Showing posts with label now. Show all posts
Showing posts with label now. Show all posts
5.23.2008
Stripped
My cute little street in the Allendale has recently become a popular dumping spot for stripped cars. I was impressed with the latest dump - someone took stripping to a new level. Note that the car parked behind this one is also a dumped, presumably stolen ride. If you recognize it, please come pick it up!
5.21.2008
4.07.2008
3.18.2008
Stop the War
Holy cow have I ever gotten behind on blogging! Forgive me; I'm a single, working mom and I've been trying to get into nursing school, so unfortunately I can't always make enough time to post regularly, but I believe things have calmed down enough for me to get back in the saddle a bit. I'm putting the finishing touches on a post for next week. In the mean time, it’s the five year anniversary of this war in Iraq, and there's a big demo in the city tomorrow. (Direct action info here.)
Forty-one years ago 100,000 people marched from Second and Market to Kezar Stadium to protest the war in Vietnam. It took 8 years after that march, but we ended that war. Let's not have 8 more years of this one.
Forty-one years ago 100,000 people marched from Second and Market to Kezar Stadium to protest the war in Vietnam. It took 8 years after that march, but we ended that war. Let's not have 8 more years of this one.
1.02.2008
Freedom of Information Act
Unbelievably, Bush just signed a bill that will reform the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to reduce some of the bureaucracy that comes with requesting government records and to create accountability for delays in processing those requests. These reforms should allow the public and the media better access to government records, although they won't require any more actual openness on the government's part. In other words, if the FBI crossed out large portions of your grandmother the communist labor organizer's record before sending you a copy, they can still do that. Bummer.
Still, there's no better time than now to request your FBI file, or if your life hasn't been interesting enough, get your grandpa's.
Still, there's no better time than now to request your FBI file, or if your life hasn't been interesting enough, get your grandpa's.
10.23.2007
You Can't Stop Me – an interview with Cathy Cade
If you have an image in your head of a lesbian feminist, Cathy Cade probably helped put in there. For at least my entire adult life, I've been looking at her pictures in the dozen books and magazines where they've been featured, and in her own book, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists.
Cathy became an activist while she was in college: in 1966 she joined the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating and organizing with SNCC. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, she helped found the Tulane chapter of SDS, and later was an early actor in the Women's Movement. In 1970, Cathy moved to San Francisco where she soon came out as a lesbian and started taking pictures, and her interconnected dedication to social justice and to photography has persisted throughout her life. Along with her documentary photo projects, Cathy runs a business as a professional photographer and personal historian. (Her website has details.) I was so excited when Cathy agreed to do an interview with me, and not only did we have a great time talking, but she managed to recruit me to a whole pile of women's history related projects she's involved with!
Along with the interview, I asked Cathy to chose a few pictures which show how her work has changed over the years. You can find them below, each with a little bit of background from her in the caption.
Gail Grassi and Kate Kaufman repairing a car. "It was a time when we all looked to the Chinese Revolution for progressive ideas of making the world a better place for people."
Bay Radical You talked before we started taping about how when you first started doing photography, you couldn't believe that women could really use that equipment.
Cathy Cade That's right.
BR You started taking pictures in '71 – is that right?
CC Ya. The same spring I came out as a lesbian; they were very connected. It was a time when a lot of lesbians were getting into the trades. And so one of the first things I did was photograph women in the trades, and photograph my friends tuning their cars, and the Women's Press Collective printing books, and carpenters. I still like to do that. Recently I've been photographing men doing skilled work. Uptown Body and Fender is in downtown Oakland and the woman who owns that loves art and she hired me to photograph her workers. [Now] there are these big beautiful black and white prints up on the wall, so when you've had your car smashed up you drive in there and you get out of your car and here are all these skilled mechanics doing their work.
BR That's really cool.
CC It turns out I like to photograph men doing skilled work also.
BR Have you taken pictures of men over the years?
CC Some gay men. But this is all political. Most of the men who work in that shop are immigrants from Latin America, one of whom was just being deported the other day. So it all stays political.
BR Was there some lag between when you started taking pictures and when you started thinking of yourself as a photographer?
CC Not very much, but it's a good question because one of the reasons I started taking pictures was because I was tired of going to meetings and all the processing and yet I still wanted to be in the movement. I figured I could make my contribution and not have to go to so many meetings. When I started photographing there were all these new magazines, and there [were] new exhibit opportunities because the women's movement and the lesbian feminist movement was just bursting out. And so my work got used right away. There wasn't any long period of me wondering if anybody was going to like my work or anything. It was totally grabbed up and used in newspapers, and magazines, and local exhibits, and in the new coffeehouses, so that made it really easy.
I didn't want to use the word "artist" because when I was growing up an artist was one of these rare people who was born with humongous talent and "please don’t embarrass us by thinking that you might be talented". But there were people like Holly Near and others using the word "cultural worker", so I could call myself a cultural worker. Things have changed over the years and I call myself an artist. And I'm glad to identify as an artist, but the fact that I was starting to do my photo work when it was wanted, needed, used and I could call myself a cultural worker – was helpful!
"I became involved with a coalition of union women called Union WAGE - Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality. Some of the leadership were of an older generation than we were and had been activists in the '30s. This was one of the only places in the '70s where women in the women's movement of different generations were connecting with each other."
BR Right. That makes sense.
CC I didn't get paid.
BR Right. [Laughing] Some things don't change.
CC I think that I worked in photography as opposed to film partly because I could take pictures without having to raise a lot of money. My attitude a lot was, "You can't stop me." With a camera and wanting to take pictures and maybe wanting to get them out a little bit, the "you can't stop me" would work.
Now a days with the new technology you probably can make little films and put them up on YouTube, that's probably shifted.
"I wanted to do a book on lesbian mothering but I never got to, and when I couldn't do a book I said 'I'm going to take some of my favorite images, and I'm going to print them on cloth and embroider the cloth onto diapers'. The great thing about it is, I hang it up on a clothes line with old fashioned clothes pins - I can hang up an exhibit in 20 minutes - which means that I can hang it up for a one day event. I have it in the works to expand it."
BR Right. Well, it's a trade off because, what we don't have now is a movement to go with it and so it's…
CC You don't think we do?
BR Well, I'm curious how you think about it because your work was such a part of a movement. Does it still feel like its connected to a movement in the same way?
CC Well, backup a minute. I had two kids as a lesbian by donor insemination. My first son was born in '78, and my second in '85 – this was the beginning of this new lesbian mothering movement – so I had my kids and raised my kids in a political context. There were those years where lesbian mothering was my movement. After they got to a certain age, I guess high school or something, they weren't around as much and I started looking around and saying, "OK, so where's the Women's Movement? Where's the Lesbian Movement now?" And I couldn't find it. At first it seemed like it was nowhere. Like, when I moved out here in '71, I knew where the Women's Liberation Movement was: it was at Glide Church on Friday nights at 7:30.
BR That makes it easy!
