[[link removed]]

RADICAL CHANGE ISN’T FREE  
[[link removed]]


 

Ed Pilkington
March 25, 2025
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The Black Panthers shook America awake before the party was
eviscerated by the US government. Their children paid a steep price,
but also emerged with unassailable pride and burning lessons for
today. _

The Black Community Survival Conference in 1972 in Oakland ,
photograph: Stephen Shames/Polaris.

 

Fred Hampton Jr was days away from taking his first breath when his
father was assassinated. Still in his mother’s womb, he would have
sensed the shots fired by police into his parents’ bedroom at the
back of 2337 Monroe Street, Chicago.

He would have absorbed the muffled screams, felt the adrenaline
rushing through his mother’s veins, been jolted by her violent
arrest. Could he also have somehow sensed the moment of his father’s
death?

His dad was “Chairman” Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois
chapter and deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, who
was sleeping beside his pregnant fiancee when 14 Chicago police
officers burst into the apartment. They shot him in bed, striking him
twice in the head. Hampton, who was 21, was killed on the spot.

The attack – up to 99 incoming gunshots
[[link removed]] and
only one fired by the Panthers from inside – also claimed the life
of Panther Mark Clark in what later emerged was a meticulously
planned, FBI-backed operation.

Twenty-five days later, on 29 December 1969, Akua Njeri (then Deborah
Johnson), gave birth to a baby boy. From that moment on, the child’s
life was to be defined by the father whom he never met.

Now 55, Fred Hampton Jr self-identifies as “chairman” in his own
right. Not of the Black Panther Party, but of the Panther cubs – the
children of the movement. As he put it: “I am a Black Panther cub by
birth, as well as by battle.”

The Guardian has talked to nine Panther cubs across the US over the
past two years. All have shared intimate stories about their
exceptional childhoods, born to parents who challenged America’s
white establishment in a bid for what they saw as Black
self-determination. They talked about being witness to a seminal
period of Black history, from the late 1960s onwards. And they also
articulated a painful truth: that radical change does not come for
free. It commands a price that so often is paid by the children of the
revolution.

Hampton Jr has a particularly poignant way of encapsulating the
emotional roller-coaster of his 55 years on Earth. “This is a
blessing and a burden,” he said. “There is heat that comes with
this. I don’t regret it. I’m not crying the blues.”

Over many hours of interviews in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago,
Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia, the cubs traced the arc of
their lives – a journey that can be sketched out in six distinct
stages. It begins with Black pride.

PRIDE

[Black and white portrait shows a middle-aged black man with white cap
standing beside a car.]

Chairman Fred Hampton Jr outside his father’s childhood home in
Maywood, Illinois. Photograph: Christian K Lee/The Guardian

‘Don’t you ever be ashamed of what you are / It’s ya Panther
power that makes you a star’
Tupac Shakur, rapper and son of New York Panther Afeni Shakur

For a child of the revolution like Ericka Abram, 55, a Panther
education began before the age of two.

From infancy, she lived in dormitories for Panther kids set up in big
creaky old houses in Oakland and Berkeley. There were three separate
dorms, divided by age: toddlers to six years, six to 10, and a teenage
dormitory up to 16. Girls slept in bunk beds in one room, boys in
another. Apart from sleeping arrangements, life was entirely communal
– even to the point of sharing clothes.

Both Ericka’s parents were on the party’s central committee –
her mother, Elaine Brown, went on to become the only woman to lead the
party; her father, Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, was minister of
education in charge of weapons training and political teaching.

Abram calls her parents 24-hour Panthers. “The revolution never
stopped,” she said. “I saw my mother maybe on weekends.”

The Black Panther Party had been founded in October 1966 by two
Oakland, California students, Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. It
emerged at a volatile moment for America: anti-Vietnam war protests
were erupting, feminist and gay liberation movements were
proliferating, and Black communities were reeling from an epidemic of
police killings of young African American men.

As its original name indicated, the Black Panther Party for Self
Defense began as a response to police brutality. The Panthers’ first
venture was CopWatch – patrols of party members who recorded and
disrupted violent police actions on the streets. They went fully
armed, in a challenge both to law enforcement and to the non-violent
ethos of the civil rights movement.

From those early roots, more than 40 chapters of the Black Panther
Party sprung up across the US, with international outposts in the UK,
north Africa, Australia and India. The scattered branches were united
by the Black Panther newspaper, which at its peak sold 140,000 copies
a week, and by a common commitment to community “survival
programs”. They provided free school breakfasts, medical treatment
for uninsured patients, legal services for those in trouble, and
prison transport for families visiting incarcerated loved ones.

The party was eventually to fall apart in 1982, ground down by the
relentless hounding of the FBI and J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro
program – the covert surveillance used to infiltrate, disrupt and
destroy a range of Black power groups and other radical movements
deemed subversive. But by then, its young leaders had inspired a new
conversation around politics and community.

And they had conceived something else: children.

[Panther cub Sala Cyril in her home holding a photograph of herself
and her sister sitting on the lap of their mother Janet Cyril.]

