54

Tony Platt, interviewer

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

The first part of the interview was conducted by Tony Platt on the UC Berkeley campus
on November 19, 2013, in the context of the seminar featured in this issue. The second
part is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Cecilia OLeary in Oakland on June
3, 2013, on behalf of the Smithsonians National Museum of African History and Culture.

Tony Platt, interviewer*

Platt (TP): Ericka, we are very glad to have you here. We have
people here from the Berkeley Law School, who are doing a masters in
law, people from several countriesChina, Thailand, Taiwan, England, and
Italyand we have students from the Masters Program in Justice Studies at San
Jos State University. This is the first time that Jonathan Simon and I have taught
this class together, and that students from the California state system and the UC
system are in the same room together having a conversation. Activistspeople
doing political and community workare also in the room.
As you know, our topic flows from a discussion Jonathan and I started a year
ago about 1970s criminology and the debates of the time about police, crime, and
prisons. We are revisiting much of the literature from that period to see what we
think about it now, how it speaks to our current crisis. It has been very much a
dialogue and a conversation.
Ericka Huggins (EH): And have you been talking about the FBIs criminal activities at that time?
ony

TP: We have indeed! We talked quite a bit about the police and everyone has been
reading The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, a book published in the 1970s that deals
extensively with political policing and the role of the FBI. May I begin by asking
you some questions and then open up a conversation?
EH: Sure, if I can ask you questions.

TP: Whenever you want. Would you like to begin with those questions?
EH: Where are you from?

* Ericka Huggins is an activist, former political prisoner, and leader in the Black Panther Party. Tony
Platt is the author of Grave Matters: Excavating Californias Buried Past and a member of the Social
Justice editorial board. This interview was conducted on the UC Berkeley campus, as part of a joint
class between the Department of Justice Studies at San Jos State University and the UC Berkeley Law
School. Cecilia OLeary is professor of history at California State University, Monterey Bay, and
Advisor to the Director, National Museum of African American History and Culture. The interviews
have been edited for length and clarity.

54

Social Justice Vol. 40, Nos. 12

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

55

TP: I grew up in England. I did graduate work in England, but then moved to the
US and came to Berkeley in 1963.
EH: Why did you come to the US?

TP: I wanted to get as far away from my patriarchal father as possible. I wanted
to travel and was attracted to the beat movement and the cultural movements on
the West Coast.
EH: Did you do drugs?

TP: Of course I did drugs! But I didnt inhale [laughter].

EH: Do you go back to England?

TP: I do, quite frequently. Its the place that I wanted to leave forever, but I find
myself going back and revisiting like one does with a homeland. Do you go back
to Washington, DC, and New Haven, where you spent a lot of time?

EH: Yes. When I left Washington, DC, I did not ever want to go back, because it
so reminded me of a plantation. You know, White Housebig house, with all the
little people enslaved to government jobs. I couldnt wait to get out of there. I
have returned many times to work, because leaving a place that needs help is not
helpful. I go back to try to be of service. My mother lived there for a long time,
until 2006, when I moved her out here. So I go there less frequently than I used to.
I was just invited to work with a group of young judges and lawyers in DC that is
working on the cradle-to-prison pipeline. Thats exciting. I dont go to New Haven
as much because the family of my husband, John Huggins, the elders of the family,
are all gone now, and the younger part of the family has moved to Manhattan and
other places on the East Coast. I did go to Southern Connecticut State University
for a graduate feminist conference. One of those wild storms occurred suddenly
and the only way out of New Haven, to catch my plane to New York, was to stop
near the Yale campus where people used to chant Free Ericka, Free Bobby! It
was on the New Haven Green at Yale, and Oh, look at that! [Tony shows her a
Free Ericka sticker.]
TP: This was on my desk when I taught at Berkeley in the 1970s.
EH: Wow, we are connected!

TP: You came to my class with Elaine Brown in 1973.

EH: Yeah. So, near the bus stop at the New Haven Green, the Occupy people were
out in the snow. It turned to sleet in their pup tents and there they were doing their
wonderful things. Along with the woman who had put the conference together, we
discussed returning to Southern Connecticut to collect and deliver the leftover food
and warm drinks from the conference, so as to give something back to a place that
had given something to me.

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Tony Platt, interviewer

TP: You first grew up and went to high school in Washington, DC. At what age
did you become aware of the racial segregation there? By your own account, you
were a rebel in high school, and kept dropping out and coming back to school.

EH: No, I didnt drop out of high school. I did leave college in my junior year to
drive across the country from Lincoln University to join the Black Panthers. When
I was eight years old, I first began to question why people lived in their cars in the
snow and why the wealthy people in the Northwest and on Capitol Hill had warm
houses and big, heavy coats in winter. I didnt understand, and my mother was the
person who mentored me. She was the first to tell me about slavery. The schools
didnt teach thatand still dont. I wasnt being taught about the true American
history in the classroom, so she told me that there were slaves. I was heartbroken,
shocked, and saddened.

