In 1963, Janice Payne Dorliae attended the March on Washington as a pregnant 18-year-old with another child waiting at home in Memphis. The 200,000 protesters gathered there made the air thick and humid around her. While the march remained unforgettable, it cemented her dissatisfaction with the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, which spoke of nonviolent protest. Their tone seemed conciliatory and their wins, the bare minimum. “I didn’t think they were right to tell us we couldn’t fight back, we couldn’t even throw a rock,” she later recalled. “I was furious to see them stopping us before we got started.” Born in Mississippi during World War II, Dorliae (née Janice Marie Lewis) grew up in South Memphis, pushing against the borders of Jim Crow from an early age. In elementary school, she purposefully sat in the white sections of public buses, and she joined the city’s desegregation movement as a teenager.
By her late teens, she became pivotal in shaping Black radicalism across Tennessee and Minnesota. She folded seemingly disparate struggles — tenant organizing, infant mortality, union strikes, anti-war protests — into a shared movement for Black working-class resistance, all of which gave momentum to the national anti-fascist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As a keen political strategist and a parent, she repeatedly confronted a fundamental tension of revolutionary struggle: balancing her community’s everyday survival while stoking the flames of deep social transformation.
“I didn’t think they were right to tell us we couldn’t fight back, we couldn’t even throw a rock.”
In 1967, a group of anti-poverty workers, students, and Vietnam veterans in Memphis formed a Black revolutionary nationalist front called The Invaders. Older, more respectable civil rights leaders often failed to resonate with the city’s poorest margins. Inspired by youth-led organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Invaders hoped to show that Black Power was a viable framework for social change. Dorliae joined the group with some of her siblings. As a so-called “Invaderette,” she mobilized community members to support the Sanitation Workers Strike and worked to politically activate poor Black women around welfare reform and food justice.
The Invaders were only active for a few years before they buckled under internal divisions and COINTELPRO. Afterward, Dorliae’s brother Maurice Lewis quickly got to work building a successor group. By 1970, he cofounded a satellite branch of the Black Panther Party — known as the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF). Dorliae followed him there. The NCCF model was a tactical rebrand for the Panthers, meant to establish their presence in new locales while reframing their fierce confrontations with law enforcement. Memphis radicals had been shaped by similar confrontations: Police blamed the Invaders for stoking violence during the Sanitation Workers Strike, and dozens of so-called “Black militants” were arrested after King’s assassination.
King’s death left Memphis bubbling with grassroots energy, and the city’s housing crisis quickly became a focal point. City officials were slow to hold private landlords accountable for keeping poor tenants in dilapidated conditions. When tenants turned to public housing instead, they often sat on waiting lists for years on end. The Panthers saw this “organized abandonment” as a form of state violence, where governments forcefully exposed Black communities to illness and death through systemic neglect.
Over a weekend in January 1971, the Panthers staged a “live-in” near their South Memphis headquarters, forcefully occupying a vacant housing project with 60 displaced tenants. When police swarmed the project to end the “live-in,” Dorliae faced them with her comrades. That standoff led to the arrest of 16 Panthers, including Dorliae and her brother Maurice. The group became known as the “Memphis 16” before most of their charges were dismissed. In the long run, the “live-in” reignited a citywide debate about how public housing should be built — and tenants eventually sued Memphis’ public housing authority in federal court.
Dorliae showed how state repression and neglect rely on each other to maintain racial hierarchy.
Dorliae’s time with the Panthers reflected broader trends in the national party; as women took on more leadership roles in local chapters, Black radicalism became inextricable from the political pressures of Black maternal life. Dorliae’s two-year-old son, Jaurice Tidel Payne, was the Memphis chapter’s pride and joy. In May 1971, Jaurice suddenly contracted bacterial meningitis, a contagious disease that didn’t yet have a vaccine. The boy died within days.
