 I met Judy at the California Historical Society where she was a speaker for them. And Terita McKell is her friend and fellow Black Panther member from the 60s. Both ladies were involved in the Black Panther Party in different capacities. And they've come to help us understand their perspective on what happened then. And how far we've come and where we are today. So please help me welcome them. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, I would like for you to. OK. Yes. I'll go first, no problem. So I'm Judy Juanita. And I was Judy Hart during the 60s, a native of Berkeley. And I was raised in Oakland. I first ran into Huey Newton and Bobby Seal at Oakland City College, which was what Merritt College was called then. And it was located on the old Grove Street. And it actually became the Grove Street College for a while. But in the 50s and the 60s, it was Oakland City College. Actually, a few years beyond that, Evel Younger, who was attorney general for Ronald Reagan, called Merritt College a hotbed for revolutionaries. And yeah, right. So like many young people in California, I just went to the community college at 16. I just graduated from high school. And I became actually an accidental radical. By that I mean I just go out on the front lawn and look at all the radicals on their soapboxes. Now on college campuses, if you go down any kind of commons area, they're selling earrings and t-shirts or something. But then there was the SDS table, the WEB Du Bois table, all of the radical groups. And also, there were many, many black radicals. I didn't understand what they were talking about then. I didn't understand the depth of it. When I heard Fair Play for Cuba, I thought that was about volleyball teams going to Cuba for something, or I mean I just, it was just totally out of my frame of reference. However, they were very interesting. And I loved listening to them. I immediately saw that they were far more intelligent than most of the people that I was dealing with in the classroom. So that began my political education. However, I was very intent on getting out of Oakland City College. And I certainly wouldn't have identified it as a feminist reason, but it was. If at that time, because community college was free, we basically just paid $2 a semester for our student ID card. People stayed at community college for years and years and years. But the scuttlebutt was that if you were a woman and you stayed there a long time, if you stayed longer than two years, you were old meat. So I was very determined. Nobody's going to call me old meat. I'm getting out of here. So I concentrated on my studies. However, when I transferred to San Francisco State, it was a totally different atmosphere. San Francisco State was attracting people from all over the world and all over the country who were, for instance, the children of trade unionists who had come back from traveling abroad, who were children of the working class. Just was a very different atmosphere. I'm so happy now and understand why it wasn't in my life to go to UC Berkeley to transfer to Berkeley, but it was in my life to transfer to San Francisco State. After my first semester there, which was the spring of 67, during that summer, I can't remember now the dates, but the summer was the summer that a contingent of students at San Francisco State went down and participated in the voter registration and the freedom bus rides. When they came back, led by Roger Alvarado, some of you may know him, they radicalized the entire campus. And once again, school was far more interesting on the outside than it was on the inside, inside the classroom. Because we hadn't changed the curriculum yet. So I became involved in the tutorial program. And then it was a gradual radicalization from there. My roommates and I in San Francisco were the first group of students from San Francisco State to join the Black Panther Party in the spring of 67. Yes, spring of 67. Huey and Bobby and several other Panthers came to the campus recruiting just like IBM and Clorox. They came and they had a room reserved and they had sign-up sheets in the back. And my roommates were all for it and they said, let's join. We were all pretty radical. We had the huge naturals and the whole stance. But my mother, who was a lifelong government employee, had always drilled in my head, never sell your body, never sell your soul, never sell your country. So I hesitated. However, that summer, instead of being the summer of love as the media named it in years afterwards, it was another long, hot summer, meaning the American cities were aflame with urban riots and rebellions like in Detroit, Los Angeles. They had happened all over in larger cities. So by August, I joined with my roommates. So I want to talk about how black women then gained some kind of ascendancy in the movement and in the world at large. First of all, the blackest beautiful movement or the black empowerment movement had to deal with color cast in the black community, had to deal with Lena Horne as beautiful and no one else is. It had to deal with the mulatto complex. That had ascendancy. When I say it had ascendancy, I mean actually one's fate or one's destiny was determined by one's skin color, whether or not one was light skinned or dark skinned. Even our historically black colleges like Howard and Spellman and Morehouse had in the earlier part of last century what they call the paper bag test. And people had to be lighter than the color of the paper bag in order to be admitted into certain schools and indefinitely in certain fraternities. Certain fraternities, sororities were for lighter skinned people or darker skinned people. So this was a cleavage in the black community for years and years. It was a caste