By Lucien Baskin
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS) is a free public education series hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In connection with the online event on State Violence: Prisons, Police, Politics, we are interviewing three of the guest speakers: Mary Frances Phillips, author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, Françoise Hamlin, co-editor (with Charles McKinney) of From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, and Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.
This interview also marks the beginning of an on-going collaboration between The Abusable Past and CBFS. The Abusable Past will serve as a home for interviews with scholars, artists, and activists participating in the CBFS series.
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write or edit your recent books?
Mary Frances Phillips (MFP): As an undergraduate student taking African American history courses, I became interested in the Black Panther Party and the stories of women in the organization. Once I entered the dissertation stage of my doctoral program, I decided to write about the Black Panthers and discovered Ericka Huggins, among many other veterans. While this topic is an offshoot of my dissertation, the book is much more advanced. It engages new archival collections interwoven with oral histories. Archival materials including prison records, census records, photographs, FBI COINTELPRO documents, trial transcripts, the Black Panther Party Oakland Community School papers, army enlistment records, high school yearbooks, death records, newspaper articles, personal never-before-published letters, and wealth of oral interviews allow me to tell an intimate rendering of Ericka’s life with attention to spirituality and wellness from her childhood to her departure from the Black Panther Party.
Françoise Hamlin (FH): Charles (Chuck) and I both teach and research African American history, particularly what is commonly known as the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. We were having a conversation about teaching and some of our frustrations at the under-education of our brilliant students about U.S. history in general and Black history in particular. In the process of bouncing ideas around about how to structure a course, or what questions needed answering, we came to the realization that we might have a book project here. So, we came to this as a methodological, intellectual, and teachable project that blossomed into a book with distinct and diverse chapters (from scholars at all ranks from different kinds of institutions) that all answer the questions about continuity and change over time while teaching history and provoking conversation and discourse.
Orisanmi Burton (OB): I begin the book by talking about its origin in an intergenerational assignment given to me in 2013 by Eddie Ellis who was an important figure in the Harlem Black Panther Party and the New York prison movement. Eddie shared with me that he felt that one of his greatest failures and one of the greatest failures of his contemporaries is that they had not adequately documented and theorized their intellectual labor in ways that demonstrated the theoretical and methodological accuracy and rigor that would allow their work to be recognized as scholarship. He indicated that I was well positioned to play that role. It was a real honor to be invited into this research process in this way by someone who was a scholar and intellectual in his own right. I took the assignment very seriously, and Tip of the Spear is the result.
CBFS: What do your recently published books teach us about the relationship between state violence and the Black freedom struggle?
MFP: The book teaches us the multiple ways women political prisoners were subjected to state violence and repression on their minds and bodies during the Black Freedom struggle. The inhumanity of the police and correctional officers ensured no age or gender was immune to state violence. Black Panther Party women opposed prison violence in several ways as they engaged in wellness practices and acts of care, studied revolutionary literature, refused medicine, organized community-building programs, wrote letters, demanded documentation in writing of the regulations that correctional officers attempted to enforce, and even physically fought back against assault from prison officials.
FH: One of the central premises of the book is that the Black freedom struggle is a direct response to state violence (narrowly and broadly defined). Moreover, struggle occurs on many registers as does the violence itself – which lends the study of the Black freedom struggle to local and community histories. For example, one essay deals with the Chicago PD, the attempts over time to reform from within, and the subsequent violence that occurred on the streets (more physical) and within the unions (with dismissals, sanctions, and undermining). Our book focuses on two points of mass movement on the Black freedom struggle timeline with the understanding that struggle can be one-on-one and nowhere near a mass movement.
OB: Tip of the Spear teaches us that repression, on its own, does not effectively quell Black movements. The whole book is about a revolutionary insurgency that erupted within a zone of political repression: the prison, which was used as a technique to try to crush movements, and which ultimately backfired. What ended up being most effective to crush? These movements were not in fact repression, but more seductive dispensations, particularly reforms that were undergirded by counterinsurgent logics.
CBFS: How are your books shaped by contemporary struggles against state violence, from Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian liberation movement?
