“Power to the People, Y’all” Revisits a Revolutionary Winston-Salem Chapter

Several years ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom drove her mother, Vivian McMillan, from Charlotte to Winston-Salem for a 50th anniversary party of the local Black Panther Party.

Seeing her mother with fellow former Black Panther Party members—now in their 70s and 80s but lively as “a bunch of teenagers”—McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and writer who teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill, began filming “for posterity.” 

That footage evolved into a mandate and later, Power to the People, Y’all, a documentary short that focuses on five founding members of the Winston-Salem chapter—Larry Little, Nelson Malloy, Cynthia Norwood, Brad Lille, and Hazel Mack—as they look back on a revolutionary chapter of North Carolina history. The 35-minute film premiered earlier this week at RiverRun International Film Festival, where it was met with a sold-out premiere and two encore screenings. 

“You don’t do anything easy when you’re doing anything with the comrades,” McMillan Cottom told the INDY, reflecting on the documentary’s origins. “Hazel Mac is organized a part excellente. She’s like, “If we’re going to do something, we should really do it.” And I was like, ‘Yeah, somebody should really come down and do a documentary.’ She looked at me like, “Yeah.” So I had my marching orders.”

Winston-Salem became the first city in the South to establish a Black Panther chapter in 1969 when activist Larry Little moved down from Chicago, looking to expand the movement. Establishing a chapter was a dangerous bet anywhere but especially in the South, given the group’s perceived political threats to the establishment (just two weeks after Little moved, Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, was assassinated). 

Locally, though, the chapter gained remarkable traction, running a series of social services for eight years before withdrawing from the national party in 1977, five years before the Black Panther Party officially dissolved. But as McMillan Cottom points out, the vision didn’t die with the chapter. Power to the People, Y’all, pays tribute to that vision and to the infectious can-do spirit that infused it. 

At RiverRun, in a bit of archival kismet, the documentary joined a slate of other documentaries, including Free Joan Little and We Are, Because We Were, that explore North Carolina’s radical Black history. It is available to screen online through May 3 via the festival’s virtual program. On the heels of a whirlwind month that included getting married and her directorial premiere, the INDY gave McMillan Cottom a call to talk about the film, the history of organizing in the Piedmont, and theories of change.  

INDY: For people new to the story—why Winston Salem? 

MCMILLAN COTTOM: My personal question was that one, as a sociologist, which is—why does a social movement happen in one place and not another? This is a motivating question of why people organize and mobilize, and this is not a for-granted place for this to happen. It’s dead smack in the middle of the Piedmont of North Carolina, which is not in the power centers of the state—it’s not Charlotte, it’s not Raleigh. 

There is a long history of what historian Bob Korstad over at Duke describes as the best, most difficult, ferocious organizing in the Piedmont, North Carolina. And Bob was like, ‘We don’t know this, because there were a lot of powerful interests to make sure nobody knew,’ right? So you have a long history of really radical female-led working-class unions in Winston-Salem and High Point, right? Well, those women had children, and those children knew their moms and their aunties and their cousins to be people who raised hell at RJ Reynolds.

They grow up, and the peace movement and the anti-war movement are happening in the 60s and 70s, and they just sort of merged those two things. They got this idea from the people who raised them that you raise hell, and even though they’ve kind of been erased from local women’s history, the people still existed.

That’s why I think the Panther Party took root in Winston-Salem, in a way that it didn’t in, say, Greensboro or Charlotte. They have a history there of this kind of radical organizing. And I wanted people to know that.

Can you tell me a bit about the programs that the chapter ran? I was intrigued by the free ambulance service. 

You know, at least in the academic world, there’s been a ton done about the Panthers over the last 15-20 years. But for a long time, nobody really talked about the healthcare programs—they talked about the free breakfast program, and that was the most signature program nationwide, and certainly very important. The suite of social programs that the Panthers did [was] driven by what Nelson says is, “You saw a problem, and you address it.” The first act that the Winston-Salem chapter did as a chapter was stopping the evictions of elderly Black women.

