The assignment consists of two short essays that cover the time period from approximately 1945 to 1965

• The assignment consists of two short essays that cover the time period from approximately 1945 to 1965. Choose two from among the below five prompts. Each essay should be 500-600 words in length (about two pages).
• These prompts refer to the “black freedom struggle,” which is a term that encompasses the activism of World War II, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement. Each essay can focus either on a narrow portion of this time period, or the entirety of it.
• You will draw upon material from Lecture 7 through Lecture 12. You must cite at least two different readings (total) across your essays, but are welcome to cite more.
• Upload your essays to Canvas as a single document, and indicate the prompt number and word count for each essay. You do not need to include a bibliography, title page, or any kind of header. Use Chicago Style footnotes anytime you reference a reading or lecture.
• These essays are open book and open note, with no time limit. They should be single-authored—you may not consult your classmates! However, you are free to make ample use of your notes and all material posted to Canvas.

PROMPTS

1. Why were boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and other forms of nonviolent protest so effective in the fight against segregation?
2. How did communism and/or anti-communism shape the black freedom struggle?
3. What was the role of non-black people in the black freedom struggle?
4. Explain the role, aims, and purpose of militancy in the black freedom struggle.
5. How did ideas about gender, manhood, and/or womanhood shape the black freedom struggle?https://video.ucdavis.edu/media/Lecture+7A+A+New+D.. https://video.ucdavis.edu/media/Lecture+12A+Black+...

the assignment is asked to write an argumentative essay. I only see you summarizing the facts instead of making an argument. I can not trace information about the lecture video I attached as well. can you edit or redo it some parts of the assignment. I need the work match with each part of the assignment as is requested.

I attached the document I wrote and I need you to fix it according to this last comment and match it with the requirements as is requested in each part. I need this on time or before the deadline. 

University of North Carolina Press Chapter Title: The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 Book Title: Remaking Black Power Book Subtitle: How Black Women Transformed an Era Book Author(s): Ashley D. Farmer Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2017) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469634388_farmer.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Remaking Black Power This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHAPTER TWO The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 Mae Mallory went to jail as the “new” nationalism was taking root in black communities across the country. By the time the Union County court exonerated her in 1965, black activists had begun to weave their nationalistinspired grassroots struggles into a united, militant organizational front. Along with other experienced radicals such as Audley Moore and Vicki Garvin, Mallory continued to mobilize around a class-conscious, nationalist agenda.1 These women also mentored younger activists, instilling in them the lessons they learned from organizing at the intersections of Garveyism and communism. The convict-turned-Muslim-minster Malcolm X was perhaps their most prized pupil. Malcolm garnered their attention in the late 1950s when he rose to fame within the Nation of Islam (NOI), the premier black nationalist organization of that decade. After he left the NOI in 1964, Malcolm rapidly became the crown prince of the growing black nationalist movement, often collaborating with postwar women radicals to help legitimize his throne.2 As an early adopter of self-defense and selfdetermination, Mallory was an ideal ally for the nationalist leader. She began appearing alongside him at events at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in 1964.3 She was also in the audience when he was gunned down in that same auditorium on February 21, 1965.4 Hailed as a black prophet killed in his prime, Malcolm X’s assassination helped stoke the embers of black nationalism into the flames of the Black Power movement. In the wake of his death, a new generation of activists, including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, fashioned themselves as his political and ideological heirs. In 1966, they created the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. They also injected the ideal of the black revolutionary—a Malcolm X–styled black nationalist and antiimperialist radical—into the black radical imaginary.5 The Panthers used their revolutionary ideal to galvanize black communities, convince them of the efficacy of the party’s ideology, and assert the inevitability of their radical political vision. In the years following Malcolm X’s death, the party, and the model of black revolutionary manhood that it projected, became one of the most visible and popular expressions of Black Power worldwide. 50 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms As the Panthers’ popularity soared, so too did its female membership. Only a few years after the party’s inception, women were close to half of the rank and file.6 Like their activist foremothers, Panther women engaged in extensive conversations over how to best conceptualize black womanhood in the party and society at large. In an effort to align their activism, political theory, and emancipatory goals, Panther women theorized a genderspecific version of the Panthers’ political identity: the Black Revolutionary Woman. An ideal that personified gendered formulations and applications of the Panthers’ political ideology, the Black Revolutionary Woman became a conduit through which female members reimagined their political and social roles. From 1967 to 1975, Panther women expanded the party’s gendered imaginary and organizing ethos through their debate over black womanhood in the Black Panther newspaper. Early female Panther recruits used the publication to theorize new ideas about the Black Revolutionary Woman as a way to challenge the Panthers’ patriarchal political imaginary. As the organization evolved, Panther women began to define the female revolutionary in ways that purposely transgressed organizational and societal gender constructs. By the early 1970s, they solidified the Black Revolutionary Woman as a viable form of self-representation and a symbol of their radical politics. Their rhetorical and pictorial constructions of the Black Revolutionary Woman expanded and diversified the party’s collective subjectivity, political identity, and everyday culture. It also shifted Panther leaders’ stance on sexism and gender equality, making the party more inclusive. The Rise of Black Power and the Black Panther Party The origins of the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary symbolism lay in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed in April 1960. During a year in which Robert F. Williams led armed self-defense protests in Monroe, North Carolina; Cuban Revolution leader Fidel Castro visited Harlem, New York; and more than ten African nations declared their independence from their colonial oppressors, four black college students staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.7 Their protest spawned a wave of sit-ins in more than thirty locations across the county.8 Seasoned activist Ella Baker, known for her NAACP organizing as well as her exposés about black domestic workers in the Bronx Slave Market, called these students together to develop an organizational infrastructure for their protests.9 They created SNCC, a student-led civil The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 51 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms rights organization dedicated to direct action and grassroots mobilization. At Baker’s urging, the students structured SNCC to promote autonomy and self-determination. They formed an independent organization without formal ties to established civil rights groups. The student group also had a decentralized organizational structure in order to cultivate indigenous black leadership and protest.10 Across the country, SNCC members spearheaded voter registration drives and desegregation protests, however the primary thrust of their early programming was the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.11 Thousands of black and white college students poured into the Magnolia State to participate in SNCC’s efforts to draw the nation’s attention to the rampant disenfranchisement of Southern blacks, register black Mississippians to vote, and create the infrastructure for a homegrown civil rights movement.12 Organizers including Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and Joyce Ladner raised money for and led literacy schools, voter education rallies, and courthouse protests that gradually increased the state’s black electorate.13 SNCC members such as Gwendolyn Patton and Gwendolyn Simmons developed similar projects in the neighboring states of Alabama and Georgia, empowering black communities and foregrounding the rampant racial violence and disenfranchisement throughout the southeastern United States.14 SNCC activists made significant inroads in challenging segregation and increasing black enfranchisement. However, translating this freedom and voting bloc into political power proved more difficult. Although black names slowly populated Southern voter rolls, state parties still barred them from participating in political life. In response, SNCC members worked with local activists to develop separate, black-led political parties to represent their interests. In Sunflower County, Mississippi, local leaders Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Throughout the spring and summer of 1964, MFDP leaders and SNCC organizers educated local residents about the electoral system, registered black voters, and held a statewide convention to elect delegates to represent the MFDP at the national level. That August, MFDP delegates—including Hamer, Gray, and Devine—attended the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the goal of unseating their white counterparts from the Mississippi State Democratic Party.15 Their challenge of the legitimacy of the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation made national headlines when Hamer testified in a nationally televised speech before the DNC Credentials Committee about the rampant violence black women faced when attempting to 52 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms vote. Looking to quell racial tensions and avoid intraparty feuding, DNC officials offered two “at large” seats to two male MFDP delegates, a gesture meant to placate the MFDP and avoid alienating Southern white democrats. Hamer and the other members of the MFDP rejected the proposal. Their Atlantic City challenge was unsuccessful.16 The MFDP’s challenge exposed the depth and breadth of white power. In response, SNCC vowed to expand black power. The original Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, epitomized this new political direction. SNCC workers including Gwendolyn Patton and Stokely Carmichael recognized that the residents of the 80 percent black Lowndes County would need to create their own party to secure local political power. Working with residents, they created the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an independent, third political party designed to grow the black electorate and “control the county” by electing local black residents to county positions.17 SNCC volunteers helped brand and promote the organization, with local field secretary Ruth Howard developing the black panther image that became the symbol and name of the group, and that would capture the imaginations of Newton and Seale.18 Throughout the spring of 1966, SNCC and LCFO members registered black voters and campaigned for black candidates to be elected to positions on the