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<h1 id="reader-title">Panther Women Look Back - NY City Lens</h1>
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<p class="single_postmeta"> <span>By <a
href="http://nycitylens.com/author/ang/">Ang Li</a>
on February 25, 2016</span> <span> </span> </p>
<p class="subtitle2">On the 50th anniversary of the
Black Panthers, four of its women tell their stories
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<p>This Black History Month marks the 50<sup>th</sup>
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.</p>
<p>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:<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Now, fifty years later, she flips
through her Panther journal and
albums. After the 50<sup>th</sup> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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, <em>Notes
of Native Son</em> by James Baldwin.
Then she was angry at herself, for not
knowing much about black history.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Muhammad
Speaks</em>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>(Photos provided by <span class="s1"><em>It’s
About Time Archive,</em> and from
photographer </span><span class="s1">Suzun
Lucia Lamaina from her contemporary
portraits of Black Panthers)</span></p>
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