Women, Power, and Revolution (1998)
by Kathleen
Neal Cleaver
About
two weeks before I joined SNCC, "Black Power" replaced
"Freedom Now" as the battle cry. We, young women and young
men who flocked to the front lines of the war against segregation,
were contesting the remaining legacy of racial slavery. What we
sought to eliminate were the legal, social, psychological, economic,
and political limitations still being imposed on our human rights,
and on our rights as citizens. That was the context in which we
fought to remove limitations imposed by gender, clearly aware that it
could not be fought as a stand-alone issue.
During
that era, we hadn't developed much language to talk, about the
elimination of gender discrimination. Racism and poverty, imposed by
bloody terrorists backed by state power, seemed so overwhelming then,
and the ghastly backdrop of the war in Vietnam kept us alert as to
what was at stake. It was not that gender discrimination wasn't
apparent. It was evident in the most intimate matters—separate
bathrooms marked "colored women" or "white ladies";
it was obvious in the facts that so many schools did not allow women
to attend, and that so many jobs were not available if you were a
woman. But from the early to mid-1960s, the first order of business
was not how to advance our cause as women but how to empower the
community of which we were a part, and how to protect our lives in
the process.
Being
in the Movement gave me and everyone who joined it a tremendous
education. That experience taught us how to understand the world
around us, how to think through the issues of what we could do on our
own to advance our peoples cause, how to organize our own people to
change the world around us, and how to stand up to terrorism.
Everything I learned in SNCC I took with me into the fledgling Black
Panther Party. I started working there in November 1967, three or
four weeks after Huey Newton was jailed on charges of killing an
Oakland policeman in a predawn shoot-out. I organized demonstrations.
I wrote leaflets. I held press conferences. I attended court
hearings. I designed posters. I appeared on television programs, I
spoke at rallies. I even ran for political office in order to
organize the community around the program of the Black Panther Party
and mobilize support to free Huey Newton.
At
times, during the question-and-answer session following a speech I'd
given, someone would ask, "What is the woman's role in the Black
Panther Party?" I never liked that question. I'd give a short
answer: "It's the same as men." We are revolutionaries, I'd
explain. Back then, I didn't understand why they wanted to think of
what men were doing and what women were doing as separate. It's taken
me years, literally about twenty-five years, to understand that what
I really didn't like was the underlying assumption motivating the
question. The assumption held that being part of a revolutionary
movement was in conflict with what the questioner had been socialized
to believe was appropriate conduct for a woman. That convoluted
concept never entered my head, although I am certain it was far more
widely accepted than I ever realized.
Nowadays,
the questions are more sophisticated: "What were the gender
issues in the Black Panther Party?" "Wasn't the Black
Panther Party a. istion of sexism? Etc., etc., etc. But nobody seems
to pose the question that I had: Where can I go to get involved in
the revolutionary struggle? It seems to me that part of the genesis
of the gender question, and this is only an opinion, lies in the way
it deflects attention from confronting the revolutionary critique our
organization made of the larger society, and turns it inward to look
at what type of dynamics and social conflicts characterized the
organization. To me, this discussion holds far less appeal than that
which engages the means we devised to struggle against the oppressive
dynamics and social conflicts the larger society imposed on us. Not
many answers to the "gender questions" take into
consideration what I've experienced. What I've read or heard as
answers generally seem to respond to a particular model of academic
inquiry that leaves out what I believe is central: How do you empower
an oppressed and impoverished people who are struggling against
racism, militarism, terrorism, and sexism too? I mean, how do you do
that? That's the real question.
My
generation became conscious during a period of profound world
turmoil, when the Vietnam War and countless insurgencies in Africa,
Asia, and in Latin America challenged the control of the resources of
the world by the capitalist powers. They were facing a major assault.
Those of us who were drawn to the early Black Panther Party were just
one more insurgent band of young men and women who refused to
tolerate the systematic violence and abuse being meted out to poor
blacks, to middle-class blacks, and to any old ordinary blacks. When
we looked at our situation, when we saw violence, bad housing,
unemployment, rotten education, unfair treatment in the courts, as
well as direct attacks from the police, our response was to defend
ourselves. We became part of that assault against the capitalist
powers.
In
a world of racist polarization, we sought solidarity. We called for
Black power for Black people, Red power for Red people, Brown power
for Brown people, Yellow power for Yellow people, and, as Eldridge
Cleaver used to say, White power for White people, because all they'd
known was "Pig power." We organized the Rainbow Coalition,
pulled together our allies, including not only the Puerto Rican Young
Lords, the youth gang called Black P. Stone Rangers, the Chicano
Brown Berets, and the Asian I Wor Keun (Red Guards), but also the
predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party and the Appalachian Young
Patriots Party. We posed not only a theoretical but a practical
challenge to the way our world was organized. And we were men and
women working together.
