About this Event
City Lights and NYU Press present
Mary Frances Phillips in conversation with Jennifer MacKenzie
discussing the new book
Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins
by Mary Frances Phillips - Published by NYU Press
The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party.
In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot.
Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including Pr*son records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins’s political journey, shedding light on Ericka’s use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In Pr*son, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement.
Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world.
Mary Frances Phillips is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York. Her research areas include the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Women’s Studies, and Black Feminism. She was selected as a 2021-2022 award recipient for a faculty fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame and the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship in 2018-2019. She has published journal articles in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, the Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Western Journal of Black Studies, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, and the Syllabus Journal. Her essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine’s blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, Black Youth Project, and the African American Intellectual Society’s blog, Black Perspectives, and Time Magazine.
Jennifer MacKenzie is a writer, poet and journalist who has been a lecturer in Lehman’s departments of Journalism and Media Studies and English since 2014. Her full-length book of poems, , was published as part of Fence Books Modern Poets Series. She has published poems widely, most recently in , , jubilat, and Conduit. Her literary journalism and reviews have appeared in outlets including the , HuffPost, Religion and Politics, , and Killing the Buddha, as cited by Longform. Her work is rooted in care webs and cultures of resistance as they intersect with neoliberal wars, necropolitics and intergenerational trauma. Her teaching incorporates multimodal approaches to writing and communication, including podcasting, oral history, globally networked learning environments, and local archival research.
Critical praise for "Black Panther Woman"
"Activism grounded in love. Phillips enlarges the history of the Black Panthers by showing women’s experiences as integral to the group’s work. A revealing, well-researched biography." ~Kirkus Reviews
"A remarkable story of awakening, commitment, grit, and fearlessness in the wake of personal pain, grassroots struggle, and state violence. This first-ever historical biography of Ericka Huggins is itself a meditation on the pertinence and power of spiritual wellness and encourages us to consider what a radically holistic movement for liberation might need. Wholly original and illuminating!" ~Rhonda Y. Williams, author of Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century
"Deftly and ethically tackling the challenge of writing about a living historical figure who was involved in an impactful resistance movement, Phillips positions Huggins’s life as a lesson about how to sustain political struggle through spiritual development. Black Panther Woman enmeshes oral history, corroborating interviews, and critical documentary assessment to offer a truly textured analysis not only of one person’s life, but a demonstration of the virtue of patient rigor. Phillips sits still with Huggins in order to deepen the collective narrative of an already layered telling of the Black Panther Party. Her detailed review of Huggins’ life—before, during, and after imprisonment—identifies the joy that is possible through liberatory skill building in ways that resist the growth of dehumanizing institutions and carceral states. Historically, soulful political organizing has been essential and the way Phillips portrays Huggins’ life models ways to cultivate collective self-care in order to effectively deal with systemic oppression in our own time. With words and records that are at once reflective and introspective, Phillips creates a stunning mosaic of Huggins and her time." ~Stephanie Y. Evans, author of Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace
"Both a memoir and an interpretive history of the Black Panther Party, Mary Frances Phillips gives us a tender rendering of Ericka Huggins's Pr*son organizing and path to spiritual wellness. The cross-fertilization of radical resistance with care strategies captures a more nuanced portrait of the Black Panther Party." ~Ula Y. Taylor, author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam
This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation
Event Venue
Online
USD 0.00
