‘A mural that celebrates Black joy’: Oakland home honors women of the Black Panther party
Jilchristina Vest always wanted people to look up to Black women. Now, thanks to a two-story mural on the side of her Oakland home, they literally do.
The mural, dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party, was unveiled earlier this month. Vest’s house sits at Center and 9th streets, in the heart of the West Oakland neighborhood where the Black Panther party began, once known as the Harlem of the west. The mural looks down on the corner where Huey Newton, one of the party’s founders, was killed.
The work was commissioned by Vest and brought to life by Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith, an Oakland-based muralist, while the former Black Panther Ericka Huggins served as mentor on the project.
Standing 30 ft tall, the towering mural is already drawing regular crowds and sparking a dialogue in the neighborhood. “People park their cars, get out and stand on the sidewalk and look up at the Black women on the wall,” says Vest. “They take pictures in front of their images. The mural starts conversations on the sidewalk. Strangers introduce themselves to one another. They ask questions.”
Vest explains the mural is based on an archival photograph taken by Stephen Shames, and that the women in the photograph were originally unidentified. But since the mural unveiling, observers have helped name the figures as Delores Henderson, Angie Johnson, and Lauren Williams and her child. The striking “Panther” blue artwork already contains the names of 260 women, and the plan is for it to eventually stretch around Vests’s entire house, covering 2,000 sq ft, and that names of more women will continue to be added.
The towering work is the first public installation honoring the women of the party who Huggins, the longest serving female Black Panther, says have long been overlooked by the media and historians. She recalls how Black teenagers from all over the country were drawn to California to join the party; two-thirds were women who worked side-by-side with the men.
“This is something people do not know,” she says. “The history books do not carry us.”
Huggins, who spent 14 years in the party, says that Newton was a lover of art and literature; they even co-authored poetry together. She describes how the Black Panthers operated community programs in the historically redlined West Oakland neighborhood – providing food, medical care, and educational programming – that went on to be replicated nationally and internationally.
“We were not a mainstream organization, nor did we aspire to be,” she recalls. “We called ourselves revolutionaries. We didn’t expect mainstream media to carry us. We were talking about uplifting not only Black and Brown people but all oppressed people.”
The mural memorializes the party’s creed, “Serve the People, Body and Soul”, as well as a quote from Huggins: “Love is an expression of power. We can use it to transform our world.” Its unveiling included a Black Panther-style community food giveaway in collaboration with the East Oakland Collective.
Vest, 54, is originally from Chicago, and was born the same year the Black Panthers formed. She moved to California at 19, and purchased her home on Ninth Street 20 years ago. While the mural was in process, she spearheaded a movement to rename three blocks of 9th Street Dr Huey P Newton Way.
Murals are an enormous undertaking, logistically and financially, but Vest says the most challenging part of the project was self-doubt. “As Black people and as Black women, we constantly have to negate what we are being told out in the world,” she says. “It is difficult to talk it down.”
The project helped Vest move through a dark period, brought about by the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd and the lack of justice over the murder of Breonna Taylor.
“I was suffering. Everyone around me was suffering. I was crying daily
and having panic attacks,” she says. “So much of the mural is born out of the events of May-June of 2020.”
Thousands of people protested across Oakland during the summer, and dozens of murals sprung up in the city’s downtown, creating a kind of outdoor museum. Vest says she found them beautiful and cathartic, but noted that they came out of grief. The artwork inspired her to commission the mural – one that celebrated life, her ancestors, community, and people who looked like her.
And at a time when “black Bodies continue to be persecuted”, she says, the mural is also a reminder that she is “not going anywhere”.
“I do not have to ask permission to take up space,” she says. “I can paint a mural on my home that celebrates Black joy, that reminds us we thrive, we are powerful, we are amazing, and we can use that to balance the grief.”