TP: At age 15 you went to the March on Washington. Did that have an impact on you?
EH: Absolutely. It transformed my life. I went by myself against my parents wishes.
TP: They thought it might be dangerous?

EH: I was 15, and their oldest daughter. When my mother said I could not go, I
reminded her that she had told me to work for the uplifting of people, my people,
and all other poor peoplethats what good people do. And she said, I didnt
mean you! [Laughter]
Anyway, I will never forget riding on the bus toward the northwest from southeast Washington and seeing all these people gathering together, who had come on
foot, in pickup trucks, in hooptie old cars, and in Greyhound and Trailways buses.
Some had flown in or came on flatbed trucks that Im sure had carried tobacco
or cotton. I was by myself and I stood there watching in amazement that African
Americans and other poor people were coming together to say no to further oppression. It was a striking day. I did not talk to anyone, and nobody talked to me.
I just listened and watched. At that time I made a vow to serve the people for the
rest of my life. It just rose up and I paid attention.
TP: Not too long after that you went to Lincoln University, a black college in rural
Pennsylvania. Why did you choose that college, or why did it choose you?
EH: Thats a nice way of asking it. Before I went to Lincoln, I attended Cheney
State Teachers College for a year. I found out much later that Cheney, Lincoln, and
Wilberforce University in Ohio were black colleges, but I didnt know that history. Those three were the first of the 103 historical black colleges to open during
slavery. So it was a conscious choice that I made unconsciously.
TP: Was the campus conservative when you went there?

EH: Cheney was a party school when I attended. And Lincoln wasnt conservative at all! However, it was historically a black, all-male campus. I was one of the

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

57

first 15 women to go there. Now, that was not fun at first. You know how it is, you
know how men can be sometimes, right?

TP: I do. Did what we would later call feminismyou already had a very strong
consciousness as a woman and about the situation of women in prison become
important to you during your college years?

EH: We call it feminism now. I knew that my mother, my grandmothers, and my

aunts were all standup women in their own way. This is not to say that they did
not respond to the socialization of their time. They certainly did. They were not
wealthy; they were mostly working class, if not that poor. I learned from them
that any notion that black people were not intelligent was not true, as was the
statement that women could not do the same things as men. So I walked with this
awareness. I did not always meet people who shared my beliefs, even among my
peers. But I knew there was something more for me than to take a government
job in Washington, DC, have 2.5 children, and a husband who would or would
not recognize who I am. I think that my generation began to feel that way. On the
Lincoln campus, I first joined a student organization. They did not want me to join
because I was a woman.
TP: Which organization?

EH: It was called the Black Student Congress. Lincoln University was a clearinghouse for African students. Kwame Nkrumah went there, as did Langston Hughes.
I had the good fortune of being there in 1967, with Stokely Carmichael. Do you
know who Stokely Carmichael is? If you do not know something, its fine, because
then you will learn about it. Well, SNCC was the Students Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and Stokely Carmichael was one of its leaders. It was the more progressive student aspect of the NAACPNational Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. Black people used to be called colored or Negroes, among other
things. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, a professor, were writing Black
Power at the time and were residents on the Lincoln campus. It is a phenomenal,
though tiny book. On Tuesday or Wednesday evenings, they gathered us in this
little room in the Student Union Building. Crowded together there, we would read
from and discuss chapters from the book. I had no clue that I was a part of making
history, no sense of myself in history. Looking back on that, it was a privilege. They
were very humble, kind, and encouraging. And once the Lincoln campus finally
came to terms with the fact that women were going to be there, it was a great, very
progressive place to be.
TP: I know a woman who worked very closely on that book as an editor, but
received no credit or any mention in the preface or elsewhere. That was also one
of the things that happened in terms of diminishing the contributions of women.
EH: Well, we live in a society that diminishes the contribution of women. Why
would Stokely and Charles be any different? Why would my father or my brother

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Tony Platt, interviewer

be any different? And it still is so. We live in a country that doesnt acknowledge
that Shirley Chisholm was the first African American person and one of the first
women to run for president in 1972. We did not hear that during the 2008 electoral campaign, did we? It is not even intentionally diminishing, but rather, Oh,
its just a woman. As Sojourner Truth says, we all come from a woman, so it is
paradoxical, isnt it?
TP: So you met John Huggins at Lincoln. Did you get married then?