Lowndes County school board, as county sheriff, as coroner, and as tax assessor under the banner of the snarling black panther.19 Although the LCFO Panther Party candidates lost the November 1966 election, they helped win the battle over Black Power brewing within SNCC. Discussions about the importance of self-defense, all-black organizing, and black separatism had been fermenting in the organization after Freedom Summer.20 The potential of the LCFO Black Panther Party, combined with Carmichael’s June 1966 “Black Power” speech and members’ growing disillusionment with the promise of integration, spurred SNCC toward adopting Black Power as its new political ideology and organizing mantra.21 Although the media often framed the organization’s adoption of Black Power, and its eventual expulsion of white members, as destructive and nihilistic, SNCC members asserted more complex analyses of the organization’s shift. SNCC/LCFO volunteer Gwendolyn Patton, for example, did not see “the separation [from whites] as divisive, but rather complementary.” “Black Power,” she contended, “demanded a strategy in which black people would transform the powerless black community into one that could exert its human potential to be an equal partner in the larger society.”22 The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 53 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Black women in the Alabama-based Black Panther Party were not the only ones thinking about embracing Black Power or the idea of a Black Panther Party. For Elendar Barnes and Judy Hart, Oakland residents and future members of Newton and Seale’s Panther Party, the political climate demanded radical, black-led activism.23 In the early 1960s, independent black female activists, and those involved in organizations like SNCC, waged protracted protests that accelerated the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, they saw few tangible results from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to equalize race relations through federal legislation. By and large, black women remained disenfranchised and barred from safe and fair housing, access to health care, and most educational and professional opportunities. In fact, the majority of black women were still relegated to employment as domestic workers.24 Moreover, black women endured gender-specific forms of discrimination, including stigmatization for poverty and alleged promiscuity, as well as sexual assault.25 When calls for black autonomy and separatism erupted in the late 1960s, such ideas appealed to many black women in search of capital and corporal control. If black women’s oppression exposed the reach of white supremacy, then their participation in urban uprisings represented their unequivocal rejection of white control. In July 1964, Harlem erupted in violence. Philadelphia followed suit that same year.26 Incidents of police brutality were often the match that lit the raging fires of black rebellion in urban metropolises across the country. However, these mass revolts were also manifestations of black Americans’ protracted frustrations with white flight, police surveillance, high unemployment rates, and rampant poverty.27 Uprisings in cities across the country foregrounded their frustration with the gradualism of mainstream desegregation struggles, government policies, and statesanctioned violence. They also fostered new ideological and organizational responses and propelled the popularity of black nationalism. Many Black Power activists framed these rebellions in nationalist and imperialist terms, casting the uprisings as examples of America’s internal black colony in revolt. Conjuring up nationalist frameworks akin to those championed by postwar activists such as Claudia Jones, younger organizers claimed that the black community was a nation within a nation, penned into urban ghettos and fighting for self-determination. These activists argued that black Americans’ subjugated position was analogous to that of colonized people of color across the globe. They joined in with Third World communities in vocalizing their opposition to American imperialist interven54 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms tion and neocolonialist practices. By 1966, many black organizers worked alongside, and, at times, with, a growing number of student and antiwar movements that cast the Vietnam War as the foremost example of American racism and imperialism run amok.28 Students and future Oakland Panther members, including Janice Garrett-Forte, aligned themselves with international liberation groups like the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, or the Viet Cong. These collegiate activists often paired their antiimperialist activism with demands for the end of their imperialist-inspired education at home. In the late 1960s, students across the country participated in sit-ins, strikes, and even violent clashes with university administrations in an effort to “decolonize” their education and their campuses.29 These campus movements forced universities across the country to create black studies programs replete with classes on African civilization, African American history, and economic inequality.30 Coming of age in Oakland in the 1960s, Newton and Seale witnessed Black Power’s ascent firsthand. The party founders were among the many black migrants from the South who found that the promise of a better life out west never materialized. Both leaders spent their boyhoods navigating the poverty, segregation, and criminalization that characterized black life in the Bay Area. Surviving a youth hounded by California’s juvenile penal system, Newton and Seale eventually enrolled in Merritt College, a local university known for its radical student activism. They became politically engaged on and off campus amid a proliferation of black nationalist organizations on campus and in the local community. Lawyer-turned-activist Donald Warden and his Afro-American Association galvanized students across multiple local universities, while the Audley Moore–inspired African Descendants People’s Partition Party revived Garveyite nationalist formulations among black San Franciscans.31 As Newton and Seale navigated the Bay Area’s nationalist groups, news of the Lowndes County Black Panther Party made its way west. Mark Comfort, a well-known local activist, had traveled to Lowndes County to work alongside SNCC activists and register black voters. He brought information about the LCFO Panther Party, and its imagery, back to Oakland. LCFO leaders also visited the Berkeley-based chapter of the SNCC support group, Friends of SNCC, to speak about their grassroots organizing.32 The OaklandLowndes connection was further solidified through two Black Power conferences held at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 1966. The first, sponsored by the Committee for Lowndes County, raised money for the LCFO Black Panther Party. The second, spearheaded by the white The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 55 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms leftist group Students for a Democratic Society, brought local, regional, and national activists together to address the meaning and substance of Black Power. Comfort was among the local activists who attended, as was Los Angeles–based black nationalist Maulana Karenga. Lowndes County SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael also spoke at the latter conference, offering news of the Alabama Black Panthers along with his analysis of American race relations.33 Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in an Oakland antipoverty center that same month. Recalling the start of the Oakland party, Newton noted that he had heard about “how the people in Lowndes County had armed themselves against Establishment violence. Their political group, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol.” “A few days later,” when he and Bobby were talking, he suggested that they “use the panther as [their] symbol and call [their] political vehicle the Black Panther Party.”34 The Oakland founders attached the LCFO’s black panther symbol to their founding document, “What We Want Now! What We Believe,” a manifesto that announced the party’s theoretical goals and practical demands.35 Originally, Newton and Seale framed their organization, programming, and goals in nationalist terms. Animated by Malcolm X’s teachings, their original Ten Point Platform borrowed its structure and rhetoric from the NOI’s weekly statement of demands published in their newspaper, Muhammad Speaks.36 Although the party’s ideological and programmatic demands differed from the NOI’s, the document still located the burgeoning organization firmly within the black nationalist tradition. Using statements such as “We want a full and complete freedom” and “We want power to determine the destiny of our black community,” the Panther founders framed black Americans as a racially subjugated group in need of ideological, political, and cultural separation and self-determination. Newton and Seale also addressed the local black community’s racially specific concerns, including their need for decent housing and protection from police brutality. In early party literature, they called on black Americans to adopt “righteous BLACK POWER” in order to achieve liberation and extolled the teachings of nationalist icons such as Malcolm X.37 In its first year, the party garnered a following through an intricate balance of high-profile protests and local-level organizing. They earned the Bay Area black community’s respect through their armed police patrols, designed to thwart the Oakland Police Department’s constant harassment of black residents. Dressed in their now-iconic uniform—black leather jacket, 56 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms black beret, and black boots—early Panther members would roam around observing police, challenging their treatment of black detainees, and loudly reciting the penal code so that both the police and observers could hear. When incidents of harassment resulted in the deaths of black people, the party led community efforts to ensure police accountability. The Panthers led the public outcry about and investigation into the death of Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old black construction worker who was harassed and eventually killed by police on April 1, 1967. Newton, Seale, and other early Panther recruits gained the Dowell family’s and other residents’ trust by protecting the family and publicizing the case. Their community support convinced black Oaklanders of the party’s potential and the importance of armed self-defense and self-determination.38 If their protest of Dowell’s death alerted the Bay Area to the Panthers’ presence, their Sacramento demonstration made them a household name. In May 1967, a group of thirty armed Panthers—twenty-four men and six women—went to the state capitol building to protest the Mulford Act, legislation designed to criminalize the Panthers’ armed police patrols. The party contingent appeared at the capitol, heavily armed and in search of the assembly chambers. Hounded by reporters, the Seale-led group spilled onto the assembly floor. The party exploited the media attention. After being escorted out of the courthouse, Seale read the Panthers’ Executive Mandate #1 on the front steps, supported by members of the delegation, such as Mary Williams and Ruby Dowell.39 Williams’s and Dowell’s activism reflected women’s early party activity. Women joined the party in 1967 and immediately became integral to organizational life. Tarika Lewis, a sixteen-year-old Oakland Technical High School student, joined the party that year. She quickly completed the Panthers’ political education and weapons training and went on to become a local lieutenant in the party while also working as an artist for the Black Panther.40 Roommates Judy Hart and Janice Garrett-Forte contributed to the Black Panther, attended rallies, and worked with the Panthers Free Breakfast Program, which began in 1968.41 Audrey Hudson served as a secretary and a member of the editorial staff of the newspaper, while community