Panther cub Sala Cyril holding a photograph of herself and her sister
sitting on the lap of their mother, Janet Cyril. Photograph: Ashley
Peña/The Guardian

As the number of Panther cubs ticked up, thoughts turned to how to
care for them – both for the sake of the children themselves, and to
free up their parents for the struggle. A radical Black approach to
education became a pillar of the Black Panthers’ world view.

Every morning, Abram and her peers would be bussed in a beat-up
Volkswagen van to their school. Opened in 1973, the Oakland community
school supported 150 kids at its height.

It was led by Ericka Huggins, a Panther leader whose fellow Panther
husband, John Huggins, was assassinated on the campus of UCLA in 1969
in a feud with a rival Black organization. Ericka Huggins herself was
arrested on suspicion of murdering an informant, and imprisoned for
two years in Connecticut, where she had founded a Panther chapter. She
was acquitted at trial and released in 1971.

On her return to the west coast, she turned her energy to creating a
new school. Her aim was to forge a model of Black education that would
put to shame the often abysmal learning Black kids received in poorly
resourced and low-performing public schools.

The school was constituted as a private institution, with costs
covered from party fundraising and the donations of rich supporters
and open to all regardless of income. Its private nature freed it from
constraints on how it selected and taught its pupils (not all children
were Panther cubs), and gave Huggins license to devise a curriculum
that was both ambitious and progressive, with an emphasis on Black
history and pride.

[Portrait of Ericka Abram]

Ericka Abram. Photograph: Kendall Bessent/The Guardian

The kids received three square meals a day. They were tested for
hearing and eyesight, and those who needed them were supplied with
glasses to ensure they could study effectively.

“I never was hungry, I never felt scared, I never felt unloved,”
Abram said.

The school day began with calisthenics in the yard, followed by
meditation in the afternoons. At morning assembly, they sang the Black
national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing
[[link removed]], instead of reciting the
pledge of allegiance, and on special occasions they wore mini-Panther
uniforms – black jackets and berets – marching energetically in
two straight lines.

There were no grades, only levels for aptitude, and classes were no
larger than 10 kids. The curriculum included reading, writing, math
and science, all taught so assiduously that when some of the children
entered their teens and were transferred to ordinary public schools,
they often went into classrooms two years above their age.

Rigorous academic classes were melded with more overt political
teaching. “We would sing ‘Black is beautiful, off the pigs!’”
Abram recalled. “That’s an interesting chant for children, but I
didn’t know they were called police until I was much older.”

Friday was movie night, with a curated selection of anti-war or
anti-capitalist films. Abram, who was named after Ericka Huggins,
remembers their teacher Donna telling them to avoid contact with
anything colored red, white and blue. “America doesn’t care about
you,” Donna would tell them.“America is not your friend.”

Unlike other children of Black Panthers, Abram does not identify as a
“cub” on grounds that she never had any intention of becoming an
adult revolutionary. Instead, she regards herself and the other dorm
children as “comrade siblings”. “The Panthers are a political
group, but to me we were family because that’s how we lived. We went
to school together, ate together, bathed together, slept in the same
room.”

‘We love ourselves, we love our culture, we love our people. Black
history wasn’t just a February thing’

She remembers spending hours playing castle with sandbags stacked in
one of the Panther homes. Only later did she learn that the bags were
used by her father to hide firearms stashed under the floorboards.
Paradoxically, the one thing the kids were never allowed to do was
play with toy guns. “In the 1970s, everyone had a cap gun, a zip
gun, but we weren’t allowed them,” Abram said. “Huey would say:
‘Guns are a tool, not a toy.’”

Huggins, who ran the school between 1973 until it closed in 1982,
liked to say that her aim was to teach children _how_ to think,
not _what _to think. Creativity and curiosity were encouraged, as
were music, drama, art and all forms of self-expression. When a child
transgressed, they were brought before a “justice court” where
they were disciplined by other kids – a far cry from
the school-to-prison pipeline
[[link removed]] so
common to this day in regular public schools.

Girls in particular were protected from negative gender and racial
stereotypes. “Black women have been shamed in so many ways – from
the auction block to the way our bodies are policed,” Abram said.
“We didn’t have that same shaming; as a girl I was not taught to
think of myself as weak.”

Teachers looked to Black luminaries to instill pride in the students.
Maya Angelou came twice to the Panther school to read poetry to the
children, the second time with James Baldwin in tow. Other visitors
included the comedian Richard Pryor and, on one memorable day, the
civil rights legend Rosa Parks.

The Hispanic labor leader Cesar Chavez also came by. Abram recalls
that they went without eating lettuce or strawberries for a year in
support of his farmworkers’ protest
[[link removed]].

[Portrait of Sharif El-Mekki wearing a hoodie that reads: ‘We need
Black teachers’.]

Sharif El-Mekki. Photograph: Shan Wallace/The Guardian

More than 3,000 miles away on the east coast, Sharif El-Mekki, 53,
shared many of the same experiences growing up. Panther cubs did not
have their own dedicated school in his city, Philadelphia, but there
were radical liberation schools imbued with a similar accent on Black
pride.

