The Backbone of the Panthers: Black Women and the Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party is often remembered through photographs of young men in leather jackets and berets. The party's daily work was carried out largely by women. By about 1969, Kathleen Cleaver estimated, women made up roughly two-thirds of the membership. They fed children, ran clinics, edited newspapers, defended comrades in court and, for three years, led the organization itself. Sixty years after its founding in Oakland in October 1966, their story is central to understanding what the Panthers were. (For the party's origins, see our piece on the founding of the Black Panther Party.)

The Voice in the Press

Kathleen Neal Cleaver came to the party in 1967 from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As communications secretary, she became the first woman on the Central Committee and one of the Panthers' most visible spokespeople. She organized the "Free Huey" campaign that turned Huey Newton's 1967 arrest into a national cause. She later became a lawyer and a scholar of the movement she helped build.

Breakfast, Clinics and Classrooms

The survival programs, as the Panthers called them, depended on women's labor and leadership. Women cooked and served the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which reached thousands of children by 1969 and helped push the federal government to expand school breakfasts. In Boston, Audrea Jones helped found the chapter and its free health clinic. Panther clinics tested residents for sickle cell anemia when few hospitals did.

Ericka Huggins lost her husband, John Huggins, to a 1969 shooting at UCLA. She was then jailed and tried in New Haven alongside Bobby Seale; the charges were dismissed in 1971. She went on to direct the Oakland Community School for most of its existence (1973–1982). The school was praised by educators and honored by the California legislature.

In the Courtroom and in Prison

Women also faced the state's full force. Afeni Shakur, one of the "Panther 21" charged in New York in 1969, chose to act as her own lawyer while pregnant. All the defendants were acquitted in 1971. Joan Bird, the youngest of the group, spent about two years in jail before the verdict. Assata Shakur, who came up through the New York chapter, later became a target of the FBI's counterintelligence campaigns. Convicted in 1977 in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper, a charge she always denied, she escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba, which granted her asylum in 1984. She lived there in exile for four decades and died in Havana in September 2025, still a symbol of that conflict.

Angela Davis worked with the Los Angeles chapter before joining the Communist Party. Her 1970–1972 prosecution and acquittal made "Free Angela" a worldwide cry. The Panthers' campaigns against political imprisonment helped carry it.

A Woman at the Head of the Party

In 1974, with Newton in exile, Elaine Brown became chairman, the only woman ever to lead the party. She steered it into Oakland electoral politics, helping elect Lionel Wilson as the city's first Black mayor in 1977. She also placed women in key administrative posts. Her memoir, A Taste of Power, describes both her authority and the sexism she confronted inside the organization.

The Fight Within

Panther women were blunt about the contradiction. A revolutionary party demanded liberation for Black people while some men in it treated women as subordinates. Women pressed for change from within, and the party's newspaper published articles calling for equality between men and women. Their experience helped shape later Black feminist thought, which held that racism, sexism and poverty must be fought together.

Why It Matters Now

Mutual aid networks, community health campaigns and organizing against police violence today run along paths these women cleared. Remembering the Panthers without them misreads the party's history. Women were not auxiliaries to the struggle. They were much of its backbone.

Artist Emory Douglas, the party's minister of culture, often made Panther women the heroes of his posters. We will feature his work in an upcoming post.

Related Reading on HistorianSpeaks

• October 1966: The Founding of the Black Panther Party
• Art as a Weapon: Emory Douglas and the Face of the Black Panther Party

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