Fred Hampton Jr was days away from taking his first breath when his father was assassinated. Still in his mother’s womb, he would have sensed the shots fired by police into his parents’ bedroom at the back of 2337 Monroe Street, Chicago.
He would have absorbed the muffled screams, felt the adrenaline rushing through his mother’s veins, been jolted by her violent arrest. Could he also have somehow sensed the moment of his father’s death?
His dad was “Chairman” Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter and deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, who was sleeping beside his pregnant fiancee when 14 Chicago police officers burst into the apartment. They shot him in bed, striking him twice in the head. Hampton, who was 21, was killed on the spot.
The attack – up to 99 incoming gunshots and only one fired by the Panthers from inside – also claimed the life of Panther Mark Clark in what later emerged was a meticulously planned, FBI-backed operation.
Twenty-five days later, on 29 December 1969, Akua Njeri (then Deborah Johnson), gave birth to a baby boy. From that moment on, the child’s life was to be defined by the father whom he never met.
Now 55, Fred Hampton Jr self-identifies as “chairman” in his own right. Not of the Black Panther Party, but of the Panther cubs – the children of the movement. As he put it: “I am a Black Panther cub by birth, as well as by battle.”
The Guardian has talked to nine Panther cubs across the US over the past two years. All have shared intimate stories about their exceptional childhoods, born to parents who challenged America’s white establishment in a bid for what they saw as Black self-determination. They talked about being witness to a seminal period of Black history, from the late 1960s onwards. And they also articulated a painful truth: that radical change does not come for free. It commands a price that so often is paid by the children of the revolution.
Hampton Jr has a particularly poignant way of encapsulating the emotional roller-coaster of his 55 years on Earth. “This is a blessing and a burden,” he said. “There is heat that comes with this. I don’t regret it. I’m not crying the blues.”
Over many hours of interviews in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia, the cubs traced the arc of their lives – a journey that can be sketched out in six distinct stages. It begins with Black pride.
Pride
‘Don’t you ever be ashamed of what you are / It’s ya Panther power that makes you a star’
Tupac Shakur, rapper and son of New York Panther Afeni Shakur
For a child of the revolution like Ericka Abram, 55, a Panther education began before the age of two.
From infancy, she lived in dormitories for Panther kids set up in big creaky old houses in Oakland and Berkeley. There were three separate dorms, divided by age: toddlers to six years, six to 10, and a teenage dormitory up to 16. Girls slept in bunk beds in one room, boys in another. Apart from sleeping arrangements, life was entirely communal – even to the point of sharing clothes.
Both Ericka’s parents were on the party’s central committee – her mother, Elaine Brown, went on to become the only woman to lead the party; her father, Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, was minister of education in charge of weapons training and political teaching.
Abram calls her parents 24-hour Panthers. “The revolution never stopped,” she said. “I saw my mother maybe on weekends.”
The Black Panther Party had been founded in October 1966 by two Oakland, California students, Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. It emerged at a volatile moment for America: anti-Vietnam war protests were erupting, feminist and gay liberation movements were proliferating, and Black communities were reeling from an epidemic of police killings of young African American men.
As its original name indicated, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense began as a response to police brutality. The Panthers’ first venture was CopWatch – patrols of party members who recorded and disrupted violent police actions on the streets. They went fully armed, in a challenge both to law enforcement and to the non-violent ethos of the civil rights movement.
From those early roots, more than 40 chapters of the Black Panther Party sprung up across the US, with international outposts in the UK, north Africa, Australia and India. The scattered branches were united by the Black Panther newspaper, which at its peak sold 140,000 copies a week, and by a common commitment to community “survival programs”. They provided free school breakfasts, medical treatment for uninsured patients, legal services for those in trouble, and prison transport for families visiting incarcerated loved ones.
The party was eventually to fall apart in 1982, ground down by the relentless hounding of the FBI and J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro program – the covert surveillance used to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy a range of Black power groups and other radical movements deemed subversive. But by then, its young leaders had inspired a new conversation around politics and community.
And they had conceived something else: children.
As the number of Panther cubs ticked up, thoughts turned to how to care for them – both for the sake of the children themselves, and to free up their parents for the struggle. A radical Black approach to education became a pillar of the Black Panthers’ world view.
Every morning, Abram and her peers would be bussed in a beat-up Volkswagen van to their school. Opened in 1973, the Oakland community school supported 150 kids at its height.
