Celebrate the publication of Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party with a conversation between author Ericka Huggins, photographer Stephen Shames, contributors Cheryl Dawson and Gayle Asali Dickson, moderated by Professor Leigh Raiford.

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This program is presented in partnership with Litquake. Please note that this program will now take place in-person at MoAD.

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About the Book

Many of us have heard these three words: Black Panther Party. Some know the Party’s history as a movement for the social, political, economic and spiritual upliftment of Black and indigenous people of colour – but to this day, few know the story of the backbone of the Party: the women. It’s estimated that six out of ten Panther Party members were women. While these remarkable women of all ages and diverse backgrounds were regularly making headlines agitating, protesting, and organising, off-stage these same women were building communities and enacting social justice, providing food, housing, education, healthcare, and more. Comrade Sisters is their story.

The book combines photos by Stephen Shames, who at the time was a 20-year-old college student at Berkeley. With the complete trust of the Black Panther Party, Shames took intimate, behind-the-scenes photographs that fully portrayed Party members’ lives. This marks his third photo book about the Black Panthers and includes many never before published images. Ericka Huggins, an early Party member and leader along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, has written a moving text, sharing what drew so many women to the Party and focusing on their monumental work on behalf of the most vulnerable citizens. Most importantly, the book includes contributions from over 50 former women members – some well-known, others not – who vividly recall their personal experiences from that time. Other texts include a foreword by Angela Davis and an afterword by Alicia Garza. All Power to the People.

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About the Presenters

Ericka Huggins is an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate, and poet. For 50 years, Ericka has used her life experiences in service to community. From 1973-1981, she was director of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School. From 1990-2004 Ericka managed HIV/AIDS Volunteer and Education programs. She also supported innovative mindfulness programs for women and youth in schools, jails and prisons.  

Ericka was professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2008 through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. From 2003 to 2011 she was professor of Women and Gender Studies at California State Universities- East Bay and San Francisco. Ericka is a Racial Equity Learning Lab facilitator for WORLD TRUST Educational Services. She curates conversations focused on the individual and collective work of becoming equitable in all areas of our daily lives. Additionally, she facilitates workshops on the benefit of self care in sustaining social change.

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Stephen Shames uses photography to raise awareness of social issues, with a particular focus on child poverty and race. Steve’s photographs are in the permanent collections of 40 major museums, including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture; Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin; Metropolitan Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; George Eastman Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Foundation Sindika Dokolo, Angola.

Steve is author of 15 monographs including: Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams, 2016); Bronx Boys (University of Texas); Outside the Dream, Pursuing the Dream, The Black Panthers (Aperture); Stephen Shames: Une Retrospective (Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneu de Gentilly | Red Eye); Bronx Boys (FotoEvidence e-book); Free Angela, We Are America, I Like You Too, Some People (Quiddity, 2021); Facing Race (Moravian College); Transforming Lives (Star Bright Books); and Free to Grow (Columbia University).

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Rev. Cheryl Dawson currently works to help women in their quest to move past the present while having hope for their future. She began work in the Black Panther Party in 1970. She chose to support to work in the Black Panther Party because of the suffering of her people. Her spirit and tenacity carried the work forward. Rev. Dawson insists that the work she began in the Black Panther Party remains in her heart and it manifests in the work she has brought to the women she serves.

Cheryl worked in the San Francisco County Jail to lift, rescue, and inspire African American women.  Rev. Dawson created the “SISTER PROJECT” in 1993 as a vehicle to help move women through episodes of incarceration, addiction and alienation. Subsequent to this work, Paul Miyamoto, the elected leader of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, made the following proclamation in 2019: “December 20 will be known in perpetuity to be Cheryl Dawson Day in the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department in honor of the thousands of women’s lives she has impacted during the years of her service.”

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M. Gayle Asali Dickson is an ordained minister and served as Pastor of the South Berkeley Congregational Church (SBCC), United Church of Christ, in Berkeley, CA from 1998 to 2006. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Holy Names University, Oakland, CA, and a Master of Divinity from the San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS), San Anselmo, CA. In 2000, Gayle Asali founded “Art Ambassadors,” a 501c3 non-profit organization that combines her background in art and theology to use the expressive arts to heal the individually and socially inflicted wounds of our past.

Prior to serving as pastor of SBCC, Gayle Asali was a graphic artist for the Black Panther Party (BPP) Newspaper, and drew for its back pages under the name Asali. She also served as a pre-school teacher at its Oakland Community School using art as a tool to teach cognitive skills to pre-schoolers. As Pastor of SBCC she opened the church to the Little Bobby Hutton Tutoring Program and was Founder/Director of the Children’s Art and Dinner Program; volunteered on the City of Berkeley Mental Health Services Prevention & Early Intervention Planning Panel. She also volunteered with Youth Spirit Artworks and was Community Organizer for PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing). She gives of her time whenever possible to the wider community.

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Leigh Raiford (she/they) is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also Co-Director and co-Principal Investigator with Tianna S. Paschel of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three year initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle; co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora; and co-editor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. She is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, a new imprint of Aperture Books. Raiford is currently completing two books: Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography co-conceived with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler (Thames and Hudson, 2023); and When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (forthcoming Duke UP).

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