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“Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation'’: Emory Douglas and protest aesthetics at the black panther Erika Doss a a University of Colorado , Boulder Published online: 13 Dec 2007.

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New Political Science, Volume 21, Number 2, 1999 245

"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation'': Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at The Black Panther

Erika Doss University of Colorado, Boulder

Abstract From its emergence in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense deliberately projected an image of black power and revolutionary martyrdom that hinged on potent black masculinity and patriarchal authority. If that image was embodied in the Black Panthers' paramilitary physical and public presence, it was also visualized in numerous posters and drawings designed for The Black Panther, the Party's newspaper and chief means of political dissemination. Emory Douglas, the primary artist at The Black Panther during the Party's peak from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, produced hundreds of pictures promoting the Panthers' mixed agenda of armed militance and community welfare. Challenging long-standing assumptions about race and racism, Douglas crafted a visual strategy of cultural resistance which aimed at convincing audiences of the efficacy of black power by offering alternative images of a forceful black masculinity.

A poster sized drawing by Emory Douglas titled Shoot to Kill (Fig. 1) occupied the back page of the November 21, 1970 issue of The Black Panther, the Black Panther Party's newspaper.1 The drawing, which featured scenes of black men killing white policemen, was subtitled, "Our Minister of Culture, Emory Dou- glas, Teaches: 'We Have to Begin to Draw Pictures That Will Make People Go Out and Kill Pigs."'

As the authors of a government report remarked in the mid-1970s, the Black Panthers were "blessed with a theatrical sixth sense that enabled them to gain an audience and project an image [that] frightened America."2 Recognition of that image is central to an understanding of the Panthers and their politics. Emory Douglas, the primary artist at The Black Panther during the Party's peak from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, produced hundreds of pictures promoting the Panthers' program of armed militance and community welfare. Challenging long-standing assumptions about race and racism in America, Douglas crafted a protest aesthetic aimed at convincing audiences of black power.

In a 1970 essay in The Black Panther, Douglas detailed the central role of

1 This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference "Toward a History of the 1960s," University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 1993. For an expanded version, see Erika Doss, "Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s— 1990s," in Prospects: An Annual of American Studies 23 (1998), pp. 483-516. I would especially like to thank Emory Douglas, John Gennari, Rickie Solinger and Rebecca Yule for their assistance and advice with this essay.

2 G. Louis Heath, Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 214.

0739-3148/99/020245-15 © 1999 Caucus for a New Political Science

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WE HAVE TO BECIH TO DRAW PICTURES THAT Wil l MAKE PEOPIE ^.

4 f GO OUT AND

mu nes

SHOOT TO KILL

Figure 1. Emory Douglas, Shoot to Kill, 1970. Offset collage, The Black Panther (November 21, 1970). Courtesy the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), Los Angeles.

visual images in raising revolutionary consciousness: "Revolutionary art gives a physical confrontation with the tyrants, and also strengthens people to continue their vigorous attack. Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation." Insisting, in another newspaper essay, that "all progressive artists take up their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other," Douglas instructed revolutionary artists to paint pictures of "fascist judges, lawyers, generals, pig policeman, firemen, Senators, Congressmen, governors, Presidents, et al., being punished for their criminal acts against the American people and the struggling people of the world. Their bridges, buildings, electric plants, pipelines, all of the Fascist American empire must be blown up in our pictures."3

From 1967 to 1973, Douglas matched his rhetorical call to arms with the pictures he produced for The Black Panther. Ranging from inflammatory images of resistance and revolution such as Shoot to Kill to drawings which focused on inner-city poverty and the need for social and political change (Fig. 2), Douglas's

3 Douglas quoted from "On Revolutionary Art," The Black Panther (January 24, 1970), p. 5, and in Lawrence Alloway, "Art," The Nation 211:12 (October 19, 1970), p. 382.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 247

Figure 2. Emory Douglas, When I Spend More Time ... ,c. 1971. Backpage drawing, The Black Panther. Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.

pictures were highly visible and highly regarded within the Party during the- black power era.

