[News] On the 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers, four of its women tell their stories

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://nycitylens.com/2016/02/panther-women-look-back/*


  Panther Women Look Back - NY City Lens

By Ang Li <http://nycitylens.com/author/ang/> on February 25, 2016

On the 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers, four of its women tell 
their stories

This Black History Month marks the 50^th Anniversary of the founding of 
the Black Panther Party. The controversial organization was a radical 
political group in the 1960s and 1970s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover 
accused group members as terrorists and carried out a 
counterintelligence program, commonly known as COINTELPRO, to destroy 
the Party.

The men in the Black Panthers often got most of the attention, and 
sometimes still do, but women, too, played a major role. To flesh out 
that story, Ang Li of NY City Lens located and interviewed four Black 
Panther women. Here are their stories— about what they did five decades 
ago and what they are doing now:

*******************************************

When Barbara Easley Cox sat in her living room—in a duplex on Diamond 
St. in Philadelphia—watching the Super Bowl halftime show, she didn’t 
realize that Beyoncé and her backup dancers were paying a tribute to her 
former identity as a Black Panther. Friends told her the next day.

Even after 45 years, she is still a Panther at heart. In her living 
room, Cox has lettered wall decorations that read “Peace,” a common 
greeting among Panthers, even today. A calendar on her bathroom door 
comes with prints of iconic Panther figures. So do buttons lying on the 
sink countertop.

Cox’s involvement with the Party started with a romantic relationship. 
When she was a student at San Francisco College, majoring in social 
work, she met her future husband, Donald Cox, at a Black Panther event 
on campus. He was already the field marshal of the Party’s Army. They 
started dating, and she started her journey with the Party.

Her first stop was a conference in Los Angeles, and it immediately 
expanded her horizons. “Sometimes you think Oakland or San Francisco is 
the whole world,” she said. “But if you get a chance to travel, you’ll 
see it’s a big world.” Ever since then, she has traveled, she said, and 
has left footprints as far away as North Korea, Algeria, and Germany.

Hailing from a small community—just four houses—Cox grew up surrounded 
by Jewish, Italian, and Chinese neighbors, and their cultures. The 
experience shaped her to be open-minded, she said, but also led to a 
late exposure to her own culture. She didn’t know much about the Civil 
Rights movement, she said, until she watched black people getting shot 
and killed on TV when she was 13. The movement was boiling up in 1964, 
and she had a chance to study history at a night school, where the 
discussion in class, she said, was eye-opening.

In 1967, she joined the Black Panther Party and started working at its 
San Francisco office after school. There she sold newspapers, worked at 
the Free Breakfast for Children Program, and gave political educational 
classes to individuals. “I am not the kind of person who needs a lot of 
direction, I just did whatever needed to be done.”

Two years later, the Party sent Cox away from her late husband—to 
Philadelphia, her hometown, to help run a new office. She was in charge 
of the local programs, raising funds, and building community connections 
for the chapter. “I was on my own and I had to grow,” she continues, “It 
was like leaving your parents’ house—you have to make decisions that’s 
good for you and people around you, and you became your own person.” 
However, she recalled, her husband was not thrilled about this move, and 
she thinks that was why he ordered her back to California.

During her pregnancy, in 1970, her husband was charged in connection 
with a murder case in Baltimore, and with a warrant out for his arrest 
he fled to Algeria. After that, she remembered, she was ordered around 
more. One night, she said, people from the Party took her to Oakland for 
a standard night watch shift and put her in the office, pregnant, with a 
gun in case of police raids. “What was I going to do as a pregnant 
woman, please?” she said. She pulled through the night with another 
woman and her baby.

As Cox’s due date was approaching, Kathleen Cleaver, who is famous for 
her leadership role in the Panther Party, was invited to have her baby 
delivered in Pyongyang, North Korea. Cox, who was also pregnant at the 
time, had to accompany Cleaver to deliver her child overseas. During her 
stay, she took lessons and watched films about the Korean War, South 
Korea, and the North Korea’s leader. The films “blew her mind,” as she 
recalled. “It was a really good time, I was learning a world, a whole 
world.”

After she left North Korea, Cox moved to Germany on her own, where she 
put out a newspaper and worked with soldiers from the Vietnam War. Being 
married to the Panther’s field marshal “opened up doors and allowed me a 
lot of privileges,” she said, including moving around to different 
countries. “I thought it was normal and everybody did it,” she said. “It 
wasn’t until years later, I realized most Panthers never left their cities.”

Cox said being a female didn’t affect her work as a Panther. After 
giving birth to her son, she continued working; “I just threw him on my 
back and took him to every place I went.” However, Cox said several 
incidents made her realize that she was a mother besides a Panther woman.

In Germany, which she described as a “bowl of trouble” because of the 
political unrest, her son was two. One day, she took him out to play in 
the snow, she said, and while she was on her knees a strange man came 
over and looked down at her. “He said, ‘that’s a beautiful son you have 
there, Barbara,’ and it scared the hell out of me, I sent my son the 
next week back to America.” She ended up not seeing her son for a year, 
“As a woman and a mother, that hurt me.”

Still, her favorite experiences were working in Philadelphia and also in 
Germany, where she was on her own and known as “Barbara, Barbara Cox, 
instead of the wife of Donald Cox.”

Now, fifty years later, she flips through her Panther journal and 
albums. After the 50^th year anniversary of the party is over, she says, 
“I’m going to put my Panther collection away, because it is over, it’s 
your time,” she said, referring to the younger generation.