His parents, Aisha El-Mekki and Hamid Khalid, were both Panthers. His
mother and step-father sent him to a school in Germantown named
Nidhamu Sasa (“Discipline Now” in Swahili). There, he practiced an
African form of martial arts. Classrooms were known by the titles of
African liberation movements: Tanu
[[link removed]], Swapo
[[link removed]], Frelimo
[[link removed]], MPLA
[[link removed]].

“Black pride was everything,” El-Mekki recalled. “We love
ourselves, we love our culture, we love our people. Black history
wasn’t just a February thing. It wasn’t even Black history, it was
history.”

At home, El-Mekki’s family did not celebrate birthdays. Instead,
their calendar would be punctuated by the martyrdom of revolutionary
heroes, such as 21 February, the day Malcolm X was killed in 1965.
“My mother would say: ‘You know, you don’t really do anything to
be born, it’s more important to commemorate those who died for
something’.”

INTO THE STORM

[K’Sisay Sadiki has her hand up against the wall where large sheets
of paper covered in small handwriting are posted.]

K’Sisay Sadiki with her letters from her father, Kamau
Sadiki. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian

‘I will never forget the haunting scream of that child’

When Sharon Shoatz was 12, her school was suddenly evacuated. It was
September 1977, and as police helicopters whirred overhead she
realized that the emergency might be related to her family.

Her home stood directly over the road from the school, and she could
see her mother, Thelma, looking distraught as a swarm of police
entered her family’s house. Could this have something to do with her
father, Russell Shoatz? She knew that he was in prison, but she had no
idea why. “He didn’t explain the Panthers to me when I was young,
not at all,” she said.

It was only the day after the police raid that she learned her father
had escaped from a correctional institution in Huntingdon,
Pennsylvania. “It was in every newspaper, on every TV screen.
That’s when it really came to me what was going on with my dad.”

Russell Shoatz had been a Philadelphia Panther, and went on to become
a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an underground
organization of largely former Black Panthers that regarded itself as
the clandestine military wing of the party. With a strong presence on
the east coast, it was often at odds with Newton and the west coast
Panthers, who were increasingly focused on community welfare programs
and running for elected office.

By contrast, the BLA was implicated in several 1970s bombings and
prison break-outs. The US government claimed it was responsible for
the deaths of 20 police officers.

Shoatz, nicknamed “Maroon” after the escaped enslaved people, was
given a life sentence having been accused of taking part in the 1970
killing of a police sergeant, Frank Von Colln, in retaliation for a
police shooting of a young unarmed Black man. A few days after the
officer was murdered, police raided the Philadelphia headquarters of
the Black Panther Party and rounded up all the men inside. They
handcuffed them, stripped them to their boxers, and lined them up
against a wall.

The photograph of this humiliation of a group of Black Panthers –
none implicated in Von Colln’s death – was one of the searing
images of the 1970s liberation struggle. It left an enduring
impression on one young Panther cub, Sharif El-Mekki, even though it
was taken before he was born.

[Members of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party are handcuffed and
stripped during a police raid.]

Members of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party are handcuffed and
stripped during a police raid. Photograph: Dominic Ligato/Courtesy of
the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries.

His mother showed him the photo when he was six years old. She pointed
out his father, Hamid Khalid, standing naked except for gray boxers,
his face turned away from the camera, his arms cuffed behind his back.

At first, El-Mekki was bemused when he saw the photo. “I kept asking
my mother: ‘Why? Why would you make someone strip?’ I couldn’t
wrap my mind around it.”

Later, it made the young boy all the more determined to live up to his
parents’ values. “Seeing that picture didn’t give me trepidation
or fear,” he said. “It gave me resolve. I was going to join the
army against injustice.”

He also started wearing boxers, because that’s what revolutionaries
did.

Though their parents tried to shield the cubs from the gathering
storm, in the end there was no escaping the epic clash between
Panthers and law enforcement. In 1969, the FBI director, J Edgar
Hoover, declared the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to
internal security of the country”, and by the end of that year 30 of
its members were in jail facing the death penalty and another 40
looking at life imprisonment.

The omnipresence of police informants became a fact of daily life,
along with the paranoia that came with it. Fred Hampton Jr grew up
knowing that his father was killed in that massive assault in Chicago
with the aid of an infiltrator – William O’Neal, the Judas of the
2021 movie Judas and the Black Messiah
[[link removed]].
“I’ve studied the dynamics of betrayal,” he said. “The
internal attacks, how it impacts every aspect of your existence, even
to this day.”

Being a Panther became a very dangerous proposition. The number of
fallen Panthers grew, killed by police or in increasingly violent
internal disputes fomented by the FBI.

By one count
[[link removed]], 28 Panthers
were killed by the turn of 1970. In the estimation of Billy X
Jennings, a former Panther who curates one of the largest archives
[[link removed]] of the party’s
history, at least 35 members lost their lives. That’s a devastating
proportion of an organization that is thought to have had, at most, a
few thousand members.

“People say the children weren’t in danger, but I beg to
differ,” said Meres-Sia Gabriel, 51, the daughter of the Panthers’
celebrated artist and minister of culture Emory Douglas
[[link removed]] and
the Panther artist Gail Dixon. “If our parents are in danger, even
if we the children are not specifically targeted, then we are in
danger.”