It was led by Ericka Huggins, a Panther leader whose fellow Panther husband, John Huggins, was assassinated on the campus of UCLA in 1969 in a feud with a rival Black organization. Ericka Huggins herself was arrested on suspicion of murdering an informant, and imprisoned for two years in Connecticut, where she had founded a Panther chapter. She was acquitted at trial and released in 1971.
On her return to the west coast, she turned her energy to creating a new school. Her aim was to forge a model of Black education that would put to shame the often abysmal learning Black kids received in poorly resourced and low-performing public schools.
The school was constituted as a private institution, with costs covered from party fundraising and the donations of rich supporters and open to all regardless of income. Its private nature freed it from constraints on how it selected and taught its pupils (not all children were Panther cubs), and gave Huggins license to devise a curriculum that was both ambitious and progressive, with an emphasis on Black history and pride.
The kids received three square meals a day. They were tested for hearing and eyesight, and those who needed them were supplied with glasses to ensure they could study effectively.
“I never was hungry, I never felt scared, I never felt unloved,” Abram said.
The school day began with calisthenics in the yard, followed by meditation in the afternoons. At morning assembly, they sang the Black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, instead of reciting the pledge of allegiance, and on special occasions they wore mini-Panther uniforms – black jackets and berets – marching energetically in two straight lines.
Gallery | Black Panthers and cubs 1960s-1970s
There were no grades, only levels for aptitude, and classes were no larger than 10 kids. The curriculum included reading, writing, math and science, all taught so assiduously that when some of the children entered their teens and were transferred to ordinary public schools, they often went into classrooms two years above their age.
Rigorous academic classes were melded with more overt political teaching. “We would sing ‘Black is beautiful, off the pigs!’” Abram recalled. “That’s an interesting chant for children, but I didn’t know they were called police until I was much older.”
Friday was movie night, with a curated selection of anti-war or anti-capitalist films. Abram, who was named after Ericka Huggins, remembers their teacher Donna telling them to avoid contact with anything colored red, white and blue. “America doesn’t care about you,” Donna would tell them.“America is not your friend.”
Unlike other children of Black Panthers, Abram does not identify as a “cub” on grounds that she never had any intention of becoming an adult revolutionary. Instead, she regards herself and the other dorm children as “comrade siblings”. “The Panthers are a political group, but to me we were family because that’s how we lived. We went to school together, ate together, bathed together, slept in the same room.”
‘We love ourselves, we love our culture, we love our people. Black history wasn’t just a February thing’
She remembers spending hours playing castle with sandbags stacked in one of the Panther homes. Only later did she learn that the bags were used by her father to hide firearms stashed under the floorboards. Paradoxically, the one thing the kids were never allowed to do was play with toy guns. “In the 1970s, everyone had a cap gun, a zip gun, but we weren’t allowed them,” Abram said. “Huey would say: ‘Guns are a tool, not a toy.’”
Huggins, who ran the school between 1973 until it closed in 1982, liked to say that her aim was to teach children how to think, not what to think. Creativity and curiosity were encouraged, as were music, drama, art and all forms of self-expression. When a child transgressed, they were brought before a “justice court” where they were disciplined by other kids – a far cry from the school-to-prison pipeline so common to this day in regular public schools.
Girls in particular were protected from negative gender and racial stereotypes. “Black women have been shamed in so many ways – from the auction block to the way our bodies are policed,” Abram said. “We didn’t have that same shaming; as a girl I was not taught to think of myself as weak.”
Teachers looked to Black luminaries to instill pride in the students. Maya Angelou came twice to the Panther school to read poetry to the children, the second time with James Baldwin in tow. Other visitors included the comedian Richard Pryor and, on one memorable day, the civil rights legend Rosa Parks.
The Hispanic labor leader Cesar Chavez also came by. Abram recalls that they went without eating lettuce or strawberries for a year in support of his farmworkers’ protest.
More than 3,000 miles away on the east coast, Sharif El-Mekki, 53, shared many of the same experiences growing up. Panther cubs did not have their own dedicated school in his city, Philadelphia, but there were radical liberation schools imbued with a similar accent on Black pride.
