ABOUT
This digital archive was compiled by Hannah Bahls and Dewi Zarni for the UC Berkeley East Bay Revolution Course. We hope these documents help future researchers, education enthusiasts, and anyone else interested in the Party's revolutionary vision of what education could be.
We would like to thank Rodney Gillead and Mary Williams for generously sharing their stories of Oakland Community School with us; the UC Berkeley Oral History Center and Ericka Huggins for Huggins’ incredible oral history; Billy X Jennings for his site It’s About Time, which played an invaluable role in our research; and Gabrielle Foreman and Susan Moffat for their helpful comments on the project.
We would also like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our professors Scott Saul and Greg Castillo for their thoughtful feedback and dedicated support.
CONTACT US
Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments through this form.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
This project on the Oakland Community School is indebted to recent scholarship that draws out, more generally, the contributions of women within the Black Panther Party, as well as to specific work on the Oakland Community School and the Panthers' educational programs.
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Random House, 1992).
Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Ericka Huggins, "An Oral History with Ericka Huggins" (interviews conducted by Fiona Thompson in 2007), Oral History Center, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, 2010.
Ericka Huggins and Angela D. LeBlanc-Earnest, "Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School," in Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds., Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
Daniel Perlstein, "Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Freedom Struggle," American Educational Research Journal 39:2 (Summer 2002), 249-277.
Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
Robyn C. Spencer, “Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California,” West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).