EH: No. Everything was happening at once in the 1960s. Every notion of norms
or what was normal was being tossed up, so relationships were different. The free
love movement was going on. Although I was not focused on that, and neither
was John, we were pulling apart the web of normalcy that our parents had given
us. At first we were just friends. Then I realized that our hearts were quite alike,
that we thought alike and wanted the same things for the most marginalized and
oppressed people in this country. And I would say that John was a feminist man.
I hope everybody understands what feminism is, because sometimes when I say
that, people go, what? That is why I loved him so much, because there was no place
where he held a human being in lock; he always saw the greatness in people. So
sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, and the gigantic phobia against
immigrants were just not possible around John Huggins. I learned a great deal
from him just by being with him. He was only a few years older than I was. He
was very wise and very free in his mind and heart. We did get married later, but
he was a dear friend.
TP: So you left in your third year at Lincoln?
EH: Very abruptly.

TP: And you decided to go to Los Angeles, never having lived or been there?

EH: We went there because someone gave us a Ramparts magazine. It was the first
underground magazine I had ever read. You couldnt buy it on a newsstand, but it
was really well written and thorough. This particular issue contained a feature article
by Eldridge Cleaver on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Before reading
the article itself, I was stunned by the picture of Huey Newton lying on a hospital
gurney with a bullet wound in his belly. Police were standing guard over him and
he had been accused of killing a policeman. As I read about the party and viewed
the picture, I thought there must be something I could do. There was a burgeoning
Free Huey movement, so John and I got in his old car and left campus. We called
our parents and stopped to visit his family, but not mine. Then we drove across the
country, arriving in LA just in time for the Huey Newton birthday rallies taking
place there and in Oakland.
TP: Was there a Black Panther Party chapter in LA that you quickly joined?

EH: Yes, there was. But we had to find ityou couldnt just call 411. A man and
woman selling the Panther newspaper told us where the office was. So we plunged

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

59

in. We sold the partys paper, spoke on its behalf, and helped to start the breakfast
program, which was one of the first BPP survival programs. Eventually, there were
25 of them, a fact that didnt appear in the newspapers or on the nightly news.
Instead, you saw scowling men, black berets, and guns. The mass media played a
crucial role in diminishing, or actually demeaning, the BPP. It portrayed the party
as violent, rather than looking at the countrys violent history. Its original name
was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Where I grew up in DClets not even talk about Oaklandmy sister and I
would walk to the corner store. In all the communities we lived in, stores had names
such as the blue store, the yellow store, or the white store, but in DC it was called
the DGS, standing for the collection of district grocery stores in the District of
Columbia. They were always in poor communities, and you had to drive to them.
It is still that way. Oakland is a food desert, just as southeast Washington, DC, was
at the time. You had to drive far to get to a Safeway or a regular market. My sister
and I walked to the DGS because they sold a bag of French fries for a quarter.
Almost every time we did, we saw the police beating somebody to the ground. We
lived in the working-class part of the neighborhood, in a housing project. There
were housing projects everywhere, and humane conditions were lacking. The
police were an occupying army. But my sister and I were too nave to know that
we could be harmed. So if we saw the police beating someone, we yelled at them
to stop. They never turned their guns on us. Children are sometimes protected. At
times they stopped, and at times they kept up the beatings.
In the Northwest, where I attended high school, the police didnt occupy
neighborhoods. That was a transformative educational experience. People said hello
to the police officers in their neighborhoods; they talked to the police. I always
thought (and my sister was even more forceful about it): Why dont people stand up
to the police? Why dont we do something? That was the reason the Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense was named in that way. The panther in the name was taken
from the mascot for the Lowndes County Freedom Organizationone of the first
voting rights organizations in Alabama. Again, media images were intended to make
us look like very violent, hateful people, but that wasnt our purpose.
TP: That was also influenced by the struggles for self-defense going on in the
South. There is a long history of black communities trying to defend themselves
from the police and other kinds of racist violence.
EH: I dont know if Angela Davis talked about this already, but her father, and many
fathers, grandfathers, and uncles had guns in their homes to protect themselves
from the Ku Klux Klan, as well as from the various racist and fascist organizations
that existed. When I grew up, people were still being lynched. At Cheney State
Teachers College, before I transferred to Lincoln, crosses were burnt on the campus
lawns right across the road from some of our main buildings. So people defended
themselves. You remember the plantation paradigm: a slave was not supposed to

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Tony Platt, interviewer

defend himself or herself. Slavery never was intervened against. It was ended on
paper and eventually in fact, but the infrastructure was in place and it persists in
many ways today.

