Emory Douglas, “Afro-American Solidarity With the Oppressed People of the World,” 1969 Favorite 

Emory Douglas joined the Black Panthers in January 1967 at the age of 23, just three months after Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party. Douglas, who had studied graphic design at San Francisco City College, swiftly became the organization’s minister of culture and the art director in charge of its eponymous newspaper. The high-contrast, boldly hued, thick-lined illustrations and full-page images Douglas created for The Black Panther, as well as his many posters and pamphlets, became inextricable parts of the party’s mission to unite those affected by injustice across the United States and around the world. Emory’s works not only communicated the strength of the group and its rage, but also its sense of collective pride and global community. In 1969, he synthesized all of these elements in one of his most celebrated images. An African-American woman wearing a patterned jacket, teardrop earrings and a rifle on her back brandishes a spear. Rendered from below, she seems to be towering above us. Beside her, text proclaiming “Afro-American solidarity with the oppressed People of the world” addresses the viewer in a no-nonsense, sans-serif font.

Reflecting on the image in 2016, Douglas highlighted the central role of female Panthers within his imagery. “The women depicted in my artwork are a reflection of the party,” he said. “Women went to jail and were in leadership roles. Women started chapters and branches of the Black Panther Party as well … that played into how I expressed them in my own artwork.” — Z.L.

TLF: Dread, could we go back to Emory Douglas and poster art?

DS: The Black Panther newspaper was the most widely read Black newspaper in the country. It was not just a fringe activist newspaper. At one point, there were 300,000 issues distributed a week. A lot of the work I was thinking about was about resistance, and I’m glad that Shirin named Leon Golub, for example. I was thinking a lot about Jacob Lawrence — those are all images of people fighting and resisting, and showing that the police are terrible oppressors. But Emory Douglas was focusing on what a revolutionary should look like and how to represent this new generation of badass, Black, leather-clad, beret-wearing people that included both men and women. How do we make the revolution sexy and attractive? The Black Panthers were very inspired by the visual iconography of the Chinese Revolution and Mao Zedong. What’s also remarkable is that Douglas was working with a very limited palette and inexpensive printing technology, yet he was still able to develop a new language to style people fighting against the police and the state. The particular work I chose has both text and image but it also has this beautiful wavy background that belongs to both the psychedelic movement and the larger revolutionary iconography of the time. So, for him to make positive images of not just Black people, but Black revolutionaries who are armed and fighting in a very stylized way, I think, was a real shift. He re-envisioned something and then made it the property of millions of people. There aren’t that many other activist movements that have been able to create that in quite the same way.