WOMEN OF THE PANTHERS
Women of the Panthers is an ongoing personal illustration series focusing
on the key female figures within the civil rights movement of the 60s.
Elaine Brown
Brown became the first and only woman to lead the revolutionary black power movement.
" It meant committing your life. I mean, that's how we saw it. It meant that we had to surrender
up something of ourselves, our own lives, because we believed that the struggle that we were
involved in, which we thought of as socialist revolution, would take our lives. And so we had
to surrender that. We had to make a kind of commitment. "
Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther who was granted formal
political asylum by the government of Fidel Castro in 1984.
“Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.”
Kathleen Cleaver
With her insatiable fighting spirit, Kathleen Cleaver went from being
a bookish child to a front-lines protestor with the Black Panthers.
" The Black Panther Party saw itself as part of a revolutionary struggle. And we were linked with organizations of native Americans, of Chicanos, of women, of Asians. And we were international. We would have been part of an international revolutionary vanguard that would have restructured the economy "