His parents, Aisha El-Mekki and Hamid Khalid, were both Panthers. His mother and step-father sent him to a school in Germantown named Nidhamu Sasa (“Discipline Now” in Swahili). There, he practiced an African form of martial arts. Classrooms were known by the titles of African liberation movements: Tanu, Swapo, Frelimo, MPLA.
“Black pride was everything,” El-Mekki recalled. “We love ourselves, we love our culture, we love our people. Black history wasn’t just a February thing. It wasn’t even Black history, it was history.”
At home, El-Mekki’s family did not celebrate birthdays. Instead, their calendar would be punctuated by the martyrdom of revolutionary heroes, such as 21 February, the day Malcolm X was killed in 1965. “My mother would say: ‘You know, you don’t really do anything to be born, it’s more important to commemorate those who died for something’.”
Into the Storm
‘I will never forget the haunting scream of that child’
When Sharon Shoatz was 12, her school was suddenly evacuated. It was September 1977, and as police helicopters whirred overhead she realized that the emergency might be related to her family.
Her home stood directly over the road from the school, and she could see her mother, Thelma, looking distraught as a swarm of police entered her family’s house. Could this have something to do with her father, Russell Shoatz? She knew that he was in prison, but she had no idea why. “He didn’t explain the Panthers to me when I was young, not at all,” she said.
It was only the day after the police raid that she learned her father had escaped from a correctional institution in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. “It was in every newspaper, on every TV screen. That’s when it really came to me what was going on with my dad.”
Russell Shoatz had been a Philadelphia Panther, and went on to become a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an underground organization of largely former Black Panthers that regarded itself as the clandestine military wing of the party. With a strong presence on the east coast, it was often at odds with Newton and the west coast Panthers, who were increasingly focused on community welfare programs and running for elected office.
By contrast, the BLA was implicated in several 1970s bombings and prison break-outs. The US government claimed it was responsible for the deaths of 20 police officers.
Shoatz, nicknamed “Maroon” after the escaped enslaved people, was given a life sentence having been accused of taking part in the 1970 killing of a police sergeant, Frank Von Colln, in retaliation for a police shooting of a young unarmed Black man. A few days after the officer was murdered, police raided the Philadelphia headquarters of the Black Panther Party and rounded up all the men inside. They handcuffed them, stripped them to their boxers, and lined them up against a wall.
The photograph of this humiliation of a group of Black Panthers – none implicated in Von Colln’s death – was one of the searing images of the 1970s liberation struggle. It left an enduring impression on one young Panther cub, Sharif El-Mekki, even though it was taken before he was born.
His mother showed him the photo when he was six years old. She pointed out his father, Hamid Khalid, standing naked except for gray boxers, his face turned away from the camera, his arms cuffed behind his back.
At first, El-Mekki was bemused when he saw the photo. “I kept asking my mother: ‘Why? Why would you make someone strip?’ I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”
Later, it made the young boy all the more determined to live up to his parents’ values. “Seeing that picture didn’t give me trepidation or fear,” he said. “It gave me resolve. I was going to join the army against injustice.”
He also started wearing boxers, because that’s what revolutionaries did.
Though their parents tried to shield the cubs from the gathering storm, in the end there was no escaping the epic clash between Panthers and law enforcement. In 1969, the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, declared the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to internal security of the country”, and by the end of that year 30 of its members were in jail facing the death penalty and another 40 looking at life imprisonment.
The omnipresence of police informants became a fact of daily life, along with the paranoia that came with it. Fred Hampton Jr grew up knowing that his father was killed in that massive assault in Chicago with the aid of an infiltrator – William O’Neal, the Judas of the 2021 movie Judas and the Black Messiah. “I’ve studied the dynamics of betrayal,” he said. “The internal attacks, how it impacts every aspect of your existence, even to this day.”
Being a Panther became a very dangerous proposition. The number of fallen Panthers grew, killed by police or in increasingly violent internal disputes fomented by the FBI.
By one count, 28 Panthers were killed by the turn of 1970. In the estimation of Billy X Jennings, a former Panther who curates one of the largest archives of the party’s history, at least 35 members lost their lives. That’s a devastating proportion of an organization that is thought to have had, at most, a few thousand members.
“People say the children weren’t in danger, but I beg to differ,” said Meres-Sia Gabriel, 51, the daughter of the Panthers’ celebrated artist and minister of culture Emory Douglas and the Panther artist Gail Dixon. “If our parents are in danger, even if we the children are not specifically targeted, then we are in danger.”
