By Nicole Haley

Three prominent activists shared the message of empowerment from their days as revolutionaries with a room full of Northeastern students and faculty in a symposium entitled, “The Legacy of the Black Panthers and Lessons for Today.”

Del Lewis, director of the Center for the Arts, said the symposium was meant to create interest for the movie screening which will feature live performances on stage to accompany the video. Noting the significance of the issues presented in Director Fred Ho’s work, Lewis said that the center was excited when Ho presented his idea for his “approach to the arts as a civic dialogue.”

“We’ve made some progress, but we’re not there yet,” Lewis said, referring to the ongoing fight for equality.

Panelist Askia Toure was a poet and activist in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in an era that he described as “just coming out of United States apartheid.”

“We knew that in order to have a liberation movement we had to have a liberation culture,” Toure said.

Poets like Toure needed a forum to speak and spread their message, and Ed Bullins, an award-winning playwright, helped to cultivate that space.

Bullins and Toure had also been linked with the Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee (NSCC), an organization through which Charles Pinderhughes, another future leader, first entered the movement.

Of the many misconceptions people have of the Panthers today, Pinderhughes said the most unwarranted of them all is the belief that the group was a racist one.

Keesha Brown, a third year law student who attended the symposium, explained how she has been inspired by their example to accomplish things in her own career.

“When I own my own firm I want to implement some of the same things as the Panthers, such as after school programs for urban youth,” Brown said.

“You don’t have a revolution without revolutionary ideas,” Toure said.