TP: You talked about how people tried to protect and defend themselves against
policing on the street. Another policing issue is what you were up against with FBI
and intelligence operations. The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, a book that some
of us worked on in the early 1970s, reprinted a cartoon circulated by the FBI to
provoke Ron (Maulana) Karenga and the more nationalist organizations into fighting with the Panthers. Beyond the infiltrations and people collecting information
on you, the FBI tried to set organization against organization. Among other things,
this resulted in the murder of your husband in 1969 on the UCLA campus, in what
was supposedly a battle over political turf. What do you think it was about?
EH: It is what I know. I wish it were just my opinion. That would probably feel
better, because an opinion could be corrected. At the Huey Newton birthday rally,
Eldridges mother stood up and said, I dont have much to say today. I just want
to say, free my baby. We could do this! The median age of BPP members was
eighteen or nineteen. Only in his mid-20s, Huey was probably one of the oldest
people in the party, which is amazing. The rally took place in a packed Oakland
Coliseum. So was the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where we were. Far
away on the huge stage, I could see Stokely Carmichael and SNCC leader James
Forman, as well as Bobby Seale. I asked about other people who would be in
Los Angeles, and they pointed to Alprentice Bunchy Carter, who was killed on
the UCLA campus with John Huggins on January 17, 1969. A beautiful picture
existsI wish I could show it to youof the section of the stage where Bunchy
was sitting next to Ron Karenga. There was no animosity. Those cartoons were
intended to create animosity. We thought they were hilarious, because no black
person would draw a cartoon like that. We knew it was the FBI, which recruited
African American informants and operatives to pretend to be members of the US
Organization, the Black Panther Party, SNCC, or any organization that tried to
change anything. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was not a well man. I wish Clint
Eastwood had done more in his film J. Edgar to point out how Hoovers actions
harmed whole families of people.
TP: It is not in Clint Eastwoods politics to do that.

EH: Right. In time, John and I joined the BPP. Our office, like those of many freedom organizations, was in the Black Congress building. Two doors away was the
office of the US Organization, whose acronym stood for United Slaves. There was
no animosity, just some teasing since our ideologies were so different. The role of
these operatives and agents is a long story. Leading up to the events of that day was
a debate over who should become the director of the Equal Opportunity Program
(OEP) on campus. The students, the US Organization, and another organization

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

61

had put forward different persons. John and Bunchy were students on campus and
were asking other students in Campbell Hall, where the EOP office was located, to
support the person we wanted. On the morning of January 17, they were murdered
there. The men who were arrested and convicted of killing them were innocent.
The real killer has never been found. But I know it was the FBI because an FBI
informant sought me out and met with me to tell me what had happened. Since
an agent plays both ends against the middle, I asked him what had prompted him
to tell me anything and why I should believe him. He could not sleep, he said,
because neither of the convicted men had done anything. When he returned to the
FBI office, which was near to Westwood, the director was pacing back and forth
and yelling at the top of his lungs, We fucked up! We werent supposed to kill
anybody! For a long time, the FBI refused to admit anything, or to comment on
its actions. A year later, though, they admitted to setting things in motion, but not
to killing John and Bunchy.
TP: So you became a widow, with a small child.

EH: When John was killed, my daughter was three weeks old. I had dreamt that he
was going to die, so I knew. And I believe he knew. Quite often, people are aware that
a transition is going to occur. I became a widow and a single mom simultaneously.
TP: Did this change your political commitment, since you had a small child?

EH: When I went to New Haven to bury Johns body and to be with his family,
Yale students and the New Haven black community asked me start a party chapter
there. I agreed. To say I was deeply sad is an understatement. I had lost two of my
best friends, teachers in a way, and John was the man I loved, the father of my
child. Although it was a very difficult time, I wanted to start a BPP chapter for him
and for the sake of my daughter. Three months later, I was arrested for conspiracy
with the intent to commit murder. I was imprisoned when my daughter was three
and one-half months old.
TP: Your daughter was with your mother?

EH: When I was arrested, my mother-in-law took my daughter into her home and
raised her.
TP: And you were imprisoned in Niantic for over two years?
EH: Two years, two months, and some hours.

TP: It was a felony charge for murdering Alex Rackley?

EH: That original charge was dropped, leaving conspiracy with the intent to commit murder. They wanted to prove that Bobby Seale and I had conspired to murder
a young man named Alex Rackley. Bobby was there in New Haven to give talks,
and I hadnt conspired to murder anybody. An FBI operative named George Sands
set it up, had them murdered. Attorney General John Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover

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Tony Platt, interviewer

said similar things: the Black Panther Party posed the greatest threat to national
security. Mitchell said, and I am paraphrasing, we will wipe them out by the end
of 1969 by any means necessary. The intention was to kill the party by getting rid
of the leadership. In a way, they succeeded.

TP: Because so many people in the leadership were either killed, jailed, imprisoned,
or went in exile in that period of time.
EH: Or went crazy. You cant be under constant threat and surveillance and be at
ease (without a lot of effort, at least). Despite being young, we must have been
deemed very powerful for the most mighty entities in the United States to come
after us in this way and to use taxpayers money, my mothers taxes, to do it. So
a lot of people lost it.
TP: In prison you were organizing, particularly other women inside, and you were
also writing your poetry, some of which appeared in a political magazine I worked
on in the early 1970s. Did this help save your sanity?

