News Release

Note: For photos, see end of release.

Exhibit, panel to trace connections
between Black Panthers, Young Lords

CHAPEL HILL — Former members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization of the 1960s and 1970s will speak Jan. 27 at the opening of an exhibit that traces their connected histories.

The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will present the panel from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. A reception will begin at 4 p.m.

The program will mark the opening of the exhibit “Radicals in Black and Brown: Palante, People’s Power and Common Cause in the Black Panthers and the Young Lords Organization.” The 63 photographs, posters, flyers and other materials will be displayed through March 2 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays.

The discussion and exhibit will be free to the public at the Stone Center, located at 150 South Road just west of the Morehead Patterson Bell Tower. Photographers and scholars who have documented the two movements will contribute to the discussion.

Panelists will include former Panthers Kathleen Cleaver and Ahmad Rahman and former Young Lords Iris Morales and Miguel “Mickey” Melendez. For the names and capsule biographies of all panelists, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan07/pantherslordspanelist011907.html.

“I can guarantee that they will point to striking similarities in the current political climate, and challenges of today, and those they faced back in the day,” said Dr. Joseph Jordan, center director, UNC professor of African-American studies and one of three scholars who are organizing the exhibit and discussion.

The exhibit will examine common and distinctive aspects of the groups’ histories, Jordan said. It will highlight ways that they influenced each other’s politics, strategies and tactics.

Items displayed will include two 1969 photos, of the late Huey Newton with the late author James Baldwin, and of a Young Lords rally in New York City. Others will be an eight-track tape of the late Eldridge Cleaver’s (Panther information minister) “Soul on Wax,” portraits, a hand-painted poster and monitors with looping video documentary excerpts. Visitors can arrange to watch the full documentaries at other times in the Stone Center Library.

Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., in to patrol black ghettoes and protect residents from police brutality. The party became a revolutionary group that called for changes including the arming of all blacks and realignment of economic policies to benefit everyone, including people of other races.

“Throughout the course of their relatively short existence (1966-1982), the Black Panthers electrified the nation with their dynamic image – berets, black leather jackets, weapons – and their revolutionary zeal,” wrote Charles Jones of Georgia State University in his essay “Power to the Panthers: An Overview of the Black Panther Party, 1966-82.

“Panther comrades galvanized communities and regularly participated in coalitions with the white left and other radical groups of color including the Young Lords,” wrote Jones, who will speak on the Stone Center panel. “Their community outreach activities, later named ‘survival programs,’ fed, clothed, educated and provided health care to thousands.”

The Young Lords, a Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist group started in the 1960s, fashioned itself in part after the Panthers; they advocated independence for Puerto Rico.

Jones, Jordan and Johanna Fernandez of Carnegie-Mellon University organized the exhibit and panel. Advisers are Darrel Enck-Wanzer of Eastern Illinois University and Hiram Maristany, a photographer and former Young Lord. Items exhibited are from the collections of Jones; Maristany; Carlos Flores of Chicago and brother and sister Alden and Mary Kimbrough of Los Angeles.

The exhibit is cosponsored by UNC’s Institute of African-American Research and Latina/o Studies minor and the African-American Latina/o Alliance of North Carolina. For more information, call (919) 962-9001.

- 30 -

Note: For names and capsule biographies of the panelists, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan07/pantherslordspanelist011907.html

Photos: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/stone_center/BaldwinNewtonJPEG.jpg
http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/stone_center/NY21RallyMaristanycopy.jpg

Stone Center contact: Olympia Friday, (919) 962-7265, ofriday@email.unc.edu
News Services contacts: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589