Our collection preserves a second printing of American poet and activist Pat Parker’s first poetry book, Child of Myself, published in 1974 by the Women’s Press Collective.The illustrations for this printing were done by Brenda Crider, Wendy Cadden, Jerri Robertson, Karen Garrison, and “Helle.” Over the course of her life, Parker published five collections of poetry and was a champion in the fight for women’s and LGBT liberation.
Parker’s activism was extensive. Parker was the founder of the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council in 1980; an early supporter of groups like the Black Panther Party; and the executive director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center from 1978 to 1987—a revolutionary organization, offering abortion healthcare to women in California, which inspired the formation of the still active, Chico Feminist Women’s Health Center (CFWHC). She also aided in the formation of the Women’s Press Collective, the publisher of her first two poetry books. The Collective was established by photographer, printer, and publisher,Wendy Cadden, and her partnerJudy Grahn, an Air Force officer turned poet and activist after being discharged for being openly gay. Producing books, poems, and graphics, the press strove to promote work by lesbians disenfranchised by race or class.
InChild of Myself, Parker challenges the socially accepted power dynamics of heterosexual relationships through critiques on women’s prescribed roles as housekeeper and caretaker. When reading Parker’s stream-of-consciousness poetics, we have to step back and appreciate the bravery of these Black, LGBT, women feminists, who endured in the face of multiple systems of oppression. Parker and friends’ fight for women’s liberation was even acknowledged by Black Panther Party Leader, Huey P. Newton, in a 1970 interview:
…we say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.
Child of Myself was originally published in 1972 by Shameless Hussy Press, founded byAlta Gerrey in Oakland in 1969—the first feminist press in the United States! The release of this first poetry book was just the beginning of Parker’s incredible career as a champion for LGBT rights, coming out as lesbian after the release of her second collection, Pit Stop, published by Women’s Press Collective in 1973, and again in 1975. Parker’s third poetry book, Womanslaughter, published in 1978 by American feminist publishing house, the Diana Press, revolves around the issue of femicide and the trauma of domestic violence. Parker often spoke publicly about these issues, kicking off day three of the first National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays, on October 15th, 1979, in Washington, D.C., with a speech about her sister’s tragic death at the hands of her husband.
Due to the Diana Press’s closure in 1979, Parker’s fourth collection, Movement in Black, published by the press in 1978, went out of print until 1983, when the Crossing Press (now a part of Random House’sCrown Publishing Group) issued a facsimile edition of the collection. By 1987 the book was once again unavailable, until, shortly after Parker’s death in 1989, Firebrand Books published its first edition of the collection—this time, including a foreword by friend, poet, and fellow activist, Audre Lorde and an introduction by Judy Grahn. Ten years later, in 1999, Firebrand released An Expanded Edition of Movement In Black, which includes a new section of previously-unpublished work, an introduction by Cheryl Clarke, and “Celebrations, Remembrances, Tributes” by ten Black writers including Lorde,Angela Y. Davis,Pamela Sneed, and Barbara Smith (founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press).
Parker’s fifth and final poetry collection, Jonestown & Other Madness, was originally published by Firebrand Books in 1985, then re-published in 1989, just before Parker’s death from breast cancer. If you click here, you can hear Parker read the title poem from the book. Parker’s legacy will not soon be forgotten. In June 2019, Parker was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. In 1991, thePat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library, was founded to encourage and facilitate the reading and research of LGBT literature.
If you or someone you know is suffering from domestic violence and looking for help, don’t hesitate to reach out to the free, 24/7,hotline through text, chat, or call at 800-799-7233.
