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?
October 18, 2008
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 (www.urbis.co.uk 0161-605 8200), Oct 30-Mar 2009
.
No comments:
Post a Comment