CC Ya! But then we're talking the late '80s, early '90s, it's like nowhere and everywhere. And that's what it feels like now. But I'm now more and more connected with an old lesbian movement, and that's easier to identify - where it is - so I've lucked out again, in another identifiable movement.
Old Lesbians Organizing for Change marching at an early anti-Iraq War demonstration. "I started cutting up my pictures and making collages. This was radical. I had all been black and white, documentary photography, and all the sudden I'm cutting up a print and I'm going, 'Who do you think you are? God?'"
BR [There's a] theme that I see in your pictures that I wondered if you see, or if you have other themes that you want to point out: The subjects in your pictures are without self-consciousness, and especially because it's women doing non-traditional work, or people who are seen by the outside world as ugly in a certain way, that you just present in this really matter-of-fact way.
CC Well, I really appreciate you calling it that because some people think I'm overly positive, disgustingly positive, just this old Pollyanna, so it's nice of you to call it self-acceptance and a lack of self-consciousness. But I really did want to show us as human beings and to show us acting out of our personal power. Those early women in the trades pictures have a lot of sense of personal power you know. And I wanted to show women as smart and loving.
And the lesbian mothering pictures, I called them "mothering" not just "lesbian mothers" because nobody talked about mothering and what a job [it] was, and that it had skills. Part of what I wanted to do in those pictures was to articulate, "What do mothers do?" Not just what do lesbian mothers do but, "What is the job of mothering?"
The other thing is the everydayness - celebrating the everydayness. Everyday activities and everyday people.
"These quilt photos start out being 4X6 color prints that I take to the lab and they make 'em. No more sweating in the dark room. I cut the prints up and I reassemble them like you would a quilt if you had little pieces of cloth. They're about beauty, and I think in this day and age beauty brings hope, and getting to have hope is very political."
Cathy became an activist while she was in college: in 1966 she joined the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating and organizing with SNCC. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, she helped found the Tulane chapter of SDS, and later was an early actor in the Women's Movement. In 1970, Cathy moved to San Francisco where she soon came out as a lesbian and started taking pictures, and her interconnected dedication to social justice and to photography has persisted throughout her life. Along with her documentary photo projects, Cathy runs a business as a professional photographer and personal historian. (Her website has details.) I was so excited when Cathy agreed to do an interview with me, and not only did we have a great time talking, but she managed to recruit me to a whole pile of women's history related projects she's involved with!
Along with the interview, I asked Cathy to chose a few pictures which show how her work has changed over the years. You can find them below, each with a little bit of background from her in the caption.
Gail Grassi and Kate Kaufman repairing a car. "It was a time when we all looked to the Chinese Revolution for progressive ideas of making the world a better place for people."
Bay Radical You talked before we started taping about how when you first started doing photography, you couldn't believe that women could really use that equipment.
Cathy Cade That's right.
BR You started taking pictures in '71 – is that right?
CC Ya. The same spring I came out as a lesbian; they were very connected. It was a time when a lot of lesbians were getting into the trades. And so one of the first things I did was photograph women in the trades, and photograph my friends tuning their cars, and the Women's Press Collective printing books, and carpenters. I still like to do that. Recently I've been photographing men doing skilled work. Uptown Body and Fender is in downtown Oakland and the woman who owns that loves art and she hired me to photograph her workers. [Now] there are these big beautiful black and white prints up on the wall, so when you've had your car smashed up you drive in there and you get out of your car and here are all these skilled mechanics doing their work.
BR That's really cool.
CC It turns out I like to photograph men doing skilled work also.
BR Have you taken pictures of men over the years?
CC Some gay men. But this is all political. Most of the men who work in that shop are immigrants from Latin America, one of whom was just being deported the other day. So it all stays political.
BR Was there some lag between when you started taking pictures and when you started thinking of yourself as a photographer?
CC Not very much, but it's a good question because one of the reasons I started taking pictures was because I was tired of going to meetings and all the processing and yet I still wanted to be in the movement. I figured I could make my contribution and not have to go to so many meetings. When I started photographing there were all these new magazines, and there [were] new exhibit opportunities because the women's movement and the lesbian feminist movement was just bursting out. And so my work got used right away. There wasn't any long period of me wondering if anybody was going to like my work or anything. It was totally grabbed up and used in newspapers, and magazines, and local exhibits, and in the new coffeehouses, so that made it really easy.
I didn't want to use the word "artist" because when I was growing up an artist was one of these rare people who was born with humongous talent and "please don’t embarrass us by thinking that you might be talented". But there were people like Holly Near and others using the word "cultural worker", so I could call myself a cultural worker. Things have changed over the years and I call myself an artist. And I'm glad to identify as an artist, but the fact that I was starting to do my photo work when it was wanted, needed, used and I could call myself a cultural worker – was helpful!
"I became involved with a coalition of union women called Union WAGE - Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality. Some of the leadership were of an older generation than we were and had been activists in the '30s. This was one of the only places in the '70s where women in the women's movement of different generations were connecting with each other."
BR Right. That makes sense.
CC I didn't get paid.
BR Right. [Laughing] Some things don't change.
CC I think that I worked in photography as opposed to film partly because I could take pictures without having to raise a lot of money. My attitude a lot was, "You can't stop me." With a camera and wanting to take pictures and maybe wanting to get them out a little bit, the "you can't stop me" would work.
Now a days with the new technology you probably can make little films and put them up on YouTube, that's probably shifted.
"I wanted to do a book on lesbian mothering but I never got to, and when I couldn't do a book I said 'I'm going to take some of my favorite images, and I'm going to print them on cloth and embroider the cloth onto diapers'. The great thing about it is, I hang it up on a clothes line with old fashioned clothes pins - I can hang up an exhibit in 20 minutes - which means that I can hang it up for a one day event. I have it in the works to expand it."
BR Right. Well, it's a trade off because, what we don't have now is a movement to go with it and so it's…
CC You don't think we do?
BR Well, I'm curious how you think about it because your work was such a part of a movement. Does it still feel like its connected to a movement in the same way?
CC Well, backup a minute. I had two kids as a lesbian by donor insemination. My first son was born in '78, and my second in '85 – this was the beginning of this new lesbian mothering movement – so I had my kids and raised my kids in a political context. There were those years where lesbian mothering was my movement. After they got to a certain age, I guess high school or something, they weren't around as much and I started looking around and saying, "OK, so where's the Women's Movement? Where's the Lesbian Movement now?" And I couldn't find it. At first it seemed like it was nowhere. Like, when I moved out here in '71, I knew where the Women's Liberation Movement was: it was at Glide Church on Friday nights at 7:30.
BR That makes it easy!
CC Ya! But then we're talking the late '80s, early '90s, it's like nowhere and everywhere. And that's what it feels like now. But I'm now more and more connected with an old lesbian movement, and that's easier to identify - where it is - so I've lucked out again, in another identifiable movement.