elders such as Ruth Beckford helped the Panthers establish an office and served on an advisory board that Newton and Seale developed.42 Belva Butcher and Majeeda Roman participated in firearms training and political education classes.43 A number of other women marched alongside men in the Panthers’ local police patrols. They also participated in the short-lived women’s auxiliary of the organization, the Pantherettes.44 The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 57 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Despite women’s formative role in early party protests, the Panthers’ early organizational culture was decidedly masculinist. The rise of the party coincided with black male activists’ unabashed calls for black women to relinquish their public roles so that black men could reclaim their manhood. To be sure, the black radical tradition was replete with narratives that equated black liberation with the restoration of black manhood. However, the 1965 Moynihan Report amplified these claims. Tasked with analyzing race relations and poverty during the Johnson administration, sociologist and Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan compiled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. Ostensibly intended to explore and ameliorate the crux of the race problem in America, the report blamed black poverty and inequality on black women’s dominance in the home and community.45 Taking their cue from Moynihan, male activists often labeled women who assumed leadership roles or asserted their independence as “castrators” who undermined the movement. They called on these women to abandon their public positions in order to perform their “revolutionary” roles as mothers and caregivers for the black men and children of the black nation. Newton and Seale initially framed the party as a conduit through which black men could redefine and assert their manhood. The first issues of the Black Panther newspaper cast the organization as a space explicitly designed for the “cream of black manhood,” knowledgeable about “all the ins and outs of the problems facing Black People.”46 The Panthers also promulgated a series of powerful visual images to promote an idealized form of revolutionary manhood, publishing photos and artwork of black men in black leather jackets, black berets, and dark sunglasses and holding weaponry. Through this combination of rhetoric and images, the Panthers created a collective subjectivity, revolutionary identity, and radical culture. Their synthesis of nationalist rhetoric and symbols also codified a masculinist construction of the revolutionary figure in the popular and political imagination.47 The Origins of the Panthers’ Black Revolutionary Woman Ideal Although Panther leaders promoted a form of militant manhood, as Robyn Spencer notes, they did not endorse a form of submissive black womanhood.48 As a result, soon after joining the party, black women created spaces in which to construct powerful images and ideas about black women’s roles in party and political organizing. The short-lived “Sisters’ Section” in the Black Panther newspaper was one of the earliest arenas in which Panther 58 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms women articulated their gender-specific vision of the revolutionary figure. The articles in the section focused on two themes that would come to characterize Panther women’s initial writings: party promotion and women’s political self-conception. Barbara Auther’s “Sisters Unite” set the tone for this section of the Panthers’ newspaper. Published alongside an image of an armed female activist with the caption “a revolutionary sister,” the article emphasized the party’s early goals of community protection and militancy. Auther denounced the “police brutality and black genocide” ravaging the local community. She also praised the black men with “guts” who stood up to the “white power structure” through armed self-defense. Speaking directly to her female readership, Auther called on black women to support the party, because it was where the “BLACK MEN [were].” She ended the article with a rousing call to arms for female readership: “Become members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Sisters, ‘we got a good thing going.’ ”49 Although it rehearsed Moynihan-inspired calls for male support, Auther’s article was also an example of women’s efforts to frame the party as an inclusive organizing space. If the Panthers created the “Sisters’ Section” to convince black women of the party’s efficacy and goals, then “Sisters Unite” invited them to envision themselves as part of the Panthers’ revolutionary legion and protests from the outset. Other early recruits used the “Sisters’ Section” to expound on the importance of redefining black womanhood within black liberation struggles. In her July 1967 article, “Black Womanhood No. 1,” Judy Hart began the public, intraorganizational debate about how to best redefine black womanhood within the party and the contemporaneous political terrain. Hart opened this discussion by offering a meditation on how the rising popularity of Black Power had necessitated shifts in the black gendered imaginary. She explained that, in the late 1960s, the black freedom movement reflected the “fusing of [black Americans’] separate frustrations, desires, convictions, and strengths toward a common liberation.” As a result, “the relationships between black men and black women [were] taking on new and crucial meanings.” Black women were beginning to “constantly analyze and evaluate [their] position and direction in relation to each other, [them]selves, to the black community, and to [their] enemy.” Their analyses of their social, cultural, and political positions, Hart argued, led many black women to determine that they needed to develop new definitions of black womanhood unbridled by Eurocentric values and principles.50 The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 59 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hart then explained how black women reshaped the gendered imaginary in light of this new political perspective, offering an extended comparison of the different definitions of black womanhood circulating in the public sphere. Previously, she argued, black women aspired to a white, capitalistdriven ideal of womanhood, or to be the “bourgeois-oriented female.” This “ultra-boogie chick,” Hart asserted, was immature, aspired to white beauty standards akin to images promulgated in “Glamour-Mademoiselle-Vogue” magazines, and emasculated black men.51 In 1967, however, black women’s cultural and political self-conception was shifting. Hart contended that the rise of Black Power caused black women to embrace black-centered ideals of beauty and politics and to redefine black womanhood within the context of movement organizing. The Panther identified two factors that she believed influenced black women’s shifting political self-conception: black men and white supremacy. The “Sisters’ Section” author argued that black women could “not help but gravitate” toward black men who were fighting for black freedom and “join with [them] in the pursuit of a life together, removing the shackles of White Racist America and establishing a solid foundation of blackness from which to build.” Hart also maintained that through their study of and participation in political organizing, black women had come to understand contemporaneous black oppression as a “repetition of history,” or the latest iteration of a long history of black subjugation engendered by the ability of white supremacy to continually manifest itself in myriad ways. Black women’s simultaneous recognition of the importance of black men, racism’s resiliency, and their own “increasing possibility” as antiracist actors had led them to rethink traditional gendered models. Hart explained that black women now realized that they should bring their strength, will, and black heritage rather than their “leadership” and “domination” to bear on the black struggle, and they recognized that they should ardently reject Eurocentric, capitalist markers of womanhood, progress, and power.52 The Panther ended the article by announcing what she believed to be a new idea of black womanhood circulating with the party and the black community at large. “Politically, economically, and sexually, a new ethic is molded,” Hart wrote, “constantly adapting itself to the needs of blackness.” She described this new conception of black womanhood as one in which the revolutionary black woman rejected white cultural standards, or “stop[ped] pressing her hair,” prioritized being “involved in her community with the end in mind of laying the foundation for the [white] man’s 60 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms destruction,” and made “her man and thus his commitment . . . [the] essence of her life.”53 Hart’s characterization of black womanhood was propagandistic, patriarchal, and, in some ways, progressive. The new gendered political persona that she envisioned reflected the party’s early Black Power agenda. In its first year, the party promoted a form of male-centered, separatist, class-conscious politics and called for black Americans to reject Eurocentric political, class, and cultural values and seize community control through armed confrontation. In line with this perspective, Hart envisioned the burgeoning Black Revolutionary Woman as an activist who was ardently opposed to white beauty standards and materialism and devoted to black community control and self-determination. The idealized trope of black womanhood that she promoted also reflected the Panthers’ initial commitment to patriarchal ideas of black empowerment in that it defined black women’s political promise largely through their support of black men. Despite these patriarchal underpinnings, Hart established the real and imagined political potential of black women within the Panther Party in “Black Womanhood No. 1.” Her explication of black women’s evolving political self-conception confirmed that black women were capable of and interested in developing a new definition of black womanhood that responded to the political moment and organizational politics. By articulating a new idea of black womanhood in a Panther-sanctioned publication, Hart asserted that the party was a space in which black women could advance new, gender-specific definitions of their rights, roles, and revolutionary identities. Ultimately, Hart’s article, and the “Sisters’ Section” more broadly, illustrated how black women’s commitment to Black Power politics and organizing shaped the gendered imaginary. These early articles also laid the groundwork for women to envision themselves as consummate revolutionaries alongside Panther men. If articles in the “Sisters’ Section” foregrounded Panther women’s changing self-conception, then their early political artwork personified their redefinition. The party began incorporating Revolutionary Art—a collection of drawings, political cartoons, and mixed-media images designed to “enlighten” party members and “educate the masses”—into the Black Panther newspaper in May 1967.54 Panther leaders used artwork as way to represent the black condition and to visually theorize black liberation.55 The Panthers’ minister of culture Emory Douglas explained that Revolutionary Art gave “people the correct picture of [their] struggle, whereas Revolutionary Ideology The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 61 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms [gave] people the correct political understanding of [their] struggle.”56 In every issue, the Panthers provided a set of imagistic lessons designed to instruct readership on the “correct” way to embody and enact their ideological and programmatic directives. It also highlighted the Panthers’ revolutionary identity and ideology. Tarika Lewis was the party’s first Revolutionary Artist. Between 1967 and 1969, she created over forty images under the pen name Matilaba.57 Although her drawings appeared alongside those of famed Panther artist Emory Douglas, they had a style and tone of their own. Readers could identify her artwork by its