The Black Panthers and Visual Imagery

The Panthers counted on media, both their own and that of the mainstream press, to spread their message. Reporters flocked to the Panthers, certainly led by the promise of a good story about American anarchy but perhaps more attracted by the Panthers' own visual presence. With their black berets and leather jackets, their afros, dark glasses, raised fists, and military drill formation, the Panthers made great visual copy. This was no accident: the Panthers were extraordinarily astute about the appeal and influence of visual imagery as a tool for raising political consciousness. Huey Newton's assertion that "the Black community is basically not a reading community" may be considered an acknowledgment of the central importance of oral expression in African Ameri-

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248 Erika Doss

can culture. But it also suggests an understanding that in the modern age people increasingly gained their information, knowledge, and political and cultural directives, from visual sources. As Douglas echoed, "Every revolutionary move- ment that I've known of has some type of revolutionary art."4 Indeed, the pictorial, the visual, became an essential component of Panther ideology. Their dramatic redefinition of black identity, and in particular their assault on previ- ously held assumptions of the passivity and powerlessness of black men, garnered the Panthers immediate attention. Their canny attention to visual authority made the Panthers' mode of self-representation the image of 1960s radicalism.

Contesting mainstream caricatures of black men, the Panthers also defied middle-class and liberal representations of black masculinity tentatively put in place by the leaders and followers of the civil rights movement. The Panthers projected black power, not egalitarianism. If Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to challenge dominant racist stereotypes by claiming black men as citizen-subjects, the Panthers' subverted that civil rights image by reconfiguring and romanticiz- ing black men as the very embodiment of revolutionary rage, defiance, and misogyny. "We shall have our manhood," Eldridge Cleaver insisted in Soul on Ice (1968), adding: "We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it." Angered by the limited field of integration and autonomy that the civil rights movement had achieved, alienated by older, "establishment" patterns of political activism, and incensed by their ongoing status as second-class Americans, the Black Panthers (like other black liberation movements of the 1960s), "sought to clear the ground for the cultural reconstruction of the black subject."5

Both civil rights and revolutionary black nationalist movements saw that black subject primarily on masculine terms: the placards carried by striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, for example, asserted "I Am A Man." The Black Panther Party's interest in more aggressive forms of masculinity followed from perceptions of very real threats to America's black men—from the large numbers of black men drafted into the US military during the Vietnam War to blatant forms of domestic oppression. Believing that the civil rights movement had failed to alleviate those threats and as such was physically, psychologically, and socially impotent, the Panthers devised a forceful image of black masculinity that asserted male power in a mostly male sphere.

In so doing, they clearly aimed to recuperate the socially constructed mascu- line attributes of power, militarism, independence, and control that had been denied subordinated black men since slavery. But by aligning black masculinity

4 Newton quoted in Brad Brewer, "Revolutionary Art," The Black Panther (October 24, 1970), p. 17; Douglas quoted in "Revolutionary Art: A Tool for Liberation," taken from a speech delivered at Malcolm X College (Chicago) at the First Revolutionary Artist Conference, June 8, 1970. Reprinted in The Black Panther (July 4, 1970), pp. 12-13. For an extended analysis of the role of the media in shaping and directing radical politics see Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

5 Eldridge Cleaver, "Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X," in Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), p. 61; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 139. See also William L. Van Deburg, Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 78-81.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 249

with symbols and styles traditionally associated with potent white masculinity, the Panthers also reinscribed the most egregious forms of patriarchal privilege and domination, from machismo and misogyny to violence and aggression.6

Their heterosexist and homophobic brand of revolutionary black nationalism excluded black women and homosexuals, and limited the context of black liberation and black power to conflicts over the definition and manifestation of black masculinity. Rather than reconstructing black masculinity on terms which would have truly disturbed white power, the Panthers aided in codifying the obviously still current cultural demonization of both black male youth and political radicalism.

Affirming the Panthers' demand for a specifically masculinist black power, one of the first writers to depict them titled his 1971 book A Panther is a Black Cat. The Panthers, Reginald Major declared, were soldiers at war in "the jungle which is America," warriors "moving to bring greatness to the American Experience" by "completing the work begun by the revolution of 1776."7

Militarism and military metaphors were rampant among the Panthers, not simply because they saw the struggle for black power as a battle against white oppression but because 1960s America was itself thoroughly steeped in military action and rhetoric, overseas and at home. It became Emory Douglas's job to visualize the militance of the Black Panther Party and to articulate an image of black masculine power that meshed with the Party's overall ambitions. In May 1967, Douglas took over the layout and visual renderings for The Black Panther. Working side by side with Cleaver and Newton, Douglas created a visually dominant newspaper style that one manag- ing editor described as "a tremendous factor" in The Black Panther's circulation, which reached over 100,000 weekly by 1969 (fairly high volume for underground newspapers at the time) and was the "most reliable and lucrative source of income for the Party."8