Learn about Brad Lomax, Black Panther and Disability Rights Activist Who Co-Lead the “504 Sit-In” (LISTEN)
Learn about Brad Lomax, Black Panther and Disability Rights Activist Who Co-Lead the “504 Sit-In” (LISTEN)
[Photo credit: HolLynn D’Lil. Brad Lomax, center, next to activist Judy Heumann at a rally in 1977 at Lafayette Square in Washington.] by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) Today, GBN celebrates Brad Lomax, the Black Panther Party member and disability activist who helped lead the “504 Sit In” to demand the federal government provide accessibility in a federal buildings and institutions. To…
Daniel Kaluuya gives an outstanding performance as Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton in the film Judas and the Black Messiah, but can the film do justice to Hampton’s radical politics?
New Arrivals: First Edition of CAPITALISM PLUS DOPE EQUALS GENOCIDE (ca.1970), by Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor.
An early critique on the relationship between drugs and the Black community by Tabor, a Harlem-born member of the Black Panther Party and one of the New York 21. The tract was important for its role in stimulating discussion on the role of drugs in marginalized communities, and an important influence in the development of the anti-drug stance taken by other radical groups. Indeed, among the Party’s many national social programs included efforts to combat drug addiction, often led by former addicts who worked with the Party. “Dope, they argued, was part of the oppressor’s plan to "ensure our enslavement”…Improving the health status of blacks thus went hand in hand with improving their political, economic, and social status. In the Party’s view, black political activism and black public health activism were interwoven" (Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, p.188-189). Reprinted in several different forms, this version is preceded only by the shorter, 4-page version published by the Committee to Defend the Panther 21, titled The Plague: Capitalism + Dope = Genocide.
On this date, July 20, in 1967, the first national Black Power conference opened in Newark, New Jersey.
More than a thousand people from a wide array of community organizations and other groups convened in Newark on July 20, 1967, to discuss the most pressing issues of the day facing African-Americans at the first national Black Power Conference.
It was one of the largest such gatherings of Black leaders, with representatives of nearly 300 organizations and institutions from 126 cities in 26 states, Bermuda and Nigeria. The conference held workshops, presented papers for specific programs and developed more than 80 resolutions calling for emphasis of Black power in political, economic and cultural affairs. [Continue reading.]
“We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such. We have respect for all people, and we have respect for the right of any people to exist. So we want the Palestinian people and the Jewish people to live in harmony together. We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” (On the Middle East, Huey Newton)
Women of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1969.
Self-defense and close combat training specifically for women will be indispensable if we ever want our sisters to break free from patriarchal oppression. No oppressed population can be freed, they must free themselves!
Huey P. Newton (seated on porch) watches Donna Howell and the children of the Intercommunal Youth Institute. Photo: Lauryn Williams, 1972
The Oakland Community School (OCS) was one of the most well-known and well-loved programs of the Black Panther Party. Point Five of the Black Panther Party’s original 1966 Ten Point Platform and Program, emphasized the need to provide an education that, among other things, taught African American and poor people about their history in the United States. To this end, the Oakland Community School became a locale for a small, but powerful group of administrators, educators, and elementary school students whose actions to empower youth and their families challenged existing public education concepts for black and other poor and racially marginalized communities during the 1970s and 1980s.
Historically, however, the educational programs of the BPP started long before the OCS with the vision of the party’s leaders. As early as 1967 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale began speaking to high school youth at San Francisco/Bay Area public schools. In 1969, in U.S. cities where there were strong BPP chapters, liberation schools staffed by volunteer party members opened in storefronts, churches and homes. These after-school programs were created to give academic support to black and other poor youth. These community school programs created a forum for young people to explore a factual history of America and a sense of connection and community.
“I dont care how much theory you got, if it don’t have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. Thats what we’ve got to be able to do.”
Blackness to me is inherently gender nonconforming largely because we will never fit into binary white supremacist notions of manhood and womanhood.
Angela Davis actually touches on this in her novel Women, Race, and Class.
