February is half over. Have you genuflected enough?
Have you acknowledged, with a quiver in your voice, the advantages bequeathed to you by your pale-faced father and mother?
If not, a young blonde woman named Olivia did so on your behalf this week in the Council Chamber at the Templeton Campus Center at Lewis & Clark College.
Olivia, along with about 60 other people, came to hear Black History Month keynote speaker Ericka Huggins, billed as a “former Black Panther leader and political prisoner.”
The reference to Black Panther “leader” caught my attention, because this was the misogynistic organization whose male leaders – familiar names like Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver – believed that the place for women in the Black Panther Party was on their backs.
Huggins didn’t touch that bit of history. Instead she noted, without elaboration, that “so many male members of the group were killed it ended up being run by the women.”
Her late husband, John Huggins, was a leader in the party. She stated simply, as if it were fact, that he had been “assassinated” by the U.S. government.
The truth is, while the FBI created discord between the Black Panthers and a rival black group called Us (led by Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga), neither the FBI nor the CIA shot Huggins. They didn’t have to. In the 1960s, just like now, young black males were inclined to shoot one another.
John Huggins and another Black Panther were killed at UCLA during a meeting with the rival group over control of the Black Studies department. Huggins was one of many who arrived at the campus meeting heavily armed.
But that was back in 1969. This week there was no whiff of defiance about Ericka Huggins. She’s tall, slender and elegant and so tranquil that when she spoke, you might have thought you were in a yoga class had the lights been dimmed.
Huggins, in fact, made a reference to doing yoga back when she was in jail and awaiting trial. She skirted the reason why she was on trial, dismissing it under the label of “political prisoner.” Here’s what she didn’t tell Olivia and the others in the audience, many of them about the same age Huggins was when she landed in jail:
Black Panthers suspected that one of their members – Alex Rackley – was a police informant. They held Rackley captive in a house where he was tied up, beaten and scalded with boiling water. Ericka Huggins was accused of boiling the water. Her jury could not reach a verdict, and she was released. The state declined to retry her. (Rackley’s body was later found in a marsh, a bullet in his head.)
Even if Huggins had boiled the water, her release was not a miscarriage of justice. A woman in her situation may not have had much choice. (It’s not like she could have told the men in the Black Panther Party to boil their own water.)
Huggins, now a grandmother with close-cropped white hair, didn’t talk about any of that.
“All struggles of all peoples are facets of the same struggle,” she said at Lewis & Clark.
She told a story about one of the police officers, a white man, who transported her to court each day, placing her in the patrol car, seat-belting her in. One day she commented on how beautiful the sun was.
“This working class white guy smiled at the sun … looked at the sun. ‘Yes it is beautiful,’ he said.”
Later that day, while being taken back to her cell, she thought to say something more to him.
“You know, your smile is quite beautiful,” she recalled telling him. “He turned and looked at me. ‘You think so?’ … The next day, my new friend turned to me – ‘I told my wife about what you said about my smile. … She said, you’re right. You need to smile more often.’”
Huggins added, “The Black Panther part of me didn’t talk to that man that day. … It certainly wasn’t the black part of me that talked to that man … we’re not parts.”
Sounds nice, but the reality is we have been reduced to parts like never before – to ethnic and racial breakdowns, practically to the fraction. Which seemed to be what Olivia and a couple of other young women were wrestling with.
“I wanted to talk about boundaries … things that we imagine and things that we create that become real and tangible,” Olivia told Huggins. The young woman described walking into certain places and feeling awkward “about my whiteness … the privileges that I carry.”
Huggins reassured her with a smile: “Privilege is a great thing if you do something with it.”
Another young woman, a freshman with pale beige skin (what is called “white,”), and brunette hair, spoke so softly she could barely be heard. Her story was that she is multi-racial, but people don’t acknowledge it.
She wiped tears from her face as a young woman sitting next to her (with unmistakable bi-racial features) comforted her.
“Your friend is taking good care of you,” Huggins said. She approached the tearful young woman and reached out her hand.
Later, Huggins suggested that this young woman – as well as another who had pale beige skin and light brown dreadlocks – could express their heritage by choosing occupations where they could help those who are multi-cultural or bi-racial.
What would Eldridge Cleaver, one of the most famous Black Panthers, have made of these white girls?
In his book, “Soul on Ice” Cleaver admitted practicing rape on black ghetto girls, working up to white prey.
“Rape was an insurrectionary act. … I felt I was getting revenge,” he wrote from Folsom Prison, where he served time for rape.
Looking at these white girls, would Cleaver have gloated? Would he recall his own words, “What has suddenly happened is that the white race has lost its heroes.”
By the time he died in 1998, Cleaver had undergone various transformations, which included joining the Mormon church and becoming a Republican.
Had he listened to these young white women embarrassed by their privilege or their perceived race, he might have thought of the gifts he had squandered. Cleaver had gone from once authoring a New York Times Top Ten book to organizing a shootout with Oakland police and becoming a crackhead.
Privileges can come and go, he could have told those young women. No matter what your race or ethnicity.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
For more on the murder of John Huggins: Children of the Revolutionary
Eldridge Cleaver!!!!!! That fool had strange ideas about girls and sex. My mother had his book. I liked Elaine Brown’s book was better … any good the Panthers did was done by the women.
Cleaver’s the kidn of man who would of hated Oprah cause she was black, female, successful.
“Soul on Ice” is a brilliant piece of writing. Cleaver didn’t spare anyone — he even saw through himself and his fellow inmates.
For all the negative that’s written about American prisons, he knew how to do time. He developed self-discipline and created his own “crash program” (his words) to make good use of his time in solitary. He rehabilitated himself. Unfortunately, after he got out of prison he fell into trouble again.
He continued writing, but he never wrote anything comparable to “Soul on Ice.”
— Pamela
If you go over to L & C’s news site, The Pioneer Log http://www.piolog.com/newsarch/, you’ll find a favorable story about Huggins.
“As the young Huggins continued to promote equality and change through activism, tragedy struck her in 1969 when her husband John and close friend Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were both assassinated by the CIA.”
She’s probably been giving the same speech to gullible college students for years. Hope L&C didn’t pay her much.