Dorliae held Jaurice’s funeral in June and allowed photos to be distributed nationwide in the Panthers’ newspaper. They showed her community coming from across the city to mourn with her, gathered in stark black and white: young beret-clad radicals, women with Afros and white dresses, standing solemnly throughout a South Memphis church, and the boy’s open casket, shining like it somehow carried its own light. Dorliae wanted the world to see the child she lost to state negligence; just 15 years after Emmett Till was lynched in nearby Mississippi, she echoed Mamie Till Mobley’s decision to publicly display her own son’s body.
Dorliae refused to frame this tragic loss as an isolated moment. Instead, she called out a lack of government investment in disease prevention that left children like Jaurice more vulnerable to treatable illnesses like meningitis. “Two other small children died in the city of Memphis of the same disease [in May],” she said. “It makes me see also that our efforts just must be intensified if we are to combat this racist government.” After Jaurice’s death, organizational shifts in the Black Panther Party put Dorliae in a new role. The Memphis chapter expanded to cover all of Tennessee, and she was selected to lead it. Local Black Power groups had long struggled to raise funds on their own, and police repression further weakened their foothold. Labor unions, nonprofits, and liberal organizers often distanced themselves from the Panthers’ troubled reputation. As armed self-defense became inviable, Dorliae shifted the Panthers’ approach.
Starting in 1972, members ran a slate of yearly programs called the Tennessee Survival Conference, which included food and clothing drives, sickle cell anemia testing, and rent and utility bill assistance. Instead of a thorn in the city’s side, the Memphis Panthers would become “a band-aid on the system” (as Dorliae put it) to cut through their controversies. They passed out milk, bacon, and sacks of groceries. At Christmas, they gave out toys and candy for children. As Memphis police created a generation of Black political prisoners, the Panthers offered free transportation for families to visit their incarcerated loved ones. “The programs are more important than the symbols or the image,” said Dorliae. “In the Tennessee Survival Conference, we are dealing strictly in programs, minus the political rhetoric.”
“We advocate the overthrow of a society that no longer meets the needs of the people.”
Dorliae hoped that rebranding the Panthers’ agenda could strengthen their “experiments with social life outside and against the racial state,” as Alberto Toscano has described them. The FBI actively surveilled Dorliae throughout this time, aided by civil rights photographer and informant Ernest Withers. By 1976, federal agents felt that Tennessee’s Black Panther chapter was “for all intents and purposes dead.” Dorliae then moved north with her children to attend college, studying anthropology. She quickly found a vibrant political home in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, which had recently incubated the American Indian Movement, a fierce anti-war movement, and several urban uprisings. She also joined the National Black Independent Political Party, which had connections with South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle and the Namibian independence movement.
Dorliae’s political work, which continued up until her death in a car accident in 1987, was defined by a radical pragmatism. To make a liberatory vision sustainable on the ground, she adjusted her tactics to meet her neighbors’ needs while investing in their political education and radicalization. The networks she built for community care and defense revealed that the capitalist state was dysfunctional by design, fueled by dispossessing the people it claimed to serve. They also managed to sustain movement and life through the end of the Civil Rights Movement, ensuring that new forms of grassroots resistance could bloom.
Dorliae and the Memphis Panthers have largely been forgotten in histories of the Black South. But her expansive vision of anti-fascism holds lessons for our present moment. By framing local housing, food, and health crises as forms of state violence — just like the FBI surveillance and police raids she faced — Dorliae showed how state repression and neglect rely on each other to maintain racial hierarchy. It’s no coincidence that cities responded to the uprisings after George Floyd’s murder with curfews and the suspension of social services like food programs and Covid testing. At Cop City in Atlanta’s Weelaunee forest, activists protecting green space and protesting police spending have been hit with terrorism charges.
At the same time, community care and anti-state critiques have risen again to the forefront of Black radical practice. They are channeling Dorlaie’s words from 1972 when she took charge of the Tennessee Black Panthers: “We advocate the overthrow of a society that no longer meets the needs of the people.”
Justin A. Davis is a journalist, poet, and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, culture, and history for outlets like Scalawag, Waging Nonviolence, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Prism, and No Bells. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
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