Ericka Huggins
Ericka Huggins was nineteen years old when she and her husband John Huggins drove from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles to start a Black Panther Party chapter. Two months later, John was shot and killed on the UCLA campus. She was nursing their newborn daughter. She kept working. She was then arrested, held in solitary confinement for two years awaiting trial in New Haven on murder charges, and the charges were dismissed. She went on to run the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School — a model of free, community-controlled education that provided meals, healthcare, and rigorous instruction to hundreds of children.
Ericka Huggins joined the Black Panther Party as a college student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where she met John Huggins. They were both committed to the same vision: a Black community that controlled its own institutions, defended itself from police violence, and provided for its own children.
In 1969, they drove to Los Angeles to help establish a Southern California chapter. They had a newborn daughter, Mai. On January 17, 1969, John Huggins was shot and killed on the UCLA campus during a confrontation between Black student organizations. Ericka was nineteen years old, a widow, nursing an infant, and a Black Panther Party organizer.
She kept working.
In May 1969, she was arrested in New Haven, Connecticut on charges related to the death of Alex Rackley, a Panther suspected of being an FBI informant. She was held in solitary confinement for nearly two years awaiting trial. During that time she wrote poetry, organized other prisoners, led hunger strikes for better conditions, and maintained her political clarity under conditions designed to break her.
Bobby Seale, the Panther co-founder, was tried alongside her. In May 1971, after the jury deadlocked and could not reach a verdict, the judge dismissed all charges.
She was released and went back to work. She became the director of the Oakland Community School — the Black Panther Party's flagship education program. The school provided free breakfast, healthcare, and rigorous academic instruction to children from pre-K through elementary school. It was a model of what community-controlled education could look like. It ran for eight years and served hundreds of children before closing in 1981 due to funding.
She later earned a doctorate. She has taught at universities, continued organizing, and remained active as a public intellectual and activist. She is in her seventies and still working.
There is no safety for anyone when the people who are supposed to protect us are the ones we need protection from.Ericka Huggins
She lost her husband at nineteen while nursing their newborn. She spent two years in solitary confinement on charges that were ultimately dismissed. The FBI's COINTELPRO program targeted the Black Panther Party specifically and her personally. The personal cost of her commitment to community organizing was total — she paid it and kept going.
Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party programs she helped build challenge a distorted narrative. The Panthers are often discussed primarily through the lens of armed self-defense and law enforcement confrontation. What gets underweighted is the social programs: the free breakfast program that fed tens of thousands of children daily (and became the model for the federal school breakfast program), the community health clinics, the Oakland Community School.
She built institutions. Under conditions of COINTELPRO-directed government harassment, assassination of leadership, and deliberate destruction of the organization, she ran a school that provided for children's full development. That is the part of the Panther story that belongs in every account of American education history.