by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Finnie Coleman said the 40th anniversary celebration for the Black Panther Party has been an unqualified success for himself and UNM.
"It's been one of the most important successes of my career. It's certainly one of the highlights of my adult life to be involved in this at all," said Coleman, director of the African American Studies Program. "And I think for the University it's clearly a great success."
David Hilliard, one of the founding members of the party, agreed.
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"I think it's been a very inspiring and warm reception," he said. "It's been amazing in terms of the response. We feel so welcome and so at home here."
Hilliard and Coleman mingled and ate barbecue with about 15 people at a reception Sunday evening.
The reception was meant to let people relax and socialize after panel discussions and speeches.
"The reception is meant to give people the opportunity - probably one of the last opportunities that they'll have - to interact personally with David," Coleman said.
The celebration may not be the end of relations between UNM and the Black Panther Party.
Hilliard said he might teach a class at UNM on the history of the party next fall.
"I certainly hope so. This is a wonderful place," he said. "And this is propitious timing, given the complexity of problems in New Mexico among the Native Americans, the Hispanics and the blacks."
Teaching such a course at UNM could help solve those problems, he said.
"Our Black Panther Party had solutions and a model to deal with this," he said. "And as people hear new ideas, they're open and wanting to hear more. They want to use our Black Panther Party as a model to deal with problems locally."
Hilliard teaches a similar class at Merritt College in Oakland, Calif.
Coleman said UNM might also become home to a Black Panther archive.
"We're trying to lay the groundwork so that if an opportunity to have these papers arises, the University is in the position to make an affirmative decision," he said.
UNM already has archives of material from the Chicano movement and the American-Indian movement. The Black Panther papers would put the University in a unique position, Coleman said.
"This would then be the only place in the country that could market itself as having papers from all three major resistance movements in the United States," he said. "That's unprecedented."
However, the Black Panther archive is not just important to complete a collection, he said.
"This is a seminal piece of American history, not just black history," he said. "We would do well to preserve that."
Coleman could not ask for the celebration to have gone any better, he said.
"Every event has been a highlight. We've been successful in everything we tried to do," he said. "When you have this many events you expect that you're going to have a shortcoming here and a shortcoming there, but we didn't have that. Every event was successful."