Though they didn’t understand the context at the time, the cubs had
security drilled into them. They were trained to be alert, spatially
aware, suspicious of outsiders, and constantly mindful of the perils
around them.

As a young girl, Abram was often accompanied by a man named Aaron
Dixon, a member of the Seattle Panthers. She recalls being vexed by
him. “Why did he have to come everywhere with me? Why did he always
have to open the door first before me?”

‘He wanted me to be a soldier, to have that discipline, to be
prepared just in case’

Only later did she realize that Dixon was her mother’s bodyguard.
His annoying insistence on opening doors was to avoid them being shot
by an assassin lurking on the other side.

Ksisay Sadiki, 53, recalls being woken up early every morning by her
Panther father, Kamau, to follow a strenuous exercise regime,
including three different types of press-ups. “He wanted me to be a
soldier, to have that discipline, to be prepared just in case.”

One of her earliest memories was of her mother, Panther Pamela Hanna,
braiding her hair in pigtails for a visit to court in Queens. She
remembers sitting in the back, on painfully hard seats, playing
peekaboo with a woman who was in the dock.

That woman was Assata Shakur, a close comrade of Sadiki’s parents.
Shakur, dubbed by police the “Black Joan of Arc”, was convicted by
an all-white jury of the 1973 killing of a police officer on the New
Jersey turnpike. She escaped from prison
[[link removed]] in
1979, went underground, and is thought to be in hiding in Cuba. The
FBI has offered a reward of $1m for her capture and lists her as one
of its most wanted terrorists.

In her autobiography, Assata
[[link removed]],
Shakur details an incident that happened when Ksisay, aged two, was
brought to court to see her jailed father. “As Kamau walked near
her, [Ksisay] held out her arms to him,” Shakur writes. “Kamau
took two steps toward her and the marshals jumped him and began
beating him … I will never forget the haunting scream of that child
as she watched her father being brutally beaten.”

[Panther cub Sala Cyril outside of her residence.]

Sala Cyril. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian

Constant security awareness was a theme of many of the cubs’
childhoods. Sala Cyril, 48, and her older sibling Malkia, 50, whose
mother, Janet, was in the Harlem Panthers, were brought up to be what
they call “hyper vigilant”. At dusk they had to close the shutters
of their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, so nobody could see
inside. If they got into trouble on the streets, they were told to ask
a community member for help, never a police officer.

When the family ate out at a diner, the children habitually sat on the
outside of the booth in case they needed to make a quick getaway. The
rules were simple: never have your back to a door, check all exits
when you enter a public space, be wary of anyone who you do not know.

FBI agents would frequently call at the Cyrils’ home. The
interventions continued right up to a couple of weeks before Janet
died of sickle cell anemia, aged 59, in 2005 – 23 years after the
Panthers’ demise. Janet was already in hospice care at home, yet
agents still insisted she would have to testify in a reopened 1971
case involving the murder of a San Francisco police officer.

Sala said such confrontations have left her with a sense of creeping
threat that pursued her well into adulthood. “There is no end for
the children,” she said. “Nothing ended, not for us.”

To this day, Sala will conduct a thorough background check on any new
friend or acquaintance, trawling public records and making inquiries.
Did she do a background check on me before we met for a two-hour
interview in Brooklyn?

“I certainly did,” she said. “I wouldn’t have talked to you if
I hadn’t.”

LOSS

[Alprentice Davis’s hands with fingers interlinked.]

Alprentice Davis in Kissena Park, New York. Photograph: Ashley
Peña/The Guardian

‘Daddy, was the cause more important than your children?’

When Ericka Abram was a toddler, her mother, Elaine Brown, traveled
the world making connections with other revolutionary leaders. She
visited the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Vietnam.

For the Panthers, Brown’s frenetic global dash was a sign that the
party was making waves. For Ericka, not yet a year old and left in the
care of a Panther minder, it had other, less lofty implications.

“She was not there when I learned to walk. And she was not there
when my teeth came in,” Abram said.

In the grand revolutionary scheme of things, does it matter that
Abram’s mother was absent when she learned to walk? Wasn’t the
fight for Black self-determination more important than witnessing a
child’s developmental milestones? Those are questions with which
Abram grapples to this day.

One of Abram’s first memories was being taken to an Ike and Tina
Turner concert with her grandmother. Her mother also came along,
wearing a flowing pink Halston dress. “I thought my mother was so
glamorous and beautiful. And strong,” Abram said. “But we didn’t
know each other.”

Abram has reflected a lot on her mother’s choices. “I can’t
imagine what it would be like trying to change the world and change a
diaper. I know that sounds simplistic, but that’s really what she
was trying to do. Everyone’s not meant to be a parent. And
everyone’s not meant to be a Panther. Sometimes you have to choose
– and my mother chose being a Black Panther.”

[Panther kids at school.]

Oakland Community School students, 1973. The school was set up by the
Black Panthers and most of its students were children of party
members. Photograph: Stephen Shames

When Abram was three, her mother ran unsuccessfully for a seat in
Oakland city council. A year later she became chair of the Black
Panther Party – the only woman ever to lead it. Abram remembers
seeing her mom on TV and on billboards, and how happy that made her.

