BPP Women's Legacy Project

I began researching women in the Black Panther Party during my sophomore year of high school. During the 30+ years since I began, I continued my mission of bringing voice and visibility to these womens’ community and social movement activism as I’ve collected and written their narratives into history. My award-winning Harvard University undergraduate senior honors thesis became a book chapter in the Charles Jones edited anthology, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (1998). My early work on women can also be found in encyclopedia’s and journal articles. I engaged in as well as guided student and community research on women while I was a Stanford graduate student and founding director of the Black Panther Party Research Project. I co-founded a collective intellectual project in 2016 with three fellow women BPP scholars, The Intersectional Black Panther Party Oral History Project, to center women and gender in BPP history. We engaged in public history projects, public presentations, as well as peer reviewed journal publications to change the narrative. Since 2020, I have collaborated with the West Oakland Mural Project in their effort to locate as many names of BPP women as possible to place on the mural (2020-present). Additionally, I was a historical consultant and introduction co-author for the Mural Project’s Women of the BPP Activity Book. Most recently, I was a photographic archival consultant and oral history consultant for the ericka huggins and Stephen Shames co-authored work, Comrade Sisters Women of the Black Panther Party (2022) and the author of the publisher’s official Comrade Sisters Women of the Black Panther Party Discussion and Resource Guide (2022).