Status Updates From We Want Freedom: A Life in ...

"In the ranks of the Black Panther Party, women were far more than mere appendages of male ego and power, they were valued and respected comrades who demonstrated daily the truth of the adage, 'a revolutionary has no gender.'"

It was the stuff of bitter hopes, of frustrated dreams, a will-o'-the-wisp of Black desires that caught on the wind's ragged updrafts, and spread like a fire in the mind, across vast distances.

To many black and white radical youth of today, the very existence of the Black Panther Party seems almost miraculous. To many of the young people who worked, lived, and loved in the Party, however, the Pay was not a miracle, but a bright, shining reality, one born of radical necessity.