Revolutionising the people: Interview with Black Panther Emory Douglas

Early in 1967, radical Black artist Emory Douglas was invited to an organising meeting for the visit of Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to the Bay Area in California. Emory was to design the poster advertising the visit.

Given Malcolm X’s recent assassination, security was a priority. Two guys came to the meeting and agreed to be in charge of security. They were Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. “After that, I kind of knew that’s what I wanted to be a part of”, Emory says, speaking in Melbourne after speaking at the annual Marxism conference.

“After the event, I asked them how I could join and Huey and Bobby gave me their phone number. I used to call over and catch up with Huey early in the morning … He’d take me around the community and introduce me to folks in Oakland and then we’d go by Bobby Seale’s house. That was my first involvement.”

The first thing that struck us during our conversation with Emory is that he talks about key figures of the Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s with their first names: Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, Kathleen, Assata, Little Bobby and Fred. Here we are talking to a man who knew the heroes of our history books, who lived that history, who was an important part of an inspiring and powerful movement.

It was a humbling and awesome conversation. We knew that Emory had been asked these questions thousands of times before, but he is a patient and generous interviewee.

Art as practice

In the 1960s, Emory was involved in the Black Arts movement in the Bay Area around San Francisco, along with others like Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones). He joined the Black Panther Party shortly after it was formed, in 1967 and became its minister of culture, a position he held until the early 1980s.

He did layout and artwork for the Black Panther newspaper, which had reached a weekly circulation of hundreds of thousands by 1969. His depiction of the policeman (and later Uncle Sam) as a pig became an enduring image for all who understand the true nature of the police force and its role in the oppression of the Black community in the US.

His artwork exposing the corruption and brutality of the system while celebrating the struggle for Black liberation and many other anti-colonial struggles has an international legacy. Emory and his work have toured the world, presenting exhibitions, working with youth groups and speaking about his history.

During his latest visit, Emory was invited to the Auckland Arts Festival and worked on a mural project at the Mangere Arts Centre with Maori youth. He also worked on a collaboration with Aboriginal artist Richard Bell at the Milani Gallery, and mentioned that the pieces included embroideries of his work done by the Zapatista Mayan women’s collective.

When speaking about his artwork, Emory makes it clear that there is a message, that art is much like the famous manifestos, programs and communiqués of the Black Panthers. Art is “a visual way of communicating with people, for those not into reading and who learn by observation and participation, by actual practice … They can get something of substance out of the art work that is relevant to them.”

Black Panther Party

We turn to the Black Panther Party. What inspired Emory to get involved? “Young people across the country were frustrated and were trying to figure out what to do because the climate in the country was that of protest – coming from the south, the civil rights movement, you see all that on TV… the beatings, the murders of the civil rights marchers and all those things.”

Emory began to help Huey and Bobby organise and go on neighbourhood patrols. He tells a story of a group of kids seeing the patrols for the first time. They were absolutely astonished that the Panthers were standing up to the cops and, because they knew the law better than the police, getting away with it. Did people find it inspiring? “For some, it was in the beginning. For some, they said we were crazy! After a while it became more understanding when they seen it in conjunction with the programs.” (The Panthers carried out a range of social provision activities.)

It might have been crazy, if not for the solid foundation that Huey and Bobby had developed before setting up the party. “Before they even got started on the street, they had everything in place … Huey used to work at a law office … so he knew about the law in relation to the Second Amendment, giving you the right to bear arms.”

According to Emory, Huey and Bobby got the idea of the patrols after watching the Watts riots in 1965 on TV. Young people patrolled the community with cameras to try to prevent incidents of police brutality. They called it Cop Watch.

Other inspirations included Robert Williams’ book Negroes with guns, which the party organised to sell, and the Louisiana Deacons for Defense, a southern local armed group who protected their community and civil rights activists from the Ku Klux Klan and other racists.

California, and particularly the Bay Area, was bursting with political ferment in the late 1960s. The Black Panthers arose from and then shaped the revolutionary atmosphere. This is illustrated in a story Emory tells of how they raised the money to buy their “technical equipment” (guns) – by selling Mao’s Red Book to students at the University of California. The Panthers read the book as well, not to transpose the Chinese revolution onto US soil, but for the universal principles contained in it that could be applied to what they were doing.

Survival Programs

At the end of our interview, Emory raises a point: “Huey always said the party was not to be forever, the party was to negate itself. The whole idea of the party was to inspire people to take on these [survival] programs, therefore it would negate itself, the negation of the negation … That was the whole idea of putting on these programs – at some point the people would become revolutionised and the party wouldn’t be needed anymore.”