system. So black women had to overcome that very unhealthy limitation from stark skin prejudice first. I had a pretty long interview with Richard Wolinski at KPFA. And he said, was black as beautiful? Was that really that important? And it took me a while to kind of real finish reeling. Yes, it was. Because we had to be empowered first within ourselves and get over a certain degree of self-hatred and a lack of self-esteem before we could turn around and face the larger community. So I have to point out that, and I deal with that a lot in my book, Virgin Soul, Colorism, the women in the Black Panther Party who were first put up in the front or were Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis and Erica Huggins, Annie Lane Brown. Well, all of those women were what is called high yellow. And they're all very intelligent, very competent women. But the blackest, beautiful movement, like all the other movements in any society, take years and decades to penetrate different levels of society. So it wasn't until around 1972 when Sounder came out that the beauty of a dark-skinned woman like Cicely Tyson was recognized as a beauty standard, meaning other people tried to look like Cicely Tyson. Other young women tried to style their hair in a very short natural. So the color prejudice that was in society was in the party too. So my roommates and I were all on the other side of the paper bag. So we came in. And also, as we discussed the pill, the pill had made sexual freedom possible for anyone at that point. And for the first time in history, women were in total control of their own sexual destiny. And women did not have to marry somebody just because they had sex with them. They did not have to have a baby just because they got pregnant. So my roommates and I exercised our sexual freedom. What happened with that? So one of my roommates, who was Bobby Seale's scheduler, she, her brother-in-law, who was what we called an older dude. He was like 28 or whatever. He said, we lived in a big, a fabulous nine-room flat, which became a safe house for the party. And he said, people are saying that you all are a big cat house and that everybody, you know, guys can go over there and jump on you and get you any time. So you better watch out. Your reputation is spreading. And actually, two of us were extremely sexually active, and three of us weren't. So we just laughed at that. We thought that was a big joke. We didn't take it seriously in terms of it impeding our activity. Now, that's dealing with family. How we dealt with it in the party, we were in at a very early stage, 67, 68, 69. So we became known as difficult. Does anybody know what that? OK. Anybody know what that means, you know? OK. One of my roommates, her take on it, and she actually was going with little Bobby Hutton at the time that he died, she called it Not Going for the Okie Doke. So that meant if somebody asked you to sleep with them, if you wanted to, yes. If you didn't want to, you weren't going for the Okie Doke. So sometimes one of us would come home from being out at a party, or what have you, or with someone we would say, so did you go for the Okie Doke, that kind of thing. So what I'm trying to approach is what my second book deals with de facto feminism. De facto feminism meaning black women had to learn how to fight and how to be independent, even if they didn't want to be. We had to be. Our source of income was not tied to a definite great flannel suit or a man with a good union job. We had to form friendships with one another, close friendships, because oftentimes the men in our lives weren't there for long, or they weren't there for a lifetime. And even the mortality rate show that the men are not, the men don't live as long, black men don't live as long. So oftentimes then we have to turn to one another for companionship, for emotional support. And even for finances, for finances. So the other thing, OK, let me just t-t-t-t-t. OK, so 75% of the Black Panther Party was female, OK? Yeah, most in other words. And there was never more than maybe 5,000 to 8,000 members nationwide, OK? So it's very small. It's just that we have a lot of what are called fellow travelers, always people coming out to the rallies. When I was a young person in Oakland going to DeFremere Park on 14th and Adeline, that was the hotspot. So people came out there. They weren't necessarily a member of the Black Panther Party. However, they were aware that coming out there meant that they put their lives in some kind of jeopardy, because at any time as the saying went, the pigs might vamp. So people went out there, and our parents were all alarmed because we were there. But the women in the party, we were more in the background other than perhaps what you would call the stars. And Terita and I have talked about it, and we call ourselves worker bees, worker bees. So I worked on the newspaper. And I think it's very funny that in my book, somebody told me that they were discussing it at a Panther, I mean, they were over Emory's house or something. And they said, oh, just turn to page 200. That's when the Panther stuff really starts, you know? So I just want to just read a little bit of that to give you an idea of what we did. And I think when you hear it, you can see that we were participating in an equal way. I signed and joined the Black Panther Party because the party's indignation and cry for self-determination matched my own. It took me a while to see that, to feel that. When I did, I became a member and went through basic training, political education classes, weapon handling, setting up rallies at different colleges and schools, disseminating important position papers and quotes to the media outlets, both alternative and mainstream. I began seeing