Emory Douglas and The Black Panther

From the start, Douglas's visual style was direct and angry, its content rooted in years of urban poverty in San Francisco's black slums, its pictorial sensibility nourished in reform school printing shops and in college art classes. As one author notes, "The story of Emory Douglas's harrowing youth is the story of the breeding of a Black Panther." Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1943, Douglas moved with his mother to the Bay Area in 1951, after her stormy relationship with his father ended in divorce. While his mother found work operating a concession stand at Juvenile Hall, an arm of San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center, Douglas worked on his "rep" as a brawler and burglar. In 1958,

6 See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 87-113; Herman Gray, "Black Masculinity and Visual Culture," in Thelma Golden (ed.), Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Black Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), pp. 175-80, and Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, pp. 141-54.

7 Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat (New York: William Morrow, 1971), pp. 280-82. 8 Frank Jones, 'Talent for the Revolution," The Black Panther (March 16, 1969), p. 9; Robert

H. Brisbane, Black Activism, Racial Revolution in the United States 1954-1970 (Valley Forge, PA: Hudson Press, 1974), p. 218.

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double-charged with truancy and fighting, he wound up at Log Cabin Ranch, a rural facility for juvenile offenders. Douglas spent a year there, assigned in particular the tasks of "taking care of the pigs and keeping the pigpen clean." When he left Log Cabin Ranch he entered San Francisco's predominantly black Polytechnic High School. But, arrested on burglary charges, Douglas was sen- tenced to 15 months at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California, near the men's prison in Chino. His work-study experience there was concentrated in the prison's printing shop and, after his release, Douglas decided to pursue commer- cial art.9

In 1964, Douglas began taking graphic design courses at San Francisco's City College. He also joined the college's Black Students Union and was drawn to political activism. Doing classroom assignments geared at teaching artists how to appeal to the tastes and dollars of mainstream consumers, Douglas made drawings of black consumers:

One of the school projects involved our doing story board drawings for an animated film. I chose to do a "brother" being denied courtesy and service in a public place until he donned the garb of an African V.I.P. As [the teacher] took a look at what I was doing he suggested that I needed to be more provocative ... Ha ha ha ha! The man had no idea how provocative I actually was. The thing was that I hadn't been able up to that time to apply my anger to my drawing and painting.

Tossing aside "aspirations to join the bourgeoisie" of mainstream commercial advertising, Douglas put his aesthetic energies into designing props for the theater workshops that playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) gave while teaching at San Francisco State College in the mid-1960s.10 He also became involved in the Black Panther Party. As he recalled:

I was drawn to it because of its dedication to self-defense. The civil rights movement headed by Dr. King turned me off at that time, for in those days nonviolent protest had no appeal for me. And although the rebellions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark were not well organized they did appeal to my nature. I could identify with them.11

As a "brother off the block," Douglas found the Panthers' message of aggressive self-reliance and revolutionary action far more persuasive than the principles of pacifism and negotiation at the core of civil rights discourse. The Panthers spoke specifically to the social reality of his urban life. They valorized an image of hardcore, militant, virile, and invincible black manhood already prevalent among the youthful black male underclass, and fused it with a political culture that similarly justified street violence and outlaw behavior.

Joining Huey Newton, Douglas was one of several heavily armed Panthers who, in February 1967, "escorted" Betty Shabazz during the First Annual Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial at Hunter's Point, a predominantly black community in San Francisco. Canny to the PR opportunities inherent in their

9 Elton C. Fax, "Emory Douglas," in Black Artists of the New Generation (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), pp. 257-78.

10 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 270, and Phineas Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," The Black Panther Party (November 22, 1969), p. 6, reprinted from The Berkeley Tribe (no date given).