Old Lesbians Organizing for Change marching at an early anti-Iraq War demonstration. "I started cutting up my pictures and making collages. This was radical. I had all been black and white, documentary photography, and all the sudden I'm cutting up a print and I'm going, 'Who do you think you are? God?'"
BR [There's a] theme that I see in your pictures that I wondered if you see, or if you have other themes that you want to point out: The subjects in your pictures are without self-consciousness, and especially because it's women doing non-traditional work, or people who are seen by the outside world as ugly in a certain way, that you just present in this really matter-of-fact way.
CC Well, I really appreciate you calling it that because some people think I'm overly positive, disgustingly positive, just this old Pollyanna, so it's nice of you to call it self-acceptance and a lack of self-consciousness. But I really did want to show us as human beings and to show us acting out of our personal power. Those early women in the trades pictures have a lot of sense of personal power you know. And I wanted to show women as smart and loving.
And the lesbian mothering pictures, I called them "mothering" not just "lesbian mothers" because nobody talked about mothering and what a job [it] was, and that it had skills. Part of what I wanted to do in those pictures was to articulate, "What do mothers do?" Not just what do lesbian mothers do but, "What is the job of mothering?"
The other thing is the everydayness - celebrating the everydayness. Everyday activities and everyday people.
"These quilt photos start out being 4X6 color prints that I take to the lab and they make 'em. No more sweating in the dark room. I cut the prints up and I reassemble them like you would a quilt if you had little pieces of cloth. They're about beauty, and I think in this day and age beauty brings hope, and getting to have hope is very political."
9.23.2007
Two Bookstores
I've had a pretty stressful few months, and unfortunately for my generally overdrawn bank account, I've been pacifying myself by buying a lot of used furniture and new books. Yesterday I found myself twice unable to resist the temptation of bookstores.
Laurel Bookstore on MacArthur and 39th is now (since I moved a couple weeks ago) my neighborhood bookstore. They mostly carry new books, with a large children's section and a nice mix of other topics. I spent some time talking to the owner and she was especially warm and helpful. The place generally has a friendly, happy, neighborhoody feeling that I liked. When I was there yesterday I found a copy of Storybook Strings and a new history of the Laurel District by Oakland lover Dennis Evanosky. Turns out he'll be doing a reading at Laurel Bookstore next month, so I'll be back!
Then last night, after filling up on injira at Cafe Colucci I stopped into Book Zoo on Telegraph at Alcatraz and found a couple used Arcadia history books and a well-preserved first edition of If They Come in the Morning from the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and Other Political Prisoners. I don't care about the first edition thing, I just want to read it, but I was impressed that the Book Zoo folks only charged four bucks. Their prices are all very reasonable and the store is beautiful, with lovely old hardbacks shelved almost to the ceiling. Very worth a visit.
I really wanted to close this with a link to John and Yoko singing Angela, but I couldn't find a copy online, so you'll have to content yourself with reading the lyrics.
Laurel Bookstore on MacArthur and 39th is now (since I moved a couple weeks ago) my neighborhood bookstore. They mostly carry new books, with a large children's section and a nice mix of other topics. I spent some time talking to the owner and she was especially warm and helpful. The place generally has a friendly, happy, neighborhoody feeling that I liked. When I was there yesterday I found a copy of Storybook Strings and a new history of the Laurel District by Oakland lover Dennis Evanosky. Turns out he'll be doing a reading at Laurel Bookstore next month, so I'll be back!
Then last night, after filling up on injira at Cafe Colucci I stopped into Book Zoo on Telegraph at Alcatraz and found a couple used Arcadia history books and a well-preserved first edition of If They Come in the Morning from the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and Other Political Prisoners. I don't care about the first edition thing, I just want to read it, but I was impressed that the Book Zoo folks only charged four bucks. Their prices are all very reasonable and the store is beautiful, with lovely old hardbacks shelved almost to the ceiling. Very worth a visit.
I really wanted to close this with a link to John and Yoko singing Angela, but I couldn't find a copy online, so you'll have to content yourself with reading the lyrics.
9.10.2007
Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park
I told the kids I was taking them to the Rosie the Riveter Park, which they seemed very excited about it despite the fact they've never heard of Rosie the Riveter. The concept of Rosie the Riveter is confusing because the idea that there was a time when women weren't allowed to work the same jobs as men is foreign to them. I mean, their parents are lesbians – in their world, women do everything including fixing cars, washing dishes, and rolling children up in their blankets like human burritos; why shouldn't women rivet? And what the hell is a rivet anyway? On the way to the park I gave them my now classic lecture (most recently used when discussing Martin Luther King Jr.) about how Sometimes People Have Ideas That Aren't True, and It's Important to Tell Those People That ANYONE Can Be a Riveter (or that anyone should be able to ride in the front of the bus, depending on which lecture I'm giving). (I restrained myself from giving a lecture on war profiteering, which might have been more appropriate for this memorial – more on that in a minute.)
I hadn't been to Richmond in a while, and when I got off the freeway, I was completely confused by the impenetrable wall of condos. This isn't the Richmond I'm familiar with, and if it is part of Richmond now, what is the city doing with all the new property taxes? Please, someone with some real Richmond knowledge fill me in. In any case, I got lost in condo land and finally ended up at an upscale mini-mart where I asked the proprietor for directions to Rosie the Riveter Park. He looked over his glasses at me and chuckled (I'm not exaggerating - he really chuckled!), "Your expectations are too high," and directed me back to a patch of grass next to a parking lot I'd just passed.
The kids and I got out at the Rosie Memorial, a little exhibit about women homefront workers that was commissioned by the City of Richmond, and designed by artist Susan Schwartzenberg (Susan, why don't you have a website?) and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Given, I'm a nerd, but I really liked it. The memorial runs the length of a Liberty Ship, and as you walk along the path spanning the ships distance, you can read a mini labor history of WWII, with a focus on people of color and women. Also interspersed are quotes from women shipyard workers, and these, along with photos posted at the site, are the most affecting part of the exhibit.
The memorial is planted on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard number 2, where steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser employed many thousands of workers to build ships for WWII.
Richmond's history is inseparably linked with Kaiser's factories and with the war. Richmond became a largely African-American city (36% of the population according to the latest census) as a result of migration related to the war industries. And the poverty that many Richmond residents confront now is directly linked with the city's failure to create adequate housing and infrastructure for its many new residents during the war, and the sudden disappearance of jobs that occurred when the war was over.
