Black Youth Project

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Black Youth Project

Black Youth Project is a digital archive and publishing site focused on the thoughts & actions of young Black folks. We are for us, by us. Without apology.

11/05/2026

BLACK LIFE EVERYWHERE | An Oakland Homecoming: Space, Place, and the Politics of Return by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD.

Jackson writes about growing up across East, West, and North Oakland as part of the Cherry family, descendants of a Great Migration lineage that stretched from Arkansas through Washington to California. Their grandmother Lucille and great-grandmother Hester carried forward traditions of feeding and clothing community, including through the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, even as Jackson’s own household was marked by their father’s addiction and their maternal grandfather’s violence.

Jackson traces the rupture that followed when, at sixteen, they were abandoned by their mother and spent the years after surviving trafficking, homelessness, and sexual violence, years they carried as distance from Oakland itself. Their return home in January 2026, held by friend and fellow organizer Malkia “Mac” Devich-Cyril, becomes a meditation on what it means to be welcomed back into a place that once hurt you, and to build Black Life Everywhere’s Oakland issue as part of claiming their place in the city’s present, not just its past.

Read more with the link in our bio.
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is a digital, multimedia magazine centered in the radical spirit of resistance and hope across the Black diaspora, an initiative of founded by Dr. Cathy Cohen.

11/04/2026

BLACK LIFE EVERYWHERE | How Has Oakland Fed You?

Oakland has raised generations of Black organizers, artists, and families whose ties to the city reach far beyond where they grew up. For BLE’s third issue, we’re asking: how has Oakland fed you? We begin with writer and organizer Amber Butts, whose maternal grandparents were Black Panthers and whose paternal grandparents brought Black Baptist traditions from Alabama to Oakland in the 1970s. A video reflection accompanies her essay, Mutual Aid, Fascism, and the Politics of Care, connecting her family’s traditions of rent parties, shared meals, and collective childcare to the community support that carried her through her child’s rare epilepsy diagnosis and her own cancer diagnosis.

As Oakland marks the Black Panther Party’s 60th anniversary, the issue sits with a hard question: the city celebrates this political history while many of the people who built it, including former Panthers and elders, can no longer afford to live here. Across eight weeks, BLE will pair written work with performance and other creative contributions on Oakland’s political and cultural life, culminating in an in-person symposium and vendor fair on the 21st, alongside a food drive ahead of Thanksgiving.

Read more with the link in our bio.
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Black Life Everywhere (BLE) is a digital, multimedia magazine centered in the radical spirit of resistance and hope across the Black diaspora, an initiative of Black Youth Project (BYP) founded by Dr. Cathy Cohen.

11/02/2026

Feed ourselves, free ourselves. 🌱

Join us on Saturday, November 21 at 7th West for BLE Oakland: Feed Ourselves, Free Ourselves, a community symposium honoring the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party’s founding in Oakland and celebrating the release of our Oakland issue.

The day will include a keynote from Ericka Huggins and our “Nourish the Root” panel with jenn m. jackson, Amber Blossoming, Niema Jordan, KB Brookins, and Darrick Smith, plus a vendor fair and exhibitions from Black artists.

In the spirit of the Black Panther Party’s People’s Free Food Program, we’re also collecting non-perishable food at the event to share with the broader Oakland community ahead of Thanksgiving.

Bring what you can to help stock our BLE Oakland Pantry. Canned soups, stews, fruit, vegetables, fish, and beans are all welcome, along with pasta, rice, and nut or seed butters. Please make sure everything is shelf-stable and hasn’t reached or neared its sell-by date.

Not sure where to start? Check your own pantry before heading to the store. Swipe through for the full guide.

Mutual aid is an act of community care, and we can’t wait to build with you.

🗓️ Saturday, November 21
📍 7th West, Oakland
🎟️ Link in bio to join us

10/30/2026

BLE Oakland: Feed Ourselves, Free Ourselves.

Sixty years ago, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded right here in Oakland and changed the course of Black liberation. This fall, Black Life Everywhere dedicated our third issue to that legacy, and now we’re bringing it home.

Join us Saturday, November 21 from 11 AM to 4 PM at 7th West in Oakland for a community symposium filled with art, conversation, food, music, and good company.

We’ll open with “Nourish the Root,” a panel conversation with jenn m. jackson, Amber Blossoming, Niema Jordan, KB Brookins, and Darrick Smith.

We’ll close with a keynote from Ericka Huggins, former Black Panther Party leader, educator, and lifelong advocate for community care.

In between, you’ll find exhibitions from local artists and space to connect around where Oakland has been, where we stand now, and where we’re headed.

Bring a donation: In the spirit of the Panthers’ community survival programs, we’re collecting non-perishable food at the event. Bring what you can to help feed our community.

Can’t make it in person? We’ll be livestreaming on YouTube.

Tickets at the link in bio.

Free ourselves. Feed ourselves.

10/26/2026

Oakland, how has this city fed you? 💚💛

On November 21, 2026, Black Life Everywhere: OAKLAND comes to life. Our in-person symposium and vendor fair honors the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party and the release of our third issue. Together, we’re gathering to honor the ways Oakland has fed us, past, present, and future.