Though they didn’t understand the context at the time, the cubs had security drilled into them. They were trained to be alert, spatially aware, suspicious of outsiders, and constantly mindful of the perils around them.
As a young girl, Abram was often accompanied by a man named Aaron Dixon, a member of the Seattle Panthers. She recalls being vexed by him. “Why did he have to come everywhere with me? Why did he always have to open the door first before me?”
‘He wanted me to be a soldier, to have that discipline, to be prepared just in case’
Only later did she realize that Dixon was her mother’s bodyguard. His annoying insistence on opening doors was to avoid them being shot by an assassin lurking on the other side.
Ksisay Sadiki, 53, recalls being woken up early every morning by her Panther father, Kamau, to follow a strenuous exercise regime, including three different types of press-ups. “He wanted me to be a soldier, to have that discipline, to be prepared just in case.”
One of her earliest memories was of her mother, Panther Pamela Hanna, braiding her hair in pigtails for a visit to court in Queens. She remembers sitting in the back, on painfully hard seats, playing peekaboo with a woman who was in the dock.
That woman was Assata Shakur, a close comrade of Sadiki’s parents. Shakur, dubbed by police the “Black Joan of Arc”, was convicted by an all-white jury of the 1973 killing of a police officer on the New Jersey turnpike. She escaped from prison in 1979, went underground, and is thought to be in hiding in Cuba. The FBI has offered a reward of $1m for her capture and lists her as one of its most wanted terrorists.
In her autobiography, Assata, Shakur details an incident that happened when Ksisay, aged two, was brought to court to see her jailed father. “As Kamau walked near her, [Ksisay] held out her arms to him,” Shakur writes. “Kamau took two steps toward her and the marshals jumped him and began beating him … I will never forget the haunting scream of that child as she watched her father being brutally beaten.”
Constant security awareness was a theme of many of the cubs’ childhoods. Sala Cyril, 48, and her older sibling Malkia, 50, whose mother, Janet, was in the Harlem Panthers, were brought up to be what they call “hyper vigilant”. At dusk they had to close the shutters of their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, so nobody could see inside. If they got into trouble on the streets, they were told to ask a community member for help, never a police officer.
When the family ate out at a diner, the children habitually sat on the outside of the booth in case they needed to make a quick getaway. The rules were simple: never have your back to a door, check all exits when you enter a public space, be wary of anyone who you do not know.
FBI agents would frequently call at the Cyrils’ home. The interventions continued right up to a couple of weeks before Janet died of sickle cell anemia, aged 59, in 2005 – 23 years after the Panthers’ demise. Janet was already in hospice care at home, yet agents still insisted she would have to testify in a reopened 1971 case involving the murder of a San Francisco police officer.
Sala said such confrontations have left her with a sense of creeping threat that pursued her well into adulthood. “There is no end for the children,” she said. “Nothing ended, not for us.”
To this day, Sala will conduct a thorough background check on any new friend or acquaintance, trawling public records and making inquiries. Did she do a background check on me before we met for a two-hour interview in Brooklyn?
“I certainly did,” she said. “I wouldn’t have talked to you if I hadn’t.”
Loss
‘Daddy, was the cause more important than your children?’
When Ericka Abram was a toddler, her mother, Elaine Brown, traveled the world making connections with other revolutionary leaders. She visited the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Vietnam.
For the Panthers, Brown’s frenetic global dash was a sign that the party was making waves. For Ericka, not yet a year old and left in the care of a Panther minder, it had other, less lofty implications.
“She was not there when I learned to walk. And she was not there when my teeth came in,” Abram said.
In the grand revolutionary scheme of things, does it matter that Abram’s mother was absent when she learned to walk? Wasn’t the fight for Black self-determination more important than witnessing a child’s developmental milestones? Those are questions with which Abram grapples to this day.
One of Abram’s first memories was being taken to an Ike and Tina Turner concert with her grandmother. Her mother also came along, wearing a flowing pink Halston dress. “I thought my mother was so glamorous and beautiful. And strong,” Abram said. “But we didn’t know each other.”
Abram has reflected a lot on her mother’s choices. “I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to change the world and change a diaper. I know that sounds simplistic, but that’s really what she was trying to do. Everyone’s not meant to be a parent. And everyone’s not meant to be a Panther. Sometimes you have to choose – and my mother chose being a Black Panther.”
