Political prisoner and activist Ericka Huggins is one of the longest serving women of the Black Panther Party, having spent 14 years organizing on behalf of the group. But not many people know the role Huggins played in running some of the party's key programs, like the Oakland Community School — a first of its kind in the country—where students learned about African American history and received three meals a day — as detailed in the work of Detroit Scholar, Mary Frances Phillips, her first biographer.
Phillips' book, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins," chronicles the life of Huggins, a queer woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party.
Not much has been written about Huggins, Phillips, an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, told Stateside, citing a lack of cohesive accounts in library archives.
“Pieces of her life lay scattered across a multitude of special collections of libraries across the U.S.,” Phillips shared. “So I had to develop a relationship with my subject to turn to her to get answers to questions that only she would know.”
Over the course of ten years, Phillips developed a close relationship with Huggins, using personal conversations to fill in the gaps left by archival records.
Their discussions covered a wide range of topics, including Huggins' upbringing in Washington, D.C., her relationships with her parents and siblings, and what led up to her decision to move to California with her husband, John Huggins, and join the Black Panther Party.
"When she first joined the party, she was asked to watch the party office," Phillips said. "She was selling Panther newspapers on the ground, interacting with people and asking, "How can the Black Panther Party serve you?'"
Huggins' early involvement in the party provided her with the blueprints for what community organizing could look like, said Phillips, but it also led to the persecution of her and her husband, who was then the leader of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party.
In 1969, her husband, Huggins, and her friend, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, were shot and killed on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Shortly after his death, Huggins moved to New Haven, Connecticut, with her daughter Mai, where she founded the local chapter of the Black Panther Party. That same year, she and Bobby Seale, founder of the Black Party for Self Defense, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to kidnap and murder party member 19-year-old Alex Rackley.
"This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well planned FBI COINTELPRO plot," Phillips writes in her book.
According to Phillips, the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a largely illegal surveillance program, extended its harassment to the families of Party members. They conducted phone calls, wiretapped, and even followed Huggins' family members when they came to visit her in prison.
“So the Panthers and their families are deeply impacted by this FBI onslaught that was happening,” Phillips explained. “It's a form of violence while you're just trying to serve your community and create these parallel institutions to help support and build and uplift your community, Black and brown communities, oppressed communities across the nation.”
Written in six chapters, "Black Panther Woman" outlines Huggins' life. From her childhood in Washington D.C, her decision to participate in the March on Washington in August of 1963 at 15 years old, without her parents' permission, to attending Lincoln University, a historically Black school in Philadelphia and running the school's Black Student Congress. It also depicts Huggins' journey toward self-discovery and acceptance of her own bisexual identity. But as Phillips notes in her book, it was Huggins' time in prison that proved pivotal in shaping the value she placed on spiritual wellness when it came to community organizing and political activism.
"To help her survive the horrors of incarceration from 1969 to 1971, and that looked like yoga, that looked like meditation, that looked like poetry; community building initiatives with other women," Phillips said.
Drawing on prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, and police documents, Phillips explores how Huggins navigated motherhood while behind bars.
"She was separated from her daughter and her partner's mother would bring her daughter to visit her once a week on a Saturday for an hour and she wanted to be full and well and healthy," Phillips said. "She didn't want to be broken and prone and sad and wilted, so turning to spirituality; these spiritual wellness practices was increasingly important to be present with her."
Even after being incarcerated, Huggins continued her work within the prison walls. Phillips notes that Huggins’ efforts exemplified what organizing among women in the Black Panther Party looked like and demonstrated how she used her time in custody as an extension of the activism she had been involved in before.
"This is why she talks about this as a moment that she is deeply appreciative for, and all of those spiritual wellness practices that she self taught herself as a form of survival and coping,” Phillips shared. “And to not internalize the violence that was surrounding her while she was incarcerated, what she was seeing, hearing and experiencing when she came out of prison, she brought those practices to the Black Panther Party because she already knew the power that it was having on her.”