thin, angular lines and pen strokes and her use of light shading to provide contrast in her black-and-white drawings. Her demonization of police officers as “pigs” galvanized readership against law enforcement; her depictions of black Americans in armed confrontation reinforced the Panthers’ real-life challenges to police brutality.58 Lewis also foregrounded black women often, and she unfailingly depicted them engaging in the same activities and tasks as men. Not only did her artwork challenge monolithic perceptions of black militancy, it also reshaped Panther and public imaginings of the black revolutionary figure. The December 21, 1968, edition of the Black Panther featured five of Lewis’s drawings. On page 4 of the issue, readers saw her full-page illustration of point number three of the Panther Party’s Ten Point Platform: “We Want an End to the Robbery by the White Man of Our Black Community.” Lewis illustrated this Panther principle by centering the image of the upper body of a black woman against a white background. Outfitted in paramilitary clothing, an Afro, and earrings, the woman does not look down or at the viewer but stares off into the distance. With a gun on her back and a shell casing strung around her neck, and her angled body conveying a sense of motion and purpose, the woman is prepared to “off the pig,” or to protect the black community, as the accompanying dialogue proclaims.59 After perusing articles about local-level politics, the Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program, and cultural nationalism, readers found another one of Lewis’s drawings on page 15 of the same issue. In this half-page illustration, Lewis depicted four armed Panthers in a room, peering through an open doorway. One man, wearing the Panthers’ signature black beret, sits at the top of the staircase; another cautiously peers around the slightly open door. The third figure, another man, stands directly behind him in a defensive posture. The only unobstructed figure is that of a woman dressed in kneehigh boots, a black skirt, and a white shirt, poised to be the first one to attack or to be attacked. Because of her vulnerable position, the woman is in a 62 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Drawing by Tarika Lewis of armed black woman from the Black Panther, December 21, 1968. This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Drawing by Tarika Lewis of group of Black Panthers from the Black Panther, December 21, 1968. defensive stance, both hands on her rifle, eyes fixed just beyond the open door.60 Originally, the Panthers used pictorial representations of black men engaged in armed self-defense to assure the male readership that, through the organization, they could redefine and assert their manhood. Leadership of the black community was foremost among these rights, as long as they also engaged in what Farah Jasmine Griffin has called the “promise of protection,” or a social contract that implied that black women would accept black men as the leaders and defenders of the community in exchange for protection and security.61 The Panthers visually conveyed this idea by populating the Black Panther newspaper with drawings and images of armed black men. Lewis questioned the gendered exclusivity of this contract. Through her artwork, she amplified party members’ daily activities, such as their armed police patrols and confrontation with local law enforcement. The artist also transformed the masculinist underpinnings of these acts by integrating women into representations of black militancy and Panther tenets. Lewis’s illustration of the third point of the Panthers’ Ten Point Platform both reinforced and reconceptualized the party’s approach to the promise of pro64 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms tection. Throughout the paper, party members often framed the organization as the one best poised to protect the black community from the avaricious white community. In her visual representation of point three, Lewis bolstered this claim by drawing a black figure armed and poised to attack. However, by illustrating this point through a stand-alone image of a black woman, Lewis confirmed party women’s ability to embody and enact the Panthers’ calls for armed self-defense and community control without the leadership or protection of men. When depicting the Panthers’ collective armed confrontation, akin to their armed police patrols, Lewis visually positioned women as protectors of the community alongside men. The location of the female figure in the second image confirms this point. She is not behind the pack of men or unarmed. Rather, she stands shoulder to shoulder with her male comrades in clear command of her weapon and the situation. Through this and other images, Lewis showed that black women were capable of identifying with, adopting, and embodying the Panthers’ revolutionary values, appearance, strategies, and politics. She also implied that the common bond among Panther members—and the core of their new revolutionary identity—was not maleness but militancy. Panther women’s early Revolutionary Art was also progressive and provocative because it subverted traditional visual constructions of black womanhood. As bell hooks notes, artists and photographers often portray black women as simplistic and transparent, particularly through frontal views of their faces and bodies.62 Lewis disputed this characterization by insisting that the viewer take note of the force and purpose of the black women. She centered the face and upper body of the female figure in the first image, yet her body is angled, eyes transfixed elsewhere, and the remaining portion of her body is absent. In the second image, Lewis drew attention to women’s militancy by outfitting the female figure in different clothing and positioning her on the outside of the Panthers’ formation. Like her counterpart in the preceding drawing, this woman does not face front or meet eyes with the viewer. Both images gave readers the sense that black women were militant, aggressive, and volatile rather than stable, dependable, domesticated, or simplistic. Lewis’s artwork reinforced the Panthers’ early message of armed militancy while simultaneously broadening the scope of their revolutionary imagery and identity. Panther women’s initial projections of the Black Revolutionary Woman had important implications for black women’s goal of collective redefinition. Although postwar activists like Mallory continually defined black women by their militancy rather than their maternalism, throughout the The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 65 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1960s, the latter often remained the litmus test of their revolutionary acuity. Even the Panthers’ Revolutionary Posters—reproductions of Emory Douglas’s art sold for profit—often featured women carrying children or caring for them.63 Lewis’s artwork disputed characterizations of black women as docile servant figures and visually solidified their place among the burgeoning militant Black Power ranks. Similarly, Auther and Hart defined the new female revolutionary by her support of radical race-based politics, anticapitalist analysis of white supremacy, and resistance to dominant ideas of black womanhood. Early Panther women consistently depicted women as public, militant, and powerful protectors of their communities rather than as maids or mammies.64 In the process, they divested black women of their domestic markers and cast them as self-defined and selfdetermining activists. Black women who joined the party in its nascent years embodied the revolutionary attributes that Hart, Lewis, and other Panther women prescribed. SNCC activist Kathleen Neal Cleaver joined the party in 1967 after meeting her future husband, Eldridge Cleaver, a former-prisoner-turnedradical-activist who joined the party in February 1967.65 Confrontations between the Panthers and police catapulted her to party prominence. On October 28, 1967, an early morning altercation between Huey Newton and Oakland police officer John Frey turned violent, resulting in Frey’s death and Newton’s incarceration.66 The Panther leader’s absence, coupled with the arrests of many early recruits after the Sacramento incident, left the party in disarray. The following month, Kathleen Cleaver relocated to the Bay Area and began working for the organization. She created leaflets, reported on court hearings, and organized demonstrations, laying the foundation for the Free Huey campaign, a national grassroots movement to free the Panther leader.67 Her leadership of the movement led to her appointment as the organization’s communications secretary, a position that made her the first woman to sit on its Central Committee and a Black Power icon. Party publications presented her as the real-life personification of the Black Revolutionary Woman that early Panther women described. Reflecting the reciprocal relationship between party literature and members, photos of Cleaver dressed in a black leather jacket and boots, with her hair styled in an Afro and a gun in her hands, began to populate the pages of the Black Panther.68 Kathleen Cleaver’s popularity was indicative of women’s growing participation in the Panther Party. Their presence in the collective increased amid a series of organizational and national events. On April 6, 1968, the 66 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms police surrounded Bobby Hutton, Eldridge Cleaver, and six other party members in West Oakland. The Panthers and police exchanged words, then gunfire. Lil’ Bobby, as the Panthers called him, was the party’s first casualty.69 Hutton’s death hit a black community still reeling from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just two days earlier. Newton’s arrest, Hutton’s murder, and King’s assassination became the triumvirate of events that tipped the scales of popular opinion toward the Panthers’ brand of insurgency. In the months following Hutton’s funeral, seventeen new Panther chapters developed in cities including Boston, Seattle, and Chicago.70 Women founded or headed many of these new branches. Mary Rem established the Des Moines chapter; Ericka Huggins helped create and lead the New Haven branch of the group.71 Audrea Jones cofounded and led the Boston branch of the party. Under Jones’s direction, the chapter developed their local Free Breakfast Program, created liberation schools, and built medical centers for black Bostonians.72 Shirley George-Meadors cofounded the San Diego branch.73 Women also held key positions within individual chapters. Yvonne King was the minister of labor and a field secretary in the Chicago chapter.74 Safiya Bukhari served as the communications and information officer of the East Coast Black Panther Party, while Elaine Brown, who came into the party through the Los Angeles chapter, became the local deputy minister of education.75 Women’s vital contributions led many to conclude that women “ran” the daily operations of the party and that the organization would have to promulgate new ideas of the revolutionary to reflect members’ lived experiences.76 Panther women such as New Orleans member Linda Greene began to reconfigure the idea of the female revolutionary in the late 1960s. In her 1968 article “The Black Revolutionary Woman,” she remarked, “There is a phenomenon that is beginning to evolve out of many other phenomenon [sic]. That is the revolutionary Black woman. She is a new, different creature, different from all women who have walked the face of the earth. . . . She is a change; she is inherently revolutionary.” Greene explained what set this new, idealized woman apart: “She is a worker. She is a mother. She is a companion intellectual, spiritual, mental, and physical. She is what her man, and what her people need her to be, when they need her. She is the strength of the struggle. . . . She is militant, revolutionary, committed, strong, and warm, feminine, loving, and kind. These qualities are not the antithesis of each other; they must all be her simultaneously.”77 While Hart and Lewis were intent on proving that women could match men’s militancy, Greene