EH: I wrote poetry from the age of 11. My father was an alcoholic, and the quietest and safest place in my house was the bathroom. You could lock the door and
nobody would question what you were doing or why you were there. I just wrote
to the paper, Dear Paper. As I got older, my junior high school teachers encouraged me to keep writing. In high school, I started writing poetry and I also wrote
while in prison. There was no time to write anything in the Black Panther Party.
We worked 20 hours a day. Teaching myself to meditate actually kept me sane.
TP: Would you mind reading one of the poems you wrote while you were inside?

EH: Sure. Writing helped me to process the grief from Johns death and the unbearable loneliness I felt from not having my daughter with me. I could only see
her for one hour, once a week, on Saturdays. Since I was writing with my hands,
with a pen or pencil, it was a kinesthetic way of healing. Ill read The Oldness of
New Things,1 since it is more uplifting:
the oldness of new things
fascinate me like a new
feeling about love about people
snow, highways that
sparkle at night, talk,
laughter...
that old longing for freedom
that this place constantly
renewsit all makes
me know that humankind
has longed to be free ever forever
since its break from the

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

63

whole
maybe the longing for
freedom will soon make
others homesick for our
natural state in/with
earth, air, fire, water
not dead
but living
not asking for freedom
but free
EH: I believe I wrote that while in solitary confinement.
TP: How does it strike you now?
EH: As true.

Student: Why did you end up in solitary confinement?

EH: If women talked to me, they were put in the hole, a room with nothing but
a hole in the floor and a pallet. Women spoke to me anyway and took that risk.
Angela Davis was in the house of detention at the same time and was put in solitary
confinement. Her lawyers argued before the State of New York that it was cruel
and unusual punishment. Our lawyers, with Bobby Seales, said to the State of
Connecticut that it could not do it either. After a while they let me out. I did learn
a lot in solitary. For example, if I did not have a relationship with myself, all my
other relationships were not going to be true. If I didnt understand who I was, how
could I understand anything else? Nobody was teaching me. In the quiet of those
days, I chose to reflect and was meditating by that time. It was an important time.
TP: I understand that Watani (Larry) Stiner, who was one of the men arrested for
killing your husband, was sent to San Quentin and escaped, which is no small
thing. He went to South America for many years, returned voluntarily for personal
reasons, was rearrested, and sent back to San Quentin.
EH: Where hes been for 19 years.

TP: I know you have a practice of visiting jails and prisons and bringing in education, meditation, and spirituality. Did you actually have a meeting with him?
EH: Yes. The most phenomenal thing happened. Angela Daviss sister Fania, a
lawyer, is the cofounder and executive director of RJOY, Restorative Justice for
Our Youth. She makes presentations in prisons, jails, and schools and gave one on
restorative justice at San Quentin. Prisoners call San Quentin the Bastille by the
Bay and its history is infamous. After her presentation, a man approached Fania
and asked whether she knew Ericka Huggins. She said, Yes, shes my friend.
He asked whether I would enter into a restorative justice dialogue with him. She

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Tony Platt, interviewer

agreed to contact me. He could not contact me; I had to contact him. When Fania
told me the story, it was a revelatory, precious moment. I immediately wrote a
letter saying that I would enter into the dialogue. That was in March of 2010. We
communicated by letter, and he said that he had first considered reaching out to
me while living in exile in Guyana. He had older children here, and two little ones
from a subsequent marriage. While looking at his children one day, it suddenly
struck him that my daughter would never have her father. This recurring thought
led him to ask for my forgiveness. It is amazing what forgiving and being forgiven
can do. I deeply believed that this would be important for Johns and my grandsons, because forgiveness for the person asking for it and for the one who gives
it has ripple effects for generations. Our letters were also amazing. He is a writer
and poet and we are kindred spirits. It raises an interesting paradox: if I had held
a grudge, I would never have known this wonderful human being. Finally, in late
September the San Quentin authorities and the victim/offender dialogue teams
approved a four-hour, face-to-face meeting with Watani at the prison. He had met
John, but that was the first time I had met him. It was a phenomenal day. He may
never leave prison, even though he didnt murder anyone. After leaving the country,
he returned on his own and received probation for that. Perhaps he is being held
because they want to know the whereabouts of his brother.
Jonathan Simon (JS): Why did he seek your forgiveness if he didnt kill your
husband?

EH: That is what I asked him. Why do you want my forgiveness if you didnt do
anything? But he said, yes, I did. He was part of something he could have stopped.
He was there on that day and felt that his organization was part of something,
consciously or unconsciously, FBI or no FBI, that had helped to murder John. I
understood him, because for many years I blamed myself for the death of Alex
Rackley, even though I did not kill him. I understood that and asked him many
times why he was in prison. He does not have an answer. The prison authorities
want his brother.
TP: I chose that experience because it is emblematic of what you have done with
the last period of your life.
EH: It was really an amazing moment that day at San Quentin. Now we plan to
speak together on restorative justice, and hopefully we can unravel some matters
for people who are still holding grudges.
TP: Let me conclude with another big question. I was in Ashland, Oregon, shortly
after you were, to see the play Party People

EH: You were? Wasnt it phenomenal?