The scope and breadth of the survival programs that the Panther’s ran is impressive, especially in a country where even the most basic social programs are denied, particularly to the Black community. The party ran everything from the famous free breakfast programs to childcare, an old folks’ program, free medical clinics, even a free ambulance service.

The survival programs were seen as an integral part of the revolutionary aspect of the Panthers. In Emory’s words, “Being a revolutionary meant you served the people, in the interests of the people … because you’re transforming the thinking and mindset of the people by what you do, by your example, and you’re inspiring people to begin to ask for these kinds of programs that were in their interest, and pointing out the contradiction between what the government wasn’t doing and what it should have been doing. That’s a part of what’s revolutionary, transforming society from being exploitative [and] capitalist oriented.”

Emory points out that the free lunch programs in US schools today came about as a result of the Panthers’ breakfast program.

Colossal Events

What really made the party grow “was the events, we called them colossal events, that captured the attention of people”.

The first of these was the delegation of Panther Party members, led by Bobby Seale, to the Sacramento legislature (the capital of California) when a politician was trying to change the gun laws to prevent the Panthers’ patrols. Huey Newton stayed in Oakland because they knew that they might be arrested and that someone would be needed to talk to the press. “So they knew how to play the press back then … [After that] you had people calling, wanting to know about the Black Panther Party.”

The second event, the “one that took it over the top”, was an incident between two police officers and Huey Newton, which resulted in one policeman dying, another being injured and Newton being injured and arrested. That began the Free Huey movement. The party decided that Eldridge Cleaver would run for president with the Peace and Freedom Party, and use the platform to talk about Huey’s case and build the Black Panther Party.

The Black Panther Party sought alliances and solidarity with revolutionary movements across the US and the world. Emory tells of trips by Panther members to Algeria and all over Africa, to Cuba and China, of the Panther Party chapters in Japan and even the Polynesian Panthers.

Solidarity for Huey Newton, as written in many of his articles, was about “revolutionary solidarity” – with the American Indian Movement, Basta Ya! (the Spanish language paper the Panthers printed following the Los Siete de la Raza incident in 1969), and many more. As Emory notes, “We were the first ones who took a position in solidarity with the gay liberation movement.”

Today

Emory is still very much involved in community projects today. One is the Eastside Arts Alliance, a cultural centre for young people in Oakland. They organise cultural events such as the annual Malcolm X Jazz Festival and block parties. For Emory, it seems, the cultural and political have always been entwined. These events are about “making sure people are aware of what’s going on so they can come together and demand justice from the local government in relationship to their concerns”.

We ask him if he’s noticed a change since the Ferguson rebellion last year. He believes that people have become more aware of things like the militarisation of the police and the staggering levels of incarceration of Black men in the US. The rates of incarceration in the US are higher than anywhere in the world, with over 2 million people behind bars. Black men have a 1 in 3 chance of imprisonment during their lifetime.

But Ferguson was also the latest in a line of rebellions against police murders of Black men. “They had been doing it before but Ferguson was the spark that lit the prairie fire this time around because you had Trayvon Martin before, young people were very upset about that. You had Oscar Grant prior to Trayvon Martin – there were riots and rebellions behind that in Oakland.”

This theme is taken up again when we ask Emory if he believes it is necessary to be a revolutionary today, “Oh yeah, revolution is about change and sometimes you know it’s going from A to B and sometimes it can be abrupt, you know sometimes it can be the spark that lights the whole chain. Revolution is always necessary. Today, absolutely.”

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

The Black Panther Party faced extraordinary repression from the police and the federal government’s Cointelpro. The legacy of that repression survives today, with many Black Panther Party members incarcerated as political prisoners.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was a former member of the party who became a radio journalist and was sentenced to death for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer. The investigation and trial were a farce, and it is clear that he was targeted for his political beliefs.

For 30 years of his sentence Mumia was held in isolation on death row. His sentence was overturned in 2001, yet he remained on death row for another 10 years. He is now serving a sentence of life without parole.

On 30 March, Mumia was hospitalised after going into diabetic shock, following inadequate medical treatment. He suffers from chronic health problems and his supporters are worried that his continued incarceration and lack of medical care may be fatal.

Despite his condition, Mumia Abu-Jamal has released a statement on the South Carolina police murder of Walter Scott, “Of punks, predators and pigs”.

The campaign to free Mumia continues, with more urgency than ever.