Second birthday celebration. My mother tried to make me “the most beautiful girl in the world.”
At a neighbor’s Halloween party on York Street where I grew up. It would not be long before I hated life there. Here with the women of my house, left to right: my grandmother, Aunt Mary, and mother (and me in costume).
First ballet recital, after which I came to consider the ballet part of the repertoire of “white things” I could do.
Some of my best friends forever, particularly during summertime, when the boundaries of my world shrunk to those of my ghetto neighborhood. Clockwise from top left: Barbara Taylor, Kathy Neal, me, and Darlese Reid.
Having left behind the black ghetto and a white lover, I stumbled upon Sandra Scott. She became a beacon of black womanhood as I entered the maelstrom called the sixties.
When the force of the Free Huey movement erupted in 1968, I was driven to decide whether to be “part of the problem or part of the solution.” I joined the Black Panther Party.
John Huggins, Black Panther captain, then Southern California chapter chairman. Only twenty-three when he lost his life, he had already retrieved mine.
Bunchy Carter, founder of the party’s Southern California chapter, formerly head of the 5,000-strong Slauson gang, was so formidable a man it was hard to come to terms with his assassination in 1969.
Ericka Huggins remained strong through the assassination of her husband, John, in Los Angeles and her own arrest in New Haven. She spent two years isolated in jail awaiting trial.
An early moment of unity among black power advocates (1967). Seated left to right: Dick Gregory, Ron Karenga, H. Rap Brown, and Ralph Featherstone. Standing: US members Tayari, second left, and Msimaji, second right.
The FBI (agent at right) directed the innumerable violent police raids on Panther facilities. This raid in Chicago occurred six months before the murder of Fred Hampton.
It would take ten years to prove that the assassination by state police of Fred Hampton, Illinois chapter chairman of the Black Panther Party, was orchestrated by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover’s directive to “stop the rise of a black messiah.”
Only eleven Panthers were inside the Los Angeles headquarters when hundreds of the L.A.P.D.’s new SWAT team assaulted it in December of 1969. Because the battle lasted an incredible five hours, it was characterized by the press as a “mini-Vietnam.”
David Hilliard, insightful and faithful Black Panther chief of staff (1967–1974), survived being viciously assailed by Eldridge Cleaver only to be later casually expelled from the party—a casualty of Huey Newton’s rage.
The provocative rhetoric of Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver not only shocked America but also drove a dangerous wedge into the heart of the party.
Masai Hewitt, Panther minister of education, father of my only child, was the center of an FBI scheme to destroy film actress Jean Seberg.
By the time I reached Beijing, traveling as part of a group headed by Eldridge Cleaver, I was living in terror from Cleaver’s threat to bury me at our final destination.
Huey Newton, founder and leader of the Black Panther Party. Not long after he was freed from prison in July 1970, I met him and came to think of him as my lover and leader.
George Jackson, writer and field marshal of the Black Panther Party, was assassinated by San Quentin prison guards one year after other California prison guards cut down his seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan.
Ten thousand came to Oakland to celebrate the life of George Jackson after his assassination in August 1971.
The success of the Panther free-breakfast program inspired numerous other party service programs for the poor, including distribution of free food and the establishment of free health clinics. These programs as much as Panther guns triggered J. Edgar Hoover’s targeting of the party for the most massive and violent FBI assault ever committed.
When Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale and I launched our campaign for Oakland political office in 1972, it was not because the party had set aside the “bullet for the ballot.” This was a change in tactics, not in strategy.
Returning with Huey from my second trip to China. I was named the party’s new minister of information, replacing Eldridge Cleaver.
Early formal school for Panther children soon developed into the well-regarded Oakland Community School. Among the students pictured here are: Ericka Brown, bottom row, far right; Geronimo Clark, left of Ericka Brown, the son of Joan Kelley and Nathaniel Clark; John and Ericka Huggins’ daughter Mai, same row, far left; Al and Norma Armour’s son, Al Jr., second row, far right; Gwen Fountaine’s daughter, Jessica, second row, second from right, and son, Ronnie, third row, second from left.
I found it difficult to be a real mother to Ericka Brown, whose love for me remained constant nevertheless.
Stealing time together just before Huey would go into exile in Cuba. Here with Gwen Fountaine, second from right, and Darron Perkins, far left, an unsung hero whose sharp witticisms always reduced me to a helpless state of laughter.
After Bobby Seale’s expulsion from the party and Huey’s designation of me as chairman in 1974, I ran for Oakland political office alone.
After I became chairman of the party, other women were finally placed on the Central Committee. Among them were: Ericka Huggins, seated; Norma Armour, standing, right; and Phyllis Jackson, whom I came to admire more than nearly anyone else in the party.
I was able to secure the endorsement of California governor Jerry Brown, left, for Lionel Wilson, the Panther-sponsored candidate for Oakland mayor.
Huey and I spent the days alone together during my one visit with him in Cuba in 1975, though he lived in exile with Gwen Fountaine. It was there I learned to appreciate that Gwen was not so much “his” woman as she was my sister.
Only months after Huey returned from three years of exile in Cuba, I suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to reexamine my commitment to him and his party.