And we want YOU there. We’re looking for Black artists, exhibitors, and vendors from Oakland to be a part of the celebration.

🎨 Artists & Exhibitors: Share creative work connected to our theme, Feed Ourselves, Free Ourselves. Speak to it directly or explore the question: How has Oakland fed you?

🛍️ Vendors: Black vendors and small businesses, we welcome it all, from your incense to your homemade bean pies. Food vendors, pre-packaged or bottled goods only (no open flames).

The details: there’s a $25 booth fee, and you’ll bring your own display setup (tables, chairs, frames) and your own POS/payment system.

To confirm your slot, email [email protected] with a short proposal by November 6th. Questions? Same inbox.

Swipe through for the full details, and subscribe to our digital magazine at blacklifeeverywhere.com. We can’t wait to see your proposals. See you soon! ✊🏾

10/20/2026

Black Life Everywhere (BLE) — Mutual Aid, Fascism, and the Politics of Care by Amber Butts.

Butts writes about Oakland as the city that raised her: home to her grandparents, two Black Panthers who held rent parties, fed the hood, and sheltered neighbors when the government offered only abandonment.

That same ethic carried her through the hardest stretch of her own life, giving birth to a Black child later diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy while facing her own cancer diagnosis, and being held by community rather than left to fight alone.

Butts argues mutual aid is a direct threat to fascism, which depends on scarcity and the belief that some people are more deserving than others, and traces a sixty-year throughline from the Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program to mutual aid networks organizing today.

Read more with the link-in-bio.
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Black Life Everywhere (BLE) is a digital, multimedia magazine centered in the radical spirit of resistance and hope across the Black diaspora, an initiative of Black Youth Project (BYP) founded by Dr. Cathy Cohen.

Our third issue, Feed Ourselves, Free Ourselves, marks 60 years since the Black Panther Party’s founding, with an in-person symposium on November 21 in Oakland. Learn more with the link in our bio.

10/20/2026

A Difficult Miracle: Black Poetics in a Time of Crisis by Jari Bradley.

Bradley writes from the 2015 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, where they first encountered Phillis Wheatley and, through June Jordan’s essay on her, began to understand constraint as something Black poets inherit and write against. Drawing on Fred Moten and Camonghne Felix, Bradley traces a lineage of Black poetics born inside crisis, from the holds of slave ships to the poet’s own imagination of a different future.

Bradley weaves in a personal reckoning too: attending those first workshops meant defying an uncle who threatened to leave them homeless while caretaking for their grandmother. That sacrifice, and the memory of a grandmother who bought books without hesitation, becomes its own difficult miracle, proof that Black art is never suffering alone but a stubborn reach toward another way of existing.

🔗 Read the full story at BlackYouthProject.com

10/20/2026

Black Gen Z Doesn’t Need Another “Leave Your Hometown” Speech by Kourtney K. Galloway.

Galloway writes from Mississippi, pushing back on the idea that ambition for young Black Southerners only looks like leaving. Building something at home, she argues, often means sitting at a kitchen table emailing local businesses, calling cousins for favors, and asking artists and educators to show up for free, work that is real but not the same as having an ecosystem.

Galloway names the gap in access to capital Black founders face and points to migration data showing many Black Americans are actually moving back to the South. Her ask isn’t loyalty to a hometown, it’s for cities to build the infrastructure that makes staying, leaving, or returning an actual choice rather than a consolation prize.

🔗 Read the full story at BlackYouthProject.com

10/20/2026

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS: Black Life Everywhere Issue 3 is dedicated to OAKLAND 🖤

60 years after the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, we’re asking: how has Oakland fed you?

Send us your new, unpublished writing, media, music, and visual art that captures Oakland’s history, people, present, and future. Selected work will be featured in our weekly digital season starting late October and in our closing zine.

Submit your work and a short bio to [email protected] by October 31st.
Want to be part of our in-person symposium on November 21? We’re looking for vendors, speakers, panelists, artists, and creatives. Reach out at the same email.

Tag an Oakland creative who needs to see this.

10/12/2026

Black Life Everywhere (BLE) is back, and this time we’re going to Oakland. 🖤

Our third issue, Feed Ourselves, Free Ourselves, celebrates 60 years since the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the movement that fed children, built clinics, and showed the world what community care looks like in practice.

So we’re asking you: How has Oakland fed you?

We’re looking for new, unpublished work that captures Oakland’s energy: its history, its people, its present, and its future. Creative writing, media, music, and visual art are all welcome.

Selected work will be featured throughout our weekly digital season starting in late October and in our closing zine.

📬 Send your work and a short bio to [email protected]
🗓️ Submissions close October 31

And mark your calendars: we’re bringing the season into the community with an in-person symposium on November 21. We’re looking for vendors, speakers, panelists, artists, and creatives to help us activate the space. Want in? Reach out at the same email.

Tag someone whose work belongs in this issue. We can’t wait to see what you create.

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http://blackyouthproject.com/

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