suggested that this was no longer the only axis on which The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 67 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms black women’s revolutionary potential should be measured. The Panthers’ ideal of revolutionary womanhood could not rest solely on women’s ability to perform “masculine” acts; rather, Panther women needed a model of womanhood that reflected the complete range of their activities and political organizing. Political expediency may have prompted Greene to rethink existing definitions of black womanhood; however, her new formulation marked a turning point in the Panthers’ gendered imaginary. Not only did her article establish the centrality of women to all aspects of party life, it also challenged popular conceptions of “masculine” and “feminine” revolutionary traits or acts. Greene continued early Panther women’s strategy of linking the Black Revolutionary Woman to the traditional markers of revolutionary manhood, stating that she was militant, revolutionary, an intellectual, and committed to struggle. However, she did not disavow the importance of femininity or traditionally feminine traits. Greene instead proffered a holistic idea of the revolutionary figure, one that responded to the political moment rather than a gender-specific understanding of men’s or women’s roles. Her rhetorical reordering countered anti-intellectual and apolitical characterizations of black women. It also offered female readership a broader, more applicable model of womanhood to adopt. Ultimately, Greene advanced an argument for reimagining black women as revolutionaries and autonomous actors while also countering the limiting gender dichotomies and binaries that had previously governed the Panthers’ gendered imaginary. Greene’s article also reflected Panther women’s attempts to balance men’s rhetoric of emasculation with their lived experiences organizing on the front lines. Like her fellow activists, she argued that the revolutionary woman should “put herself to the task and honor of inspiring” black men. She departed from this masculinist construction, however, in her rationale for calling for black women’s support of black men. In the late 1960s, the predominant claim among Black Power organizers was that true, revolutionary black men were in short supply. Greene suggested the opposite. She claimed that it was “true, revolutionary Black women,” rather than men, who were “more scarce than freedom.”78 The political climate demanded that versatile, rigorous, and committed activists lead both the party and the movement. The Black Revolutionary Woman, as Greene envisioned her, was the one who fit that bill. Greene’s rhetorical reversal, in which she framed black women as the most sought-after liberation fighters, challenged malecentered frames of revolutionary activism. Her article, and those of other women who joined the party in 1968, highlighted Panther women’s invest68 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ment in theorizing a continually evolving definition of black revolutionary womanhood within the organization. Revolutionary Nationalism and the Black Revolutionary Woman Greene and her contemporaries formulated new definitions of revolutionary womanhood as the party entered a new organizational and ideological phase. Between 1968 and 1970, female membership in the organization peaked.79 At the same time, Panther leadership also began to question the feasibility of their black nationalist and masculinist agenda. Women who joined the party during this period invested in the Panthers’ expanding ideological frame, developing more capacious conceptualizations of women’s real and imagined roles. Their reformulation of the Black Revolutionary Woman in the remaining years of the decade directly challenged patriarchal interpretations of party ideology and pushed Panther leadership to label sexist practices as counterrevolutionary. Women poured into the Panther Party amid an increasingly repressive government order. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency, garnering over 60 percent of the popular vote through an aggressive campaign that emphasized “law and order” and free enterprise. Nixon’s approach to the black community reflected this two-pronged platform. Under his watch, the FBI extended the counterintelligence program—known as COINTELPRO—in an effort to stamp out black groups. He simultaneously embraced the idea of black capitalism as a form of Black Power, establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, funneling money toward black colleges and black-owned businesses, and enriching the black middle class.80 As an anti-state and anticapitalist organization, the party drew the ire of Nixon administration. In 1967, state and federal officials escalated their attacks on the Panthers through COINTELPRO. The goal of the program was to “disrupt, misdirect, and discredit” what the bureau deemed to be subversive, black nationalist organizations and leaders.81 In 1969 alone, the Panthers endured raids on offices and members in Des Moines, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other cities.82 Most notably, government agents fostered antipathy between the Panthers and the Us Organization, a Los Angeles–based cultural nationalist group. The FBIfueled animosity between Us and the party led to a January 17, 1969, shootout on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the deaths of Panther members John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 69 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Carter.83 Local police arrested two Us members, Larry and George Stiner, for their murders. The incident also initiated a wave of interorganizational attacks that adversely affected both groups. Although patriarchal conceptions of leadership led law enforcement to target Panther men, women in the organization responded to state-sponsored violence in kind. Renee “Peaches” Moore, a nineteen-year-old member of the Los Angeles chapter, exchanged gunfire with the LAPD after officers raided the chapter’s headquarters in December 1969. Catherine “Top Cat” Bourns, Leah Hodges, and Elaine “E-baby” Young of the New Orleans chapter garnered national attention for their involvement in a September 1970 shootout with local police.84 Panther women’s resiliency in the face of repression impressed their contemporaries and brought more women into the organization. Kiilu Nyasha (Pat Gallyot), for example, became a Panther after seeing photos from Huggins’s funeral. She recalled that she joined the New Haven chapter in 1969 because she was “very impressed by the Black Panther Party and their seriousness and their militancy.”85 Nyasha joined the party as its leaders were shifting their ideological perspectives on black liberation, capitalism, and imperialism. Initial members came of age during a period in which grassroots, independent, black-led political parties and the proliferation of independent black nations in Africa made calls for black political autonomy, self-determination, and physical separation appear feasible. However, party leaders soon found black nationhood to be a difficult goal to achieve on American soil. Lacking separate land on which to establish a new nation, many Panthers realized that black Americans would have to become a “dominant faction” within the United States to achieve their original nationalist goals. Achieving political and cultural dominance was virtually impossible without physical separation. This circular approach to nation building led many of them to conclude that this model of black nationalism was an untenable ideological approach to maintain.86 Drawing on the lessons that he learned as a student of revolutionary theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Mao Zedong, in 1969, Newton announced that the party had adopted the ideology of revolutionary nationalism. The Panthers’ new goal was to join forces with “other people of the world struggling for decolonization and nationhood.”87 Not only would allying with other dispersed and dispossessed communities help black Americans achieve their nationalistic goals, it could also bring about a “people’s revolution with the end goal of the people being in power.”88 The Panthers became “nationalists who want[ed] revolutionary changes in 70 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms everything, including the economic system the[ir] oppressor inflict[ed] on [them].”89 This elastic political frame led party members to amplify their anticapitalist and anti-imperialist critique of American society. It also laid the foundation for them to challenge other forms of oppression, including patriarchy, under the auspices of the organization’s expanding revolutionary ethos. Women in the party cited the organization’s ideological evolution as the impetus behind their changing definition of black revolutionary womanhood. In a 1969 interview with the Movement, a white radical newspaper, a group of Panther women explained that the organization’s emphasis on comprehensive revolutionary change had caused party members to scrutinize gender roles and their relationship with capitalist structures. According to these women, members’ adoption of an explicit anticapitalist frame led party participants to “realize that male chauvinism and all of its manifestations [were] bourgeois,” or that sexism and patriarchal gender roles were tools developed by white, capitalist society that mediated black community building. Further study led party members to develop an intersectional analysis of black women’s oppression and to conclude that their emancipatory visions would have to account for the converging forms of racism and sexism that black women experienced. Echoing earlier radicals, such as Claudia Jones, the Panther women asserted, “In a proletarian revolution, the emancipation of women is primary.”90 Party women’s emphasis on women’s liberation reflected conversations taking place inside and outside the black liberation movement. The surge of leftist activism in the late 1960s and, in particular, women’s participation in the civil rights movement generated new debates about gender roles and hierarchies across multiple progressive and radical groups.91 Black and white women began to develop collective and separate organizations dedicated to ending sexism in the home, the workplace, political organizing, and society at large.92 By the end of the decade, the women’s liberation movement was in full swing, with activists and protests attracting mainstream media coverage and the publication of a bevy of books, manifestos, and anthologies dedicated to defining feminism, eradicating patriarchy, and advocating for reproductive rights.93 Women in the party were often interested in women’s liberation principles but not the movement itself. They, like many other black women, maintained that it was a white-centered movement, designed to end patriarchy while leaving racism intact. As Kathleen Neal Cleaver explained, many members found that the “problems of black women and the problems of white women are so completely diverse they [could not] possibly be solved The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 71 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms in the same type of organization nor met by the same type of activity.”94 Other Panther women maintained that feminist organizations that did not incorporate a race or class critique into their political ideology were misguided, as women could only truly be liberated through the simultaneous destruction of racism, sexism, and capitalism. This led many party women, according to historian Mary Phillips, to “operat[e] as feminists” while distancing themselves from the term.95 However, Panther women did, at times, collaborate with feminist organizations.96 They also integrated feminist principles into their visions of revolutionary womanhood. In the August 1969 issue of the Black Panther, member Candi Robinson characterized the Black Revolutionary Woman as a feminist and revolutionary nationalist activist. In her article, “Message to Revolutionary Women,” she told readers, “Black Women, Black Women, hold