ALL POWER: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party at Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) Exhibit

Bruce Bennett, Center 4, Bronzeville, Chicago, 2013, courtesy of the photographer, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018

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Friedrich Engels wondered whether the horribly treated, underpaid and overworked labor class of early industrial Europe could even be aware of their oppression and exploitation, given what he perceived to be their false consciousness. This piggy-backed off of Marx’s idea that the lower classes tend to embrace the values and ideology created by the upper classes. Much later Pierre Bourdieu would offer the concept of symbolic violence - those who suffer unjustly often accept their suffering as being perfectly justifiable. But these were all middle-class guys examining workers from a distance. In the 1960s the Black Panthers of Oakland, California busted apart this myth of false consciousness and symbolic violence among the economically and racially oppressed in the USA.

This was a radicalized proletariat - of working class and poor black folks (openly Marxist and who welcomed alliances from progressives of any color). They decided to be more than theoretical socialists waiting for history to develop and attempted to protect their community from police abuse while providing services to their community they could not expect from the government. The Panthers understood that racism, discrimination and segregation had led to the adverse status of black folks in America, but they did not become absorbed in the Black Power orientation toward racial pride and cohesion. It was the economics of capitalism that was the ultimate enemy for them; although class and race intersected, focusing on race, in itself, was a red herring to them. J. Edgar Hoover considered the Panthers to be the most severe security threat to the American way of life at that time and many members of the leadership were framed and/or murdered by the police/FBI.

Endia Beal, Sabrina and Katrina, 2015, from "Am I What You're Looking For?", courtesy of the artist, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018

ALL POWER: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party was previewed at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) show in Manhattan a couple weeks ago and will be opening in Seattle on April 20^th at the Photographic Center Northwest. PCNW posted the Panthers’ 10-point plan on the walls around their show and, true, I did not see many of the well-heeled folks at the vernissage contemplating these posters, but kudos to AIPAD for providing the space for some in-your-face material for the patrons.  

(Basically, if you are curious, the 10-point plan included demands for full employment; reparations payments for black folks - General Sherman’s idea of giving every freed black person 40 acres of land and 2 mules after the Civil War was referenced; decent housing; an educational system that provided a knowledge of self and one’s position in society; an end to the war in Vietnam pursued by a white-racist government and business class; an end to police brutality and the right of black folks to carry arms to protect themselves from the police; the release of black prisoners from America’s prison-industrial complex; trials of black defendants before juries that could understand the experience of the defendants and, mirroring the language of the Declaration of Independence, a call for separation from the dominant American culture.)

In a photo by Bruce Bennett, we see a number of children at a playground in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago - still one of America’s most racially segregated cities, where poor black kids live in some of the most violent neighborhoods in the country. These kids at the playground are not playing, however. Someone once investigated “play” and one of the things you need, in order to play, is a “relaxed field”. You need to be comfortable, secure and relatively free from anxiety or sorrow to be goofy with your friends. These guys are not being goofy. The viewer is directly confronted by their harsh attitudes. Indeed, their expressions look as if they are emotionally responding to the hypocrisy, callousness and lame excuses that have left vast numbers of African American males with few meaningful options. 

A well-heeled viewer of the photo might first discern the pent-up annoyance and/or hostility, and then should probably realize it is meant for him/her. Like the Panthers, these are young men who realize their situation and they have stopped playing and are, for the moment, waiting. Politicians, churches, social services, the business community and academia, folks with capacity, have failed these young people as everyone pursues his/her own excellence and prestigious career without second thought to those who do not have the same privileges and cannot get on that type of gravy train.

Endia Beal is represented in the show with images from her Am I What You’re Looking For? series. Beal went to the homes of African American women about to graduate from college and set up a backdrop of an office space where she did an internship at Yale University. Before interviewing for the internship she was advised by an acquaintance to alter her appearance and behavior to become more acceptable to her white, Ivy interviewers. The backdrop contrasts sharply with the homes and is meant to represent the foreign, mysterious and even, perhaps, scary environment these women aspire to join. How much does the corporate world expect these women to change – in values and appearance – in order for them to enter this new world?

Ayana Jackson, Martha, 2016, from the series “Leapfrog”, courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Seattle, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018

Ayana Jackson’s Leapfrog (a bit of the other) Grand Matron Army series is also part of the show. Ayana, herself, poses in a number of differing outfits, in the leap frog position, representing a sequence of generations of black women. Hegel promised that history was unfolding along a humane path and we can look at the experience of the African and African American/Caribbean woman throughout history to see how or whether this progress has been made and to think about all of the factors involved in black women gaining equality and independence. One of the problems referenced in the photos is the deliberate exotification or eroticizing of the black female body by dominant colonial powers and that lingering legacy. Ayana also deals with the stereotypes by which black women have been viewed by the dominant culture.

In Lewis Watts’ photo of graffiti from West Oakland we see that the Panthers are still remembered but the details of their mission may be entering into a type of vague mythology. Black Power and the Panthers were, in fact, two different movements but there was an apparent attempt to merge them in this graffiti. Yet, the obliteration of the letters “PO” leave the syllable “WER” which sounds like “were” – thus the graffiti underscores, perhaps, the absence of a power force that actually sought to change the lives of the poor for the better. The Panthers have, perhaps, been replaced by perfunctory social services that are not guided with as much passion, integrity or intensity.

Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018

Robert Wade’s photo shows black solidarity in California for the Chicago 8 – sometimes called the Chicago 7 and sometimes the Chicago 10 (you can watch the entire movie Chicago 10 on youtube for free). One member of the Chicago 8 was Bobby Seale – co-founder of the Black Panthers with Huey Newton. The Chicago 8 were the young men arrested as scapegoats for the riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention caused by the utterly corrupt Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and his brutal Chicago Police Department. Thousands of young people descended on Chicago to protest the Vietnam War (which had been started and escalated by Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson). Seale’s inclusion among the other 7 defendants was controversial since he had not been among the organizing committees behind the protests. Seale was literally tied to a chair and gagged during parts of the trial.

Robert Wade, California, 1969-1970, courtesy of the photographer, from "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," PCNW 2018 

The Panthers got tired of waiting. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his letter from Birmingham Jail, he mentioned that the early Christian Church had been a thermostat for and not a thermometer of its times. He seemed to be urging the contemporary church in America to step forward more into social activism and to change society while helping black folks integrate into it. The Panthers attempted to be this type of thermostat in lieu of any other institutions within the system. The idea that folks in the poorer classes cannot even perceive their own abuse was a middle-class academic dogma that the Panthers put to shame. More than anything their legacy, as reflected in this show, is that reform must come from those folks who are being neglected and abused. If those who are successful and have status are conscientious, they must help make a way for those who are struggling, not continue to merely pursue their own self-interests. The Panthers showed that integration was essential but it had to be integration under the terms of the integrators – because only these folks could be the true moral reformers of their society.  If you want to see social change, link with those who are suffering the most and help them lead the way.