“Two weeks would have passed and I wouldn’t have seen her in
person, so I would be happy to see her on television – ‘Oh, she
looks great, everything’s OK.’”

Brown has publicly expressed sorrow for being distant from her young
child as a result of her Panther calling. Her autobiography, A Taste
of Power
[[link removed]],
which Brown dedicates to her daughter, contains a photo of Brown tying
little Ericka’s shoelaces, with the caption: “I found it difficult
to be a real mother to Ericka, whose love for me remained constant
nevertheless.”

When Brown was interviewed for a 2004 book on the kids of civil rights
leaders, Children of the Movement
[[link removed]],
she said: “We didn’t know how to be parents, we knew how to be
revolutionaries. I feel sorry for Ericka, but I can’t make myself
over. She suffered in life because of me, and I don’t know how to
deal with it.”

When I read that passage to Abram, her eyes welled up and she looked
emotionally overwhelmed. “It’s very difficult to hear her say
that, even now,” she said, her voice breaking.

Did she ever hear her mother express such feelings – not quite an
apology, but a recognition of how hard it was for her daughter – to
her directly?

“No,” Abram said.

Other cubs did. Sharif El-Mekki’s father, Hamid Khalid, who spent 17
years in prison, apologized to him for being absent. “Not for the
work that landed him there, but for its consequences,” El-Mekki
said.

“I told him: ‘I don’t think you need to apologize for anything.
People make sacrifices. I don’t know a single revolutionary that
spends every moment they want with their family.’”

Sharon Shoatz, who is now 59, also wrestled with the loss of a parent
to prison – her father Russell “Maroon” Shoatz spent 49 years
behind bars, 22 in solitary confinement. She said there were times
when she felt mad about it all. “I would think: ‘You know, Daddy,
how do you explain yourself? Was the cause more important than your
children?’”

In December 2021, just days before her father died having been
released from prison a month earlier with end-stage colorectal cancer,
he called her. “I just want to say sorry, for anything I did to
you,” he said.

Shoatz replied: “Dad, it’s good. It’s all good.”

[Portrait of Sharon Shoatz. She is holding a large decorated card that
reads: ‘Happy birthday Sharon/Pampada’ and features a small
picture of her father, Russell Shoatz]

Sharon Shoatz. Photograph: Shan Wallace/The Guardian

Of all the varieties of loss that come with being a Panther cub,
prolonged imprisonment of a parent is perhaps the hardest. Shoatz was
seven when her father was arrested, 56 when he came home to die.

From the age of 10, she traveled long distances to visit him in
umpteen prisons. For many years, she had no idea why her father was
incarcerated other than that he had been convicted of killing a police
officer. Then in 1990, when she was in her late 20s, she attended an
event in New York to publicize the plight of long-term Black prisoners
and came across a man carrying a placard proclaiming: “Free Russell
Shoatz”.

It made her question everything she thought she knew. “I asked
myself: ‘Who are you, dude? I don’t even know who you are.
You’re like my dad, but who _are_ you?’”

She started to exchange letters with him, asking for details. In one
of them, she invited him to explain what bugged her most: how could he
have put Black struggle before his own children?

He explained that when he was a child, he had watched the brutal
treatment of Black people by Philadelphia police and had grown
disgusted by how his own father merely looked out the window and
stayed silent. He came to think of his father as a coward, and vowed
to be different.

Those exchanges helped Shoatz see her own father in a new light.
“There was a wide range of emotions, from anger, to feeling I lost
out on having a father, to finally growing to appreciate his
politics.”

Shoatz uses the same word as Hampton Jr to describe the impact of
those years – burden. “We didn’t have a father in the home and
my mother struggled. Then there was the burden of freedom that weighs
heavily on you – the fact that we were free, and he was not.”

And there was the sense that her life had never been truly hers. “I
would like to live _my _life, because I’ve lived the life of
trying to support my father. So much of my life has been dedicated to
that.”

Ksisay Sadiki has been through the bereavement of losing her father to
prison twice. Kamau Sadiki was arrested and imprisoned for robbery in
1972 when he was living clandestinely in Atlanta, Georgia, and was
incarcerated for the first eight years of his daughter’s life.

Following release, her father lived an ordinary New York life for more
than 20 years, going back to school, working for a phone company,
providing for his family. He had come home, “and I thought that was
it,” she said.

[Panther cub K’Sisay Sadiki looks out of the window of her home in
Harlem, New York on September 22nd, 2024.]

Panther cub K’Sisay Sadiki at her home in Harlem, New
York. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian

Then in 2002, when Ksisay was 31 and had children of her own, it
happened again. In the heightened tension after the 9/11 terror
attacks, her father was arrested in Brooklyn on gun charges and
investigated for the 1971 murder of an Atlanta police officer, James
Green. He was sent down to Atlanta for trial, convicted, and sentenced
to life imprisonment plus 10 years.

“My world collapsed,” Sadiki said. “I couldn’t wrap my heart
and head around it.” From his new prison cell, her father would send
her letters telling her not to worry, he’d be coming home soon. But
this second time, that wasn’t true. Kamau remains locked up in
Georgia today.