When Abram was three, her mother ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Oakland city council. A year later she became chair of the Black Panther Party – the only woman ever to lead it. Abram remembers seeing her mom on TV and on billboards, and how happy that made her.
“Two weeks would have passed and I wouldn’t have seen her in person, so I would be happy to see her on television – ‘Oh, she looks great, everything’s OK.’”
Brown has publicly expressed sorrow for being distant from her young child as a result of her Panther calling. Her autobiography, A Taste of Power, which Brown dedicates to her daughter, contains a photo of Brown tying little Ericka’s shoelaces, with the caption: “I found it difficult to be a real mother to Ericka, whose love for me remained constant nevertheless.”
When Brown was interviewed for a 2004 book on the kids of civil rights leaders, Children of the Movement, she said: “We didn’t know how to be parents, we knew how to be revolutionaries. I feel sorry for Ericka, but I can’t make myself over. She suffered in life because of me, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”
When I read that passage to Abram, her eyes welled up and she looked emotionally overwhelmed. “It’s very difficult to hear her say that, even now,” she said, her voice breaking.
Did she ever hear her mother express such feelings – not quite an apology, but a recognition of how hard it was for her daughter – to her directly?
“No,” Abram said.
Other cubs did. Sharif El-Mekki’s father, Hamid Khalid, who spent 17 years in prison, apologized to him for being absent. “Not for the work that landed him there, but for its consequences,” El-Mekki said.
“I told him: ‘I don’t think you need to apologize for anything. People make sacrifices. I don’t know a single revolutionary that spends every moment they want with their family.’”
Sharon Shoatz, who is now 59, also wrestled with the loss of a parent to prison – her father Russell “Maroon” Shoatz spent 49 years behind bars, 22 in solitary confinement. She said there were times when she felt mad about it all. “I would think: ‘You know, Daddy, how do you explain yourself? Was the cause more important than your children?’”
In December 2021, just days before her father died having been released from prison a month earlier with end-stage colorectal cancer, he called her. “I just want to say sorry, for anything I did to you,” he said.
Shoatz replied: “Dad, it’s good. It’s all good.”
Of all the varieties of loss that come with being a Panther cub, prolonged imprisonment of a parent is perhaps the hardest. Shoatz was seven when her father was arrested, 56 when he came home to die.
From the age of 10, she traveled long distances to visit him in umpteen prisons. For many years, she had no idea why her father was incarcerated other than that he had been convicted of killing a police officer. Then in 1990, when she was in her late 20s, she attended an event in New York to publicize the plight of long-term Black prisoners and came across a man carrying a placard proclaiming: “Free Russell Shoatz”.
It made her question everything she thought she knew. “I asked myself: ‘Who are you, dude? I don’t even know who you are. You’re like my dad, but who are you?’”
She started to exchange letters with him, asking for details. In one of them, she invited him to explain what bugged her most: how could he have put Black struggle before his own children?
He explained that when he was a child, he had watched the brutal treatment of Black people by Philadelphia police and had grown disgusted by how his own father merely looked out the window and stayed silent. He came to think of his father as a coward, and vowed to be different.
Those exchanges helped Shoatz see her own father in a new light. “There was a wide range of emotions, from anger, to feeling I lost out on having a father, to finally growing to appreciate his politics.”
Shoatz uses the same word as Hampton Jr to describe the impact of those years – burden. “We didn’t have a father in the home and my mother struggled. Then there was the burden of freedom that weighs heavily on you – the fact that we were free, and he was not.”
And there was the sense that her life had never been truly hers. “I would like to live my life, because I’ve lived the life of trying to support my father. So much of my life has been dedicated to that.”
Ksisay Sadiki has been through the bereavement of losing her father to prison twice. Kamau Sadiki was arrested and imprisoned for robbery in 1972 when he was living clandestinely in Atlanta, Georgia, and was incarcerated for the first eight years of his daughter’s life.
Following release, her father lived an ordinary New York life for more than 20 years, going back to school, working for a phone company, providing for his family. He had come home, “and I thought that was it,” she said.
Then in 2002, when Ksisay was 31 and had children of her own, it happened again. In the heightened tension after the 9/11 terror attacks, her father was arrested in Brooklyn on gun charges and investigated for the 1971 murder of an Atlanta police officer, James Green. He was sent down to Atlanta for trial, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 10 years.
