Images of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense need no captioning. Black men and women in leather, perfectly rounded afros, guns crossing the torso — the organization’s aesthetics dominate public consciousness. Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, co-authored by Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins, presents these photographs as well as more intimate ones of women coordinating free grocery drives, free ambulatory services, or political education classes.
Published last October, Comrade Sisters focuses on the women who made up over two-thirds of the Black Panther Party. Shames’s many portraits, candids, and landscape shots appear alongside first and second-hand accounts; Huggins, an activist and leader in the party, coordinated interviews and tributes that speak to the Panthers’ sense of purpose and community. I had a dream about saying the names of the women of the Black Panther Party, some of whom have never been thanked,” Huggins said during a panel at the Columbia University Institute for Research in African-American Studies last October. Shames spent seven years taking pictures of the Black Panther Party and was one of the few outside photographers given access to its inner workings. He was a student at the University of California, Berkley, and came into contact with Bobby Seale and the Panthers through his involvement with and photography of student activist groups and anti-war organizing.
Earlene Coleman prepares bags of food for the Panther Free Food Program in Oakland, California in March 1972.
The co-founder of the party expressed interest in Shames’s work and the pair developed a working relationship. He photographed the 60 “Community Survival Programs” organized by the party as well as meetings and rallies, many of which were attended, staffed, and run by women.
The words “purpose,” “family,” and “love” come up frequently in their testimonies. “You have to love people to serve them. I was so loved,” said Barbara Easley-Cox of the Philadelphia and International Chapters. “So blessed on this earth because of my sisters, all of us, who came into the Party.” This sentiment, that the Panthers were a family who fueled their service with love for the community, appears in some form across the many recollections.
“The women of the Black Panther Party are not special in some way that separates them from others,” writes Huggins in her introductory remarks for Comrade Sisters. “They are simply women who, whether at 12, 14, 16, 18, or 21, decided that there had to be ‘a way out of no way’ for Black and poor people.”
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