your head up, and look ahead. We too are needed in the revolution. We too are strong. We too are a threat to the oppressive enemy. We are revolutionaries. We are the other half of our revolutionary men. We are their equal halves, may it be with gun in hand, or battling in streets to make this country take a socialist lead.”97 This parity, according to Robinson, meant that one of the key roles of female revolutionaries was to “educate [their] people [to] combat liberalism, and combat male chauvinism. Awaken [their] men to the fact that [black women were] no more nor no less than they.” “For too long,” she contended, women had “been doubly oppressed, not only by capitalist society but also by [their men].” Employing the rhetoric of the moment, Robinson encouraged her female readership to teach men to “bring their minds from a male chauvinistic level to a higher level” and to continually remind them that women were “as revolutionary as they.”98 The Panther promoted a vision of revolutionary womanhood in which party women were the intellectual and organizational equals of men, invested in the revolutionary nationalist goal of bringing about a socialist state, and dedicated to ending sexism within the organization and the movement at large. Panther women like Robinson simultaneously codified Panther ideology and stretched the boundaries of the party’s gendered ideals. Her formulation of this political identity retained earlier Panther women’s efforts to envision the Black Revolutionary Woman as militant, political, and versatile. Reflecting shifting ideas about women’s rights and gender roles, Robinson also envisioned the female revolutionary as a political actor who incorporated antisexist work into her litany of roles and responsibilities. In her estimation, the Black Revolutionary Woman brought the Panthers closer 72 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms to their proletariat revolution by explicitly combatting the central disciplining structures of capitalism: liberalism and male chauvinism. She was also a woman who expanded the definition of revolution, and the Panthers’ revolutionary ideal, by envisioning a world free from sexism and leading the fight to achieve gender equality. If Panther women’s articles were prescriptive, then their autobiographical accounts were demonstrative. Like postwar women radicals, they used their personal stories of politicization to both model and project new, more radical conceptions of black womanhood. New York chapter member Joan Bird’s autobiographical essays highlighted this practice. Born and raised in the city, Bird joined the party in 1968. Her party activism led to her incarceration as one of the Panther 21, a group of New York members falsely accused of plotting to bomb department stores, police stations, and other local landmarks in 1969.99 Like Mallory, Bird penned autobiographical accounts from her jail cell to call attention to her case and contextualize it within the larger framework of government repression and white supremacy. She also used her account of radicalization to model how Panther women adopted and enacted the identity of the Revolutionary Black Woman that members like Greene and Robinson described. In “Joan Bird, N.Y. Panther 21 Political Prisoner,” Bird provided readers with her personal narrative of persecution and politicization. She began her account with her upbringing and introduction to the Panther Party. “I was born and raised in Harlem in New York City. I went to a parochial elementary school from kindergarten through eighth grade, from there I attended Cathedral High School. . . . It was an integrated school and in there I found different sorts of racism present both among teachers and among the students. I can think of one incident where a group of Black sisters were sitting in the auditorium and we were rapping during a recess period. A White racist nun came over and said, ‘get the hell outta here, this is all you niggers are good for.’ ”100 Bird offered other examples of the gender-specific incidents of racism that framed her young adult life: “After graduation from Cathedral, I decided to go into nursing at Bronx Community College, I was instructed by a Zionist, who had a thing against Black women. She didn’t dig us wearing our hair natural, and did anything to deprive us of being ourselves.” Frustrated at every turn, Bird explained that she sought both refuge and community. She was attracted to the party because it offered “some sort of concrete ideology” to explain her oppression and community programs through which she could organize against it.101 The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 73 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The New York activist then gave Black Panther readers a detailed account of her arrest, incarceration, and trial. “In January of 1969, I was in a car and two pigs stopped and they asked us what was the trouble. A few minutes later the pigs, started shooting. A ten minute interval later, one pig, named McKenzie, (a Black pig by the way) says, cover me, I think there’s a broad in the car and he came up to the car where I’m at. . . . I was dragged out and finally, I was placed on the ground, beaten with a blackjack by McKenzie, kicked, stomped, beaten in the head, given a busted lip and busted eye.” Bird confirmed that once she was arrested and released on bail, she continued working for the Panthers until the police arrested her again. In closing, she remarked, “I have been in jail for over fourteen months now, along with my brothers, ten of them, and we have just finished our preliminary hearings which clearly shows that the racist system of America does not intend to give the Black Panther Party members justice or anyone else in this country any sort of justice.”102 Bird’s account not only established the party as an inclusive organization, it also foregrounded Panther women’s revolutionary potential and reshaped the contours of the Panthers’ revolutionary persona. The New York organizer cast the party as an ideologically and organizationally malleable organization, flexible enough to address her gender-specific experiences with oppression and equipped with an ideological framework that could offer “concrete” solutions for black women’s subjugation. Her narrative indicates that she was not only welcomed into the party ranks but also able to apply the Panthers’ revolutionary nationalist tenets to her lived experiences as a working-class black woman. Bird’s recounting of her arrest and incarceration undergirded this message. In her retelling, she casts the state as the natural enemy of black women, emphasizing that it was the police, not her fellow Panthers, who targeted and abused her. Instead, Panther men were her comrades in arms, fighting alongside her and enduring the trumpedup legal charges. This narrative left the reader with the impression that the party was a conduit through which black women could assert their community based, anti-imperialist politics and challenge state-sanctioned political repression. Bird also gendered black activists’ prototypical stories of revolutionary transformation. Often published as essays in the newspaper—and later in book form—the autobiographical accounts that (male) Panthers produced offered a road map of how they became radical activists worthy of public recognition.103 Bird’s article was similar to those that black activists created, beginning with her upbringing and experiences with discrimination. She 74 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms departed from masculinist radicalization narratives, however, by foregrounding her personal moments of politicization in gendered and racial terms. Bird consistently citied incidents of racism particular to her girlhood in order to foreground how oppression manifested differently for black women. Her narrative challenged claims that black women did not experience the same level of police harassment or racial violence as black men.104 It also indicated that black women could be radicalized through their gender-specific experiences with repression. Bird’s use of this genre had important implications for Panther women’s theorizing of the female revolutionary identity and subjectivity. Her recounting offered an alternative genealogy of politicization and transformation outside the traditional tropes that male activists produced and presented readers with a model of black revolutionary womanhood steeped in black women’s personal or subjective modes. Ultimately, Bird’s autobiographical account challenged the imagined universality of the Panthers’ masculine revolutionary subject and shaped public perceptions about black women’s political personas and organizing.105 Her narrative and the others like it can be thought of as what Sidonie Smith calls “autobiographical manifestos,” which can contest dominant narratives “by working to dislodge the consolidations of the Eurocentric, phallogocenric ‘I’ ” and replacing them with black, women-centered understandings of the political subject.106 Bird literally and rhetorically reconfigured herself as a true revolutionary, physically and ideologically in step with Panther men. She also provided readers with a gender-specific story of personal transformation, framed the party as a gender-inclusive and ideologically generative space, and modeled a gender-specific form of the black revolutionary that other black women could adopt. Her account exemplifies Panther women’s attempts to dislodge universal, male-dominated conceptions of the black revolutionary subject and assert a women-centered political identity in service of advancing the Panthers’ revolutionary nationalist politics. Bird, along with many other Panther women, used autobiographical manifestos to insist on the potential and equality of the female revolutionary actor and to chart a path to redefinition and radical action for the party’s female readership. Panther women’s rhetorical reformulations and real-life representations of the revolutionary figure altered the male leadership’s perspectives on men’s and women’s roles. One of the starkest examples of this shift was in the public declarations of party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver rose to prominence after the publication of his controversial book Soul on Ice, an The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 75 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms autobiographical account that included graphic tales of misogyny and heterosexual, oppressive sexual politics.107 When he became the minister of information for the party in 1967, the Panthers implicitly endorsed his sexist positions along with his political vision. Several years later, Cleaver revised his public statements on women’s rights and roles, citing Panther women’s real and imagined acts of revolutionary activism as evidence for his claims. Writing from the Panthers’ International Section in Algeria, a chapter he and Kathleen Cleaver formed in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver championed gender equality within the organization and women’s revolutionary potential.108 The Panther leader used Ericka Huggins’s imprisonment and trial as evidence for the need for gender parity within the organization. Huggins was jailed on charges that she, along with Seale and several other Panthers, tortured and killed member Alex Rackley in May 1969 because they suspected him of being an FBI informant.109 Local police incarcerated her for years while the State of Connecticut engaged in a long and costly trial in an effort to convict the group of Panthers, known as the New Haven 9, and undermine the party’s reputation and leadership.110 In “Message to Sister Ericka Huggins,” Eldridge Cleaver argued that Huggins’s political commitments and activism made her the ideal revolutionary actor and that her experiences with government repression discredited claims of women’s inferiority. In a full-page spread on the back page of the July 5, 1969, edition of the Black Panther, Cleaver claimed that Huggins was “a shining example of a revolutionary woman,” and that her “incarceration and suffering” should serve as a “stinging