Monday 26 Jan 2009
The Black Panthers’ official artist and ‘minister of culture’ explains his provocative images to Digital Arts.
Not many artists’ work can justifiably be described as iconic; Emory Douglas is one of those artists. Between 1967 and the end of the 1970s, Douglas was the official artist of the US black activist group the Black Panther Party and the art director of the organization’s mouthpiece, the weekly paper The Black Panther.
For 13 years, he created the images and visual aesthetic that defined the Black Panthers, documenting poverty and urging black Americans to resist police oppression – by violent means if necessary.
Douglas’ proudly revolutionary images took up the whole back page of almost every issue of the paper ever printed. They were crucial in planting the movement’s aims in the imaginations of the Black Panthers’ key audience – deprived communities where many people were illiterate or semi-literate.
Because of this, his artworks had a political weight that few graphic designers today could even dream of today. “A lot of people used to say they’d buy the paper just for the artwork itself,” says Douglas now.
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The Black Panthers
Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act gave black US citizens the right to vote, it didn’t end discrimination in housing, health and jobs, disproportionate poverty among the black community, or police brutality against black people.
Activist groups – including the Black Panthers – sprang up to combat the more insidious forms of racism.
Founded in California in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense eschewed Martin Luther King’s ethos of peaceful protest, arguing that institutional violence could only be answered with armed resistance.
They also ran breakfast programmes, rehab courses, and other social initiatives aimed at improving conditions for the black community.
Douglas’ work often made striking use of just two colours, as in these posters. The text on the top poster says: “Our people’s army should be built up into a revolutionary force equipped with indefatigable spirit of fighting through thick and thin for the party, and the people into an iron army, each member of which is a match for one hundred enemies...”
The Black Panther was a weekly tabloid; while Douglas did much of the posters, he worked at the head of a team in charge of the paper’s layout and other illustrations. “You could say I did about 85 per cent of the work overall,” he says. “But there’s another large volume of work that the other Panthers did themselves. Some of them were better artists than I was, but didn’t know how to put the political content of the paper together, so I would work with them to give them some insight into how that could be integrated into the art that they were doing.”
Douglas has been unimpressed by much recent political graphic design, including the 2008 election. “They could have done better, but that’s how they play the game,” he says. “Those who have been inspired by Barack Obama, some of them have put out some good posters.”
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