NEW DOC-FILM ABOUT THE POLYNESIAN PANTHERS

A a major thank you to the filmmakers.

See the film online HERE

EMORY DOUGLAS INTERVIEWED IN NEW ZEALAND

Power of the Panther

NZ Herald, 22 Aug, 2010

One of the first things Emory Douglas had to do in his new

job in January 1967 was to draw the pig. "Huey and Bobby

would come over after organising in the evenings and they

would talk about the pig - how they defined the police as

pigs."

That's Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who had just founded the

Black Panther Party in October 1966 in Oakland, California.

Douglas, then a 23-year-old commercial art student, was

doing his best to take the idea on board. "This is all new

to me. I'm a new kid on the block. This is on-the-job

learning. I'm listening and trying to figure out how I

could express in art form what was requested of me. My

whole experience was interpreting what was being projected

and articulated verbally."

When he talks it's a mix of street and artspeak. Cool. Very

down. What was being projected was point No 7 of the Black

Panther's Ten Point Programme - "an immediate end to police

brutality and murder of black people." It was a programme

born out of socialist and communist doctrines mixed with

black nationalism, militant posture and plenty of

provocative rhetoric.

The party's uniform was blue shirts, black pants, black

leather jackets, black berets, shades and loaded shotguns -

for self defence. The party had reclaimed the American

constitutional right to bear arms - only in this case,

blacks were protecting themselves from the police.

Organised neighbourhood patrols were common - perfectly

legal under Californian law which allowed carrying a loaded

rifle or shotgun in public, as long as it was publicly

displayed and pointed at no one.

This was the new wild west of social change and a tactic

that promoted two very different tellings of history. One

is the story of the Black Panthers as hoodlums and

gun-toting gangsters who terrorised their communities. The

other is the Black Panthers as a legitimate social protest

movement - dedicated young blacks serving the people while

heroically defending themselves against unprovoked attacks

by the racist police.

At the time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called them "the

greatest threat to the internal security of the country"

and ordered via its counter intelligence programme

'COINTELPRO' extensive covert and illegal methods to

"expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise

neutralise" the party's activities.

It's a legacy that lives on. "Even at our 40th anniversary

people were trying to say we were terrorists and that we

were hoodlums and thugs and criminals," says Douglas who is

here as the Elam International Artist in Residence at the

University of Auckland. "Thousands of people came from all

over the world to the 40th celebrations - they showed

different. They tried to say we were racists. The

progressive whites and activists came forward and they

refuted all of that."

The year 1967, when he offered his commercial art skills to

help produce the fledgling Black Panther newspaper, was the

beginning of Douglas' party politicisation. Already a

member of San Francisco City College's Black Student Union

and involved in the Bay area Black Arts movement, he was a

fast learner. He knew about youth correctional facilities

too. "The fact that you understood the bigotry and

hypocrisy of the authorities first hand, those experiences

kind of shaped what I did."

His pig-in-uniform drawings were crude and provocative -

the pig was always fat bellied, with exaggerated snout and

usually with insects swarming around the head. "That came

from seeing pigs and the slime they're eating and they have

the flies flying around them. In American culture that was

a grotesque thing."

The captions were provocative too: "A low-natured beast

that has no regard for law, justice or the rights of

people, a creature that bites the hand that feeds it, a

foul, depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the

victim of an unprovoked attack."

Newton and Seale liked what they saw and before long

Douglas had a job title like no other - Revolutionary

Artist and Minister of Culture - and a free hand to draw as

he saw fit. "When I first started working, Bobby and Huey

made sure I understood the politics of what the party was

about. Once they saw that I understood that, and could

articulate it in my artwork, I was given the green light."

The green light - the back page of the weekly Black Panther

newspaper published from 1967 through to 1980 - unleashed

Douglas' pent-up talent and a style of drawing that he'd

tried before, but which had been rejected at commercial art

school. At its peak, from 1968-72, the Black Panther sold

about 100,000 copies a week on street corners and college

campuses across the United States.

Douglas' back-page poster image was often reprinted and

pasted on the walls of the street. In tribute to his visit

here, a run of his posters have been plastered around

Symonds St. "It reminds me of what we used to say - our

gallery is the community," says Douglas.

His style began with cartoon-like, thick black outline

drawings which developed to include collage and patterns

from Format, a less expensive version of Letraset. He liked

woodcuts, but found them too time-consuming for the demands

of a weekly deadline. "I tried to mimic woodcuts by using

markers and hard ballpoint pen lines, then using the

prefabricated textured material that you could cut out to

get the tones and the contrasts."

There are three phases that come and go and resurface in

Douglas' drawings. "The pig drawings are the earlier work.