“My world collapsed,” Sadiki said. “I couldn’t wrap my heart and head around it.” From his new prison cell, her father would send her letters telling her not to worry, he’d be coming home soon. But this second time, that wasn’t true. Kamau remains locked up in Georgia today.
Sadiki has spent the past 20 years trying to get him out. There are times when she feels angry, others when she feels an unbearable responsibility. But despite it all, the bond remains fierce. “You know, I still call him Daddy,” she said. “My father’s my world.”
Recently, her father has become very apologetic. “He’s like: ‘I don’t want to burden you.’ And I’m like, ‘Daddy, please stop. You never ever, ever, burden me.”
Implosion
‘I wasn’t acknowledged as a Panther child, I just happened to be born’
Ericka Abram’s last moments as a child within the Black Panther Party occurred in the middle of the night. The eight-year-old was shaken awake in the dorm by her mother’s bodyguard, Aaron – the irritating man who opened doors for her. She was told to be quick and pack a suitcase with just her most prized possessions.
What Abram didn’t know then was that her mother had decided to quit the Black Panthers and relocate overnight from Oakland to Los Angeles.
As she describes in A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown had become dismayed by the treatment of women in the party. An assistant principal of the Panther school, Regina Davis, was subjected to a severe beating and had her jaw broken by male Panthers after she tried to reprimand one of them for refusing to perform an assigned task. Huey P Newton had authorized the assault.
The departure of mother and daughter was sudden and jolting, and what came after it even more unmooring. They moved into an apartment in Malibu provided for them by the Motown executive Suzanne de Passe, with whom Brown had recorded an album. De Passe found Ericka a place in an elite French lycee by calling in a favor from one of the school’s patrons, Diana Ross.
Within the space of three weeks, Abram’s universe switched from the Panther dorm to an almost all-white school for the kids of the Hollywood jetset (fellow students included Lisa Marie Presley and Jodie Foster). How did she get her head around the change?
“I didn’t. Thankfully, at the Malibu house I could walk down to the beach and sit there for hours digging up sand crabs and looking at the water.”
For Meres-Sia Gabriel, the final collapse of the party in 1982 also came as a wrench. Her father, the artist Emory Douglas, created many of the most memorable Panther images replete with strong lines, bright colors and police officers depicted as pigs. Gabriel has several of her father’s original Panther works on the walls of her apartment in Richmond, California.
While the Black Panther Party was in existence, Gabriel and her parents had all their basic needs met. But when the movement formally folded, her mother, the Panther artist Gail Dixon, abruptly moved her from her grandmother’s small but safe and predictable home where she had spent much of the Panther era into a run-down corner of Oakland.
In contrast to Abram’s move to rich white Malibu, Gabriel woke up one morning in a Black neighborhood that felt disjointed and violent. “It was a shock. Looking back, that was a traumatic, stressful, chaotic time,” she said.
Suddenly, she was living among other kids who knew nothing of the Panthers or their cause. Her parents told her not to reveal to anyone that they had been in the party.
A couple of years ago Gabriel wrote a poem that describes that painful transition, capturing the sense of loss, isolation and fear:
In 1982 when the revolution was over,
We woke to a soiled mattress in our front yard and a pair of beat up sneakers hanging from the telephone wires.
The kids down the street wanted to fight me …
They had no idea my parents fought for them to have free breakfast in school,
Neither did I.
After the Black Panther Party formally collapsed, many of the cubs went through a prolonged period of introspection that, for some, continues to this day. “You are told you were born for revolution,” Abram said. “So what do you do with your life when the revolution doesn’t come?”
As they’ve confronted these existential questions, the cubs have found comfort and mutual support in their own collective identity. The first cub event that Sharon Shoatz attended was a retreat in the early 1990s outside Rye, New York.
The cubs made an instant connection. They had been through so many common experiences that they understood each other instinctually, without the endless explanation that non-Panther friends required. “We found we could come together, and share our stories, and our pain,” Shoatz said. “It was a form of healing.”
Since then, groups of cubs have convened every few years for reunions that Shoatz has found part-cathartic, part-empowering. The most recent was in August 2024, when about 20 cubs came together in Portland, Oregon.
Individually, the cubs continue to ask tough questions about their pasts. Meres-Sia Gabriel has probed deeply into the contradictions of her Panther childhood, and is writing a one-woman show that seeks to tell her story of that struggle in poetry and music.