11 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 273.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 251

protection of Malcolm X's widow, Newton's Panthers were eager to shape their first testing of the media waters around claims to Shabazz, despite the fact that she had actually been invited to speak by the Black Panther Party of Northern California. The press played into Newton's hands, producing headlines such as "A Frightening Army" in the San Francisco Chronicle.12 Soon joined by Cleaver, Newton's Panthers went on to become the Black Panthers, and the San Francisco group aligned with the Afrocentrism of Maulana Karenga's US (United Slaves) Organization. The split was hardly amicable: repeatedly over the next few years, The Black Panther featured vicious cartoons and blistering essays blasting the "armchair revolutionaries" of cultural nationalism, for whom black liberation was found in "back to black" clothing, hairstyles, language, and holidays (cf. Kwanzaa) rather than in armed resistance and revolution. Bobby Seale sneered, "I have a natural and I like it, but power for the people doesn't grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki."13

Emory Douglas was present, too, at the Panther's next heavily publicized action. On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale and 30 fully uniformed, fully armed Panthers stormed the California state capitol in Sacramento to protest the Mulford Bill, an ordinance motivated by Oakland police fears of armed black resistance, and aimed at curtailing the Panthers by banning the display of loaded guns in public. Eldridge Cleaver was present as well, as a reporter for Ramparts. While Governor Ronald Reagan's handlers quickly hustled him inside the building (he'd been giving a speech to a teenage group of Future Youth Leaders on the capitol lawn), the Panthers made their way toward the state assembly and Seale delivered Executive Mandate No. 1, a lengthy statement condemning not only the pending bill but the "racist California Legislature" and the "racist war of genocide in Vietnam." The journalists and news reporters who had come out in droves to cover the story asked Seale to read it again and he did, twice.14

Media coverage of the Panthers' "invasion" of Sacramento (and the arrest of over 20 Panthers, including Douglas, on their way back to Oakland) swelled. US News and World Report demonized the Panthers as a gang of "armed Negroes" who had swept through capitol corridors crowded with schoolchildren. Photo- graphs showing the Panthers as a disciplined and tough-looking cadre of militant and macho revolutionaries were published in Life and Time and the New York Times Magazine. Angela Davis, then studying in Frankfurt at the Goethe Institute with Theodor Adorno, recalls seeing the "image" of "leather-jacketed, black-bereted warriors standing with guns at the entrance to the California legislature" in German newspapers. The "appeal" of that image called her back to the United States "into an organizing frenzy in the streets of South Central

12 Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp. 120-26, Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, pp. 70-72, and Mario Van Peebles, Ula Y. Taylor and J. Tarika Lewis, Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film (New York: New Market Press, 1995), pp. 31-32.

13 On cultural nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 170-91.

14 The full text of Executive Mandate No. 1, written by Huey Newton, is reprinted in Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, pp. 289-90.

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Los Angeles." But it also, she would later write, came to represent the problem- atic "masculinist dimensions of black nationalism."15

Out on bail after returning from Sacramento, Douglas began full-time work at The Black Panther. Breaking away from Baraka, who had become deeply involved with cultural nationalism, Douglas's earliest newspaper art mostly consisted of attacks on counterrevolutionary "paper panthers" opposed to armed resistance. One 1967 editorial by Cleaver damning the "scurvy-ness of the NAACP" was accompanied by Douglas's montage of a "bootlickers gallery," which positioned photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and Roy Wilkins against a crude cartoon of a prostrate black man licking the cowboy boots of President Lyndon Johnson. Douglas's scornful caricatures of the "Old Toms" of the civil rights movement, and his insinuations as to their apparent complicity with mainstream American politics, helped visually prop the aggress- ive and oppositional tenets of the Black Panther Party. Within a year, however, Douglas (known as "Emory" in the Party and at the newspaper, as he signed his drawings with his first name) developed a more refined and brightly colored graphics style of "revolutionary art" which concentrated on "new images of victory" to "get the defeatist attitude out of the people's minds."16 He also began writing newspaper essays and giving speeches on revolutionary art's centrality to black liberation.

Reproaching the social realism of an earlier generation of black artists, Douglas remarked, "Charles White used to draw various pictures dealing with the social injustices the people suffer but it was civil rights art." White's 1950s images of "mothers scrubbing the floors" were "valid," said Douglas, but they weren't geared toward raising revolutionary consciousness. Dismissing, too, many contemporary black artists, especially musicians, Douglas wrote: "What I see Aretha [Franklin] and B. B. King singing about is cultural nationalism from the beginnings of slavery up to now. But it isn't anything that TRANSCENDS COMMUNITIES and creates revolution."17 The civil rights movement, and the art associated with it, was seen by the Panthers as toothless and soft; the "soul style" sensitivity of cultural nationalism was viewed on similarly derisive terms. In contrast, Douglas crafted a hard and unyielding visual narrative grounded in black resistance and revolution.

