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<b><big><big><span class="style1">Ericka Huggins and the Company We Keep</span></big></big></b><br>
<span class="style2">by Susie Day<br>
<br>
4/23/13<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/day230413.html">http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/day230413.html</a><br>
</span>
<p>Like most of the white liberal-to-left elite, I am mesmerized by
radical 1960s and '70s activist groups such as SDS and the Weather
Underground. My auto-entrancement likely stems from a deep nostalgia
for the glory days when 100,000 protesters could <a
href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/100000-people-march-on-the-pentagon"
class="style5">march on the Pentagon</a> and nary a one could be
linked to Al Qaeda.</p>
<p>For years, I, with my cohorts, have watched film dramas,
documentaries, plays; attended conferences, art installations; worn
retro tie-dyes, half-price items from the GAP's "1969" clothing; pored
over novels, history books, and <em>memoirs</em>, <em>memoirs</em>, <em>memoirs</em>
-- all in a vague attempt to staunch some psychic wound possibly caused
by the question of violence itself.</p>
<p>Some of our '60s nostalgia may be a yearning for a time when we
could guilelessly discuss the use of "armed struggle" for social
change; and whether we should give up our little individual lives in
order to play a part for History's greater good. Today these questions
are stifled, in fiction and nonfiction, by template portrayals of '60s
revolutionaries as smug, angrily idealistic kids who "had everything
but threw it away." Few accounts stop to consider that these kids were
able to throw everything away because they were, in the first place,
white.</p>
<p>The latest remembrance-of-us-past is <em><a
href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381404/" class="style5">The Company
You Keep</a></em>, a film directed and starred in by Robert Redford.
For two hours, middle-aged yet mysteriously hip white people, passing
as well-adjusted conformists, delve into their incendiary past, while
fending off media and cops seeking justice for a '60s rad-lib bank
robbery (which never happened) that resulted in the death of a security
guard (who never existed). But, for all the film's hackneyed suspense
and narcissism disguised as concern with real moral dilemmas, what
Redford, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, and Julie Christie manage to
convey -- erroneously -- is that there was a large number of
celebrities in the Weather Underground who have emerged victorious from
<em>la lucha </em>with plastic surgery.</p>
<p>Missing egregiously from this film -- and from 97.9% of mainstream
films, books, and art about this era -- are Black people and other
people of color. What was the reality of the Black Panthers and the
Young Lords who, in fact, radicalized white organizations? What did
they want? Where did they go? Did they survive?</p>
<p>Recently, at Manhattan's Baruch College, there was yet another <a
href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/calendar/EventList.aspx?eventidn=3364&view=EventDetails&information_id=7726"
class="style5">panel</a> on '60s radicalism. But this one was
different: it focused on the experience of <em>Black</em> radicals.
>From the panelists, you got the idea that, unlike SDS and Weather kids,
most Black youth in the '60s didn't wake up one day in a college dorm
and realize their country was unjust: they began internalizing that
reality in the womb. The fact of the Jim Crow South and the North's
undeclared apartheid forced thousands of young Black people to see
themselves "in a war," which didn't allow many options to discuss armed
struggle versus nonviolence.</p>
<p>In this war, and now on this panel, was <a
href="http://www.rebeccawalker.com/blog/2011/11/13/the-fire-this-time-my-interview-with-ericka-huggins-for-the-root"
class="style5">Ericka Huggins</a>. Her life, once luridly
trash-compacted into forgettable tabloid headlines, is now largely
ignored by popular history. In 1969, at 18, Ericka became, with her
husband John, a leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther
Party. Three weeks after the birth of their daughter, John was <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/devon-mcreynolds/another-side-of-the-sixti_b_589322.html"
class="style5">gunned down</a> on the UCLA campus by a member of the
rival Black group, the US Organization. Although a Senate
investigation would later reveal this murder to have been instigated by
the FBI's <a
href="http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/people/people_hoover.html"
class="style5">Counter Intelligence Program</a>, the public at the
time easily dismissed it because, as Ericka noted, "Black men are
supposed to shoot Black men."</p>
<p>After bringing John's body to New Haven for burial, Ericka, with
Bobby Seale, was charged (I can't say "framed" here because I'm trying
to be objective) with <a
href="http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/black-panthers-trial-courtroom-sketches-robert-templeton"
class="style5">the murder of another Panther member</a>. Her daughter
was taken from her and Ericka spent two years in prison, often in
solitary confinement, until a massive legal campaign forced prosecutors
to drop the charges.</p>
<p>Today, Ericka Huggins says, people ask her, "After all your
suffering, why, didn't you leave the Party, leave radicalism?"</p>
<p>Because, she answers, she couldn't give up this fight for the
fundamental humanity of people of color, for the vast -- and vastly
ignored -- reality that every child of any color is welcome and needed
on this planet.</p>
<p>Ericka was able to survive because in prison she taught herself to
meditate. "Now," she says, "if I don't meditate on any given day, it's
like I've left home without my clothes." After prison, Ericka became a
grade-school teacher; she taught yoga and mediation in prisons; she
developed a volunteer program for women and children with HIV in San
Francisco's Tenderloin district.</p>
<p>Now in her early sixties, she's a tall, silver-haired grandmother
who works in Restorative Justice, a practice in which the people who've
hurt others -- often criminally -- can sit down with those they've
harmed and try to find some mutual resolution. It was through
Restorative Justice that the man who killed John Huggins could, years
later, ask Ericka for forgiveness. And it was through some act of
grace, which I have yet to see in any pop version of the '60s, that
Ericka Huggins was able to forgive him.</p>
<p>Three other radical activists appeared on this panel: Dhoruba Bin
Wahad, Akinyele Umoja, and Dequi Kioni Sadiki. Each told a different
life tale, equally stunning. Stories like these -- unlike pre-cooked
'60s action thrillers -- will not be coming anytime soon to a theater
near you.</p>
<p>Maybe that's OK. Unless Ericka Huggins has a yen to be played by
Kerry Washington, Robert Redford should probably not know about stories
like this. But we should.</p>
<p>We must.</p>
<hr>
<span class="style3">Susie Day is a writer.</span>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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