TP: Yes, it was an incredible, extraordinary experience. I was there on the weekend
that Fred Hampton, Jr., was there, and it was just an amazing set of conversations.

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

65

One of the brave things about Party People, which is about the history of the Black
Panther Party and the Young Lords, is that they talk quite openly about what they
call collateral damage, that is, the harm, damage, and cruelty committed by
comrades against one another in organizations. Those of us who join organizations
fighting for social justice often think of ourselves as immune from social injustices
within our organizations. The play takes on that topic, among other things, and
tries to politically defend the movement. But it brings that into a very harsh light.
What did you think about that? Some people would say that we shouldnt wash
our dirty laundry in public, or talk about internal problems, cause the man will
use it against us

EH: The United States has piles of dirty laundrywith some shit in itand doesnt
talk about it. We cant talk about race without getting defensive, guilty, ashamed,
or upset. Why? Because we dont talk about it! Lets take it down to the tiniest
unit, the family. If there is abuse in the familysexual or physical abuseand it
is not talked about, it festers and there is no healing. It is simply carried forward.
The Black Panthers and Young Lords Party had similar trajectories and experiences. I spent a lot of time with Denise Oliver, the second time I was in Ashland.
She was a leading member of the Young Lords Party and a BPP member. Denises
story is told in a stunning book that focuses on women, which is rare. Edited by
Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, it is entitled Want to Start a
Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. There is a chapter on
Denise Oliver and one on the real Rosa Parks, whose picture appears on the cover.
Denise and I shared stories, laughedwe almost couldnt sit straightand we
also cried together. The first time we saw the play, we were spellbound. Particular
scenes were difficult for both of us. Afterwards, Denise and I, plus all the people
gathered there, including Emory Douglas, had wide-ranging conversations. The
second time I saw the play, I felt great that people could see the love that we had
for one another, but also that that love was not constant. It was very clear that the
FBI, COINTELPRO, as well as the police and other governmental agencies seriously affected uskilled our spirit and physically killed people.
Questions and Comments
JS: Can you say a little more about how you and John saw the BPP from Lincoln?
The exposure you had to a range of emancipation movements, from SNCC to the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in which more whites were likely involved, was rather extraordinary. What was it about the Panthers that excited you so
much that you drove across the country without even knowing where to find them?

EH: SDS hadnt reached Lincoln yet. The Black Panther Party wasnt a nationalist
organizationit wasnt focused solely on uplifting black people. I thought about
its sloganAll power to the peoplewhich for John and I meant it was about

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Tony Platt, interviewer

poor people of all kinds. Down the road from the campus was a little city called
Lincoln Village, where black and brown children were in school. The demographics
were somewhat like southeast Washington, DC, Harlem, or North Philadelphia.
Poor white children were there as well. They lacked everything, including a sense
of their own esteem. The BPP was international in scope, and the organization
sought to meet the needs of poor people wherever they were, regardless of their
race or ethnicity. Its broad and open feeling stood out to me. And as time went on,
the party formed chapters around the worldnot just in Algiers, where Eldridge
was. It touched people of all ages, at all stages of life, and in all parts of the community in Los Angeles. In the chapter I joined, there were former students, like
myself, Vietnam vets, former drug dealers and prostitutes, people who had just left
prison, and former gangbangers. As a matter of fact, Bunchy Carter politicized the
Renegade Slausen street gang, which was a very famous community entity, and
brought many of them into the party. It was not just students, or a lot of talking.
It was about action. People were hungry, so feed them! People needed a school?
Create one! People couldnt visit their loved ones in prison? Create a bus-to-prisons
program! Why wait for the government, which obviously was not going to do what
needed to be done?

Dario Melossi: Was this just do it, dont wait approach a criticism of the traditional
Left, of the pie in the sky idea whereby it would be possible to do something
only when the real revolution took place?
EH: Im not sure it was a criticism of the Left, but Huey Newton did apply the
term armchair revolutionaries to those who talked about it, but whenever a
person needed something, they said, No, the people arent ready. We asked how
somebody could think about changing their circumstances if their children were
starving, they lacked clothing, or were being been shot at. We wanted to make it
so that people could come to an understanding of the need for change. Poverty is
like quicksand, and when youre living in the throws of poverty you simply dont
have clarity of mind, body, or spirit.
Student: I am a teacher at San Quentin in the Prison University Project. From your
experience, how would you advise people interested in restorative justice and in
expanding those measures across the nation?