The revolutionary artist, by extension, was committed foremost to the revol- ution. As Black Panther artist Brad Brewer explained in 1970: "The primary thing about a revolutionary artist is that he is a revolutionary first. The question confronting Black people today is not whether or not he or she is 'Black' but whether or not he or she is a revolutionary. With politics guiding the brush, and the gun protecting them both, the potential Black revolutionary artists could rid themselves of their tendencies of cultural nationalism. Because their talents are geared in behalf of preparing for revolution, they aren't involved in dealing in life style but rather [in] offering solutions."18

15 On media coverage of the Panthers see, for example, Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties, The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 65, and Peebles, Taylor and Lewis, Panther, p. 39. Angela Davis, "Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties," in Gina Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, Dia Center for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No. 8 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), p. 319.

16 Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p. 6. 17 Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p. 6. 18 Brewer, "Revolutionary Art," p. 17.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 253

Douglas found aesthetic inspiration for those solutions in "the art coming out of the struggle in Vietnam. Their pictures ... always express the victorious spirit, a picture of a mother holding her baby—we will fight from one generation to the next!"19 1960s-era underground newspapers attentive to international struggle frequently reprinted the well-designed, semi-abstract posters produced by OSPAALA (the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Many, including The Black Panther, subscribed to the Liberation News Service and received twice-weekly mailings of news bulletins, feature articles, and graphics detailing armed revolution around the world. Inspired by propaganda posters from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Cuba picturing heroic sword or gun-toting peasants—male and female—in indigenous garb, Douglas often pictured Panthers similarly outfitted in cotton pajamas and thongs, draped in bandoliers, carrying rifles.

The fact that few, if any, Black Panthers dressed this way, much less carried Kalishnikovs, didn't matter: this was revolutionary art that transcended the realities of inner-city America in deference to a vision of global black liberation. Women had a place in this revolutionary art, too: Douglas's 1969 cartoon All Power to the People depicts a black female, machete in tow, hawking copies of The Black Panther; Revolutionary Art Exhibit (Fig. 3, 1969); a poster Douglas designed to advertise a display of his pictures illustrates a black mother cradling her child, dressed in a cotton shift and head-scarf, a rifle slung over her back. But by casting black women within conventional and limited roles, as salesgirls and mothers, for instance, Douglas reinforced the patriarchal conceits that largely dominated the Black Panthers' political image and program.

Honing the City College commercial art lessons which had given him "insights into how to appeal to the audience I was trying to reach," Douglas turned Madison Avenue advertising and global agitprop into a form of revol- utionary art aimed at empowering the Black Panther Party. Perceiving a key relationship between black liberation and pictures, Douglas stressed the educa- tive and preparative role of revolutionary art, and laid out the precise means by which revolutionary artists were to operate. Rather than forecasting a Utopian future to be lived after the revolution, revolutionary artists were instructed to illustrate the ongoing political struggle: "When we say that we want decent housing, we must have pictures that reflect how we're going to get decent housing." Taking their cues from Fanon's advice that the oppressed must destroy their oppressors, revolutionary artists were ordered to "create brand new images of revolutionary action for the entire community" which would convince "the vast majority of black people—who aren't readers but activists— [that] through their observation of our work, they feel they have the right to destroy the enemy."20

In a 1968 issue of The Black Panther, Douglas listed the images that revolution- ary artists should cull to elicit such reactions:

We draw pictures of our brothers with stoner guns with one bullet going through forty pigs, taking out their intestines along the way... We draw pictures that show Standard Oil in milk bottles launched at Rockefeller with the wicks made of

19 Douglas quoted in Israeli, "Emory Grinds Down the Pigs," p. 6. 20 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 274; Douglas, "Revolutionary Art," p. 13; Emory Douglas,

"Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation," The Black Panther (May 18, 1968), p. 20.

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254 Erika Doss

SEE REVOLUTIONARY ART EXHIBIT

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Figure 3. Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Art Exhibit, 1969. Offset print, The B/acfc Panther (October 10,1970). Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.

cloth from I. Magnin... This is revolutionary art—pigs lying in alleyways of the colony dead with their eyes gouged out... Pictures that show black people kicking down prison gates—sniping bombers, shooting down helicopters, police mayors governors senators assemblymen congressmen firemen newsmen busi- nessmen Americans.21

In each edition of The Black Panther, Douglas matched these scenes with quotes and slogans from Panther leaders or from the pages of various revolutionary tracts: "By Any Means Necessary," "In Defense of Self-Defense," "All Power to the People." Concentrating especially on pictures of young, gun-wielding black men, sometimes dressed in Black Panther regalia and sometimes outfitted in military uniforms appropriated from OSPAALA or Liberation News Service images of international freedom fighters, Douglas provided an iconography that clearly supported the Panthers' profoundly militant and masculinist thrust.