rebuke to all manifestations of male chauvinism in [party] ranks.” “We must purge our ranks and our hearts, and our minds, and our understanding of any chauvinism, chauvinistic behavior or disrespectful behavior toward women,” Cleaver told the Panther readership. “We must too recognize that a woman can be just as revolutionary as a man and that she has equal stature [with men] . . . that we cannot prejudice her in any manner, [and] that we cannot relegate her to an inferior position.”111 Cleaver’s “Message” marked an important moment in the evolution of the Panthers’ ethos and gendered imaginary. As a party leader, Cleaver’s rhetorical disavowal of patriarchy served as prong of the organization’s de facto repudiation of sexism. Moreover, his message reflected the changes in the Panthers’ culture brought about by women’s political and personal sacrifice, as well as their assertions of women’s revolutionary identity and potential. Huggins, according to Cleaver, was a revolutionary black woman because she eschewed traditional, gender-specific roles and embodied and 76 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms enacted the traits of revolutionary womanhood that women like Greene, Bird, and Robinson described. If Panther women sought to reformulate the black revolutionary as an empowered female actor, then Cleaver’s public endorsement of their assertions reflected the inroads they had made in infusing this ideal into party culture. Individual chapter leaders took Cleaver’s message to heart. At the local level, members advanced a progressive, if uneven, line on gender equality that codified Panther women’s framing of the Black Revolutionary Woman as men’s powerful, political, and militant equal. Women in the Chicago chapter maintained that their leader, Fred Hampton, demanded that women be treated as equals and purged members who did not comply.112 Ruby Morgan, a member of the Houston chapter, indicated that local leaders such as Charles Freeman illustrated their commitment to equality by assigning men and women to the same jobs and posts and by following women’s leadership when they became ranking officers.113 Debating, organizing, and studying with women caused rank-and-file men to rethink the masculinist image of the revolutionary figure. Austin Allen, who worked alongside many women in Oakland, later noted that his female fellow members clearly embodied and articulated the Panthers’ ideological platform and revolutionary culture.114 Panther women’s rhetorical and pictorial constructions of the Black Revolutionary Woman gave members, and the broader public, the tools with which to reimagine and enact alternative understandings of manhood and womanhood. By 1970, they had solidified a party discourse and ideological ethos that framed black women as leaders and revolutionary equals. Internationalism, Intercommunalism, and the Black Revolutionary Woman In the 1970s, women emerged as formal leaders within the party. They filled multiple organizational positions, becoming directors, newspaper editors, and heads of the group’s community programs. Panther women led efforts to transform the party into a locally driven, globally minded grassroots organization during its final years. They also capitalized on the organization’s shifting focus to expand the boundaries of the party’s gendered imaginary. From 1970 to 1975, female members developed an expansive political identity that integrated black mothers, feminists, and caregivers into the party’s revolutionary fold. Their broadening of the definition of the Black Revolutionary Woman diversified the Panthers’ political identity during a period The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 77 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms in which the party was in need of wide-ranging community support. It also transformed the organization into a space that openly championed women’s and feminist causes. On August 5, 1970, the Free Huey campaign declared victory when the California Court of Appeals overturned Newton’s manslaughter conviction.115 The Panther leader walked out of Alameda County Jail and back into an organization that had changed significantly in his three-year absence. Between 1967 and 1970, the party proliferated, growing from a local, Bay Area group to an organization with chapters across the globe. The group’s meteoric rise was matched only by the FBI’s efforts to curtail its power. Local and federal law enforcement cells launched violent attacks on the organization, decimating party ranks and casting the organization as destructive and nihilistic. By the time the Panther founder resumed leadership of the organization, it was disjointed, reeling from the assassinations of major figures such as Chicago chapter leader Fred Hampton and in need of infrastructure and a political vision for the new decade.116 In an attempt to consolidate and streamline the party, Newton demilitarized its image and turned its focus toward community organizing. To create ideological and administrative coherence, the Panther founder shifted the party’s ideological stance to intercommunalism. At the Pantherhosted Revolutionary People’s Convention in Philadelphia, held in September 1970, Newton postulated that the United States was no longer simply a nation—it was an empire that controlled “all the world’s land and people” and transformed other nations into oppressed communities. The global power struggle was divided along the axis of a “small circle that administered and profited from the empire of the United States” and those peoples and nations caught under the weight of American imperialism. As intercommunalists, the Panthers’ goal was to work with other oppressed communities to create a global network of revolutionaries dedicated to ending all facets of American imperialism.117 A position that drew on the Panthers’ previous Marxist-Leninist and internationalist stances, intercommunalism amplified rather than completely redefined the organization’s existing revolutionary nationalist position. Intercommunalism also brought about a new organizing mantra: survival pending revolution. As member Gwen Hodges explained, the Panthers maintained that the “overthrow of one class by another [had to] be carried out by revolutionary violence.” However, until they could achieve this goal, the party was going to “concentrate on the immediate needs of the people” in order to “build a unified political force” to fight racism and 78 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms imperialism.118 To this end, members created survival programs, or a network of services designed to mitigate the daily effects of oppression in black communities. The Panthers had already instituted this type of programming through initiatives such as the Free Breakfast Program that Seale started in 1968. In the early 1970s they expanded these programs—which included free health clinics and clothing and food programs—and framed them as “a firstaid kit,” triaging and treating the black community so that it could “see the next day or see the revolution.”119 The party’s survival programs, and the intercommunal ideology that framed them, allowed the Panthers to lay claim to their earlier revolutionary rhetoric while also engaging in progressive and practical community-based activities that improved their image and deepened their community relationships.120 A key part of this new image was party leaders’ public endorsement of women’s equality. In an August 1970 statement, Newton announced his formal support of women’s and gay rights and framed sexism and homophobia as counterrevolutionary positions. “I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things toward homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression,” Newton warned. “As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the woman’s right to be free.”121 Newton’s public pronouncement simultaneously validated Panther women’s contributions to political struggle and highlighted the distinction between party rhetoric and the quotidian experiences of Panther women. During the time that the party leader was incarcerated, female members not only directly challenged organizational sexism, they also linked women’s liberation and proletariat revolution through their political writings, public speeches, and everyday activism. Reflecting these influences, Newton’s statement was a rhetorical disavowal of the Moynihan-induced discourses of hypermasculinity, violence, and homophobia that had characterized the organization’s political positions and perspectives in previous years. As was often the case, the party put the ideals Newton professed into practice unevenly. It would be up to women in the party to close the gap between rhetoric and reality by imagining and enacting new definitions of black womanhood.122 Although Newton’s affirmation of women’s equality may have been popular, his new approach to party organizing was not. In the early 1970s, Panther leadership deepened their support of community programming and deemphasized armed revolution. Members of the New York chapter were especially vocal about their disagreement with this new stance.123 On The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 79 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms January 19, 1971, the New York Panther 21 published an open letter denouncing Newton’s gradualist approach. The East Coast group maintained that revolution required armed struggle, violence, and bloodshed and that a revolutionary organization developed through political education, “extreme violence, and radicalization.”124 In response, Newton expelled this group and other Panthers who disagreed with the party’s new direction.125 Some members of this expulsed faction created the Black Liberation Army, an underground group designed to defend the black community and prepare them for armed revolutionary warfare.126 On the heels of this schism, Eldridge Cleaver, who sided with the Panther 21, publicly challenged Newton about this ideological turn. On February 26, 1971, Newton appeared live on San Francisco’s locally syndicated A.M. Show with Jim Dunbar. Cleaver called in to the show from Algiers, challenged Newton’s new survival program strategy, and demanded that he reinstate the expulsed members. After the program, Newton expelled Cleaver and members of the International Section of the party.127 FBI agents fueled the animosity between the two Panther leaders, using Connie Matthews, a Jamaican woman who served as the Panthers’ international coordinator in Europe, as a mark in their efforts.128 The sectarian split escalated in the following months, with calls from each side for the removal of members, damaging claims published by each faction in the mainstream and underground press, and the murders of Robert Webb and Sam Napier, which members blamed on this dispute. During this period, numerous chapters broke away from the national body, reducing the number of chapters by nearly half.129 In the face of dwindling support, an ideological schism, and internal mutinies, Newton and the Central Committee decided to consolidate the party. In July 1972, they closed all remaining chapters and asked members to relocate to the Panthers’ central headquarters in Oakland.130 In the years leading up to this organizational consolidation, women made up a large portion of the rank and file. They were also the majority of members who relocated to the Bay Area. By the fall of that year, there was a critical mass of women at the helm of the party in Oakland working to reconstitute it as an intercommunalist organization.131 The Central Committee envisioned Oakland as the epicenter of the Panthers’ new political movement. To that end, the Panthers focused on turning the Bay Area city from a “reactionary base into a revolutionary one” using a three-pronged approach.132 Members formed alliances with progressive groups such as the East Bay Democratic Club and black politicians such as 80 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Congressman Ron Dellums and congresswoman and 1972 presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.133 They also expanded their existing community