—you were now walking through the jail’s iron gates—our silence was throbbing with inexpressible pain. And as we were desperately searching for words to convey our unyielding solidarity, it was your strong, undaunted voice that broke the silence Your unflinching determination as you clenched your fist and said, “All Power to the People,” prompted me to think to myself, this must be the strongest, most courageous Black woman in America.
Personal testimony offered an alternative history to political struggles. Angela began by indicting the U.S. justice system for what she believed was a “manifestly fabricated charge” against Ericka in its attempt to silence her political activities.
Instead, she inserted a direct reference to pain, humanizing Ericka. Angela expressed collective empathy and sorrow: “We were hurting with your pain.” Her transition from “we” to “you” showcases her individual feeling and political connection with Ericka and the community activists who shared her sentiment.
Angela’s letter is a public document, one that politicized the personal. She recognized Ericka’s absence as the authorities purged her from the record when she wrote, “Our silence was throbbing with inexpressible pain,” and she reflected on the collective inability to challenge institutional power when she compared powerlessness to speechlessness.
Her letter identified Ericka’s example as more than speech but also defiance against institutional injustice. In Huey’s words, “All Power to the People’ sums up our goals for Black people, as well as our deep love and commitment to them. All power comes from the people, and all power must be ultimately vested in them.”
As she chanted “All Power to the People,” she underscored the values of the BPP: community practice of love, action, authority, and change, all rooted in the collective strength of the community.
Ericka’s “clenched fist” thus represented a declaration of emotional intensity and deep love. As she chanted “All Power to the People,” she underscored the values of the BPP: community practice of love, action, authority, and change, all rooted in the collective strength of the community.
Constant infiltration and trumped-up criminal charges plagued the BPP. Under siege, the BPP struggled to reclaim its identity as a community advocate in the public imagination. The BPP consistently challenged the FBI’s violent onslaught, and its self-determination and resistance linked it to the long history of Black protest.
Ericka highlighted the parallels between Black women’s activism in the BPP, the resistance efforts of formerly enslaved women, and Black women’s organizing during the civil rights movement, emphasizing that “all of them had the same goals in mind.” Their shared goals included the liberation of Black and poor communities. In doing this, they encountered obstacles, including racism, sexism, and classism.
Likewise, Angela Y. Davis wrote, “The status of Black women within the community of slaves was definitely a barometer indicating the overall potential for resistance. This process did not end with the formal dissolution of slavery.” Both Ericka and Angela recognized those women as the forerunners of 1970s Black liberation.
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Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins by Mary Frances Phillips is available via New York University Press.
