Ode to Our Feminist Foremothers: The Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project on Collaborative Praxis and Fifty Years of Panther History

This roundtable describes the creation and evolution of the Intersectional Black Panther Party (BPP) History Project, a feminist collective created by Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, Tracye A. Matthews, Mary Phillips, and Robyn C. Spencer, four Black women historians who have spent decades researching and writing about Panther women’s lives. Our discussion centers around the intellectual legacy of the Combahee River Collective to explore the utility of Black feminist methodologies in studying the BPP; the state of the field; silences in the historiography around queer identities, pleasure, and gendering men; and the impact of the crisis facing Black women in the larger society on our work as scholar-activists.