EH: Make sure that you get yourselves out of prison and look deeply into your
hearts and minds, where you hold the notion of saving or fixing. Remain committed even when challenged, because California has built more prisons than
schools. Poor schools are training grounds for prison. To restore justice, we need
to educate children and teens. Extend your thinking beyond incarcerated people
to the abolition of prisons.
Student: Could you speak more about the links between the Old Left and New Left,
in particular how that related to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in

Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

67

1963? One of the chief demands was for full employment and a guaranteed annual
income, and this was also the second point in the Panthers Ten Point Program. I
know Johns family was involved with the trade unions, the social movement Left
in New Haven. In the conventional narrative, people of my generation have been
told that the Old and New Left were antagonistic. What was your experience, since
they clearly werent antagonistic?

EH: No, they werent. Generally, when youre 18, you feel that people over 30
are moving too slowly. That was more the issue than any real antagonism. Each
time Stokely Carmichael spoke of the NAACP or any organization from the generation before him, he spoke with great respect and love. Yet something else also
needed to be done. John Huggins took a similar approach: Yes, that was good, but
we need to do it differently now. I remember conversations between members of
SNCC and the BPP. Yes, the student movement is great, on the ground and in the
communities. Come look at it, we need to move now. The same was true of the
antiwar movement. It needed a broader base, and developed one, because there was
a war going on in Vietnam. We wanted to end the Vietnam War, as well as the war
in the streets of the United States. Sometimes it was difficult to get people to see
that their own backyard had garbage in it. And that was because of the hesitance
to tell the truth about your own country, your own family.
Student: Many people in the radical Asian movement today are devastated by
recent revelations about Richard Aoki.2 Do you have any reflection on this?

EH: Richard was my friend. We are all complex human beings capable of horrendous,
terrible things as well as beautiful, wondrous, secret things. Depending upon our
understanding and growth, I would say from within, you may start over here and
end up over here. The Richard Aoki I knew had only good things to do and say. I
saw him toward the end of his life, when he was very sick. We spoke together at a
panel at MOAD, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Franciscoa place
I encourage you to visit. Richard was a wonderful human being, and despite his
illness he made us all laugh. When the news broke, people wanted to debate with
me about it. Why would I want to further that? I dont care what he was. I know
who he was to me, and all of my friends feel the same way. Of course, somewhere
in the web of our lives he may have caused unspeakable harm. But I choose to
hold onto him as I knew him throughout the years. If I knew you very well and
someone told me you were a serial killer, I couldnt speak about that. I could only
talk about what I know of you, right? I choose to avoid things that distract us from
what needs to be done in the moment. So, the spin on Richard Aoki keeps us from
doing something really uplifting. Often, such distractions are what the FBI intends
by setting up all kinds of whoha, some of which I got involved in. You are pulled
into that instead of concentrating on the fact that children are starving, women in
Oakland dont have adequate prenatal care, and all the other things that should be
happening now.

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Tony Platt, interviewer

Visitor (WW): My name is Wilda White, and I am the executive director of the
Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the Law School in Berkeley. Our
program has the twofold mission of running the program for students who aspire to
social justice careers and we do original community-engaged participatory research
on race, gender, and poverty. I would like to ask about Stokely Carmichael. Part of
an upcoming symposium concerns gender violence and sexism in the Civil Rights
Movement. When Stokely Carmichael said that the only place for women in the
movement was prone, how did you interpret that?

EH: I met Stokely before that statement was made, and I saw him afterward. I
cant hold anyone in check for something they might have said at one time. Have
you ever made a remark about something and wondered, Did that actually come
out of my mouth?
WW: Too many times to remember. But if I thought about it, I apologized.

EH: He did apologize, but no one wanted to hear it. I am not defending him; Im
only telling you what I know. He was socialized in Trinidad, which was very genderbiased, and then in the United States, which is gender-biased and misogynist. As
with Aoki, I choose not to further the question of what Stokely Carmichael said
in the 1970s. I care much more about gender violence, about why it happens and
what infrastructures are in place that made it possible for the man who raped me to
rape me. What are we doing to stop the harm that we can stop? What can we do to
raise feminist boys? What can we do to teach girls how to own and claim not just
their bodies, but their lives? I have worked with young people in juvenile facilities
and I can tell you that their socialization is violent. The United States has a rape
culture. A statement like Stokelys could come out of anybodys mouth, including
some of the men in my family when I was growing up. It is a culture in which it is
okay for men to talk like that, to joke like that. And sometimes women allow for it.
WW: Its frightening.

EH: It is frightening. That is why we must start talking about these things when
people are young. The first conversations should not be at the university level.

TP: Yes. It is appropriate for us to end this conversation on an issue of controversy

that needs much more discussion. This is not the end of the conversation, but the
beginning of a larger one. You have helped us to deepen our understanding of these
issues. Thank you for being here and sharing your experiences with us.

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Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

Cecilia OLeary, interviewer

Cecilia OLeary (CO): How would you want the Black Panther Party to be represented in a national museum dealing with African American history and culture?
Ericka Huggins (EH): By women and children! It was women who ran all of the
day-to-day operations and programs of the party. Black men in leather jackets holding guns did not reflect the everyday work of community survival programs. This
image was important at first because of community education about the need for
self-defense. Then it became a media phenomenon. However, after 1968 women
and most party members did not wear the jacket and beret.
CO: What programs were important to the BPP?