Essentially, she says that Black women may have been considered genderless because we did all the same work as men but then weren’t considered men when it came to sexual abuse, suddenly being forced into these feminine, submissive roles that we clearly didn’t fit into. Once the Atlantic Slave Trade was banned, Black women were then seen as breeders to provide for slaves since they couldn’t be imported. Despite this, Black women, even if we were pregnant, still had to work in the fields and suffer the same punishment as our male counterparts.
Angela Davis goes on further to say that since Black women were never seen as housewives, Black men were in turn never seen as family providers or heads of households. By this point, Black women had acquired an abundance of traits that didn’t fit into 19th century perception of what it meant to be a woman. Also, with the rise of industrialization, white women never experienced that same intensive labor which further pushed them into the housewife stereotype. Essentially, there was this white feminist movement to erase the housewife stereotype but it didn’t include the struggles of Black women because we were never seen as housewives to begin with.
All of this to say: We were genderless and outside of any gender norm within the white supremacist framework.
Please read Hortense Spillers “mamas baby papas maybe” also, we are inherently outside of eurocentric gender norms because the ideals of them are established through a society that seeks to both degender -as well as- hyper gender us all at once, the paradox of which can be viewed as a particular site of violence experienced only by Black people ( we are viewed as valuable only through our flesh, nonblacks do not respect your personhood).
Seeing gender for the plantation in the imaginary that it is made to be will make it clear why even in the LGBTQ+ communities you will find white people who still inherently think its their place to police Black gender and sexual expression (t*rfs, exclusionists, queerphobes). They might be “free” to celebrate the particular conformist ways they accept and experience what queerness is (even if they act like the word is repulsive ive noticed they love the fruits of Queer labor, i wonder why ) but your Black ass is not. If gender is confined as a carceral state of being in our society, then white people are aiming to become the wardens and inherit the keys to the cells.
like I rlly had to dig for this but this is the piece a lot of yall seem to be missing where it concerns Blackness and gender and now more than ever with how yt ppl of various marginalized groups are now arrogantly speaking on and speaking over experiences they dk a damn thing abt
surprised to see this post still circulating! you ate that analysis UP though!
not even necessarily on the topic of gender, but what you said at the end about wardens deeply reminded me of 1) the way Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party just two months prior to his assassination called the president at the time “Ward Nixon” in an interview because 2) like Angela Davis notes of Palestine in one of her many novels, we live in an open-air prison, although to varying degrees. that’s essentially what structural racism is, one large open-air prison where marginalized communities, and in this case specifically Black people, are the detainees, the political prisoners.
gender is just one lens through which we are controlled in this aforementioned prison, transformed into a form of punishment, exclusion, and dehumanization rather than a liberating form of expression. only the privileged gain full access to the latter.
Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” 2022,
Organized in conjunction with The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Eagle Creek Saloon presents Sadie Barnette’s fluorescent recreation of the San Francisco gay bar that her father, founder of the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party, operated in the early 1990s.
On select Saturdays, the architectural installation is activated by DJs invited by queer scholar and artist madison moore as part of The Kitchen’s new nightlife and club culture residency; visitors are invited to dance, an homage to queer Black spaces past and present.
remembering richard aoki, born 76 years ago on november 20, 1938.
he died on march 15, 2009, which the autopsy report stated was of “a self-inflicted [gun shot wound] to the abdomen [diaphragm].
lauded as the only asian american member of the black panthers, richard played a major role in the ethnic studies and third world liberation front strikes in 1968.
however, on august 20, 2012, when journalist seth rosenfeld revealed FBI files that proved richard once served as an informant, the community was forced to reexamine richard’s glorious legacy. to this day, there are more questions than answers, and there will continue to be questions that cannot be answered by richard himself.
1968, Asian American high school students attend the Black Panther Party funeral rally for Bobby Hutton,16 years old BPP member.
Now that’s what I’m talking about!
Photo by Nikki Arai (who also took the famous photo of Richard Aoki). On April 12, 1968, Oakland High students walked out to attend the memorial rally. Bobby Hutton was killed by OPD on April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