the world of the Black Panther Party in every utterance around me. It was like a torrent. Eventually, I became an editor at the Black Panther Party paper. I thought I'd renounced journalism with my disgust at the Gator. It was a San Francisco State paper. But like a persistent ex-lover, it kept showing up at my doorstep looking for action. This is how we put out the Black Panther Party inter-communal news service. We got documents, position papers, and editorials from Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, who was the Minister of Information, or George Murray, Eldridge, who was the Minister of Information, or George Murray, the Minister of Education. George, who was a fellow student at state, had handwriting that drove me absolutely nuts. Pages and pages, since he was a genius, of course, of chicken scratching that took me hours to transcribe. There were endorsements, poems, and reports of police brutality and repression from all over the Bay Area, then from all over the United States. Some needed retyping and proofreading, which I did. Many we were able to reproduce directly. Emery, the artist, did the entire layout and the editorial cartoons. Huey's picture, front and center, his eyes above the fold always, glistening with black defiance. Once we were through, we hand-carried it to the printer. When we got it back, we sold it alongside the rank and file for a quarter. My ears and my eyes and ears took in so much. So I'm trying to demonstrate that. It was quite an experience. We were there, we were in it. It was like people asked me to the stay. How come I don't see more pictures of you? And if you go to the Panther movie, the one that came out that was around my friend from New York, she said, did you have a black and white dress? I think that you look at about 20 minutes in. And so I got it on the internet. And sure enough, there it was in that black and white dress that I used to wash out every night because it was so easy. But anyway, over and over again, that black and white zigzaggy dress shows up in the background. And to me, that's so emblematic. We were the worker bees in the back, absolutely necessary and influencing many things because our families and our friends knew what we were doing and feared for us. So I don't know if that's... I think that's enough for right now. It's all good. Thank you. Wow, I tell people, I still have PTSD when the exhibit we saw there at the Oakland Museum. I walked in and I was like... And I kept looking around and I just walked straight out. And then I'm shaking. And then there's tears. And I said, where is this from? I can't remember. There are things I cannot remember. But the tissues hold memories. And bits and pieces come out. And so, yes, that was a time not long out of foster care. So my coming up into the Black Panther Party was as a foster child. So I was already disenfranchised. I was already put off by the foster parent the state gave me who took care of foster children, working mothers, and a stable of women owned by a pimp. And that's what... Because I said, what's stable? What's a stable? Fine young fillies. And there were things that the Panthers were talking about self-determination and moving forward. And there were things that I witnessed just being in that foster care situation in San Francisco with the woman whose baby was sick. And she's changing the diaper. And the penis is red and swollen. And so I suggest to her that she run away. Just take the baby and run, but she belongs to this pimp. And so there's this patriarchy that's so instilled. I also learned more about the patriarchal issues through a book called Widow Black Mama by Iceberg Slim. That wasn't even required reading, but it drew me because it explained how blacks would lose their land in the South, come north, and then just lose everything. The male loses his dignity. My father, what I remembered of him before we went into foster care, said that there were things white men were afraid of regarding black men. And so in that fear, there was how to stand up for your rights or learning how to be quiet certain times. There were things that my grandfather would say, who could pass, he looked. Now, he was mulatto, and he was the light-skinded one, as they would say, in families. But all of that, him telling me when I was seven years old about a lynching that he witnessed in Louisiana because my grandfather and my grandmother had to leave Louisiana to get married. They kept the article, they called it miscegenation, but he had that one drop of black blood, but still it was that energy there for him to tell me about a lynching. So disenfranchisement in foster care, the lynching before I go into foster care, my mother passed when I was 10, so we went into foster care because my father couldn't handle it. He kept seeing spirits, and that's another story because, wow, as we talked about astrology, the summer of love and all of that, astrology, all the things, the palm readings, the tarot, all of that energy was very much alive because we wanted to be alive. We were discounting the establishment, the religion, all of these things that tried to hold us down. And then Martin Luther King was killed the day before my birthday. And my daughter's father was the president of the Black Student Union, at Lainey. And so there were these things that were mounting. Things were just, they're mounting. And then, wow, we have a disease called sickle cell that specifically affects black people. And when the clinic begins to start with the Black Panthers, the free health clinic, they do testing. And I see these vans out at Lainey in different places where they're doing that, testing for sickle cell. I also had this drive for biological science. And so that's what my thing