Then there were the self defence drawings, then the ones

that dealt with social programmes."

The comic book style self defence images are the most

confronting - guns in the hands of defiant black men and

women in response to the oppressor that seem like a call to

arms, to rise up and fight. The captions reinforce the

idea: "All power to the people. Death to the pigs." Douglas

says they were about empowering and fighting for freedom.

And effecting change. "It was making them heroes. People

begin to see themselves in the images and they become the

heroes on the stage. They can identify with that."

But while the style is evidence of propaganda and a visual

mythology to give power to the people, it's easy to see how

some might be fearful of such images. Douglas is staunch:

"Those who were frightened were frightened. Those who

admired them weren't."

The social programme drawings, borne out of the Panther's

Ten Point Programme demands for decent housing, education

and employment, are softer, but more confronting in terms

of the predicament and emotion expressed. Here, Douglas

shows the conditions that made the revolution seem

necessary. In one, a woman fights off rats (landlords)

attacking her in her home. "I was trying to show a person

trying to overcome the conditions - exaggerating the

housing situation - but at the same time showing a person

who had politics in their life. Even though they were

struggling they were still concerned with the issues of

that time."

Animals - pigs, rats and vultures - feature often as

representations of not just the police and authority, but

also the entire capitalist military/industrial system. In

one image relating to the New Haven Black Panther trials in

1970 when Seale was imprisoned, the caption reads: "If the

fascist pigs attempt to murder chairman Bobby Seale and the

Connecticut Panthers in the electric chair, there won't be

any lights for days."

They were meant to be provocative, says Douglas. "And some

were meant to be humorous. So this was just saying the

blood sucking vulture is the US Government being choked by

the extension cord and hit on the head with the light

bulb."

Point six in the party's programme was "all black men to be

exempt from military service." Douglas' images relating to

the issue were often about the Vietnam War and the effects

it had on those returning, such as drug addiction. It was

important, he says, to have authentic detail. "There were

people in the party who had been ex-drug addicts. When I

did this drawing [an addict shooting up] I had one brother

pose for me. But I also asked what kind of syringes and

stuff they used and that's there - what they use out on the

street."

Douglas was very aware of other revolutionary propaganda

art of the time. "We were getting posters from Africa,

Latin America, out of Palestine and Vietnam and seeing

Chinese and Russian, plus the American art protest work. I

was mostly inspired by the work that came out of Cuba."

He says those who went there with the Venceremos Brigades

to show solidarity for the Cuban Revolution often came back

saying his drawings had come from there. Douglas insists it

was the other way round. "It was amazing, they remixed some

of my images." It's amazing too how the party's message

spread around the world, including to New Zealand's

Polynesian Panthers.

The party also got considerable support from white America

including the Honkies for Huey campaign and composer

Leonard Bernstein and friends who held fundraising parties.

The latter was lampooned by journalist Tom Wolfe in 1970 as

"radical chic" - the social elite endorsing radical causes

to assuage white guilt.

As Douglas sees it, Wolfe was buying into the

disinformation campaign. "People donate if they want to."

Did it feel like a revolution in America? "We were hopeful.

We had a swagger about ourselves believing that we could

achieve what we set out to achieve. That was overcoming the

obstacles of transforming society. And we were doing that.

It was the ideal that we were changing the mindset of

people."

Douglas, like other Black Panthers, has obtained the file

the FBI had on him showing the level of surveillance that

was going on - the tracking of his travel, his bank account

(which had $64 in it at the time) and the questioning of

his mother and aunt.

He's yet to get his file from Operation CHAOS, the code

name for the domestic espionage project conducted by the

CIA. But the picture emerging as the information becomes

declassified shows the extraordinary measures that were

taken by the authorities to discredit the party - including

letters on forged Black Panther letterhead threatening to

kill donors to the party if they didn't give more. Douglas

agreed there were problems within the party itself that led

to its dissolution in the early 1980s - Newton getting

caught up in drugs and substance abuse and in-fighting

among party factions. But he says the Government's

discrediting campaign also played a big part.

"The fact is what we did is still something people are

inspired by. There is the solidarity and coalition

politics. That's the legacy of what the Black Panther Party

left - kind of like a blueprint that people could be

inspired by."

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EXHIBITION

What: Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture, Black Panther

Party exhibition Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74

Shortland St, October 3 On the web:

www.gusfishergallery.auckland.ac.nz Public events: Emory

Douglas and the Art of Revolution - lecture University of

Auckland Engineering Building Monday August 24, 6:30pm; MC5

and the White Panthers - Gus Fisher Gallery, August 29, 1pm