If pictures of black men hoisting guns were essential to the Panther's ideological directives, Douglas's most influential images were those of black

21 Douglas, "Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation," p. 20.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 255

men fighting pig-policemen. Considered the in-house "expert on the way pigs look and act" because of his pigpen chores at the Log Cabin Ranch reform school, Douglas has been credited with inventing the era's visual symbolization of policemen as fat, mean, uniformed pigs. Linking policemen with pigs actually has much earlier roots: Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has: "Pig, police officer. A China Street pig; a Bow Street officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer and run away." Still, if not exactly an innovation of the black power movement, Douglas's cartoons helped revitalize a broad na- tional trend of vilifying cops as pigs. His pig pictures were a regular feature in The Black Panther and "readers looked forward every week to seeing them."22

Douglas later extended this anthropomorphic demonization to represent politi- cians as rats and businessmen as vultures.

The "purpose" of his caricatures, said Douglas, was "to make the people aware of the character of those who oppressed us" and to provide visual examples that would inspire them to "revolt against the slavemasters" and "kill the pigs." Some cartoons highlighted the badge numbers of policemen "whowere harassing blacks in the community." Others were more ideological: one 1969 cartoon featured four hogs swinging from a tree, labeled, respectively: "AVARICIOUS BUSINESSMEN," "DEMAGOGUE POLITICIANS," "PIG COPS," and "U.S. MILITARY." The text below read: "ON LANDSCAPE ART: 'It is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother f—kin neck"' (Fig. 4).23

With their straightforward slogans and images, Douglas's pig pictures recast despised figures of institutional authority in negative symbolic form. The con- trast between the clarity of his political cartoons and the "happy" type and obfuscated imagery of the psychedelic styles used in other 1960s-era under- ground newspapers is obvious. Keyed to revolutionary instruction rather than counterculture euphoria, Douglas's artwork was visual reinforcement for a radical politics of militant black struggle, the pictorial linchpin, as he explained, to a "revolutionary culture that serves the people."24

Douglas's Effects on Others

During his years with The Black Panther, Douglas shaped a protest aesthetic with which the Black Panther Party aspired to revolutionize the black masses. Along with Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Bakunin's The Catechism of the Revolutionist, Douglas's pictures of black men fighting pig-policemen, and his heroizing posters of "Bobby" and "Huey," were aimed at generating ideological conviction among the black "lumpen." For white leftists who claimed the Panthers as "irresistible allies," and for Panther leaders who found power in

22 Fax, "Emory Douglas," pp. 276-77. On the etymology of policemen as pigs, see Philip Howard, The State of the Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 28.

23 Fax, "Emory Douglas," p. 277; Douglas, "On Revolutionary Art," p. 5, and quoted from author interview (April 17, 1993). In another version of the cartoon, Douglas labeled the four hogs "Dean of Rusk," "Mad McNamara," "L.B.J." and "R.F.K."; see The Black Panther (March 16, 1968), p. 10.

24 Douglas, "On Revolutionary Culture," in Abraham Chapman (ed.), New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature (New York: New American Library, 1972), pp. 489-90.

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256 Erika Doss

Figure 4. Emory Douglas, On Landscape Art, 1969. Offset print, The Black Panther (January 4, 1969). Courtesy CSPG, Los Angeles.

pictures, Douglas's art was held in highest esteem. Eldridge Cleaver claimed that "the ideology of the Black Panther Party and the teachings of Huey P. Newton are contained in their purest form in Emory's art." Reginald Major boasted that "Emory, as artist, is more of a vanguard than the Panthers as politicians," and added: "As an artist, he has more effective freedom of ex- pression than Eldridge as a writer, or Hilliard [David Hilliard, Panther Chief of Staff] as an orator. Emory's views on the purposes of revolutionary art have had a decided influence on the politics of the Party." His art had immense visual cachet with black audiences: the Black Students Union at San Francisco State College adopted his image of a "loin-clothed black man with a gun in one hand and a book in the other as the symbol of their educational aspirations." In homes across America, Douglas's poster-portraits of Panther personalities bedecked living room walls.25

