UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation explores the role of young people in the Black Panther Party in history, legacy, and memory. By 1970, in the midst of a failed War on Poverty, children and youth assumed a major presence in the Party’s consciousness. On the one hand, the conditions of children and youth in low-income neighborhoods lent credence to Panther critiques of what they recognized as a dysfunctional national welfare system. At the same time, Panther activists celebrated young people’s capacity to be full participants in the organization’s revolutionary movement. Thus, young people represented a paradox: they were figures who simultaneously underscored the absence of a socialist present and the promise of its future existence. How did children and the category of childhood spur adults to imagine the future? How did young people themselves understand and navigate their relationships to the Panthers’ project at the time? And finally, how do members of the filial generation remember and make sense of their childhoods today?

While much has been written about how Black Panther radicalism operated as a spectacular politics, fewer studies have explored the more intimate domains in which Party members engaged ideas about racial and class equity. I trace how children and youth operated in Panther discourse and grassroots mobilizations in Party chapters throughout the country, and the Bay Area in particular. By examining the BPP’s history through the lens of intergenerational relations, this dissertation helps broaden our understanding of the Party’s sites of racial and class struggle and provides a more nuanced analysis of the BPP’s gender theories and practices. Further, my work helps underscore how the organization’s campaign to extend social welfare to working-class families was necessarily entangled with government attempts to create vulnerabilities within these same families.

For many in the Party, life unfolded at the intersection of family, community, and the pursuit of a new social order. I argue that a full accounting of the role of children, and ideas about children, within the BPP’s community services reveals that these programs went beyond providing temporary relief for contemporary social ills to constitute a revolutionary vision for long-term transformations. As the descendants of Party members look back on their childhoods roughly fifty years later, their reflections are met with a mixture of pride, nostalgia, confusion and frustration. In large part their coming-of-age narratives and personal testimonies elucidate a generation characterized by degrees of political inheritance. Today, their professional endeavors range widely, including in the areas of education, law, social work, and entertainment among others. While few are as involved in radical organization-based activism as their parents had been during the Black Power era, most engage in formal and informal activities that deeply resonate with the BPP’s visions for eradicating social, economic, and political oppression.