Sadiki has spent the past 20 years trying to get him out. There are
times when she feels angry, others when she feels an unbearable
responsibility. But despite it all, the bond remains fierce. “You
know, I still call him Daddy,” she said. “My father’s my
world.”

Recently, her father has become very apologetic. “He’s like: ‘I
don’t want to burden you.’ And I’m like, ‘Daddy, please stop.
You never ever, ever, burden me.”

IMPLOSION

[Black and white portrait of Ericka Abram.]V

Ericka Abram. Photograph: Kendall Bessent/The Guardian

‘I wasn’t acknowledged as a Panther child, I just happened to be
born’

Ericka Abram’s last moments as a child within the Black Panther
Party occurred in the middle of the night. The eight-year-old was
shaken awake in the dorm by her mother’s bodyguard, Aaron – the
irritating man who opened doors for her. She was told to be quick and
pack a suitcase with just her most prized possessions.

What Abram didn’t know then was that her mother had decided to quit
the Black Panthers and relocate overnight from Oakland to Los Angeles.

As she describes in A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown had become dismayed
by the treatment of women in the party. An assistant principal of the
Panther school, Regina Davis, was subjected to a severe beating and
had her jaw broken by male Panthers after she tried to reprimand one
of them for refusing to perform an assigned task. Huey P Newton had
authorized the assault.

The departure of mother and daughter was sudden and jolting, and what
came after it even more unmooring. They moved into an apartment in
Malibu provided for them by the Motown executive Suzanne de Passe,
with whom Brown had recorded an album. De Passe found Ericka a place
in an elite French lycee by calling in a favor from one of the
school’s patrons, Diana Ross.

Within the space of three weeks, Abram’s universe switched from the
Panther dorm to an almost all-white school for the kids of the
Hollywood jetset (fellow students included Lisa Marie Presley and
Jodie Foster). How did she get her head around the change?

“I didn’t. Thankfully, at the Malibu house I could walk down to
the beach and sit there for hours digging up sand crabs and looking at
the water.”

For Meres-Sia Gabriel, the final collapse of the party in 1982 also
came as a wrench. Her father, the artist Emory Douglas, created many
of the most memorable Panther images replete with strong lines, bright
colors and police officers depicted as pigs. Gabriel has several of
her father’s original Panther works on the walls of her apartment in
Richmond, California.

[Meres-Sia Gabriel poses for a portrait at home in Richmond,
California, on 21 Sept 2024. Gabriel is the child of Emory Douglas,
the former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party.]

Meres-Sia Gabriel in Richmond, California. Gabriel is the child of
Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther
Party. Photograph: Marissa Leshnov/The Guardian

While the Black Panther Party was in existence, Gabriel and her
parents had all their basic needs met. But when the movement formally
folded, her mother, the Panther artist Gail Dixon, abruptly moved her
from her grandmother’s small but safe and predictable home where she
had spent much of the Panther era into a run-down corner of Oakland.

In contrast to Abram’s move to rich white Malibu, Gabriel woke up
one morning in a Black neighborhood that felt disjointed and violent.
“It was a shock. Looking back, that was a traumatic, stressful,
chaotic time,” she said.

Suddenly, she was living among other kids who knew nothing of the
Panthers or their cause. Her parents told her not to reveal to anyone
that they had been in the party.

A couple of years ago Gabriel wrote a poem that describes that painful
transition, capturing the sense of loss, isolation and fear:

In 1982 when the revolution was over,

We woke to a soiled mattress in our front yard and a pair of beat up
sneakers hanging from the telephone wires.

The kids down the street wanted to fight me …

They had no idea my parents fought for them to have free breakfast in
school,

_Neither did I._

After the Black Panther Party formally collapsed, many of the cubs
went through a prolonged period of introspection that, for some,
continues to this day. “You are told you were born for
revolution,” Abram said. “So what do you do with your life when
the revolution doesn’t come?”

As they’ve confronted these existential questions, the cubs have
found comfort and mutual support in their own collective identity. The
first cub event that Sharon Shoatz attended was a retreat in the early
1990s outside Rye, New York.

The cubs made an instant connection. They had been through so many
common experiences that they understood each other instinctually,
without the endless explanation that non-Panther friends required.
“We found we could come together, and share our stories, and our
pain,” Shoatz said. “It was a form of healing.”

[A house in Oakland that is painted mainly blue and features a mural
of four woman and the words: ‘Women of the Black Panther Party’.]

The Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland features the only public
mural dedicated to the women of the Black Panther Party. Photograph:
Marissa Leshnov/The Guardian

Since then, groups of cubs have convened every few years for reunions
that Shoatz has found part-cathartic, part-empowering. The most recent
was in August 2024, when about 20 cubs came together in Portland,
Oregon.

Individually, the cubs continue to ask tough questions about their
pasts. Meres-Sia Gabriel has probed deeply into the contradictions of
her Panther childhood, and is writing a one-woman show that seeks to
tell her story of that struggle in poetry and music.

She sees the process as a form of learning to love the “inner
child” in her who was ignored when she was young. For her, the
children of the Panthers were the most overlooked members of the
party.

“I felt I wasn’t acknowledged as a Panther child, I just happened
to be born. They said they were serving the people. Well then, am I
the people, am I a person? If you’re committing everything to
serving the people, the child born to you wonders, where do I fit
in?”