She sees the process as a form of learning to love the “inner child” in her who was ignored when she was young. For her, the children of the Panthers were the most overlooked members of the party.
“I felt I wasn’t acknowledged as a Panther child, I just happened to be born. They said they were serving the people. Well then, am I the people, am I a person? If you’re committing everything to serving the people, the child born to you wonders, where do I fit in?”
In her 30s, she legally changed her name. She discarded her birth name, Cindy Douglas, which her parents had given her as an homage to Cindy Smallwood, a Panther who had joined the party when she was 16 and was killed in a car crash three years later.
She replaced it with Meres-Sia Gabriel. Meres-Sia is drawn from ancient Egyptian meaning “beloved one with insight”. Gabriel is after the Abrahamic archangel. “It was part of me reclaiming self-love,” she said.
Over time, Gabriel has come to be proud of her parents’ revolutionary work. She now emulates them, by pursuing her own activism of sorts. “It’s a different revolution, to get to know and soothe this wounded inner child and to understand how to love her, and how to love the Black Panther Party.”
To love them both?
“My intention is to honor what was good about the party, and to be courageous on this journey of deep healing for my own self.”
Shock and Awe
‘This is an escalation. The executive orders made my heart begin to beat a little faster, fear begin to grow.’
The explosive return of Donald Trump to the White House in January, and his instant carpet bombing with incendiary executive orders, did not take Malkia Cyril by surprise. They had long been tracking the erosion of neoliberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, in the US and around the world.
What did unnerve Cyril was the scale and speed of it. “This is an escalation. The shock and awe of the early weeks, when so many executive orders dropped, it made my heart begin to beat a little faster, fear begin to grow.”
Trump’s attack is personal. Cyril came out as queer when they were 12. They were just in the throes of changing the gender marker on their official documents to X when the president issued an executive order declaring that the government would henceforth only recognise a person’s sex assigned at birth. “I am feeling extraordinarily distressed and in some pain as I witness the onslaught.”
Nor was it coincidental, in Cyril’s view, that Trump made federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs one of his first and biggest targets. Cyril hates the term “DEI”, because in their view it obscures what is really going on. “This is an attack on the fundamental civil rights that have been gained by Black folk since emancipation. It’s a demonstration of power that is meant to terrify us into silence.”
Has the shocking start to 2025 given Cyril clarity on what it is to be a Panther cub? No, they said. “I’ve always been a Panther cub. I live, read, walk, talk, Panther cub. The Panther Party is the water, I’m a fish.”
What it has done, rather, is give them greater clarity on what their role is to be at this critical juncture. “What I have to offer as a Panther cub is unique and necessary in this moment,” they said.
“There is a clarity to my mandate: to help rebuild the left, to show that it is not a dirty word, that the left is not a space that should be hidden from view. That life can be breathed into it. That’s my mandate: to breathe life back into the left – and I’m not the only one.”
Many of the cubs are struck by the parallels between the volatility of their parents’ Panther days in the early 70s and the present day. Ksisay Sadiki keeps referring back to the 10-point manifesto written by Newton and Seale when they set up the party. “They address the same issues we’re talking about today: education, housing, policing, mass incarceration.”
The first iteration of the 10 points written in 1966 did not directly address healthcare, though a second version produced six years later did call for free medical treatment for all Black and oppressed people. That strikes a chord with Sadiki. Both her parents are facing ill health – her father is in prison hospital and her mother is regularly admitted to community hospitals in New York.
“What upsets me so much about my parents is that they’re sick and they’re not getting the medical attention they need. And that makes me think about land. If we had our own land, our own resources, to grow our own food, to be healthy, not to have to sacrifice your life for other people, that would be progress.”
Just a few statistics illuminate how the basic inequities to which she is alluding continue to tear at the fabric of American society. Black women are two to three times more likely to die from causes related to pregnancy than white women. A Black kid receives on average $2,700 less in state funding in their school district than a white kid. Black families account for more than 50% of the total of all families with children who are homeless, when Black people form only 13% of the general population. And a statistic that lands with a thump: despite the convulsive churn of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson in 2014, and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020, Black Americans continue to be killed by police at almost three times the rate of white Americans.
‘This moment we are in, it’s a threat. It’s terrifying. But it is also an opportunity.’