But Cox is not fading out of the historical frame. She has some plans: 
finding political organizations and participating in the next 
presidential election. “I need to get rid of that damn Donald Trump and 
fight his ass,” she said.

********************************************

When she became a Black Panther at the age of 17 in Corona, Queens, 
Claudia Williams said, her job was more than selling papers. She raised 
funds for breakfast programs, cooked for people in the field, and even 
filled in sandbags—to be used to protect people from gunfire.

“Sisters did everything that brothers did,” she said, explaining that 
people addressed each other as brothers and sisters inside the Black 
Panther Party. When the females went out to the streets to sell papers, 
the males had to watch and feed the children. “When women went inside, 
brothers came out in the early evenings to get donations from grocery 
stores for breakfast programs.”

Williams thinks it was hard for her as a female, “It was non-ending 
grind,” she said. “None of us got to eat as we were supposed to; none of 
us got the sleep we needed,” At the age of 65, she said, “Now we are 
starting to feel the effect.” Today, Williams lives in her old 
neighborhood in Queens, volunteering to read to children.

When she was pregnant, she recalled selling papers on the streets, 
almost till her due date. Throughout the summer months, she had male 
Panthers get her cups of crushed ice to keep herself hydrated. “I loved 
to talk to people and getting the word out,” she says. “It was like a 
shining glory.”

During her four and half years in the Party, she said she experienced 
some male chauvinism from her partner. They argued about the differences 
in men and women’s roles in the Party. She recalled a training session 
she had with her partner, in which they had to break down and load a 
semiautomatic in three minutes. Her partner excelled at the practice and 
expected her to do the same. She wasn’t as good at it, “but instead of 
going to a corner and crying after being yelled at, I kept working on 
it,” Williams said. She said the women in the Party tried to rule the 
male chauvinism out by speaking up, “We were able to speak on it, and we 
never felt less” than males.

Williams was dispatched to operate in the party’s Harlem office from 
Corona after a group called the Panther 21 was arrested. Women were the 
ones who took over, she said, they kept the offices and programs running 
and protected the people who came into their offices for clothes, food, 
or political education classes.

As a teenager, the hardest part for Williams, she says, was thinking 
about her possible demise. “I did not think I would live to 25 years old 
because the police were killing us all over,” she says, adding, “We have 
17 panthers behind the walls for 40 plus years.”

***********************************

While studying accounting at New York City Community College in Brooklyn 
(now the New York City College of Technology), J. Yasmeen Sutton became 
involved with the Black Students Union. She grew up in Corona, Queens, 
and was not conscious of being black, she says, until she read the book, 
/Notes of Native Son/ by James Baldwin. Then she was angry at herself, 
for not knowing much about black history.

Inspired by the book, she started immersing herself in black 
biographies. “The more I read, the angrier I got,” Sutton said. Seeing 
people being beaten on TV fueled her anger, and made her want to do 
something to change the lives of American blacks.

She joined the Black Panther Party in 1969 and managed its finances for 
a year before she left the Party. She counted and recorded the money—the 
dues, the donations, and she was in charge of running the bank account. 
“There was no clearly defined roles,” Sutton said. “It was not about man 
or woman, it was about doing the work.”

Now, at 65, Sutton works as a senior accountant at a rehabilitation 
center for people of color. She drives a BMW and she is about to get 
married again. She is the treasurer of the National Alumni Association 
of the Black Panther Party and is active in trying to free Panthers who 
are still incarcerated in prisons.

/*****************************/

Paula Peebles grew up in a strict Catholic household in Philadelphia and 
went to a local Catholic high school. She recalls struggling to get an 
education on black history in her textbooks in the Catholic archdiocese 
school system.

It was an all-girl high school, where the majority was white, she says, 
and it was there she says she first experienced racism. She was 
criticized for her hoop earrings, which according to Peebles, were 
common for an African-American to wear at that time. Whites did not sit 
with blacks at the school, she says. By senior year, she decided she had 
had enough, so she organized a student walkout at her school in order to 
protest against racism.

Joining the Black Panther Party at 15, she became a communication 
secretary and stayed on for five years. Aside from working on the Black 
Panther Party Weekly, she assisted volunteer doctors, who provided free 
medical services, especially sickle cell testing, to the community.

Due to the heavy workload she bore as a Panther, she had to send her 
child to a communal child development center, Peebles says, where other 
Panthers took care of the children. “Being a mother in the Party was 
difficult, I had to let her go, leaving her in a commune, and see her 
once a week or every two weeks.”

Peebles currently lives in Philadelphia and works as a community 
activist, focusing on economic and social justice issues. She is a 
mother of three daughters.

She said people back then thought that being in the Party, carrying 
guns, and selling papers on the streets, were not proper activities for 
a woman, not to mention a black woman. She remembers selling Panther 
papers on the corner while other people were selling /Muhammad Speaks/, 
the official journal of Nation of Islam. “I was selling more than they 
did, so they were totally incensed,” she said, laughing. “The society 
said one thing for all the roles of women, and we were breaking off all 
the chains.”

However, Peebles didn’t identify with the feminism movement back in 
1960s. As she put it, black women’s struggles were different: “The white 
girls were freeing themselves from washing machines, or from their 
husbands, families. It was not our struggle because we were trying to 
get a house, trying to get our own washing machines.”

(Photos provided by /It’s About Time Archive,/ and from photographer 
Suzun Lucia Lamaina from her contemporary portraits of Black Panthers)

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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