Chicago activist Mary Scott-Boria reflects on "Judas and the Black Messiah" and her time with the Black Panther Party

by Suzanne Hanney

A Black Panther Party member in the late 1960s, Mary Scott-Boria doesn’t remember any shotgun shoot-outs with police as in the movie, “Judas and the Black Messiah."

“I thought the movie hyped that aspect up too much,” Scott- Boria said in a telephone interview. “I was never asked to participate in anything that was a violent interaction.”

Scott-Boria remembers not darkness, but sunny days on Madison Street, peddling the Panther Party newspaper. She also recalls the Panthers’ free breakfast program for kids on the West Side and Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton interacting with everyday people just as readily as he mesmerized crowds with his speeches.

“This hard-core revolutionary wasn’t all that he was. The reality was, there was sort of this air of hyper-machismo. The men – if you’ve been demonized and dehumanized and get positions of power -- sometimes it goes to your head. It didn’t go to Fred’s head, but it did go to other guys’ heads.”

Scott-Boria said she counted eight times in the film where Hampton’s character showed an emotional connection to his fiancée, now known as Akua Njeri. Njeri was pregnant with Hampton’s son when [plot spoiler] Chicago Police broke into their apartment and assassinated him on Dec. 4, 1969, at the behest of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and the FBI.

“[The movie] showed sort of a softer side of what the image of him is. It was nice. It might have been overplayed, but it balanced this image of him as radical revolutionary,” she said.

How much of the Panther strategy was really about government overthrow and joining with the Soviet Union?

Scott-Boria said she didn’t know the extent to which Panther leadership was involved with revolutionary leaders overseas, but “I know the literature we read was focused on international solidarity with countries that had become socialist countries. The Panthers advocated this 10-point program [full employment, housing, education, end to police brutality, exemption from the military because it fought wars against people of color, and more] that really spoke to the needs of people, primarily African Americans. And Fred was very deliberate about aligning with Latinos, poor whites, very deliberate about a coalition with these groups.”

Hampton’s organizing followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which brought anti-war activists from across the nation. “Fred had the ability to make a connection with a lot of national sentiment against the war.”

Even if the word “revolution” wasn’t used, Hampton’s work was about transforming society. Besides the free breakfasts, the Panthers ran a health center and were the first to do sickle cell anemia testing, which was later taken over by Cook County Hospital, she said.

Simultaneously, Scott-Boria recalls an interview Hampton did with a Chicago journalist (not part of the movie) where he was asked about actions of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen.

“He said, ‘that’s crazy, we’re not bombing buildings.’”

But Hampton advocated dramatic change for Black people to feel free. “That meant protecting ourselves against the police because the police didn’t protect us, forcing the government to meet the needs of the people, forcing schools to live up to the promise of integration. Things we are still struggling for.”

Socialism provided a framework, she said, “because there were models of countries like Cuba that were taking care of their people. It was very much a threat to J. Edgar Hoover because the Panthers were gaining momentum. So much was happening in 1968 and 1969 that Hoover was quite afraid of the rhetoric of the Black Panther Party being a connection to Vietnam and Cuba and the African liberation struggle being fueled by the Soviet Union.”

However, Soviet communism was a state system, she said, whereas socialism is Medicare, Social Security, the federal housing authority, public education.

“We have pieces of socialism in our country already. The argument of socialism vs. capitalism is, ‘are we going to sell off our education system to private vendors, or keep public education that can be equalized for everyone? Are we going to make Medicare for all so that everyone can have access to health care?’

“That’s the modern-day idea of socialism. We not trying to governmentize, but to realize there’s certain inalienable rights everyone should have access to.”

Scott-Boria came to her activism while a student at Richard Crane Junior College on the West Side. The college was housed in a portion of an old school building, which meant the Black Panthers were rubbing shoulders with Black liberationists and Black nationalists, perhaps 20 to 30 people in all, in a second-floor hallway.

As the daughter of a Black father and an activist white mother, Scott-Boria used the Panthers as an opportunity to prove her Blackness.

“I’m here in black pants and a black shirt. I had a black beret. Because I was so light-skinned, my Afro needed to be bigger, and I needed to wear those combat boots” – even at the National Honor Society dinner.

“It was a very small space we congregated in, so we had lots of opportunities to talk to each other and feel excited. We were trying really hard to get a new college because we were in that crappy little high school. Our goal was to force the City Colleges to give us a new college. It snowballed.”

The result was Malcolm X College, opened in 1969 at 1900 W. Van Buren and named after the Nation of Islam leader assassinated in 1965. The students also demanded a Black president, new faculty and more Black studies classes.

“We thought there would be massive change in the '60s because of the power of our voice and the power of momentum. As I get older, I realize it doesn’t happen like that, although George Floyd was a moment in time, that fueled activism.”

She thinks Hampton’s idea of revolution was a mass movement to force the government to change its policies toward Black people. “I felt like sort of the rhetoric was, ‘we don’t believe in this government, but this government has made a promise of equal rights, so it’s our job to force this government to change.’”

Following Hampton's murder, Scott-Boria left the Panthers after about six months, during which time another friend they had recruited was shot by police.

“I thought, ‘this murder demonstrates the power of the state, not the power of the Panthers.’ I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore.” She also had a little daughter to protect.

Finishing her degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), she also became interested in women’s issues, such as a campaign against forced sterilization of young Puerto Rican women. After college, she became a social worker at a hospital, an abortion counselor immediately after Roe v. Wade became inactive. After completing her graduate degree in social work at UIC , she worked for the City -- without being beholden to the Machine, since the Shakman Decrees had recently been passed.

She organized community rape crisis centers around the idea of a hotline, and became the first executive director of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, for which the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago was the fiscal agent. She was founding executive member of the Cook County Democratic Women and later, director of women’s services at the YWCA, then successively associate director and director of the Youth Services Project in Humboldt Park and finally, director of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest urban studies program for 15 years.