The
women who filled the ranks of our organization did not have
specifically designated sex roles. Some women worked with the
newspaper, like Shelley Bursey, who became a grand jury resister when
she was jailed because she refused to respond to one of the
investigations into the Black Panther Party newspaper. Some of us,
like Ericka Huggins, saw their husbands murdered, then were arrested
themselves. In Ericka's case, she was jailed along with Bobby Seale
and most of the New Haven chapter on charges of conspiracy to commit
murder. She was later acquitted, but imagine what happens to an
organization when fourteen people at once get arrested on capital
charges. That doesn't leave much time to organize, or to have a
family life. Maybe that was the kind of pressure that they hoped
would force us to give up.
I
created the position of Communications Secretary, based on what I had
seen Julian Bond do in SNCC. I sent out press releases, I got
photographers and journalists to publish about us, I wrote articles
for our newspaper. I ran for political office on the Peace and
Freedom Party ticket, against the incumbent Democratic state
representative—who, by the way, was Willie Brown (now mayor of
San Francisco). We ran a campaign poster in the Black Panther
newspaper, which was a drawing of Willie Brown with his mouth
sewed up, his body tied up in rope. The caption read: Willie Brown's
position on the Vietnam War, political prisoners, and racism, you get
the idea. We were imaginative in our approach to political
organizing. Matilaba [J. Tarika Lewis], one of the earliest women
members of the Black Panther Party, published drawings in the
newspaper along with Emory Douglas. Connie Matthews, a young Jamaican
who was working for the United Nations in Copenhagen, met Bobby Seale
when he came over there on a tour, joined the Black Panther Party,
and became our International Coordinator. Assata Shakur, who joined
the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, later became
convicted of murdering a state trooper after a shoot-out on the New
Jersey Turnpike in which she was wounded and another Panther, Zayd
Shakur, was killed. Fearing that she would be killed, she escaped
from prison, lived underground for a while, and eventually received
asylum in Cuba.
In
fact, according to a survey Bobby Seale did in 1969, two-thirds of
the members of the Black Panther Party were women. I am sure you are
wondering, why isn't this the image that you have of the Black
Panther Party? Well, ask yourself, where did the image of the Black
Panthers that you have in your head come from? Did you read those
articles planted by the FBI in the newspaper? Did you listen to the
newscasters who announced what they decided was significant, usually,
how many Panthers got arrested or killed? How many photographs of
women Panthers have you seen? Think about this: how many newspaper
photographers were women? How many newspaper editors were women? How
many newscasters were women? How many television producers were
women? How many magazine, book, newspaper publishers? Who was making
the decisions about what information gets circulated, and when that
decision gets made, who do you think they decide to present? Is it
possible, and this is just a question, is it possible that the
reality of what was actually going on day to day in the Black Panther
Party was far less newsworthy, and provided no justification for the
campaign of destruction that the intelligence agencies and the police
were waging against us? Could it be that the images and stories of
the Black Panthers that you've seen and heard were geared to
something other than conveying what was actually going on?
What
I think is distinctive about gender relations within the Black
Panther Party is not how those gender relations duplicated what was
going on in the world around us. In fact, that world was extremely
misogynist and authoritarian. That's part of what inspired us to
fight against it. When women suffered hostility, abuse, neglect, and
assault—this was not something arising from the policies or
structure of the Black Panther Party, something absent from the
world—that's what was going on in the world. The difference
that being in the Black Panther Party made was that it put a woman in
a position when such treatment occurred to contest it. I'll always
remember a particular mini-trial that took place at one of our
meetings. A member of the Party was accused of raping a young sister,
who was visiting from the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther
Party, and he got voted out of the Party on the spot. Right there in
the meeting. In 1970 the Black Panther Party took a formal position
on the liberation of women. Did the U.S. Congress make any statement
on the liberation of women? Did the Congress enable the Equal Rights
Amendment to become part of the Constitution? Did the Oakland police
issue a position against gender discrimination? It is in this context
that gender relations—a term that we didn't have back then—in
the Black Panther Party should be examined.
I
think it is important to place the women who fought oppression as
Black Panthers within the longer tradition of freedom fighters like
Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, who took on an
entirely oppressive world and insisted that their race, their gender,
and their humanity be respected all at the same time. Not singled
out, each one separate, but all at the same time. You cannot
segregate out one aspect of our reality and expect to get a clear
picture of what this struggle is about. In some cases, those who
raise issues about gender are responding to what they think is the
one-sided portrayal of the Black Panther Party as some all-male,
macho revolutionary group. But look at where the picture is coming
from before concluding that the appropriate response is to
investigate gender dynamics within the Black Panther Party. I am not
criticizing the project, but I am criticizing the angle.
The
way Black women have sustained our community is phenomenal.
Historically, we did not live within the isolation of a patriarchal
world, we were thrust into that brutal equality slavery imposed. Our
foremothers knew we would have to face the world on our own, and they
tried to prepare us for that. What I think need to be examined and
explained more fully are the powerful contributions women have made
to our resistance against slavery, to our resistance against
segregation, to our resistance against racism. Placing the
participation of women in the Black Panther Party within that context
illuminates a long tradition of fighting women.
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