In 1940, Richmond had a small town feeling and a population of around 23,000. By 1950, the population was more than 99,000. Workers came in carloads and trainloads, brought by the more than 170 recruiters that Kaiser employed around the state and around the country to power the shipbuilding empire that he had centered in Richmond. So desperate was Kaiser for workers that at one point, LA recruiters instituted a "work for drunks" program where judges issued suspended sentences to 'vagrants' in exchange for an agreement to come work in the Richmond yards. That program didn't last long, but even for the average newly arrived worker, (if you can say that there was an 'average' since folks came from all over the state, from all regions of the country, and represented dozens of ethnic groups) the attrition rate was high. Once workers arrived they found limited housing, working conditions that were both stressful and tedious, and the loneliness of leaving home. The many new African-American workers transplanted from the South found themselves subject to the same Jim Crow racist hiring and housing practices they were familiar with from back home. War industry work crews were racially segregated, Black workers were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, and Black workers were refused membership in the major unions and instead relegated to auxiliary 'negro' unions where members were expected to pay dues but received little or no protection. (White women faced job discrimination as well, receiving significantly lower pay for jobs that white male workers got more for). While many protested these conditions, for example, in the Sausalito shipyards nearly all the Black employees walked out in protest of racist conditions in 1943, government agencies, white labor leaders, and industrialist business-owners were less than sympathetic. Outside of the factory, public housing built during the war was segregated in Richmond, as it was in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. (According to The Second Gold Rush, details on that book below, Berkeley community leader Byron Rumford started a petition drive protesting public housing segregation which finally lead to federally mandated integration of Berkeley/Albany public housing in 1946.) Basic workplace rights and decent housing were a struggle for Richmond's many new Black residents. For their part, newly arrived white Southern workers tended to complain about 'having to' work side-by-side with African-Americans.
Who was Henry J. Kaiser? He was your basic guy-out-to-make-a-buck, all-American, success story. He got his big start running a road-paving business, and ended his life turning Honolulu into the tourist sink that it is today. He was successful to say the least – his company, along with another Bay Area local, Bechtel and four other companies managed the construction of the Hoover Dam. During the war, Kaiser employees in Richmond (and his three other factories along the West Coast) were building a whole war ship in about a month (the record was set when workers constructed an entire ship in just over four days). His name also lives on in the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which was created because Kaiser needed to provide some basic health services to his thousands of employees, and who can afford that kind of expense (while maintaining a millionaire lifestyle)?
When the war ended, Kaiser moved on to new projects. He even (briefly) got into the auto industry. For the thousands of factory workers who had moved to the Bay Area, many full of patriotism and hope for the future, life wasn't quite as easy as Kaiser's. The jobs disappeared almost immediately. Soldiers came home and were given priority for the few jobs that remained. Women and men of color found themselves fired or demoted to make way for white men who were prioritized by employers. Today Richmond is still full of art, culture, and hard work, but undeniably, Richmond has been scarred by the poverty that is a legacy of the war industry here. The Rosie Memorial is just a little thing, but I loved getting to learn more about why things happened the way they did here. I was glad to come. I confess that the kids liked the nearby boats a lot more than that exhibit, but what can they do, they're a captive audience.
This entry barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the long-term impact of WWII industry on race, gender, and economics here. If you want to learn more, there are a bunch of other sources I'd recommend:
Marilynn S. Johnson's The Second Gold Rush provided a bunch of references for this post. It's factually dense but it maintains a readable narrative. I don't think you have to be as obsessive as I am to enjoy it, which is unusual for this kind of regional history book.
Fight or Be Slaves also has tons of information about this period.
Robert Self discusses issues related to changing racial dynamics in the East Bay after WWII in American Babylon. Unfortunately, I got about 50 pages into this book last summer, and then accidentally left it at Feather River Family Camp, so I can't tell you for sure if it's worth reading, but my friend Jess was just saying good things about it, so on his recommendation, I'll say, go for it.
I thought this Bay Crossings article had some interesting history about water travel related to Richmond.
Finally, I was inspired to check out the Rosie park after reading a nice article about it in the San Francisco Bayview. The article originally appeared on Black Commentator, but I'm including the Bayview link because of some additional notes at the end of their version.
Hey, if you want to learn more, Here's a whole pile of relevant sources.
I'll send you out with this video by historian Betty Soskin on African-Americans in the Richmond war industries. You can read some details about the content of the video here.
8.05.2007
Free the SF 8!
When I started this site, I wanted to find a way to connect historical movements with contemporary struggles. Unfortunately, I now have an opportunity to do that:
Eight men are in jail in San Francisco, charged with a 30 year old murder. All these guys were radicals a long, long time ago. When they were charged this year, some of them were still community activists, a couple were already serving prison time, mostly, they are older men who one would be hard-pressed to see as dangerous. In the words of 64-year old defendant Ray Boudreaux (an electrician who lives in Southern California), "…for the last 25 years I've lived a pretty peaceful and quiet life. My politics are still the same. It's just that I'm not active. People come to me sometimes as a peace-maker."
I'm aware that most of us progressives suffer from a certain overwhelm about the unjustly imprisoned. We marched to Free Mumia until our marches petered out into t-shirts and then occasional arguments and then, nothing. Mumia is still on death row. We've been carrying our "Free Peltier" signs since 1977 but with every rejected parole hearing, we say less about him. It's easy to give up when we feel so hopeless, and for that reason, it's important to find ways to stay connected to the people who are stuck behind bars.
Mostly, when I think about these guys in jail in San Francisco, I think about their families. I imagine my dad having to go to jail at this point in his life – how he'd feel – how I'd feel. You don't even have to know that they're innocent to agree that they should be given a reasonable bail (it was set at 3 million each) so they can go home while they deal with the legal proceedings that are still ahead of them. For me, a prison abolitionist, just knowing that eight former activists who are clearly not a threat to anyone now are in jail is enough to push me to want to do something. If you're better motivated by outrage, then you should know that the evidence that prosecutors say points to these men was obtained through torture.
There are eight men in jail now – there on the strength of a confession obtained under torture. That's ugly and worth fighting against. But its worth also wondering what the point of this is for the state. While I'm not going to suggest a conspiracy, it's pretty obvious what message this is sending to any radical activists now: take your movement beyond the choreographed protest march and you'll spend the rest of your life with the threat of prison hanging over you. It's important that we stick up for each other as activists, even 30 years after the movement is gone. Solidarity isn't a one-time action, it's a lifetime commitment.
All of this is a long introduction to what I want to say here, which is this: Tomorrow, Monday, August 6th, the San Francisco 8 will be having a hearing dealing with the terms of their bail and other matters, and your presence at that hearing would not only make a psychological difference for the guys, but would also help make a point to the court, prosecutors, and media, that we care about these men, and want to see them treated fairly. It doesn't take a lot of work to get down to 850 Bryant. I've made the trip twice, both times with kids (sure, I only made it through 15 minutes of hearings before I had to usher the bored and confused 4 and 5 year olds out of the courtroom, but I did manage to show up). Go down. Show your support. Check out the website. Put up a poster. Wear a button. Blog about them. Do what you can, because you can do something.