MFP: This biography on Ericka Huggins foregrounds how acts of wellness organized the lives of some Black Panthers and helps us redefine the movement for the present generation engaged in self-care and holistic health. Ericka’s advocacy for the liberation of all oppressed people and the call to abolish prisons profoundly resonates with the principles of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, the #SayHerName movement, Black Youth Project 100, and other liberation movements. Black Panther Woman positions us to grasp the complex link between trauma and recovery and the need for wellness in advancing social change. Ericka’s lessons on political activism are intertwined with spirituality and promote compassion and well-being.
FH: Ultimately, we anchor the book on the claim that history matters – and to understand the present we need to understand the past. The essays, while disparate in their topics and actors, all coalesce around the necessity to understand power and politics (locally, nationally, and internationally) in order to predict behavior and rhetoric and then to meter the responses that exploit power and politics in specific ways.
OB: Black Lives Matter, defund the police, NoDAPL, and the national prison strikes all emerged as I was writing the book. I was paying close attention to these movements while writing and having a feeling of déjà vu because so many of the challenges and contradictions faced by people organizing against the state in the 1970s are similar to what people were facing in contemporary movements. I took this as an opportunity to really clarify some of these challenges of organizing around questions of violence, language, gender, reform, and Abolition. I used it as an opportunity to clarify some of these challenges and not necessarily to provide solutions, but to open up the contradictions such that people who are engaged in struggle today could have a basis for discussion that is rooted in a historical consciousness of what came before them.
AUTHOR BIOS
Mary Frances Phillips (BS, Michigan State University; MA, The Ohio State University; Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on race and gender in post-1945 social movements and the carceral state. Her research areas include the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Feminism, and Black Power Studies.
Her book, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins will be released in January 2025 with New York University Press’ Black Power Series. Black Panther Woman is both a critical study and biography of Black Panther Party veteran Ericka Huggins, one of the longest-serving women members in the organization. Her book historicizes women’s prison organizing, resistance, and collision with law enforcement of women political prisoners. 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. Outside of the academy, her essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, Black Youth Project, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, Black Perspectives. Her work has garnered media attention in TIME Magazine, the New-York Historical Museum & Library Women at the Center blog series, the Detroit Free Press; BronxNet Cable Television; Bronx News 12; WBAI Pacifica Radio, New York City; and WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio.
Françoise N. Hamlin (Ph.D. Yale University, 2004) is an Associate Professor in History and Africana Studies. She earned her Masters from the University of London, and her B.A. from the University of Essex (both in United States Studies). Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War is a co-edited anthology published by the University of Florida Press in 2015. It was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2023 with the University Press of Mississippi she republished the previously self-published 1975 autobiography of Mississippi civil rights activist, Vera Pigee, The Struggle of Struggles, and added a full introduction, annotation, and a timeline. This book was named one of the top five books about women in the civil rights movement in the Wall Street Journal in January 2024. Hamlin’s new research focuses on youth, trauma, and activism. At Brown she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses primarily in twentieth century U.S. history, African American history, southern history, cultural studies and Africana Studies. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Professor Hamlin was a DuBois-Mandela-Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan (2004-2005), and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2005-2007). Since then she has been a Charles Warren Center Fellow at Harvard University (2007-2008), and a Woodrow Wilson-Mellon Fellow (2010-2011). Most recently she was the American Council of Learned Societies, Frederick Burkhardt Fellow (2017-2018) at the Radcliffe Institute, and an Andrew Carnegie Foundation fellow from 2021-2023
As a social anthropologist working in the United States, Orisanmi Burton’s research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression. Within this broad area of inquiry, his present work explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment. Burton analyzes the productivity of this collision; how it gives rise to new formations of knowledge, subjectivity, intimacy, gender, organization, and statecraft across time and space. He asks: how do Black radical demands generated within and against US prisons presage alternative futures for people and places on both sides of prison walls? In what ways have state-organized responses to these demands – via diverse configurations of repression, reform, and incorporation – been key drivers of US historical development and state formation? Through what bureaucratic, ideological, and material processes is this dynamic political struggle transformed into an administrative problem of “criminal justice”? How can conceptualizing the US prison as a domain of war open new analytical, theoretical, and methodological terrain? His first book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published in October 2023 by The University of California Press.
Lucien Baskin is a doctoral student in Urban Education at the Grad Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. Their dissertation focuses on histories of solidarity and organizing at CUNY. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, are an inaugural Freedom and Justice Institute fellow at Scholars for Social Justice, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. They organize with Graduate Center for Palestine and are a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.