So housing and eviction protection, and then, of course, the free breakfast programs. But they also had a suite of health programs, and we only really started exploring those in the last 10 or 15 years …. In this post-segregation moment, when ostensibly, health care had been integrated, the state still hadn’t invested in services for poor Black people.

There was this gap, right? Ambulances wouldn’t come for poor Black people, or if they came, they would charge them before they let them get on the ambulance. They’d have cash to get on. And even then, they might leave you, only take you halfway to the hospital, and leave you. There were instances of people dying while they tried to finagle access to the ambulance service. 

So the chapter looks, and their theory of change was, “Okay, there’s a problem. How do we solve it?” In a very straightforward way, they create an ambulance service. They have a couple of dispatchers. My mom became a 911 dispatcher, after the party, because she’d dispatched with the ambulance service. So it also became this way for them to rebuild their lives. 

What did you learn about the ways those programs had second and third lives? 

I just read something last week about, you know, the fast-growing careers in health care, how it’s the fastest-growing segment of the labor market. These are female-dominated jobs, and I think back to the 1980s, you know, ‘76, ‘77, ‘78—what you had out of that chapter, my mom included, was that a lot of the women went and got their EMT certification so that they could run the free ambulance program.

Surry Community College [was] the only community college in the state that would let the Panthers enroll and get a certificate. The CIA actually tried to stop that community college from allowing them to enroll.

Of course they did. 

The [college] President stood in the gap and just said, “No.” I can’t imagine a [college] president saying no today— by the way, in so many ways, we are less independent and less radical than we were then. He said, “Not only do they deserve education as North Carolinians, but the Panthers are some of our best students.”

What were some of the other surprises or challenges you encountered in the process? 

As much as the Panthers have been written about and studied and fictionalized, and loomed so large in our public memory, here in the South …. the archives of their lives are really sporadic, and there has not been much infrastructure for collecting and preserving their memorabilia and activism. And that’s no accident. Like, what are you gonna do? Are you going to the Reynolds or Hanes or Duke Power and ask them to endow the archive for the Winston-Salem Black Panther Party, you know? 

The archival images and footage in our film, we had to collect all of that and go around to everybody’s house and centralize this archive. There were some things, obviously, but I think the more intimate telling things were things still living in their homes. We’re not archivists, but we have the responsibility to that material. 

You were picking up that line, “Somebody has to do it.” 

Somebody has to do it, that’s it. And if you’re sitting here and I’m looking at you, then it’s your job. 

We took a lot from them about that. We would do an interview, or we’d be reviewing footage at a moment when we were having some challenge with the film, and it was almost like they would be speaking to us. There were several times when Hazel [Mack] was like, “Yeah, if you can do it, you’re supposed to do it.” Or of Nelson [Malloy] saying, “Listen, we can philosophize about this all day. Or we can go solve a problem.” That’s how we approached making the film.

Well, that ties into my last question—what do you hope people take away? But also, what was your experience of listening to the group during this particular moment? 

I will be honest, I was despondent, maybe borderline depressed, when I started working on this project. 

I came away from it with—this is not a uniquely bad time, it is just our turn at the bad. That felt really convicting for me.

I was also just really struck by—you know, we tell a lot of stories about the people who try to revolutionize the world, change the world, who die young. I thought there was something really powerful about this—everybody doesn’t die, Sarah, some people survive.

My question was [then], how would they go on? What I learned from them is, well, you take what you got from the party, and then you go infuse it in your work elsewhere. And then when the moment comes back around, realizing, “Oh, something’s happening, it’s time again.”  They’re energized for that. They’re like, “Okay, we’ve been waiting. Let’s go.” And then that’s what we do. They can’t kill us all. 

I think that’s a good note to end on. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about, or you haven’t been able to talk about, that’s on your mind?

One of my not-so-super-secret motivations for making this is that I really wanted the women of the party to be as central to the story in the film as they were in the organizing. We tell a really masculine story about the party, and honey, the reason why some of these people are still alive today and still living and working and raising hell is because of the women. 

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