Therapy for Black Girls · iHeartPodcasts and Joy Harden Bradford, Ph.D.

Session 415: Black Panther Woman

June 11, 2025·37 min·2 clips

Erica Huggins taught herself yoga in prison to stay healthy for her daughter's visits.

1. Therapy for Black Girls, hosted by Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, features Dr. Mary Frances Phillips discussing her book 'Black Panther Woman,' a scholarly biography of Black Panther leader Erica Huggins. 2. Dr. Phillips is an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose interdisciplinary research focuses on race, gender, post-1945 social movements, and the carceral state. 3. The episode's thesis is that Erica Huggins's spiritual and wellness practices — developed under state imprisonment — offer a practical model for internal healing that is applicable to Black and brown women in the current political moment. 4. Phillips traces her interest in Black Panther women to undergraduate African American history courses at Michigan State University, where she became curious about women's everyday experiences inside the party. 5. She connected with Huggins after a conference presentation on the Panthers, introduced by mentor LaDee LaBlanc-Earnest, and conducted over a decade of oral history interviews with Huggins to build the biography. 6. The book blends oral history, prison records, COINTELPRO papers, photographs, and archives at Yale University, noting that no single institution holds all of Huggins's papers. 7. Phillips describes occasional conflict with Huggins during the writing process — Huggins wanted some stories cut, some were removed, some were not — requiring a 'delicate balance' between the historian's interpretive framework and the subject's preferred self-presentation. 8. 'Black Panther Woman' is described as the first academic scholarly biography of any Black Panther woman, with Huggins rising from rank-and-file member to the Central Committee and ultimately directing the Oakland Community School. 9. Women made up the numerical majority of the Black Panther Party early in its history, ran its community survival programs, and kept the organization functioning when police and state forces attacked its publicly visible male leadership. 10. Huggins was arrested for a crime she did not commit and held at Niantic Prison (now Young Correctional Institution) from 1969 to 1971, where she and other Panther women were the first political prisoners that facility had ever housed. 11. To maintain her health for her daughter Mai's Saturday four-hour prison visits, Huggins borrowed a yoga book from her lawyer Charles Garry — a practicing yogi who did headstands before court appearances — and self-taught yoga and meditation. 12. In the prison's general population, Huggins founded the Sister Love Collective, a women-centered mutual aid organization that addressed social, medical, and psychological needs and included a hair salon, refashioned prison uniforms, and a women's bail fund. 13. After release, Huggins became director of the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School, where she introduced yoga and meditation for students — sending disruptive children to do yoga rather than to punishment, and leading whole-school meditation sessions. 14. Phillips describes the queerness thread in Huggins's biography, noting that many Panthers 'loved who they loved unapologetically' during the free love movement, and that Huggins worked through her queer identity in conversations with her aunt before embracing it fully. 15. Black Lives Matter and other contemporary movements are actively studying Panther activists, including Huggins, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur, and using intersectional frameworks developed in the feminist movements of that era. 16. Phillips says that mental health stigma in the Black community is tied to histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and government assault — framing avoidance of mental health terminology as a 'protective mechanism' rather than ignorance. 17. Phillips notes that Erica Huggins, at 21, made choices she might not have made later, and caused harm to others; the book addresses these moments in context and documents Huggins's restorative justice work around them. 18. The episode has a warm, scholarly interview tone — Bradford asks substantive historical questions and Phillips responds with layered, nuanced answers that consistently contextualize Black women's contributions. 19. The episode will suit listeners interested in Black history, Black feminist thought, carceral wellness, and historical models of resistance and mental health practice. 20. Listeners who want practical mental health tools rather than historical analysis, or who are unfamiliar with the Black Panther Party, may find the episode more academic than actionable.

As heard by us

A thoughtful Therapy for Black Girls conversation on Erica Huggins, Black feminist history, incarceration, and survival as a practice of care.

Session 415 of Therapy for Black Girls uses Mary Frances Phillips' Black Panther Woman to look at Erica Huggins through the overlap of activism, Black feminist thought, incarceration, and emotional survival. Dr.

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Why you'd press play

Black Panther history, told through care, spirituality, and the politics of Black women's autonomy.

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