Ericka Huggins

Ericka Huggins, her former name being, Ericka Jenkins was born on January 5, 1948, in Washington D.C, United States. She is popular as an American activist and pedagogue. In all Ericka had two elder siblings. However, her parents’ identity is yet not known. Ericka was the youngest of her siblings. In 1966, Ericka completing her school days at a high school in Washington DC, Ericka got enrolled in Cheyney State College, though later she moved to Lincoln University to complete her collegiate, and there she met her future husband from Vietnam, John Huggins, who attained the Master’s degree in Sociology. Huggins was a professor who taught Sociology at the Laney College, in Oakland and also taught at Berkeley City College. In 1972, Ericka was elected as a member of the Berkeley Community Development Council, after she traversed to California. Also, Ericka was also the Director of the Oakland Community School, which belonged to the Black Panther Click to look into! >> Read More... Party. She also worked as an educator at Stanford, Cornell, and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). After being an active member of the Black Panther Party,

Ericka along with the support of the other two women, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, an American professor of law, and Elaine Brown, an American activist, writer and singer, who was once the chairman of the Black Panther Party, in Oakland, California, preached the chapters of Black Panther Party in New Haven. On January 16, 1969, her husband John Huggins was killed, because of a rivalry between the Blank Panther Party and a US organization, a Black Nationalist group. The burial ceremony of John Huggins took place at his birthplace, New Haven, which was attended by Ericka, loaded with a lot of grief. In 1970, when Alex Rackley was murdered, for being a suspect, who exchanged information, Huggins along with the co-founder of Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale was accused of kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder. This created a riot across the country, and everything became unstable and torturous.

There were protests saying “Free Bobby, Free Ericka” or whether the Panther party would get obtain affair judgment. While waiting for her trials, Ericka inculcated spiritual practices in her life and learned meditation. While, after a term of ten years, when she came out of the jail, she started sharing her meditation experiences. In 1967, Ericka married John Huggins and gave birth a daughter, Mai Huggins when she was just 20 years of age. Three months after John was shot to death and Ericka brought up her child as a widowed mother. Besides Mai, Ericka has two sons, one from James Mott, who was the lead singer of the Black Panther troop. Ericka has always lectured across the world, encouraging well-being of women, children, and the young generation. She was the first black person and a woman both who made it to the Alameda Co. Board of Education. Her desires of preaching humanity arose in 1963 when she attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was great at poetry and many of her works even appeared in magazines and newspapers. She even took to reading as she believed that it would hone her thought process. For public awareness of HIV/AIDS, Ericka had been the first women volunteer to support the movement and took to help in spreading awareness, and hence volunteered the Shanti Project. She even developed programs to spread awareness of gay or lesbian relationship.