was. I said, we have to fix something. Something has to be done. And so the sciences is where I ended up. The pill is what I learned about in physiology where I forget who this amazing professor, but he would show us films about what the pill could do to the body of a woman and how you should be careful with it. So I took everything, all the classes for pre-med for just smelling cadavers, walking into a grocery store and smelling the formaldehyde, which broke the meat thing immediately. If you go from a cadaver to the meat section of Safeway, it's not happening. So I really got into the health arena. Got involved with the free health clinic. And there were so many things. I wrote, and forgive me for being a little spacey because I'm addressing something that was a big turnaround for me to come out of foster care in 67, 68, be kicked out of high school because the foster parent wouldn't let you go to school. I mean, there's all the, you know, so what was the panel up here before that said it didn't matter if you were black or white or, you know, whatever your gender was. You're going to oppress me. That's the bottom line. If you're going to oppress me, I'm not going to have anything to do with you. And so I'm looking at all these layers and levels of oppression. So by the time I'm 11, 12 years old, I have bells palsy and half my face goes dead. There are girls, a Spanish, white, Jewish, black girls talking about how their fathers raped them, what they went through. And this is in Schenetic her cottage on 150th. All these things are mounting up. And then black people, you know, I'm remembering the lynching my father talking to me about all these things that black men go through. And then hearing Stokely Carmichael at Merritt College. That was that was a astounding. Listening to some of the things that later on I would be able to actually do with him, which was to interview him, speak with him. And he among the all those that I would speak to, he was accessible. His heart was there. He would look you in the eye and speak about your concern in the community, how people were being treated, what was going on. He made a statement in one of the interviews, and I quote it in the book as well. Education in this country makes you stupid, but what is worse, it makes you arrogant in your stupidity. I said, whoa, because I was witnessing things. I had the circular way of thinking that no one could address while I was in school. I was, you know, any exam I took had to connect, you know, sociology had to connect to physiology had to connect to, you know, all chemistry. I, I didn't understand why it did not connect, nor why I felt it had to. And so when he said that, I was able to understand not only is our oppression relating to just our physicality and skin color, but it's also relating to the mind. I had a chemistry professor who told me that I could not use the method of solving problems, even though I got the right answer. He said, I had to use the method he taught. And I said, but why if we come up with the same answer? And he couldn't give me an answer. I ended up working and studying with Africans in my class, because, you know, Africans would come here and just blow chemistry up. Kim 1A, 1B, I mean, wow, they were on it. So I studied with them. And I said, yeah, I'm used to, they would say, we don't know why they make it so difficult. Pounds and ounces should be like grams and moles. I said, yeah, that makes sense to me, you know, so I studied with them. And I said, well, if we turn in our homework together, it would all work. And so they got all theirs correct. And wow. And then I get mine. I said, well, what happened? I said, we studied together, used the same methods. He said, to me, they're going back to Africa. You're not. You have to stick with the method I give you. That was like, I had temporary aphasia. I couldn't, you know, I was a single mother. I couldn't stop. I couldn't, I couldn't, it just blew my mind. I said, how many ways can we be oppressed? How many ways are we being oppressed? At the George Jackson Free Health Clinic, when we recognized that drugs were being spread throughout our communities to weaken the black power base, to cause strife in the communities between those who wanted the drugs out and those who used the drugs to self-medicate and make money. So all of this was going on. We tried to set up methadone programs, which we thought at the time methadone would help people get off heroin. We learned other things, but, you know, we were trying. We felt we did a number of things that we felt were very, very powerful for our people. So, I don't know what more I can say other than I spent some time at the clinic. We studied and we did a number of things, but I wrote this so I could just give you an idea of what happened in 1994. I don't even know how they found my number, but the Tribune calls. We were soldiers on the battlefield with life light in our eyes, said Sister Sonja. 