EH: The community survival programs were the body and soul of the party. They
existed from the very beginning. Women played a central role in each of them,
from the early Breakfast for Children programs to the longest standing program
of the party, The Oakland Community School (OCS). The Ten Point Program was
the foundation for meeting the needs of the Black and other marginalized and
under-resourced communitieseach point is connected to survival programs and
community initiatives that the party created.
CO: Can you give me examples of some specific programs?

EH: Free health clinics in many cities in the United States where party chapters
were strong, including sickle-cell anemia testing and dental services; senior programs, such as Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (S.A.F.E.); teen programs;
pest control programs; distribution of clothes, including shoes and coatsthink
about East Coast winters; and Bussing to Prisons, a program to support the families
of prisoners.
CO: Did the BPP have any influence beyond Black communities?

EH: The party influenced community organizations in communities of color and

poor white communities across the United States to create similar programs. The
concept of the free health clinic, staffed by volunteer doctors, dentists, and nurses,
became a template for free clinics throughout the United States. The Haight-Ashbury
Free Clinic in San Francisco and La Clnica de La Raza in the Latino Community
(Fruitvale Area) of East Oakland are still thriving. J. Edgar Hoover included the
survival programs in his charge that the Black Panthers were a threat to the United
States. The FBI Counter Intelligence Program (CONITELPRO) committed acts to
sabotage and destroy the BPP Community Survival programs.
CO: Could you tell me about your community work as an educator?3

EH: The schools approach to teaching history was that anything could be taught.
Children can understand everything. This policy was informed by the fact that

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Cecilia OLeary, interviewer

young Black children were already witnessing violence and they had a right to
know about the past. The Oakland Community School believed that all children
deserve to know their place in history and feel empowered to serve with compassion. Knowledge is power, a revolutionary power because it can transform our
sense of ourselves as teachers and students.
As the OCS director, I regularly visited classrooms. I remember watching a
male teacher discussing with eight- and nine-year-olds how slaves were transported
from Africa to the Americas in tight dark spaces where they were packed head to
crotch and hip to hip. To help the children understand what this meant, he asked
them to lie down on a clean carpet in the classroom head to foot just like the slaves.
Closer, he encouraged. Get tighter. The children held this position on the floor
for a minute. Then they got up quietly.
The children then talked about it. First there was silence, then a child asked, If
they were in chains or unable to move, where did they poop? Right there, the
teacher said. Where did they have their babies? Right there, he said. And so
the discussion began. One child asked if anyone said they were sorry to do this to
so many people. No apology was made, the teacher said. In this exercise, children
engaged in both emotional (affective) and conceptual learning. They were asked
what they would do to prevent this violence from happening again.
CO: Who would you want to see included in the museums section on Black feminists in the 1960s1970s and the section on Black feminists today?
EH: Sojourner Truth has to be featured as one of the earliest Black feminists. Her
speech Aint I a Woman? exemplifies one of the first descriptions of the intersection of gender and race.
Theres also a need to define feminism. Most people do not know what this term
means. Male students in my classes often think it means feminine. Others think it
means man-hater. I suggest using bell hooks definition of feminism: Simply
put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.4
I also use Alice Walkers definition of womanism.
Academics are among the well-known feminists, but we need to include women
of color, community women, beyond the academy and the arts. The academy does
not own intellect; art is not the only way to express it. An intellectual is a person
with a wealth of knowledge and the ability to share it.
CO: Anything else youd like to add?

EH: Throughout the history of African people in the United States there has been a
continuous effort to squelch the past. Every effort was made to separate men from
women of color and communities of people of color from each other. An exhibit in
the museum should show our alliances, coalitions, and support from and to the Latin
Diaspora and the Asian Diaspora, as well as the linkages between the Indigenous
peoples of North America and enslaved and later free Africans.

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Two Interviews with Ericka Huggins

NOTES

1. Ericka Huggins and Huey Newton, Insights and Poems, City Lights Books 1975; see also Crime
and Social Justice 1 (1974), Poem, p. 50.
2. On the controversy over documents revealed by Seth Rosenfeld concerning Richard Aokis role
as an FBI informant, see the discussion between Tony Platt (The Case for and against Richard Aoki, at
www.socialjusticejournal.org/SJEdits/Platt_Richard_Aoki.html) and Gregory Shank (Richard Aokis
Troubled World: A Response, at www.socialjusticejournal.org/SJEdits/Shank_Richard_Aoki.html).
3. Ericka Huggins was the director of the Black Panthers Oakland Community School from 1973
to 1981. During that time she was both the first Black person and first woman to be appointed to the
Alameda County Board of Education.
4. bell hooks, Feminism for Everybody, South End Press 2000.