Black Panther Museum education exhibit made more accessible through new Spanish translation

For the past year, an exhibit at the Oakland Black Panther Party Museum has educated visitors about the community school model that was launched by the Panthers in 1973 and has since been incorporated into every Oakland Unified School District building. 

Recently, the exhibit’s reach was expanded, thanks to the efforts of a Madison Park Academy student and the nonprofit Ocelotl, which worked to translate the exhibit into Spanish. 

“The Black Panther Party, they brought communities together, and I feel like projects like this being more accessible to people and open for others, helps bring our new communities together,” said Valeria Cajero Huidor, the 17-year-old student who spent nearly 100 hours translating the exhibit this summer as an Ocelotl intern. 

OUSD’s modern-day community school model celebrates the Panthers’ legacy, bringing various essential services to students and families, free of charge including medical and mental health services, after school programs, clothes closets and food pantries. 

The “Each One Teach One: The History of the Oakland Community School” exhibit, which opened in January 2024 and will remain on display until the end of this year, features unpublished photographs taken by Black Panther newspaper photographer Donald Cunningham between 1973 and 1982. It emphasizes the importance of the Oakland Community School, which used a liberation-based curriculum that focused on the whole child. Museum visitors can access translated text and audio through QR codes or at the museum’s website.

Fred Hampton’s legacy

Last month, on the 77^th birthday of the late Fred Hampton, co-founder of the Illinois Black Panther Party, the museum held a panel discussion on Each One Teach One and the effort to translate it into Spanish. They talked about Hampton’s “Rainbow Coalition” that brought together disparate groups to fight against their shared oppression under capitalism, including Spanish-speaking groups such as the Young Lords Organization. Like the Oakland Community School, the Rainbow Coalition brought health and services to communities. 

Xavier Buck, executive director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, emphasized the importance of these collective organizing movements, telling the panel that Hampton crafted the blueprint for how groups now organize. 

“We were all in a common struggle, and it made sense for us to work together because we’re all going through the same thing and we all have the same community solutions,” he said. 

Hampton was 21 when police raided the Chicago apartment where he and other Panthers were living, killing him as he slept. 

Each One Teach One is the Black Panther Museum’s inaugural exhibit. When Robin Noel Morales, co-founder of Ocelotl saw it, she was moved and approached Buck about sharing that history with more people in the community, namely, Oakland’s many Spanish speakers. 

“The community school model reflects that we have to attend to basic needs,” Noel Morales noted. “So if people have employment, if people have housing, if people have health care, then kids become secure in feeling safe and can start to learn and explore and become who they need to be.”

To help students understand this legacy, Noel Morales knew the information had to be offered in more than just English. Latinos are the largest demographic group in the Oakland Unified School District, making up about half of student enrollment, according to state and district data. And Spanish is by far the most common language spoken in the district, outside of English. 

Noel Morales, whose organization helps youths of color overcome systemic challenges, told the panel about a field trip for 78 newcomer students from Madison Park Academy to a museum that did not provide Spanish translations for all of its exhibits. She wanted students to be able to engage with the material, so she enlisted the help of Ocelotl’s language navigators, who also are peer mentors, to offer in-person translations. 

Luis Bibiano, a Madison Park alum, was among the Ocelotl language navigators on the field trip, translating for small groups. “It was, in fact, better than reading a text,” he said. “It gives them almost a real-life interaction.”

Bibiano, who also provided translation for the panel discussion, hopes such efforts will expand throughout Oakland.

“A lot of people come to visit Oakland, and a lot of people don’t really speak English as their main language, so I think it would be very important to help translate other exhibits and other museums, so it could be more accessible,” Bibiano said. 

Cajero Huidor, another language navigator on that field trip, agrees. That’s why she put so much effort into translating Each One Teach One, putting the philosophy behind the Panthers’ Community School model into making the exhibit more accessible. 

“For the Each One Teach One, everyone was involved, everyone worked together to make better communities, to help make a better future,” she said. “I hope that that comes back.” 

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