When a Grand Jury started calling former Panthers to testify about the murder case a couple years ago, four men were jailed for refusing to testify. At that time, Bay Area activists Andres AlegrÃa, Claude Marks & others at The Freedom Archives made a video about the grand jury resistors called Legacy of Torture. It played at the Roxy and various venues around town. Here's the preview:
Eight men are in jail in San Francisco, charged with a 30 year old murder. All these guys were radicals a long, long time ago. When they were charged this year, some of them were still community activists, a couple were already serving prison time, mostly, they are older men who one would be hard-pressed to see as dangerous. In the words of 64-year old defendant Ray Boudreaux (an electrician who lives in Southern California), "…for the last 25 years I've lived a pretty peaceful and quiet life. My politics are still the same. It's just that I'm not active. People come to me sometimes as a peace-maker."
I'm aware that most of us progressives suffer from a certain overwhelm about the unjustly imprisoned. We marched to Free Mumia until our marches petered out into t-shirts and then occasional arguments and then, nothing. Mumia is still on death row. We've been carrying our "Free Peltier" signs since 1977 but with every rejected parole hearing, we say less about him. It's easy to give up when we feel so hopeless, and for that reason, it's important to find ways to stay connected to the people who are stuck behind bars.
Mostly, when I think about these guys in jail in San Francisco, I think about their families. I imagine my dad having to go to jail at this point in his life – how he'd feel – how I'd feel. You don't even have to know that they're innocent to agree that they should be given a reasonable bail (it was set at 3 million each) so they can go home while they deal with the legal proceedings that are still ahead of them. For me, a prison abolitionist, just knowing that eight former activists who are clearly not a threat to anyone now are in jail is enough to push me to want to do something. If you're better motivated by outrage, then you should know that the evidence that prosecutors say points to these men was obtained through torture.
There are eight men in jail now – there on the strength of a confession obtained under torture. That's ugly and worth fighting against. But its worth also wondering what the point of this is for the state. While I'm not going to suggest a conspiracy, it's pretty obvious what message this is sending to any radical activists now: take your movement beyond the choreographed protest march and you'll spend the rest of your life with the threat of prison hanging over you. It's important that we stick up for each other as activists, even 30 years after the movement is gone. Solidarity isn't a one-time action, it's a lifetime commitment.
All of this is a long introduction to what I want to say here, which is this: Tomorrow, Monday, August 6th, the San Francisco 8 will be having a hearing dealing with the terms of their bail and other matters, and your presence at that hearing would not only make a psychological difference for the guys, but would also help make a point to the court, prosecutors, and media, that we care about these men, and want to see them treated fairly. It doesn't take a lot of work to get down to 850 Bryant. I've made the trip twice, both times with kids (sure, I only made it through 15 minutes of hearings before I had to usher the bored and confused 4 and 5 year olds out of the courtroom, but I did manage to show up). Go down. Show your support. Check out the website. Put up a poster. Wear a button. Blog about them. Do what you can, because you can do something.
When a Grand Jury started calling former Panthers to testify about the murder case a couple years ago, four men were jailed for refusing to testify. At that time, Bay Area activists Andres AlegrÃa, Claude Marks & others at The Freedom Archives made a video about the grand jury resistors called Legacy of Torture. It played at the Roxy and various venues around town. Here's the preview:
7.23.2007
Ericka Huggins
Dana and I went out to Thai food on Grand Avenue the other day, and happened to sit next to one of my heroes. Later I wished I had said something really thoughtful and articulate like, "Excuse me, I apologize for interrupting your meal, but I couldn't let you leave without telling you how grateful I am for the work you've done to support the liberation of African American people, and of all people, and for the many very real sacrifices you've made over these many years. Thank you." Of course, if I had actually talked to her in the moment, whatever I said would have come out making me sound like a gibbering stalker, (I know this to be true because I ran into her once before, and did talk to her like a gibbering stalker), so it's for the best that I contented myself to bask in the glow of her fashionable (although in no way ostentatious) back, which was seated only a foot or two away from me.
I doubt she's recognized much now, but Ericka Huggins spent a few years being infamous. In 1970, she was a defendant in an internationally notorious and highly politicized murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Folks like Dr. Benjamin Spock and writer Jean Genet came to Yale to speak on her behalf. One year before that trial, her husband John Huggins, a leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers, was killed at UCLA by members of a rival activist faction. Throughout the 70s she co-authored a book of poems with Huey Newton, held political offices, and directed a Black Panther school. I wish I knew more about what she's doing now – meditation, spirituality and education seem to be among her current interests, and she does some speaking about her time in the Black Panthers, but it's hard to find out much about her because, although one site says that she's writing a memoir, she clearly isn't out to promote herself, which is a consistent theme for her, actually.
Ericka grew up in Washington, D.C. She was politicized early on, attending the March on Washington when she was 15. The late 60s, the moment when Ericka was coming of age, was a point of increasing militancy among activists in general, and Black activists in particular. (SNCC for example, a major organization in the Civil Rights Movement, officially changed its strategy from specifically nonviolent, to including a broader range of tactics when Stokely Carmichael took over the organization in 1966.) Like thousands of young people around her, Ericka probably felt shocked and horrified by the poverty and violence that Black people and poor people were experiencing around her. Race riots were a regular feature of the late 60s, and were invariably inspired by, and then followed by, harsh police violence. The Vietnam War, and protests against it, escalated around her. Internationally, militancy seemed to be on the increase, with revolutionary movements gaining prominence in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and even next door in Quebec. In this context, in 1968, Ericka joined the Black Panthers. She met John ("Jon" in Ericka's love letters) at college and they moved together to LA where they got very involved in the growing Panther chapter there. They took and then taught political education classes, organized, fundraised, served in the Party social programs, and I'll assume they studied marksmanship, a requirement for all Party members. John took on a leadership position. Ericka got pregnant.
With his beard and bellbottoms, John gave off much more of a hippy vibe than his fellow militants, especially Bunchy Carter, a charismatic former gang leader who was a rising star in the Party (and was known for his impeccable style), and who was with John on the day they met with, and then were shot and killed by members of the US organization at UCLA. I won't pretend that the details of this story aren't complicated*, but one thing we do know from 1975 senate hearings on the FBI's counterintelligence program (Cointelpro) is that the FBI actively sought to increase tension between the Panthers and US**, before and after these killings, by sending inflammatory cartoons and letters to both organizations, and by propagating rumors about each organization. I've read that Richard Held, the FBI officer in charge of the L.A. office at that time took credit for the deaths of Huggins and Carter. I can't back that one up with a citation though.
After John's death, Ericka moved with her daughter Mai to Connecticut where John's parents lived. With local activists, she started a Panther chapter in Bridgeport, and then moved it to New Haven. She was 21.
In her memoir, A Taste of Power, Brown remembers Ericka as being checked out and disconnected after John's death. An interview with a Connecticut Panther in another memoir - David Hilliard's This Side of Glory - describes her as "spaced out but genuine". I don't know why she kept sleepwalking through her activist career at that point. Maybe if your partner is killed for the revolution, you feel you must soldier on, to give his memory meaning. Especially because, as she trudged through what must have been a personal nightmare, the bigger community was turning uglier around her too.