In her 30s, she legally changed her name. She discarded her birth
name, Cindy Douglas, which her parents had given her as an homage to
Cindy Smallwood, a Panther who had joined the party when she was 16
and was killed in a car crash three years later.

She replaced it with Meres-Sia Gabriel. Meres-Sia is drawn from
ancient Egyptian meaning “beloved one with insight”. Gabriel is
after the Abrahamic archangel. “It was part of me reclaiming
self-love,” she said.

Over time, Gabriel has come to be proud of her parents’
revolutionary work. She now emulates them, by pursuing her own
activism of sorts. “It’s a different revolution, to get to know
and soothe this wounded inner child and to understand how to love her,
and how to love the Black Panther Party.”

To love them both?

“My intention is to honor what was good about the party, and to be
courageous on this journey of deep healing for my own self.”

SHOCK AND AWE

[K’Sisay Sadiki sits with her chin resting on her hands.]

K’Sisay Sadiki at her home in Harlem. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The
Guardian

‘This is an escalation. The executive orders made my heart begin to
beat a little faster, fear begin to grow.’

The explosive return of Donald Trump to the White House in January,
and his instant carpet bombing with incendiary executive orders, did
not take Malkia Cyril by surprise. They had long been tracking the
erosion of neoliberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, in
the US and around the world.

What did unnerve Cyril was the scale and speed of it. “This is an
escalation. The shock and awe of the early weeks, when so many
executive orders dropped, it made my heart begin to beat a little
faster, fear begin to grow.”

Trump’s attack is personal. Cyril came out as queer when they were
12. They were just in the throes of changing the gender marker on
their official documents to X when the president issued an executive
order
[[link removed]] declaring
that the government would henceforth only recognise a person’s sex
assigned at birth. “I am feeling extraordinarily distressed and in
some pain as I witness the onslaught.”

Nor was it coincidental, in Cyril’s view, that Trump made federal
diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs one of his first and
biggest targets. Cyril hates the term “DEI”, because in their view
it obscures what is really going on. “This is an attack on the
fundamental civil rights that have been gained by Black folk since
emancipation. It’s a demonstration of power that is meant to terrify
us into silence.”

Has the shocking start to 2025 given Cyril clarity on what it is to be
a Panther cub? No, they said. “I’ve always been a Panther cub. I
live, read, walk, talk, Panther cub. The Panther Party is the water,
I’m a fish.”

What it has done, rather, is give them greater clarity on what their
role is to be at this critical juncture. “What I have to offer as a
Panther cub is unique and necessary in this moment,” they said.

[Malkia Cyril sits on a wooden chair outside her home, which has
slatted wooden pannelling, in the sunshine.]

Malkia Cyril at home in Oakland in 2024. Photograph: Marissa
Leshnov/The Guardian

“There is a clarity to my mandate: to help rebuild the left, to show
that it is not a dirty word, that the left is not a space that should
be hidden from view. That life can be breathed into it. That’s my
mandate: to breathe life back into the left – and I’m not the only
one.”

Many of the cubs are struck by the parallels between the volatility of
their parents’ Panther days in the early 70s and the present day.
Ksisay Sadiki keeps referring back to the 10-point manifesto written
by Newton and Seale when they set up the party. “They address the
same issues we’re talking about today: education, housing, policing,
mass incarceration.”

The first iteration of the 10 points written in 1966 did not directly
address healthcare, though a second version produced six years later
did call for free medical treatment for all Black and oppressed
people. That strikes a chord with Sadiki. Both her parents are facing
ill health – her father is in prison hospital and her mother is
regularly admitted to community hospitals in New York.

“What upsets me so much about my parents is that they’re sick and
they’re not getting the medical attention they need. And that makes
me think about land. If we had our own land, our own resources, to
grow our own food, to be healthy, not to have to sacrifice your life
for other people, that would be progress.”

Just a few statistics illuminate how the basic inequities to which she
is alluding continue to tear at the fabric of American society. Black
women are two to three times
[[link removed]] more
likely to die from causes related to pregnancy than white women. A
Black kid receives on average $2,700 less in state funding
[[link removed]] in
their school district than a white kid. Black families account for
more than 50% of the total
[[link removed]] of
all families with children who are homeless, when Black people form
only 13% of the general population. And a statistic that lands with a
thump: despite the convulsive churn of Black Lives Matter protests in
the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson in 2014, and George
Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020, Black Americans continue to
be killed by police at almost three times
[[link removed]] the
rate of white Americans.

‘This moment we are in, it’s a threat. It’s terrifying. But it
is also an opportunity.’

Alprentice Davis, 54, cites his own personal data point, based on 30
years working as a football coach for at-risk kids in poor Black
neighborhoods in New York and Washington DC. By his estimate, on
average one of his students has been shot to death every seven years.

[Portrait of Alprentice Davis looking away from the camera, with trees
in the background.]

Panther cub Alprentice Davis at Kissena Park. Photograph: Ashley
Peña/The Guardian

Davis is the son of Thelma Davis from the Queens, New York, chapter of
the Panthers, and Robert Bay, a top adviser to Huey P Newton in
Oakland. In Davis’s memoir, Urchin Society: Memories of a Black
Panther Cub
[[link removed]],
he ponders what would have happened if the government, instead of
pummeling the party to the point of extinction, had worked with them.

