Treacherous Intersections
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            Another welcome departure from traditional Panther scholarship is Phillips’ focus on her subject’s spiritual practice, a transformational tool that Huggins developed in solitary confinement and later shared with other female prisoners. Huggins, now 77, has continued to practice yoga and meditation throughout her life. Phillips’ account of love and support among women contributes an unusual dimension to extant Panther historiography.

     Organized in six parts, Black Panther Woman contains many revelations. Besides describing Huggins’s family background, the first part details her rejection of her mother’s Old Testament Christianity and the early self-protective thought practices she developed to cope with her father’s physically abusive behavior. Another chapter traces Huggins’ political development, activated by her attendance, at age fifteen and against her parents’ wishes, at the 1963 March on Washington, and continues through her joining the Black Panther Party and the violent murder of John Huggins and a comrade in the organization.

            Five months after her first arrest, Huggins and five other Panther women were arrested on fabricated charges and remanded to the Niantic Correctional Institutional (formerly the Connecticut State Farm and Reformatory for Women). The three chapters covering Huggins’ eighteen-month incarceration form the center of the book, replete with stories of horrible abuse and the female prisoners’ heroic resistance.

            One such story involves a prisoner named Linda, whose all-night screams of heroin withdrawal rocked the cellblock. Huggins recalls that she and fellow prisoners repeatedly called for help, to no avail. When Linda was found dead the following morning, prisoners learned she had died from inflammation caused by an infection. In response, prisoners developed a surreptitious network of outreach to detoxifying women using strategies like smuggling candy and cigarettes to them and lying on the floor with them to talk them through withdrawal.

            The network that Huggins and a non-Panther prisoner formed was called the Sister Love Collective and is the subject a of a full chapter in Black Panther Woman. Under the guise of operating a hair salon, prisoners were able to exchange important information about their legal needs and plan resistance strategies. They organized oppositional actions, including hunger strikes and the establishment of bail funds. Phillips makes much of the increased self-esteem these women experienced through hair and makeup, occasionally risking generalizations about adherence to “female beauty standards.” Still, the positive impact of this cross-racial organization cannot be overstated, and positioning the salon as an extension of the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s and ’70s provides a useful historical context.

            While Huggins recognized her bisexuality early on and made acceptance of it a condition of her relationships with men, Phillips reports that “’[I]t was in prison that Ericka first fell in love with a woman.” Although Huggins “refrained from assigning a label to their connection” and her love interest was transferred to another floor, probably to disrupt their relationship, Phillips describes the Sister Love Collective as a diverse, multiracial queer space. Another love interest for Huggins appears during her trial, when she develops what Phillips describes as a “romantic friendship” with Jan Van Flattern, a white lesbian journalist who covered the trial for a left-leaning underground wire service. While this relationship also remained platonic, Van Flattern proved to be an important ally to Sister Love members who needed connections to the outside world.

            The last reference to Huggins’ same-sex love occurs in the book’s epilogue, where Phillips declares almost as an aside while discussing Huggins postgraduate studies: “Four years prior, she found love with Lisbet Tellefsen whom she has been with for over seventeen years.” This circumspect treatment of Huggins’ same-sex romances corresponds with Phillips’ earlier clarification that “while Ericka has a fraught relationship with labels because she does not feel that she fits within their confinement, she leans most to the term ‘queer.’” Thus the intensity of Huggins’ attraction to women is recognized but downplayed, possibly in accordance with the subject’s wishes.

            Another apparent accommodation to Huggins is more problematical. In the introduction, Phillips acknowledges Huggins’ condition that certain parts of her life be excised from the narrative. Phillips explains: “I constantly negotiated respect for her privacy and her resistance to letting the world see her unguarded, scissoring out some stories and parts of her life per her request.” That this acquiescence undermines the biography is made clear in the epilogue, when Phillips explains that Huggins left the Black Panthers in 1981 because of “the sexual violence she endured within the organization.” End of discussion.

            One key point not included in this passage is the widely reported 2007 statement by Huggins that Panther cofounder Huey Newton raped her repeatedly and threatened to hurt her family if she told anyone. In her own account, published elsewhere, Huggins explains that Newton’s assaults prompted her to leave the party. By excluding this material about Newton, Phillips obfuscates the range of adversities that Black Panther women, including Ericka Huggins, had to face.

            That said, Black Panther Woman performs an important service in exposing the atrocities of the prison system and the FBI’s lawless persecution of the Black Panther Party. By focusing on the life of an important female leader, Phillips highlights the Panthers’ many accomplishments in community- building and care. Ericka Huggins is an exemplary figure whose spiritual journey is worthy of study. However, readers will need to look elsewhere for the complete story.