John Huggins was killed on January 17th, 1969. That night, the LAPD raided John and Ericka's home and arrested all twelve Panthers inside, including Ericka with their infant daughter. There were no real charges filed against those arrested – the LAPD justified the arrests by saying that they were preempting retaliatory action towards members of US. This kind of police action towards the Panthers was typical. They raided Panther offices across the country frequently, and often repetitively, sometimes looking for specific suspects, sometimes just to destroy their typewriters, or break up their free breakfast program, which the FBI specifically sought to destroy. (Details on that here. Just search for "breakfast".) In April of '69, 21 New York Panthers were arrested and charged with conspiracy. All 21 were eventually found innocent. Also in April, the Des Moines Panther office was leveled by a bomb blast, injuring two Panthers. In response, local police arrested Panthers. In the first two weeks of May that year, the LAPD arrested 42 Black Panthers. Of course, this hostility wasn't one sided. The Panthers were both a service organization and a militant one, and as much as their free clothing, free food, free medical clinics, ambulance service, and free breakfast programs have been underreported, their armed confrontation of police was also quite real. Panthers regularly engaged in shootouts with police, and not all these were initiated by the cops. After all, the Panthers were trying to engage in a revolutionary struggle.
Outside of the Panthers, even mainstream liberals were aware of how harsh the repercussion could be for activists who opposed the status quo. In August of 1968, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had sent 12,000 police officers and 7,500 National Guard in to disrupt protests at the Democratic Convention. (Bobby Seale, the Panther's co-founder and essentially second-in-command officer, spent several years fighting legal charges from the Convention protests. He'd famously been bound and gagged in the courtroom during his trial.) In December of 1968, more than 450 students at SF State were arrested in connection with a student strike in support of Black Studies program. And only a few months earlier, police had massacred hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City. Vietnam raged on. Nixon had just been inaugurated. Someone who was as involved in the Panthers as Ericka was in early 1969 must have been pretty convinced that the revolution was needed, that it was coming, that a new system of socialist governance prioritizing self-determination for Black people and economic fairness for all seemed like a real possibility. And militant struggle probably felt like it was the strategy for bringing that revolution.
Courtroom illustration of Bobby Seale, bound and gagged during the initial Chicago 8 hearings
It feels important to know all this context before you read what happened next. What happened next is that that someone, a Panther, murdered someone else, another Panther, a 19 year old from New York. And that young murder victim, Alex Rackley, was killed after two days of being tortured – having boiling water poured on his body and so forth. And Ericka was in the house where all this happened.
A mentally-unstable out of town Panther named George Sams instigated the kidnapping and torture of Rackley, who he accused of being an undercover agent. Several New Haven Panthers participated in the torture and then in the murder. Sams only did four years in prison for the killing, and rumors persist that he was an agent provocateur himself, although I've never read any evidence for this. He was certainly crazy, and was heavily medicated during his own trial. And it is unarguable that the Panthers were heavily infiltrated. Still, at the point when you are pouring boiling water on someone, or even watching your comrade pour boiling water on someone, you must take some personal responsibility. Going along with what you're told isn't any more justifiable for revolutionaries than it is for Nazis.
While it's not a justification, I'm sure that Ericka Huggins learned this lesson. After the actual killers were convicted (some confessed, turning state's evidence), she and Bobby Seale were tried for ordering the murders. They spent two years in jail in New Haven during the proceedings, inspiring an international protest movement.*** Yale students staged a months-long strike, starting with a massive May Day rally featuring Abbie Hoffman et al. While she was in prison, Free Jazz pianist Francois Tusques composed a song for her. (You can listen to it on this archived WFMU jazz show. The song starts roughly at minute 1:46 and then restarts at 1:48.)
What shocks me about Ericka Huggins, is that after seeing the absolute ugliest sides of revolutionary movements, she moved to the Bay Area and spent the 1970s working on the Panther newspaper, running for and then serving on the Berkeley Community Development Council (an anti-poverty agency) and on the Alameda County School Board, and eventually running the last surviving segment of the Black Panther Party – their children's school. She was, I guess, one of the last members of the Black Panther Party, since she continued to run the school throughout the 1970s until it finally closed in the early 80s, long after every other Panther institution was gone, and after Huey Newton, the organizations' charismatic but borderline leader had lost all credibility among activists and even most of his friends.
Another thing that strikes me about Ericka Huggins is the way she just doesn't show up in Panther memoirs. Elaine Brown, who named her daughter Ericka dedicates more page space to her than any other Panther alum. As far as I remember, everything Elaine says is positive, and even in her book, there's not much. In other memoirs, Ericka tends to show up for a few pages as a benign force and then disappear, as if she was never there. For someone who was so important in the Party, I can only guess that she found a way to stay out of everyone's way and for the most part, do the work that felt important, instead of engaging in power-plays or battles of ego.
Sitting next to her at dinner, I confess I had a difficult time paying enough attention to my date. What does someone who spent more than a decade trying to make the impossible work feel when it doesn’t? What does it feel like to be so key in a grassroots, militant, educated, disciplined, activist corps - a group that seemed so close to revolution – and then to lose it? Does she resent the way Panther leaders spiraled out of control? Does she feel defeated by the forces of the state – the FBI, the police, the media – that did, in fact defeat her movement? Does she feel manipulated? Is she angry? Her manner is quiet and poised. She projects a feeling of attentive calm. I hope she thinks back on serving free food to children, on writing and explaining, on teaching and running a school that provided a real alternative for kids who needed it and feels proud.
_________
That's how I ended this article. And I was just looking for a few more photos before posting, when I decided to start googling Ericka's name and the world "meditation" (since I know she's a practitioner) and found her to be associated with that ashram on San Pablo – Syda.
Apparently, the New Yorker did an investigation of Syda a few years ago, and quoted members who reported sexual and financial abuses within the largely secretive organization. Former members complained that they were harrassed if they spoke out. There's a website where ex-members share their (bad) experiences, although for the record, most of the alleged abuses happened quite a while ago, and even the New Yorker article points out that most members have no contact with the people at the top of the organization, and simply go to Syda's various ashrams to meditate, chant, and find spiritual community. At this point, I'm feeling a bit depressed by imagining my hero as a cult member. And I'm sure it's more complicated than that anyway. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she can stomach a degree of unquestioned hierarchy, since she managed to work under an abusive power fiend like Huey Newton for so long.
I really admire Ericka Huggins. I'm not an investigative reporter, and if I was, why would I want to 'expose' someone who has spent most of her life working for good? So what if she likes charismatic leaders? I want to respect the fact that she has a life. Has some privacy. So good luck to you Ericka. I'm not going to read any more about what you did or what you do. Thank you for your work. Good luck to you in your life.
_______________
*Trying to make out what really happened here is completely impossible. Every Panther has their story, and the stories tend to contradict each other.
