Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party
Photographs by Stephen Shames, text by Ericka Huggins
ACC Art Books £35

IT IS impossible not to be moved by Stephen Shames’s innocent and spontaneous documentation of the communal “‘survival programmes” that were inspired by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s.

He was 20 years old, an amateur, and he found himself in the middle of a defiant and self-organising mass movement that was addressing existential problems in the black community in a way that was without precedent in the history of the US.

Suddenly, all of it is interesting.

What does the packing of 10,000 food parcels look like? What kind of calm dedication can be seen in the body language of the woman doing the packing?

Who does the preparation of food for primary school children, and what is the atmosphere in the classroom?

With what kind of materials does a mass testing programme for sickle cell anaemia promote itself when the programme is organised by the community and without government support?

All these details are caught with Shames’s unguarded and celebratory eye. The beauty of his black and white photography is not to be found in their formality or composition, apparently effortless and excellent as it is, but their social content.

This is an important and comprehensive work of documentation.

It is framed by the words of the former communist Angela Davis and Ericka, the widow of John Huggins, and gathers short testimonies from women who were involved in the party in the course of its decade and a half of existence.

Davis emphasises that the majority of BPP members were women, and Huggins confirms that the BPP was a majority female movement from early on, 1969. She calls the book “a very late, very humble shout of gratitude to those unknown and unsung for so many years.”

Why, you wonder, has it taken so long for women to celebrate their participation in the movement in this way, and why is their numerical superiority among the membership so surprising?

The women speak of their experience at that time as the most rewarding experience of their lives, in terms of solidarity, and the satisfactions of teaching, bringing medical aid to the community, and nourishing children together.

This kind of experience surely preceded the BPP, even if it was never achieved on a mass scale and across the US, as it momentarily was then. The motivation to create communal self-help was a potential that already existed inside the black community, that the BPP could amplify.

What is curious in these accounts is how the lessons learned are expressed in terms of individual development rather than collective or political consciousness.

“I want women and girls to know that it’s important to concentrate on yourself,” says Veronica Roni Hagopian. “Take care of yourself first, because if you don’t nobody will.”

You hardly need a revolutionary movement to learn this kind of home truth.

So what is this “very late, very humble” very expensive coffee table book trying to convey about a now defunct black rights mass movement at this moment in time?

Davis suggests that the BPP inspired Black Lives Matter, but BLM is a completely different phenomenon to the BPP. It does not have a revolutionary programme, or an organisation that aims to create communal self-help on a mass scale.

When I interviewed Elaine Brown for the Star she dismissed its slogan as “plantation mentality.” To whom is the plea that black lives matter addressed? To the white overlord?
 
Black Lives Matter is not a political programme but a media event, and for that reason devoid of revolutionary content, and it is a shame that these marvellous photographs are packaged inside a politically neutral offering.

The absence of Brown from the book, when she lead the movement from 1974-1977 and was the principal “Comrade Sister,” is telling, and painful.

My favourite images show the faces of those women who are selling the Black Panther paper. Any single edition of that paper would be both cheaper, and less compromised than this book, beautiful as it is.