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“Like I’m so completely lopsided with this rage and this grief and this sorrow and their answer back to me was to surround myself with black joy,” said Vest, in an interview with the Film Girls’ Social Archive - JILCHRISTINA VEST
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five Black Panther community programs and showcases the longest list of women leaders in the Panthers ever cataloged. “Seventy percent of the Panthers were women,” Vest said in a 2022 interview with PBS NewsHour, “and the average age was around eighteen or nineteen. So some of these people are still alive.” Vest came up with the idea for the mural out of her grief during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. She felt that celebrating Black women leaders would provide joy that would be a light in her time of sadness.
Women participated in the Panthers right alongside men, playing many of the same roles, but many of them have yet to be named and recorded for history. The 2,000-square-foot mural was completed in 2021, under the guidance of former Panther Ericka Huggins and artistic team leader Rachel Wolfe- Goldsmith. Huggins wanted to honor the Panthers’ community self-help programs, known as Survival Programs, and the many “rank and file” women who served with the Panthers. The massive artwork on the bright blue wall pays tribute to the more than sixty-
Black history is the story of what Black people have
done,” says Jilchristina Vest, curator of the Women of the Black Panther Party museum. “Not the story of what others have done to us. That’s their history.” This focus on self-determination is evident in the mural on the building’s side wall showcasing the women of the Black Panther Party, an Oakland- based group active in the 1960s and 1970s who fought for the rights of Black people and operated self-help programs providing (among other things) food, clothing, and education for children.
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