**Every December I subject some poor soul to my annual anti-Kwanzaa rant. I know that if the holiday has come to have meaning for people, I should support it, but for me it is uglied by the fact that it was created by Ron Karenga (or, as he named himself, Maulana – a Swahili word for master teacher). Karenga was the head of US at the time of the UCLA shooting. He went on to serve prison time for assaulting and torturing two female members of his organization.
** As usual, Snopes does a nice job of clarifying the line of bullshit that circulated on the net a few years ago suggesting that Hillary Rodham, a Yalie, was Ericka's defender. (As if Hillary would have advocated for militants!
If you're not done already with learning about Ericka:
I mentioned it a bunch of times because A Taste of Power talks more about Ericka than most published material on the Panthers. The author, Elaine Brown, has been accused of including some inaccuracies, or maybe outright lies in this book, but it is as good a history of the Black Panther Party as any, and, coming from a woman's perspective, manages to be honest about some of the disparities that did exist in the organization.
Most of what I know about Ericka's trial comes from the long out-of-print Agony in New Haven, which was certainly descriptive. It seemed to depict the four month long jury selection process in real time, detailing each potential juror, each recess called by the judge, and each outfit chosen by the various lawyers. Well written, but only worth while if you're obsessed. There's a newer book I haven't read yet called Murder in the Model City which probably provides some more context.
I know he's become controversial, even among radicals, but Ward Churchill's Agents of Repression (written with Jim Vander Wall) is still the most readable, detailed, and footnoted book I know about Cointelpro and it's where I first learned anything about the Panthers. I recommend it.
Finally, the very best website for Black Panther information is It's About Time. This site has tons of original source material on the Party: newspaper transcriptions, dozens of photos, regional chapter histories, and updates on issues impacting former Panthers now. Most of the photos in this post came from that site (thank you!) and I haven't even gotten half-way through all there is to read there yet. Check it out.
Note that I've made a couple small factual and editorial corrections and changes since I first wrote this, although the post is pretty much the same as the original.
I doubt she's recognized much now, but Ericka Huggins spent a few years being infamous. In 1970, she was a defendant in an internationally notorious and highly politicized murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Folks like Dr. Benjamin Spock and writer Jean Genet came to Yale to speak on her behalf. One year before that trial, her husband John Huggins, a leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers, was killed at UCLA by members of a rival activist faction. Throughout the 70s she co-authored a book of poems with Huey Newton, held political offices, and directed a Black Panther school. I wish I knew more about what she's doing now – meditation, spirituality and education seem to be among her current interests, and she does some speaking about her time in the Black Panthers, but it's hard to find out much about her because, although one site says that she's writing a memoir, she clearly isn't out to promote herself, which is a consistent theme for her, actually.
Ericka grew up in Washington, D.C. She was politicized early on, attending the March on Washington when she was 15. The late 60s, the moment when Ericka was coming of age, was a point of increasing militancy among activists in general, and Black activists in particular. (SNCC for example, a major organization in the Civil Rights Movement, officially changed its strategy from specifically nonviolent, to including a broader range of tactics when Stokely Carmichael took over the organization in 1966.) Like thousands of young people around her, Ericka probably felt shocked and horrified by the poverty and violence that Black people and poor people were experiencing around her. Race riots were a regular feature of the late 60s, and were invariably inspired by, and then followed by, harsh police violence. The Vietnam War, and protests against it, escalated around her. Internationally, militancy seemed to be on the increase, with revolutionary movements gaining prominence in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and even next door in Quebec. In this context, in 1968, Ericka joined the Black Panthers. She met John ("Jon" in Ericka's love letters) at college and they moved together to LA where they got very involved in the growing Panther chapter there. They took and then taught political education classes, organized, fundraised, served in the Party social programs, and I'll assume they studied marksmanship, a requirement for all Party members. John took on a leadership position. Ericka got pregnant.
With his beard and bellbottoms, John gave off much more of a hippy vibe than his fellow militants, especially Bunchy Carter, a charismatic former gang leader who was a rising star in the Party (and was known for his impeccable style), and who was with John on the day they met with, and then were shot and killed by members of the US organization at UCLA. I won't pretend that the details of this story aren't complicated*, but one thing we do know from 1975 senate hearings on the FBI's counterintelligence program (Cointelpro) is that the FBI actively sought to increase tension between the Panthers and US**, before and after these killings, by sending inflammatory cartoons and letters to both organizations, and by propagating rumors about each organization. I've read that Richard Held, the FBI officer in charge of the L.A. office at that time took credit for the deaths of Huggins and Carter. I can't back that one up with a citation though.
After John's death, Ericka moved with her daughter Mai to Connecticut where John's parents lived. With local activists, she started a Panther chapter in Bridgeport, and then moved it to New Haven. She was 21.
In her memoir, A Taste of Power, Brown remembers Ericka as being checked out and disconnected after John's death. An interview with a Connecticut Panther in another memoir - David Hilliard's This Side of Glory - describes her as "spaced out but genuine". I don't know why she kept sleepwalking through her activist career at that point. Maybe if your partner is killed for the revolution, you feel you must soldier on, to give his memory meaning. Especially because, as she trudged through what must have been a personal nightmare, the bigger community was turning uglier around her too.
John Huggins was killed on January 17th, 1969. That night, the LAPD raided John and Ericka's home and arrested all twelve Panthers inside, including Ericka with their infant daughter. There were no real charges filed against those arrested – the LAPD justified the arrests by saying that they were preempting retaliatory action towards members of US. This kind of police action towards the Panthers was typical. They raided Panther offices across the country frequently, and often repetitively, sometimes looking for specific suspects, sometimes just to destroy their typewriters, or break up their free breakfast program, which the FBI specifically sought to destroy. (Details on that here. Just search for "breakfast".) In April of '69, 21 New York Panthers were arrested and charged with conspiracy. All 21 were eventually found innocent. Also in April, the Des Moines Panther office was leveled by a bomb blast, injuring two Panthers. In response, local police arrested Panthers. In the first two weeks of May that year, the LAPD arrested 42 Black Panthers. Of course, this hostility wasn't one sided. The Panthers were both a service organization and a militant one, and as much as their free clothing, free food, free medical clinics, ambulance service, and free breakfast programs have been underreported, their armed confrontation of police was also quite real. Panthers regularly engaged in shootouts with police, and not all these were initiated by the cops. After all, the Panthers were trying to engage in a revolutionary struggle.
Outside of the Panthers, even mainstream liberals were aware of how harsh the repercussion could be for activists who opposed the status quo. In August of 1968, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had sent 12,000 police officers and 7,500 National Guard in to disrupt protests at the Democratic Convention. (Bobby Seale, the Panther's co-founder and essentially second-in-command officer, spent several years fighting legal charges from the Convention protests. He'd famously been bound and gagged in the courtroom during his trial.) In December of 1968, more than 450 students at SF State were arrested in connection with a student strike in support of Black Studies program. And only a few months earlier, police had massacred hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City. Vietnam raged on. Nixon had just been inaugurated. Someone who was as involved in the Panthers as Ericka was in early 1969 must have been pretty convinced that the revolution was needed, that it was coming, that a new system of socialist governance prioritizing self-determination for Black people and economic fairness for all seemed like a real possibility. And militant struggle probably felt like it was the strategy for bringing that revolution.