programs to create a complex network of services to meet the local community’s needs.134 Finally, the organization concentrated on winning political power in Oakland through electoral politics. The organization’s Black Community Survival Conference in March 1972 epitomized their multilayered approach to transforming the city. At this massive rally, held at Oakland’s DeFremery Park, the Panthers combined political speeches from candidates like Chisholm with coalition building, voter registration drives, food and clothing giveaways, and health care screenings. Such conferences raised the consciousness of local residents and advanced the Panthers’ political agenda. The events also created a black voter base for party political office candidates Elaine Brown and Bobby Seale.135 Panther women headed this phase of party organizing. By 1973, they had developed the organization’s Oakland-based survival programs, which included the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, the Legal Aid Educational Program, the People’s Free Clothing Program, and the People’s Free Shoe Program, among others. Female members also created Liberation Schools and the Intercommunal Youth Institute, an “alternative to established learning institutions” that provided “black and other oppressed children with a scientific method of thinking and analyzing things.”136 Many Panther women had been in charge of survival programs in their local chapters and continued to lead them after relocating to the Bay Area. Audrea Jones, who established the Panthers’ free medical clinics in Boston, also headed their clinics and health services in Oakland.137 As members of the Detroit chapter, Jonina Abron and Gwendolyn Robinson helped run the Free Busing to Prison Program. They also picked up where they left off when they relocated to the West Coast, helping to run similar programs in Oakland.138 Women were also the face of the group’s electoral efforts. After supporting party-backed candidates in the early 1970s, Elaine Brown became the Panthers’ candidate for Oakland City Council in 1973 and 1975. Challenging the city’s Republican stronghold, she garnered an impressive 44 percent of the vote in the 1975 election.139 Panther women also occupied other local and municipal seats. In addition to serving as the campaign manager for Seale’s mayoral run, Audrea Jones was one of four Panthers who won a seat on the Berkeley Community Development Council board of directors, a local board that controlled the distribution of millions of federal dollars for antipoverty programs. Ericka Huggins, who was also elected, joined The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 81 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Jones on the board because she “found it hard to ignore the unending harassment, poverty, and racism Black and poor people” faced.140 Female Panthers also took over editorial leadership of the Black Panther newspaper, now called the Intercommunal News Service. Under the direction of Brown and Huggins, the paper often featured women on the cover and published articles that foregrounded the gender-specific concerns of black women in inner-city communities.141 Readers encountered articles about forced sterilization from women such as Lula Hudson, who wrote about her “fascist ordeal” in “They Told Me I Had to Be Sterilized or Die.”142 They also heard from female prisoners about their fight for self-determination and human dignity in the face of inhumane carceral conditions.143 The Intercommunal News Service featured interviews with Margaret Sloan, founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization. It also chronicled Angela Davis’s 1972 trial, informing readers on how the former UCLA professor and activist was falsely accused of supplying the guns used in the August 7, 1970, Marin County Courthouse takeover that ended with the deaths of the judge and three other men.144 The party’s newspaper had always been an ideologically and organizationally generative space. With female editors and artists at the helm, it continued to foreground the intersections of black womanhood, community organizing, and political theory. In command of the party’s programming and propaganda, Panther women expanded their real and imagined representations of black revolutionary women. The front-page story of the February 12, 1972, issue of the paper, for example, featured a photo of Inez Williams, mother of Fleeta Drumgo, as part of the article “Another Mother for Struggle.”145 Drumgo was one of the Soledad Brothers—three black Soledad prison inmates, including George Jackson and John Clutchette, charged with murdering white prison guard John Vincent Mills.146 The cover of the issue features Williams in the foreground, sitting in a chair and looking stoically off into the distance. The space behind her is populated with the faces of black activists and revolutionaries, the visages of the Soledad Brothers and Angela Davis among them. The image is black and white, except for two elements in color: Williams’s sweater and the title of the article. Emblazoned in fuchsia, the title of the article floats over the image of Williams and the sea of black faces, all flanked by a series of vertical bars. In the accompanying article, the newspaper editors framed Williams as a militant crusader and revolutionary warrior. They noted that through her “tireless activity on behalf of the Soledad Brothers, she became involved in 82 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Cover of the Black Panther, February 12, 1972. This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the larger movement to free all political prisoners” and that these events “brought Sister Inez Williams to another, a higher level in understanding our oppression, and, thereby working to end it.” Williams, they wrote, struggled for “[Drumgo’s] and her survival and right to live in dignity as human beings, expanded. Her direct experiences with this ruthless power structure had not defeated her. The murderous and racist tactics of the State ha[d], in fact, served to contribute another fearless fighter for the basic human rights of all people.”147 Images featuring women like Williams reflected how Panther women provocatively recast the Black Revolutionary Woman during the party’s intercommunal phase. During a period in which the organization actively worked to demilitarize its image, the newspaper editors foregrounded black women’s everyday acts of militancy. The placement of the components of the cover image featuring Drumgo’s mother underscores this point. Williams dominates the frame, and, seated in a chair, she is the only figure staving off the encroaching vertical lines—arranged in the same array as prison bars—from obscuring the collection of faces of activists and revolutionaries. This framing simultaneously cast Williams as an emancipator, holding the carceral state at bay so that the revolutionaries behind her can escape, and as the last line of defense protecting black activists and community members from long arm of the state. Foregrounded against a sea of mostly male faces, Williams’s position as a protector and redeemer shifted the party’s visual markers of revolutionary symbolism. The cover image gives the reader the sense that Williams should be considered a revolutionary just like the radical black men behind her and that both Panther- and publicsanctioned revolutionaries literally and metaphorically supported her struggle and depended on her leadership. The editors also used the cover to rhetorically redraw the boundaries of the Panthers’ revolutionary identity. The choice to label Williams as a “mother” in struggle, and to visually link her to the term through the limited use of color, suggested that black motherhood and revolutionary womanhood were not mutually exclusive concepts. Throughout the 1970s, Panther women inserted a broader range of black women into the party’s revolutionary canon. They also proffered an ideal of the Black Revolutionary Woman as a community-based, antiimperialist mother or actor who carried on the Panthers’ revolutionary struggles. The accompanying article about Williams’s politics further legitimized her revolutionary potential. The party maintained that the prison 84 CHAPTER TWO This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms system was one of the most ardent manifestations of state-sponsored race, class, and gender oppression in America and across the globe. As intercommunalists, the Panthers’ goal was to identify oppressive mechanisms of the state and work to free all people from their grasp. Williams exemplified this revolutionary ethos. Far from being an uneducated, marginal, and apolitical black woman, the Panthers cast her as a political theorist with a “higher understanding” of the machinations of the state and viewed freeing her son as a critical part of building a larger prison abolition movement. In the process, Panther women expanded the definitions of who could be a radical or revolutionary actor and of what constituted a revolutionary act. They also framed the party as a space that welcomed women of all walks of life and one in which black mothers became Black Revolutionary Women through their ardent expressions of intercommunal politics. The Panthers also established their intercommunal identity through Revolutionary Art. In the early 1970s, Gayle Dickson became one of the primary artists for the paper. Dickson was originally a member of and an artist for the Seattle chapter, where she drew signs for the local free medical clinics under the pen name Asali.148 When the Central Committee consolidated the organization in 1972, Dickson relocated to Oakland. Like other women, she picked up where she left off, creating Revolutionary Art for the newspaper in Oakland. According to other rank-and-file activists, Dickson had a profound impact on the party’s artistic culture. Fellow artist Reginald “Malik” Edwards recalled that she was known for a “distinct application of a traditional form to capture ‘Panther ideology.’ ”149 Dickson’s artwork often featured black women from all stages and walks of life, frequently participating in and advocating for the Panthers’ survival programs. Her artwork foregrounded black women’s collective feelings of oppression and joy, their relationship with the party, and their efforts to eradicate racism. For the June 3, 1972, edition of the paper, Dickson created a mixed-media image of an older black woman carrying a bag filled with food from the Free Food Program. On the bag is an endorsement of Seale for mayor of Oakland. The woman, sporting a button promoting Elaine Brown for Oakland City councilwoman, wears a green beret with a pin stating, “Vote for Survival,” and carries a flyer announcing the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm for president. The woman’s eyes are closed, her head tilted back, and she is wearing a broad smile, rejoicing over the goods that she has received from the Panthers. Above the image, “Let It Shine, Let It Shine! Let the Power of the People Shine!” appears.150 The Black Revolutionary Woman, 1966–1975 85 This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mixed-media image by Gayle Dickson from the Black Panther, June 3, 1972. This content downloaded from 128.120.145.218 on Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:57:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mirroring the articles in the Intercommunal News Service, Dickson centered and then transformed traditional images of black womanhood by visually uniting them with symbols of the Panthers’ revolutionary ethos. Although the subject of the June 3 image is an older black woman—a figure not typically included in the black revolutionary imaginary—Dickson uses color, scale, and shading to cast her as part of the Panthers’ revolutionary community. The artist reserved her use of color for the older woman’s clothes, a hat and overcoat that cover most of her body. The representation plays on the Panthers’ symbolism, as the woman’s hat and coat are reminiscent of the Panthers’ signature black berets and leather jackets. Dickson’s use of green, rather than a sharper color like.