How Women Were at the Helm of the Black Panther Party - Fighting Two Wars
As Clayborne Carson, an African American professor of history at Stanford University said in the 2015 "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution" documentary, "one of the ironies in the Black Panther movement is the image of a Black male in a ripper jacket and a gun, but the reality is that a majority of the rank and file by the end of 1960s were women."
Although women were assuming these far-reaching positions, at the core of it, unlike men, women in the Black liberation movement were fighting two battles. One that entailed a common shared goal of achieving political and economic equality of African-Americans and armed self-defense against police and state violence. Another was constantly challenging the patriarchal status quo that women navigated both within and outside of the organization.
But even though men in the group were portrayed as the vanguard, women in the party were at the helm of most activities. By the early 1970s, women formed nearly two-thirds of the Black Panther Party. They not only served important leadership roles alongside the men, such as state and national secretaries, chair positions and editors, but they were also serving essential roles, such as feeding children, ensuring that they remained in schools and strategizing to protect the neighborhood.
"Women have been organizers of protest movements for a very long time, we could trace that back to the period of the antebellum era. We have always been there front and center, we are at the forefront of these movements, so we are these movements," Phillips concluded.
By Black Angenda Report