25 Todd Gitlin discusses radical left attraction to the Panthers in The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 350-51; Cleaver quoted in "Eldridge on Weathermen," The Black Panther (November 22, 1969), p. 5, reprinted from The Berkeley Tribe (no date given); Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, pp. 139, 140, 142.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 257

The Black Panther Party advanced the visual appeal of Douglas's pictures by often printing 10 to 20,000 copies of posters and circulating them throughout urban black neighborhoods. From "the Christian to the brother on the block, the college student and the high school drop-out, the street walker and the secretary, the pimp and the preacher," revolutionary art, said Douglas, was for everybody. The ghetto, he added, was "the gallery" for the revolutionary artist. "His art is plastered on the walls, in store front windows, on fences, doorways, telephone poles and booths, passing busses, alleyways, gas stations, barber shops, beauty parlors, laundry mats, liquor stores, as well as the huts of the ghetto." Douglas believed in the revolutionary power of art, and often stated that image making and consumption were, in and of themselves, revolutionary praxis. "The people are the masterpieces," he intoned, thus rejecting art world ideas about aesthetic autonomy and insisting on revolutionary culture's populist (albeit primarily male) and pragmatic underpinnings. "The community," he recalls, "was the museum for our artwork. Some people saw art for the first time when they saw my posters. Some joined the Black Panther Party, some got inspired to make art too."26

Some of those inspired were community muralists. Throughout the late 1960s, urban artists painted gigantic Walls of Dignity and Walls of Respect on the sides and facades of inner-city buildings, representing Panthers en masse and Panthers engaged in standoffs and shootouts with the police. Other African American artists produced similarly militant and visually compelling prints, posters, and easel paintings focused on black power. Faith Ringgold's The Flag is Bleeding (1967) and David Hammons's Injustice Case (1970) utilized the American flag's symbolic reference to freedom and justice to point out the duplicity of such imagery: in Ringgold's painting, a black man pledges al- legiance to that flag with blood pouring from his heart; in Hammon's body- print, a black man bound and gagged in a courtroom chair (a nod to Bobby Seale's treatment during the 1969 trial of the Chicago 8) looks in anguish and anger at that flag. In Fred Hampton's Door (1970), Dana Chandler paid tribute to the chief of the Chicago Panthers, slain when police fired more than 90 rounds of ammunition through his apartment. Painting his picture of Hampton's bullet-ridden door a vivid red, and then shooting at the finished painting and piercing it with bullet-holes, Chandler remarked, "I'm not trying to be aestheti- cally pleasing. I'm trying to be relevant."27

Like Douglas, most of these artists aimed at raising revolutionary conscious- ness by picturing black struggle and liberation primarily on masculinist terms. Others, including sculptors Betye Saar and Elizabeth Catlett, were also inspired by the anger and violence of the black power movement's protest aesthetics, but challenged its exclusionary preoccupation with black men. In The Liberation of

26 Douglas, "On Revolutionary Art," p. 5, and from author interview (April 27, 1993); see also Fax, "Emory Douglas," pp. 276-77.

27 A l a n Barnet t , Community Murals: The People's Art (Phi ladelphia : A r t All iance Press , 1984), Alber t Boime, " W a v i n g the Red Flag a n d Recons t i tu t ing O ld Glory ," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4:2 (1990), p p . 3 -25 , Samella S. Lewis a n d R u t h G. W a d d y , Black Artists on Art, Vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Contemporary Crafts, 1969), pp. 39-42, Fax, "Dana Chandler," in Black Artists of the New Generation, pp. 345-61, and Elsa Honig Fine, The Afro-American Artist, A Search for Identity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 203-04.

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Aunt Jemima (1972) and Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), Saar and Catlett, respectively, drew on the guns and fists of Panther iconography and raised questions about black power's patriarchal focus: Saar posing a stereotypical Mammy (broom in one hand, rifle in the other) against a Warhol-esque grid of Aunt Jemima pancake-mix boxes; Catlett paying tribute to the stylized figure of a woman giving the black power salute.28 But their depictions were exceptional: most African American protest artists of the black power era were more engrossed with the threatening image of aggressive black masculinity that the Panthers projected.

