Former Black Panther Ericka Huggins talked about the Panthers’ Oakland Community School at the Minister Huey P. Newton Birthday Celebration at the West Oakland Library Feb. 16. Photo: Minister of Information JR

When the Black Panther Party is remembered, shotguns, Black leather coats and berets come to mind. Seldom is the Black Panther school, the Oakland Community School and its curriculum, discussed.

The Black Panther Party was an "armed propaganda unit," as Deputy Minister of Health "Doc" Satchell once stated, where politically educating the Black and other oppressed masses was one of its most important tasks, right beside self-defense. Former Black Panther Ericka Huggins was the director of the Oakland Community School, so, in the studios of KPFA 94.1 FM, we recorded this Block Report Radio interview so that the community could better understand the significance and legacy of such a revolutionary institution as the Inter-Communal Institute, which was later renamed the Oakland Community School.

MOI JR: What attracted you to the Black Panther Party initially?

E. Huggins: Everything attracted me to the Black Panther Party. The way that Black and poor people were being treated across the country attracted me to the Black Panther Party. I went to the March on Washington when I was 15 years old, then went to college. While I was in college, I read a Ramparts Magazine article about the shooting and jailing of Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense - that was its original name. And I decided to leave school with Jon Huggins and join the Black Panther Party and serve poor and oppressed people. That was what I wanted to do with my life.

MOI JR: What year was this?

E. Huggins: That was the winter of 1967.

MOI JR: While you were in the Black Panther Party, what were some of the duties that were assigned to you?

E. Huggins: Well, everybody had the same duties. We cleaned the office. We worked in the office. We sold newspapers. We took out the trash. We cooked food. We took care of babies. We helped the elderly. We spoke on high school and college campuses, which I really loved. I've always loved working with my peers when I was younger, and young people as I've gotten older.

And we also spoke out against injustice in the community, and in any community forum that we could find we built coalitions with other organizations of Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, women, students and so on. So there was no particular assignment at first.

I would say after a year, after Jon Huggins was killed, the government assigned me to court, then to jail. So I spent two years in prison.

Then upon my release, I taught at the Inter-communal Youth Institute, which became the Oakland Community School. I was released from prison in 1971 and worked as a teacher in the school and a writer for the Black Panther News Service until 1973, and became director of the Oakland Community School as its name changed from the Inter-communal Youth Institute, from 1973 to 1981.

MOI JR: How did the Oakland Community School start and what was its purpose?

E. Huggins: Well, the purpose of all of the Black Panther Party's educational programs was to give people a sense of themselves, their true nature and the true nature of the society based in Point 5 of the Black Panther Party's 10 Point Platform and Program. And it started because we saw a need to educate or, if they were older, re-educate young people, because we had all grown up in public schools.

No matter where we were from, when we arrived to the Black Panther Party in Oakland, we knew that we had been mis-educated, especially about the wisdom and the value of Black people. It actually was when I worked with the Inter-communal Youth Institute, before it became the Oakland Community School, in a large house in East Oakland, that we realized that the children in a public school setting were in need of far more one-on-one attention. They were really lacking in resources at the public school setting, and that is still true today, and still true for Oakland.

So we decided eventually to buy a school building at 6118 East 14th St., now International Boulevard. And we opened the school in 1973. We did it because we wanted our children and the children of the larger community to learn how to think, because they were being told what to think. Our motto was the world was a child's classroom.

MOI JR: What kinds of things were taught at the Oakland Community School?

E. Huggins: Well, a lot of things were taught and there was also a lot of mentoring. If the media of the times - newspapers, TV news and radio - were to tell it, we taught children hatred, but there was enough hatred directed at them. We taught them how to love one another and the people in their community and to love their communities enough to serve their communities, and we gave them a global view of people of color in the world.

Now that's at the mentoring level. Their actual curriculum was language arts, which included reading, writing and English. They also had Spanish. They had a current events class that we called political education, and they had martial arts, bhakti yoga and, towards the end of the school's existence, they also meditated every day for 10 minutes in the middle of the day. Also they were given an understanding of nutrition because we served three meals a day. The food was healthy and nutritious.
By the way, we served three meals a day, because we realized that many of our students - and we always had 150 students every year and unborn children on the waiting list - we served three meals a day because we realized that many of the children who came there were hungry and didn't want to go home because there may or may not have been enough food there, no fault of the parents, fault of a system which is wealthy at one end and extremely impoverished at the other. So we served very nutritious food. No junk.

And we also educated the children about food by having them turn the soil and plant a garden in the parking lot in the back of the school. We lifted up cement and put in a garden. We had art, drama and dance and brought in some of the most amazing local artists and national artists to talk with them and read poetry to them and hang out with them.

For instance, Maya Angelou came and read poetry to the children. James Baldwin came back the next time with her. He left in tears. That was always the thing that happened. People were so touched in their hearts, and their minds were so inspired by what we were doing, because the public schools were not able to do that.

Some of the teachers from the schools were members of the Black Panther Party, like myself, but many of them were young teachers who came directly from their teaching intern programs to Oakland Community School or gave up their jobs in Oakland Unified or Berkeley or San Francisco Unified School District to work there. It was a phenomenal educational institution and known about all over the world. And people came to visit and stay there; by that I mean they interned there so they could go to their homes wherever they lived in the United States or in other parts of the world, Europe included, to replicate the school program where they lived with the children that were in most need.

Email POCC Minister of Information JR at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and visit www.blockreportradio.com, hiphopwarreport.com and myspace.com/blockreportfilm.

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