Courtroom illustration of Bobby Seale, bound and gagged during the initial Chicago 8 hearings
It feels important to know all this context before you read what happened next. What happened next is that that someone, a Panther, murdered someone else, another Panther, a 19 year old from New York. And that young murder victim, Alex Rackley, was killed after two days of being tortured – having boiling water poured on his body and so forth. And Ericka was in the house where all this happened.
A mentally-unstable out of town Panther named George Sams instigated the kidnapping and torture of Rackley, who he accused of being an undercover agent. Several New Haven Panthers participated in the torture and then in the murder. Sams only did four years in prison for the killing, and rumors persist that he was an agent provocateur himself, although I've never read any evidence for this. He was certainly crazy, and was heavily medicated during his own trial. And it is unarguable that the Panthers were heavily infiltrated. Still, at the point when you are pouring boiling water on someone, or even watching your comrade pour boiling water on someone, you must take some personal responsibility. Going along with what you're told isn't any more justifiable for revolutionaries than it is for Nazis.
While it's not a justification, I'm sure that Ericka Huggins learned this lesson. After the actual killers were convicted (some confessed, turning state's evidence), she and Bobby Seale were tried for ordering the murders. They spent two years in jail in New Haven during the proceedings, inspiring an international protest movement.*** Yale students staged a months-long strike, starting with a massive May Day rally featuring Abbie Hoffman et al. While she was in prison, Free Jazz pianist Francois Tusques composed a song for her. (You can listen to it on this archived WFMU jazz show. The song starts roughly at minute 1:46 and then restarts at 1:48.)
What shocks me about Ericka Huggins, is that after seeing the absolute ugliest sides of revolutionary movements, she moved to the Bay Area and spent the 1970s working on the Panther newspaper, running for and then serving on the Berkeley Community Development Council (an anti-poverty agency) and on the Alameda County School Board, and eventually running the last surviving segment of the Black Panther Party – their children's school. She was, I guess, one of the last members of the Black Panther Party, since she continued to run the school throughout the 1970s until it finally closed in the early 80s, long after every other Panther institution was gone, and after Huey Newton, the organizations' charismatic but borderline leader had lost all credibility among activists and even most of his friends.
Another thing that strikes me about Ericka Huggins is the way she just doesn't show up in Panther memoirs. Elaine Brown, who named her daughter Ericka dedicates more page space to her than any other Panther alum. As far as I remember, everything Elaine says is positive, and even in her book, there's not much. In other memoirs, Ericka tends to show up for a few pages as a benign force and then disappear, as if she was never there. For someone who was so important in the Party, I can only guess that she found a way to stay out of everyone's way and for the most part, do the work that felt important, instead of engaging in power-plays or battles of ego.
Sitting next to her at dinner, I confess I had a difficult time paying enough attention to my date. What does someone who spent more than a decade trying to make the impossible work feel when it doesn’t? What does it feel like to be so key in a grassroots, militant, educated, disciplined, activist corps - a group that seemed so close to revolution – and then to lose it? Does she resent the way Panther leaders spiraled out of control? Does she feel defeated by the forces of the state – the FBI, the police, the media – that did, in fact defeat her movement? Does she feel manipulated? Is she angry? Her manner is quiet and poised. She projects a feeling of attentive calm. I hope she thinks back on serving free food to children, on writing and explaining, on teaching and running a school that provided a real alternative for kids who needed it and feels proud.
_________
That's how I ended this article. And I was just looking for a few more photos before posting, when I decided to start googling Ericka's name and the world "meditation" (since I know she's a practitioner) and found her to be associated with that ashram on San Pablo – Syda.
Apparently, the New Yorker did an investigation of Syda a few years ago, and quoted members who reported sexual and financial abuses within the largely secretive organization. Former members complained that they were harrassed if they spoke out. There's a website where ex-members share their (bad) experiences, although for the record, most of the alleged abuses happened quite a while ago, and even the New Yorker article points out that most members have no contact with the people at the top of the organization, and simply go to Syda's various ashrams to meditate, chant, and find spiritual community. At this point, I'm feeling a bit depressed by imagining my hero as a cult member. And I'm sure it's more complicated than that anyway. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she can stomach a degree of unquestioned hierarchy, since she managed to work under an abusive power fiend like Huey Newton for so long.
I really admire Ericka Huggins. I'm not an investigative reporter, and if I was, why would I want to 'expose' someone who has spent most of her life working for good? So what if she likes charismatic leaders? I want to respect the fact that she has a life. Has some privacy. So good luck to you Ericka. I'm not going to read any more about what you did or what you do. Thank you for your work. Good luck to you in your life.
_______________
*Trying to make out what really happened here is completely impossible. Every Panther has their story, and the stories tend to contradict each other.
**Every December I subject some poor soul to my annual anti-Kwanzaa rant. I know that if the holiday has come to have meaning for people, I should support it, but for me it is uglied by the fact that it was created by Ron Karenga (or, as he named himself, Maulana – a Swahili word for master teacher). Karenga was the head of US at the time of the UCLA shooting. He went on to serve prison time for assaulting and torturing two female members of his organization.
** As usual, Snopes does a nice job of clarifying the line of bullshit that circulated on the net a few years ago suggesting that Hillary Rodham, a Yalie, was Ericka's defender. (As if Hillary would have advocated for militants!
If you're not done already with learning about Ericka:
I mentioned it a bunch of times because A Taste of Power talks more about Ericka than most published material on the Panthers. The author, Elaine Brown, has been accused of including some inaccuracies, or maybe outright lies in this book, but it is as good a history of the Black Panther Party as any, and, coming from a woman's perspective, manages to be honest about some of the disparities that did exist in the organization.
Most of what I know about Ericka's trial comes from the long out-of-print Agony in New Haven, which was certainly descriptive. It seemed to depict the four month long jury selection process in real time, detailing each potential juror, each recess called by the judge, and each outfit chosen by the various lawyers. Well written, but only worth while if you're obsessed. There's a newer book I haven't read yet called Murder in the Model City which probably provides some more context.
I know he's become controversial, even among radicals, but Ward Churchill's Agents of Repression (written with Jim Vander Wall) is still the most readable, detailed, and footnoted book I know about Cointelpro and it's where I first learned anything about the Panthers. I recommend it.
Finally, the very best website for Black Panther information is It's About Time. This site has tons of original source material on the Party: newspaper transcriptions, dozens of photos, regional chapter histories, and updates on issues impacting former Panthers now. Most of the photos in this post came from that site (thank you!) and I haven't even gotten half-way through all there is to read there yet. Check it out.
Note that I've made a couple small factual and editorial corrections and changes since I first wrote this, although the post is pretty much the same as the original.
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