Emory Douglas stayed at The Black Panther until the newspaper folded in 1979. But his art shifted from inflammatory images of resistance and revolution to the "loves, joys, hopes and dreams of black people in America: the bright side as well as the dark side of life." Abandoning the militant and masculinist underpinnings once central to Panther ideology, Douglas now concentrated on pictures of black families and black children and imaged African American solidarity. As he explained in 1993, "My art was a reflection of the politics of the party, so when the party changed to community action so did my art, from pigs to kids."29 Other African American artists also abandoned the black power movement's protest aesthetic: Betye Saar, for example, began to make shrines and altars which reclaimed ethnic and minority histories and religions, and which dealt extensively with her powerful female ancestors. As she explained in 1975: "Now, my messages are more subtle. There is more secretiveness about them because I think this represents the way Black People feel about the movement today. They've got over the violent part and have become more introspective."30

Douglas had initially used his protest aesthetic to convince black audiences about the efficacy of a radical black political culture. By the early 1970s, however, that aesthetic was being used in ways that challenged the original meaning and intentionality of revolutionary art. The pig-policeman image which Douglas reinvigorated was appropriated by American cops who began sporting buttons stating P.I.G.—" Pride, Integrity, Guts." Black power fists became the design motifs for consumer items ranging from coffee table sculptures to rings. Black men wearing afros and leather coats were cast as the macho anti-heroes of blaxploitation movies like Shaft (1971).31 Even if such films, like Melvin Van Peebles' 1972 movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, challenged dominant cultural assumptions about black men, they reproduced and strengthened the tropes of a raging, outlaw, heterosexual, and sexist black masculinity that the Panthers themselves had helped set in place only a few years earlier. While liberatory visions of justice and the possibilities of a transformative political

28 Lucy L i p p a r d , Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America ( N e w York: P a n t h e o n , 1990), p . 234, El izabeth Catlet t , "The Role of the Black Art is t , " The Black Scholar (June 1975), pp. 10-14.

29 Douglas quoted in The Black Panther (January 18,1972), p. 22 and from author interview (April 27, 1993).

30 Saar quoted in a 1975 interview with Benny Andrews, "Jemimas, Mysticism, and Mojos: The Art of Betye Saar," Encore American and Worldwide News (March 17, 1975), as noted in Betye Saar (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 23, 41.

31 An illustration of black power era merchandise is seen in Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p . 14.

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"Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation" 259

culture largely evaporated, the visualization of black patriarchal power that the Black Panther Party promoted in the late 1960s and early 1970s spread.

The impact of the women's movement, the economic changes rendered by de-industrialization, the anti-minority actions of current political culture, and the grim statistics regarding unemployment, imprisonment, and average life expect- ancy for black men in America are all factors which have led many African American men in the 1990s to glance backward at the Panthers and to resuscitate the last set of images which represented black power and patriarchal control. Likewise, as figures such as Louis Farrakhan aim to generate a new politicized public culture for black Americans, they, too, draw on the patriarchal dimen- sions of black power, whereby black men assume control of the black family and black life. However much Farrakhan has been credited with rebuking the "pernicious role model" of the Black Panther cum gangsta rapper, the Million Man March clearly aimed at vindicating black manhood by creating "a new black patriarchy."32

In the 1990s, the Black Panthers remain a potent symbol. Rappers like Paris and the late Tupac Shakur (whose mother, Assata Shakur, was a member of the New York 21) have claimed the Panthers as black heroes; more than a few Public Enemy songs and videos pay homage to Panther attributes (black berets, black leather jackets) and catchphrases ("Power to the People"). As contemporary black men struggle to gain meaning and control in their lives, it is no surprise that the Panthers imaging of black masculine power and authority retains immense appeal. However, as former Panther leader Elaine Brown cautioned in 1992, "a lot of young people look back on the Black Panther Party and they see icons. But icons are a very dangerous thing to create. Icons make mistakes." Critic bell hooks warns, further, that we should all vigilantly reconsider the icons we identify with, lest we continue to perpetuate "the spectacle of contem- porary colonization, dehumanization, and disempowerment where the image serves as a murder weapon."33 Prompting that cultural critique demands re-vi- sualizing black experience and radical politics in diverse and egalitarian terms, rather than placing faith in an imaging of black power that the Black Panthers projected in the late 1960s, and which continues to persist in contemporary American culture.

32 See Nicholas von Hoffman, "Pop Goes the Gangsta, Farrakhan's Message Routs a Pernicious Role Model," The Washington Post (November 12, 1995), pp. C-1, C-4, and Donna Franklin, "Black Herstory," The New York Times (October 18, 1995), p. A-19.

33 B r o w n q u o t e d i n P e a r s o n , Shadow of the Panther, p . 336, h o o k s , Black Looks, p . 7.

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