1994 Tribune calls asked, how many guns did you have at the clinic? How many guns? Not how many services were provided? Not how many programs were implemented? Not how many doctors or healthcare workers volunteered? Not even why we cared to put into practice such a program with so many hospitals in our community? No, the reporter didn't ask any of that. She asked, how many guns did we have? Not what illnesses or diseases most affected our communities or how often we provided diabetes, sickle cell, and high blood pressure tests, if at all, or what was my field at the clinic, though I could have told her my interest in certain grains to regain genetic memory. But she was more interested in how many guns we had. Not who ran the clinic or what hours and days of the week we were open, or who was our hero or she wrote about such a task as managing the clinic, or what was assessed that continues to sustain community's health needs today. No, the reporter asked, how many guns did you have? Late teens, 20-something, black women volunteered as interns, studied to become doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and therapists, did homework between seeing patients. Black doctors Talbert Small and Eddie Newsom, where volunteer staff physicians tried to reverse curse of drug addictions purposely placed in neighborhoods to weaken black power base, developed programs to neutralize drug threats, opened methadone program believed at that time would eradicate heroin, took vital signs, did sickle cell tests, tested diabetes, kept patient records, organized charts, med room, pharmacy, gave better care than Kaiser dared, held life in our eyes, books, our bullets, educationally armed knowledge, our right to fight through labeled walls imprisoning us as violent drug infested gun carrying sex craze ignorant jigger booze. Kwame Ture warned us, we must be politically prepared for what is coming. We have no choice. The revolution is coming whether you want it or not. How many guns did we have? We were soldiers on the battlefield with life light in our eyes. Sure. My idea that the circulated in the coal pills were genocidal. Yeah. And I'm wanting to just comment on that. Well, not only were they, they were genocidal but also had a side effect. This freedom love thing was great. It was beautiful. I got pregnant. But it scared me what I learned in physiology. We really got into the science of what was going on. But black people, as a people, we felt always hindered in our development and family. It's no accident today that so many children have to live with their grandparents because so many parents had been disenfranchised from their community through drugs, through, you know, lost, just losing minds. The fact that had I not gotten into understanding the circular way of thinking is a natural, cultural, indigenous way of thinking. And so my problem-solving method allowed me in that understanding to keep sanity. Many people don't have that. And they aren't taught that. And that's why Watson and Crick, I'm sorry I got a little bit off, but that's my circular thinking again. But Watson and Crick, the geneticists said that, you know, there are biological toxins. Sure, but there are also cultural ones as well. And so, yeah, with this, the stuff that's happening with the care that they're putting on, they're doing something with putting it on the arm now, anything that hampers the endocrine system that slows it or tries to do something to it to regulate it can be yet dangerous. There were things, people ended up with cysts on the ovaries and full opium tubes and, you know, certain forms of cancers and all kinds of things. But yeah, that was discussed. And then going through why black men were afraid to even have children or why some of us were afraid to have children because, you know, what are we bringing our children into? And it was all of that. And then Dr. Shockley trying to talk about our intelligence. And I'm so glad Dr. Francis Kress, Wellesing Third Generation Psychiatrists took care of that. Yeah. Did you share what you learned from those? Yes, I very much like to speak to that because my sister was involved in that. My sister is nine years younger than I am. And my mom used to call us her nine year delayed twins because it seems like, seems like whatever I did then nine years later she would do it. So actually nine years later she got involved in the Panthers, went into an intentional house in her senior year of high school, senior year of high school. And by that time the Panther Party had worked out those internal contradictions about the treatment of women. So by the time she went there it was different. But I was at the beginning and it was raw. So she profited tremendously from being in this house. She had tremendous support. My mother and father who were always supportive of us, whatever we chose to do even if they didn't agree with it. And they would take her food or come by and get her car checked or what have you. And so in that way, that communal sense that always existed in the party. I always say the party consisted of one person from every tribe, every tribe in the black community, one person grieving the system. And so that one person was looked at by the rest of the family as kind of like you're doing it for us. So my parents supported her. And I think by their presence and the presence of other parents and other people in the community, it was like a watchdog. Frankly speaking, my father kind of like saying, if you mistreat my daughter, I'll kick your ass, that kind of thing. So yeah, so there was intentional community at that time. And it profited her tremendously. And she was also encouraged to go to college. She was always a bright student. She's now an attorney. She was encouraged to go to Mills. She got into Mills. And so it was a whole different situation by then. But of course, everything had changed by 74, including Nixon being drummed out. And I'm thankful we didn't go through that though. There were a majority of women at the clinic that worked. And we were there from, we just had different shifts. But in the evening, I don't remember being accosted or anyone talking about that person did this or that or any male mistreatment. I didn't even. But it went on. It went on in the early days. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, but we spoke out against it. We fought against it. A lot of people quit because of it. But it changed. It changed. All right. Well, thank you very much, ladies. And again, it's break time 20 after. Thank you very much.