[News] New Book by Emory Douglas

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Black Panthers advocated armed struggle. Emory Douglas' weapon of 
choice? The pen.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/28/DDGIFOS2F61.DTL


Jessica Werner Zack, Special to The Chronicle

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
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The work of San Francisco artist Emory Douglas is collect...
  <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/28//cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/03/28/DDGIFOS2F61.DTL&o=1&type=printable>
Douglas (left), former art director of the Black Panthers...
 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/28//cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/03/28/DDGIFOS2F61.DTL&o=2&type=printable>
Emory Douglas' work documented Black Panther social progr...
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Issues the Black Panther Party confronted are still with ...


In January 1967, the organizers of San Francisco's first annual 
Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial tapped Emory Douglas, a 22-year-old 
graphic arts student, to create the poster and flyers for the 
Hunter's Point event. As Douglas remembers it, "There was talk about 
some brothers coming over from Oakland to provide security for Betty 
Shabazz (Malcolm X's widow), and when they got there it was Huey 
Newton and Bobby Seale."

Douglas, a member of City College's Black Student Union who was 
designing props and sets for playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), 
had heard rumors about Seale and Newton. The two friends from Merritt 
College had, just three months before, co-founded the Black Panther 
Party for Self-Defense. "Huey and Bobby spoke," Douglas recalls, "and 
I knew then I wanted to be a part of what they were doing."

Douglas was soon named the party's minister of culture, a position he 
filled until the Black Panther newspaper ceased publication in 1979. 
Art directing every issue, he created a visual history of the party's 
ideology and agenda, designing hundreds of provocative original 
illustrations, photo collages and political posters, more than 200 of 
which are reproduced in the recently released Rizzoli book "Black 
Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas."

The Black Panther Party was a controversial offshoot of the civil 
rights and black nationalist movements. Douglas' involvement with the 
party began one April evening 40 years ago, when he paid his first 
visit to Eldridge Cleaver's Duboce Park apartment, the so-called 
Black House. Douglas found Seale working on the inaugural, 
typewritten and mimeographed issue of the Black Panther. Douglas 
offered his commercial typography and illustration skills (first 
acquired in a Chino prison print shop as a teen sentenced to juvenile 
detention for burglary) to make the weekly paper look as potent and 
persuasive as its message.

Interviewed before a packed book release party at Oakland's Eastside 
Cultural Center, Douglas says that "since the black community at that 
time weren't by and large readers," he "created an 'everyperson' look 
everyone could connect with." In effect, he branded the militant-chic 
Panther image decades before the concept became commonplace. He used 
the newspaper's popularity (circulation neared 400,000 at its peak in 
1970) to incite the disenfranchised to action, portraying the poor 
with genuine empathy, not as victims but as outraged, unapologetic 
and ready for a fight.

Some of his most powerful drawings show people in stances of active 
armed resistance, men draped in bandoliers, women holding infants and 
toting rifles.

Douglas' art echoes expressionist elements of the African American 
artists he admires, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. His style -- 
drawing with thick black outlines and creating woodcut textures -- is 
also similar to the Chicano poster art of the '60s and '70s. The 
images are full of anger and biting humor -- especially the many 
famous pig cartoons, iterations of the epithet the Panthers 
popularized for all embodiments of repressive authority. "It's 
important to remember the context" out of which the Panthers emerged, 
Douglas says. The Summer of Love punctuated a volatile period when 
the United States was riven by assassinations, war protests and race 
riots. "There were a lot of young brothers and sisters being attacked 
and brutalized by the police." Young activists like Douglas found 
their calling in the Panthers' imperatives to "Seize the Time" and 
make "Revolution in Our Lifetime" a reality.

Quiet and with an easy sense of humor, Douglas exudes a surprising 
calm for a man whose confrontational artwork Baraka describes in an 
essay in the book as functioning "as if you were in the middle of a 
rumble and somebody tossed you a machine pistol."

"They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the 
world," the book's editor, Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, writes in 
his introduction.

One 1967 editorial by Cleaver criticizing the NAACP was illustrated 
by Douglas' "bootlickers gallery," which imposed photos of Martin 
Luther King Jr. and other leaders against a crude cartoon of a black 
man prostrate before then-President Lyndon Johnson's cowboy boots.

"Emory's pictures are actually a lot less terrifying than the news 
photos of the day," says Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge Cleaver's 
ex-wife) formerly the Panthers' communications secretary and now a 
senior lecturer at Emory University Law School. "It's amazing that he 
was able to maintain his gentle artistic being through those risky, 
extreme times. Cities were on fire, people were being arrested by the 
droves and police brutality was the order of the day."

Durant (whose own sculptures and installations have explored Black 
Panther history), says he sees the book as a corrective to "the ways 
the party has been misrepresented and maligned in the mainstream 
press, and perhaps even misused in popular culture. ... At a time 
when the police were an occupying army in the black community, they 
took up arms to defend themselves, simple as that."

As the Panthers' agenda broadened to include social programs, 
Douglas' posters illustrated the impact of the party's community 
outreach: free breakfast programs for children, grocery giveaways, 
health clinics and sickle-cell anemia testing.

"A lot of people would say they could look at the artwork in the 
paper and see in which direction the party was headed," Douglas says. 
He modestly admits that "some people did start buying the paper 
specifically for the art."

Douglas lives in San Francisco's Excelsior district with his blind 
mother, and has continued to work as a graphic artist since the Black 
Panther Party's collapse in 1980. After a brief stint designing ads 
for Safeway ("That was definitely not my thing," he says), Douglas 
has been an illustrator and prepress manager for the Bayview/Hunter's 
Point Sun-Reporter newspaper since 1984. He is currently working on a 
"children's artwork series called 'Health is Wealth,' a dialogue 
between two kids about HIV/AIDS."

"My politics have evolved because politics always do," he says. "But 
I'm still concerned about the same things. I think people are drawn 
to my work right now because they see the same issues in it on the 
line today -- police brutality, education, housing. It's a different 
time but we have the same needs."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/28/DDGIFOS2F61.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle


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