Alprentice Davis, 54, cites his own personal data point, based on 30 years working as a football coach for at-risk kids in poor Black neighborhoods in New York and Washington DC. By his estimate, on average one of his students has been shot to death every seven years.
Davis is the son of Thelma Davis from the Queens, New York, chapter of the Panthers, and Robert Bay, a top adviser to Huey P Newton in Oakland. In Davis’s memoir, Urchin Society: Memories of a Black Panther Cub, he ponders what would have happened if the government, instead of pummeling the party to the point of extinction, had worked with them.
“Black communities would be totally different,” Davis said. “There’d be less drugs on the streets, the police wouldn’t be like an occupying army and there would be real community policing. There’d be a whole lot less Trayvon Martins and Michael Browns.”
Malkia Cyril was deeply involved in the founding of Black Lives Matter after the shooting to death of the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a Florida gun owner in 2012. Cyril could draw a direct line between the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that was going viral on social media and the trigger behind the formation of the Black Panther Party: both were a response to the killing of Black people. “Every Black movement in this country began with a death,” Cyril said, “and this was no different. There absolutely was continuity, because there was continuity of conditions.”
Today, as Trump proceeds to tear up the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement, Cyril is having to contend with the limits of protest as a political strategy. “There has definitely been a shift in what protest alone can do. The lesson here is that while protest movements are important, they’re insufficient.”
Their hope is that out of the fear and instability instilled in Trump’s America will come something more positive: a whole new strategy centered around building community, a new collective action.
“It’s very important to understand this,” they said. “This moment we are in, it’s a threat. It’s terrifying. But it is also an opportunity.”
Legacy
‘It’s a quintessential Black love story’
Forty-two years after the official end of the Black Panther Party, the cubs’ childhood experiences remain seared into their DNA. Though they have responded in diverse ways – some with boundless pride, others seeking self-healing – they can all agree on how deeply it touched them.
One of the most striking aspects of the legacy of the Black Panther Party is how its progeny have gone on to be leaders in their own right. In addition to Tupac Shakur, there is a long list of cubs in the public spotlight that includes Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who brought indictments against Donald Trump; the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates; and Ericka Huggins’ daughter Mai Lassiter, an LA-based music executive and philanthropist.
The nine cubs the Guardian spoke to have all gone on to lead adult lives imbued with the creativity and skills they acquired during the Panther years. Sala Cyril, who was taught by her mother to be “hyper vigilant” in the face of FBI surveillance, is the national security co-ordinator of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an organization that promotes self-determination for the Black community. She also works as a community safety liaison, advising other Black groups.
Drawing directly on what she learned from Panther elders, she teaches the groups best practice on vetting, how to recognize when you are being targeted, and how to defend against infiltration and smear tactics of the sort Hoover wielded so successfully against the party.
Several of the cubs have applied their inspirational learning to careers in education. Sharif El-Mekki went on from his Philadelphia freedom school to work as a teacher and principal for almost 30 years and now runs a group that seeks to train the next generation of motivational Black educators.
El-Mekki’s respect for his parents’ revolutionary activities knows no limits. “I think the Black Panther Party was one of the Blackest, most incredible social justice movements America has seen. Being a cub for me is a deep badge of pride. It’s a quintessential Black love story.”
He has six children. He calls them “grandcubs”.
Several others have channeled the Panthers’ belief in the power of the written word to become writers. Ericka Abram is writing a memoir of her surreal journey from the Panther dorm to Malibu, titled Black Panther Princess. Sharon Shoatz has helped disseminate her father’s recently published posthumous autobiography, I Am Maroon.
Having been conflicted for so long over the absence of her mother, Abram is finally learning to forgive her. “I now appreciate her for what she did. She was incredibly brave – a fighter, and a survivor.”
She is also learning to forgive herself. “I thought for many years that I was useless, because I wasn’t a revolutionary. Now I think that if you contribute in any positive way, that’s OK. I’m not gonna beat myself up any longer.”
All the cubs feel a responsibility to keep the memory of their parents’ sacrifices and achievements alive. Fred Hampton Jr feels that keenly – he is working to preserve Hampton Sr’s childhood home in Chicago, the Hampton House, as the legacy of his father slain 25 days before he was born.
“It’s a way of life for me, this is my calling,” he said. “And so we pass the baton. We keep moving, we keep going.”
