Women from the ‘60s Black Panther movement talk with female activists working today

Regina Jennings was 12 years old, jumping rope with friends on Annin Street in South Philly, when, she told an audience recently, she saw police beat up one of her friends, a boy her age named Frank.

Jennings, a poet, university professor, and author, said that what she witnessed that day led her to eventually move to California at age 17 to join the Black Panther Party, which was originally founded as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

“Understand how young we were,” Jennings said at a panel discussion at the Slought Foundation on Feb. 5. The event was organized to celebrate publication of the coffee-table photography book Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, by Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins.

“Franklin was playing Dead Block on the sidewalk, and me and my girlfriends were jumping Double Dutch.”

She described the episode in the poem “Jumping Double Dutch” from her book Panther Poems: Poetry of a Sister Panther:

Until one of the officers said:

“ … Wait, boys wait, the one I saw was bigger,

Wait, boys wait, we beat the wrong … "

Jennings left the next word unspoken.

She was among several former Black Panther members or supporters who came together in Philadelphia — several in person and a few by Zoom from Tanzania, France, and California. They spoke at a panel discussion with younger women who are working as activists or educators.

The program was cosponsored by the Paul Robeson House and the IAMM Science Education Group. Michelle Strongfields, a physician who is the director of IAMM Science, said the event started as a book discussion on Comrade Sisters. But it developed into a conversation.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if older Panther women could have conversations with younger women who were influenced by their work,’” Strongfields said.

For example, she noted that one of the younger panelists, Lavinia Davis, director of operations and special programming for the Philly Peace Park, works with the urban gardening program that teaches children and adults how to grow their own food.

“That’s connected to the Free Breakfast program that the Panthers started,” Strongfields said.

» READ MORE: A garden grew in North Philly

Jennings also talked about her work in the Panthers’ breakfast program after she moved to California. The program inspired the federal government’s free breakfasts in public schools.

“Do you know what it took to feed the children?” Jennings asked. “We had to get up before dawn. We were young — you know we went to bed late. But we had to get up because we had to get up to prepare the food for our children.

“Why? Because they were our children. They were Black children. They were children that this country never even cared about, like it doesn’t care about Black people even today. Don’t be fooled.”

Another former Black Panther, Hazel Mack, grew up in what she called the protected cocoon of segregation in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her parents and community created a safe bubble for her and other young children so that they were unaware of the “horrors” of racism outside of their all-Black neighborhoods.

By the time Mack was 17, she had begun to venture out into the larger society.

“I saw a world that was raging,” she said. “I realized what was going on around me. They had killed Malcolm. Killed King. They had bombed churches, killed the little girls in the church. That was all coming at me as a teenager. I was enraged at that point.”

About that time, she met young Black Panthers in her hometown.

She said the Panthers required them to read, study, and debate issues of the day.

“I learned and understood history,” she said. “Not just our history, not just the history of my people, but the history of all struggling people in the world.”

She likened the work of the Black Panthers to the Christianity she was learning in church.

“It gave me an understanding of Christianity, and the teachings of Christ became real to me on an everyday basis,” she said. “It meant service. It meant people should eat if they were hungry. That people should have the basics of society.”

She said the Panthers were the first to give free health care through clinics that also tested Black people for the sickle cell trait in the 1970s.

When officials closed the hospital that served Black people in Winston Salem, Mack said, people died because they could not get to the closest hospital, which was miles away.

“If people called for an ambulance, the company demanded payment, or proof you had the means to pay.

“You can just look outside your door and see so many things that need to be done.”

“So we started a free ambulance program. We were children, y’all. And when young people ask me today, what they should be doing, I say: ‘Look around you. The answer is at your fingertips. You don’t have to do grand things. You can just look outside your door and see so many things that need to be done.’”

Mack later came to Philadelphia, where she graduated from Temple University Law School. She worked at Community Legal Services for about 10 years before returning to North Carolina and continuing in law there.

In 1997, she founded the Carter G. Woodson School, an independent K-12 public charter school, when she was frustrated about her daughter’s public school. She also opened Other Suns Cafe & Market Place, which provides space for small-business entrepreneurs as well as a coffee shop.

Another Black Panther veteran, Charlotte Hill O’Neal, a poet and musician, talked to the group by Zoom from exile in Tanzania, where she and her husband, Pete O’Neal, fled in 1972 because he was facing charges for carrying a gun across state lines.

And Julia Wright, the daughter of the novelist Richard Wright, spoke from France.

Among the younger women were Ohenewa Ra, who teaches social work at the Philadelphia campus of Alvernia University. She said she is teaching young people to become social workers to respect families and to pledge they will not place children into foster care hundreds of miles from their communities.

Lavinia Davis of the Peace Park said the Black Panther veterans “laid the foundation for us.”

Tiffany Murphy, coordinator of the annual Uhuru Health Festival & Marketplace, scheduled for April 22, said 60% of the original Black Panther members were women, proving that women can be leaders along with men.

“We stand on their shoulders,” Murphy said. “They give us the courage and the audacity to continue to fight.”