[News] Emory Douglas paints American history black

[Anti-Imperialist News]

October 18, 2008


Emory Douglas paints American history black

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4954699.ece

This man’s art once caused panic in America. Has 
Black Panther Emory Douglas lost his claws?

Jane Wheatley

You may think you don’t know Emory Douglas but 
you do: you know him through his iconic images 
which documented one of the most turbulent 
periods in black American history – the fist 
raised in the black power salute, the gun-toting 
brothers and sisters of black resistance, the 
slavering, fly-ridden pigs and rats of white US 
imperialism. Surviving on scraps of paper, 
flyers, posters and newspaper cuttings, an 
extraordinary body of work has been assembled for 
its British debut in an exhibition at the Urbis museum in Manchester.

 From 1968 to 1982 Douglas was the official 
artist of the Black Panther Party, militant child 
of America’s civil rights movement, which 
rejected the politics of nonviolence in favour of 
the right to bear arms in defence of black 
oppression. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover 
considered the group “the single greatest threat 
to the internal security of the United States”. 
Their hero was the assassinated black civil 
rights leader Malcolm X, their symbol the black 
power salute, memorably employed on the winners’ 
podium by two American athletes at the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968.

It was the era of radical protest: you weren’t 
alive if you weren’t marching for or against 
something – apartheid in South Africa, nuclear 
disarmament, the Vietnam War – and the Panthers 
were a potent symbol of frontline resistance. I’m 
old enough to remember them – scowling Afro-glam, 
exciting and quite scary – but such a long way 
from the middle-class agitprop of British student 
politics, you never expected to meet one. So it’s 
a curious thing to be sitting across a table from 
Emory Douglas, sharing a bottle of Coke and 
flicking through brittle, yellowing copies of the 
Black Panther newspaper for which he was chief 
illustrator. Among them is a photograph of a 
young Douglas, arms raised high, directing a 
challenging stare at the police officer about to arrest him.

Forty years on, the gaze has softened, the black 
halo of hair is grizzled and less abundant, the 
smile when it comes is transforming. Now 62, 
Douglas is in Manchester to promote an exhibition 
of his work; the show has toured the US and the 
impressive accompanying catalogue includes essays 
by academics on his life and work. As so often, 
history comes round to honouring the rebel outcast.

His art was of its time and community: part 
cartoon strip, part satire, part call to arms – 
“a mix of expressionist agitprop and homeboy 
familiarity”. How does he feel about its presence 
in galleries and art books? “If it’s 
educational,” he says, “if it tells people 
something about that period of history, then 
that’s a positive thing.” It certainly does that: 
even if you were living at the time, it’s easy to 
forget the appalling inequality suffered by black 
Americans. Slavery might have gone but the 
mentality lived on and segregation was still sanctioned in some states.

Douglas was 10 years old when he took a trip to 
Oklahoma to visit an aunt: “We went into a café 
and were not allowed to sit up at the counter,” 
he recalls, “That made a big impression on me.” 
He grew up in decaying flats in the Bay area of 
San Francisco with his single, blind mother. He 
was politicised early, “just by the stuff going 
on around me; there were dog tags and curfews for 
black kids – many Bay area police were recruited 
from the South and they were very racist. Black 
people were not allowed to work in the big chain hotels.”

He was, he says, incorrigible as a youngster: “I 
was into what you might call illegitimate 
activities; things not sanctioned by the state.” 
By 15 he was in a youth detention centre. There 
he began painting and an officer suggested he 
should apply to do art at city college on release.

He was also taking a keen interest in television 
news: “I saw reports of apartheid in South Africa 
– police using tanks, dogs, water hoses; then 
there were the student protests in South America 
and the viciousness of the police. Here in 
California whenever a black man was killed by 
police, it was always justified, even if he was shot in the back.

“I started going out to San Francisco State 
University to black student union meetings: there 
was Stokely Carmichael, Leroy Jones, Marvin X and 
other playwrights and poets.” He attended a 
community event where the recently formed Black 
Panthers were providing the armed security. “I 
was impressed they believed in self-defence – 
that there were people who didn’t want to turn 
the other cheek; seemed like we’d been doing that for too long.”

Two young black activists, Huey Newton and Bobby 
Seale, had formed the Panther Party in 1966 with 
the aim of protecting black community from police 
brutality; Douglas hooked up with them two years 
later. “I used to go by Bobby Seale’s house, 
that’s where I met the first cadre: there’d be 
Eldridge [Cleaver, the playwright] upstairs, 
Marvin [X, poet and playwright] downstairs, Bobby 
working on the first issue of the newspaper.” 
Douglas offered to help and went home for art 
materials. “When I got back they said, ‘You seem 
like you’re committed, we’d like you to be the artist.’ ”

Douglas’s work was vital in reaching a 
semi-literate community: “People saw themselves 
in my pictures,” he says. “They were the heroes – 
the aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters – 
the pictures captivated them, then they could 
dwell on the message.” He drew mothers sitting in 
rat-infested tenement rooms, a baby in one arm, 
rifle in the other; he drew politicians strung up 
in trees by their necks and posters exhorting blacks to “Shoot to kill”.

But though the Panthers were principally known – 
and feared – for their militant “witnessing” of 
illegal police raids and arrests, they also ran 
social programmes for housing, education and 
health: a poignant Douglas drawing shows a mother 
and child reading a pamphlet on sickle cell 
anaemia – a disease affecting mainly black people.

The heavy black lines and patterns in his work 
allude to traditional African art – a black mama 
boogies with raised arms under the legend, 
“Hallelujah! The might and the power of the people is beginning to show.”

The Panthers lived in collectives, bought 
property and funded their social programmes with 
donations from liberal supporters: Did he marry? 
“Well, yes and no. I was a playboy, I guess. When 
the party be gan the women were lookin’ good, the 
men were lookin’ good . . . I did marry, but my 
wife left the party and I had a son with another 
lady. Then she left and I had a kid with a new young lady.”

There was chauvinism, he says, but the Panthers 
had women involved in all aspects of their work. 
The Panthers petered out towards the end of the 
Seventies with leaders jailed and riven by 
factions. Douglas went to work for the 
Sun-Reporter – “a news journal for the cause of 
the people” – but nothing since has matched the 
glory days. Is the community less cohesive now? 
How does he feel about the misogynist violence of 
some hip-hop? “I’m opposed to those negative 
aspects,” he says, “But there’s a whole movement 
out there of young activists challenging it: it’s a very diverse culture.”

Do black Americans get a better deal now? “You 
might get the illusion that things might be a 
little improved – there is student access but 
there ain’t enough jobs.” And what hopes of 
Barack Obama? “He’s a fresh voice,” Douglas 
concedes. Is he a brother? “Yeah, sure,” says 
Douglas, not entirely convincingly.

Douglas is off now to lunch with poet Linton 
Kwesi Johnson and the playwright Kwame Kwei 
Armah, then back to California where he’ll have 
more time for work since his beloved mother died 
earlier this year – he’s spent much of the past 
15 years looking after her. I go to shake his 
hand but he puts his arms round me for a big hug instead. Lovely man.

Black Panther: Emory Douglas and the Art of 
Revolution, Urbis, Cathedral Gardens, Manchester 
(<http://www.urbis.co.uk>www.urbis.co.uk 0161-605 8200), Oct 30-Mar 2009




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