“Black communities would be totally different,” Davis said.
“There’d be less drugs on the streets, the police wouldn’t be
like an occupying army and there would be real community policing.
There’d be a whole lot less Trayvon Martins and Michael Browns.”

Malkia Cyril was deeply involved in Black Lives Matter after it
emerged in the wake of the shooting to death of the 17-year-old
Trayvon Martin by a Florida gun owner in 2012. Cyril could draw a
direct line between the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that was going viral
on social media and the trigger behind the formation of the Black
Panther Party: both were a response to the killing of Black people.
“Every Black movement in this country began with a death,” Cyril
said, “and this was no different. There absolutely was continuity,
because there was continuity of conditions.”

Today, as Trump proceeds to tear up the hard-won victories of the
civil rights movement, Cyril is having to contend with the limits of
protest as a political strategy. “There has definitely been a shift
in what protest alone can do. The lesson here is that while protest
movements are important, they’re insufficient.”

Their hope is that out of the fear and instability instilled in
Trump’s America will come something more positive: a whole new
strategy centered around building community, a new collective action.

“It’s very important to understand this,” they said. “This
moment we are in, it’s a threat. It’s terrifying. But it is also
an opportunity.”

LEGACY

[Panther cub Alprentice Davis closes his eyes and lays beside his
daughter at Kissena Park, New York.]

Alprentice Davis with his daughter in Kissena Park, New
York. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian

‘It’s a quintessential Black love story’

Forty-two years after the official end of the Black Panther Party, the
cubs’ childhood experiences remain seared into their DNA. Though
they have responded in diverse ways – some with boundless pride,
others seeking self-healing – they can all agree on how deeply it
touched them.

One of the most striking aspects of the legacy of the Black Panther
Party is how its progeny have gone on to be leaders in their own
right. In addition to Tupac Shakur, there is a long list of cubs in
the public spotlight that includes Fani Willis
[[link removed]],
the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who brought
indictments against Donald Trump; the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates; and
Ericka Huggins’ daughter Mai Lassiter, an LA-based music executive
and philanthropist.

The nine cubs the Guardian spoke to have all gone on to lead adult
lives imbued with the creativity and skills they acquired during the
Panther years. Sala Cyril, who was taught by her mother to be “hyper
vigilant” in the face of FBI surveillance, is the national security
co-ordinator of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an organization
that promotes self-determination for the Black community. She also
works advising left movement groups on community safety.

[Ksisay Sadiki and her daughter holding each other at the park during
a picnic in Harlem, New York.]

Ksisay Sadiki and her daughter at a park in Harlem in
2024. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The Guardian

Drawing directly on what she learned from Panther elders, she teaches
the groups best practice on vetting, how to recognize when you are
being targeted, and how to defend against infiltration and smear
tactics of the sort Hoover wielded so successfully against the party.

Several of the cubs have applied their inspirational learning to
careers in education. Sharif El-Mekki went on from his Philadelphia
freedom school to work as a teacher and principal for almost 30 years
and now runs a group that seeks to train the next generation of
motivational Black educators.

El-Mekki’s respect for his parents’ revolutionary activities knows
no limits. “I think the Black Panther Party was one of the Blackest,
most incredible social justice movements America has seen. Being a cub
for me is a deep badge of pride. It’s a quintessential Black love
story.”

He has six children. He calls them “grandcubs”.

Several others have channeled the Panthers’ belief in the power of
the written word to become writers. Ericka Abram is writing a memoir
of her surreal journey from the Panther dorm to Malibu, titled Black
Panther Princess. Sharon Shoatz has helped disseminate her father’s
recently published posthumous autobiography, I Am Maroon
[[link removed]].

[Sala Cyril with her daughter in 2024.]

Sala Cyril with her daughter in 2024. Photograph: Ashley Peña/The
Guardian

Having been conflicted for so long over the absence of her mother,
Abram is finally learning to forgive her. “I now appreciate her for
what she did. She was incredibly brave – a fighter, and a
survivor.”

She is also learning to forgive herself. “I thought for many years
that I was useless, because I wasn’t a revolutionary. Now I think
that if you contribute in any positive way, that’s OK. I’m not
gonna beat myself up any longer.”

All the cubs feel a responsibility to keep the memory of their
parents’ sacrifices and achievements alive. Fred Hampton Jr feels
that keenly – he is working to preserve Hampton Sr’s childhood
home in Chicago, the Hampton House
[[link removed]], as the legacy of his father
slain 25 days before he was born.

“It’s a way of life for me, this is my calling,” he said. “And
so we pass the baton. We keep moving, we keep going.”

_Ed Pilkington is chief reporter for Guardian US. He is the author of
Beyond the Mother Country. _

_The Guardian [[link removed]] is globally renowned
for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
subjects you care about with the Guardian's brilliant email
newsletters
[[link removed]],
free to your inbox._

* The Black Panther Party
[[link removed]]
* revolutionary movements
[[link removed]]
* police repression
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]