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Sometime in the early 1970s, the graphic
artist Emory Douglas
answered his phone to find an art dealer on the line. The man
heaped high praise on Douglas's artwork, along with promises of
riches to be made. He asked Douglas to come to a meeting in San
Francisco. Douglas hesitated. The next time the man called, Douglas
replied that he wasn't interested and hung up. After all, his
number was unlisted.
"So I figured it
was the police," he told the crowd who had come
to see a retrospective exhibit of his work at Los Angeles's Museum
of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center in October 2007. Douglas
is now a grandfather in his mid-60s. The short afro he had sported
three decades ago has been replaced by a smoothly shaved head,
often topped by a stylish fedora. His easygoing demeanor and gentle
smile hardly betray the idea of his once having been a high-level
law enforcement target, but nearly four decades ago he had a right
to be paranoid as the Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture
for the Black Panther Party. From 1967 to roughly 1980, Douglas
oversaw the art direction and production of The Black
Panther, the party's official newspaper. Douglas's artwork in
the paper played no small part in propagating its combative
criticisms of the U.S. government, as well as any other
institutions or persons the party viewed as perpetuators of racism,
police brutality, poverty and global imperialism. Years after the
suspicious call, released FBI records would confirm that Douglas
had been identified and listed on its Security Index and Agitator
Index. "It didn't bother me at all. It just meant we were doing our
jobs," says Douglas later, on the phone from San Francisco.
Douglas on design:
It's an ongoing process, always changing and
evolving, like
life. We have to overcome the obstacles and rise up to the
challenges.
Emory Douglas
was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1943. At age
8, he and his family moved to the Bay Area after a doctor told his
mother the climate there would ease his asthma. Art and design
would not be serious pursuits for Douglas until his teens, when his
criminal behavior landed him in the Youth Training School in
Ontario, California. During his 15 months at the juvenile center's
print shop, Douglas had his first lessons in typography,
illustration and logo design. Sometime after he left the center,
Douglas ran into a former counselor at a concession stand his
mother managed. The counselor encouraged him to enroll in
commercial art classes at the City College of San Francisco. The
classes he took there gave him a basis in combining art and
message. "Without that foundation, I wouldn't have been able to do
anything I did for the party," says Douglas.
His
advice to new graduates:
Be
patient and stay focused on your goal. Develop your craft
continuously. And have fun!
It was the late 1960s, and college campuses
in the Bay Area
smoldered with political anger. At rallies, crowds chanted for the
withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Demands were made: freedom of
speech, justice, self-determination and civil rights for
African-Americans. The countercultural fervor made an impression on
Douglas, who had grown up watching news footage of civil rights
protests. At City College, Douglas admired the artworks of Charles
White, Aaron Douglas and Elizabeth Catlett and became active in the
Black Arts Movement. Once, in March 1967, when Douglas was working
on props for Amiri Baraka's theater workshop, Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale, founders of the newly formed Black Panther Party, came
to a meeting to discuss security for an upcoming visit by Betty
Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow. They also found a new recruit. "After
that meeting, I told them I was interested in joining the party. I
began catching the bus to Oakland, hanging out with Huey and Bobby
and going on patrols with them," says Douglas.
At civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver's
apartment, where
Seale was working on the inaugural issue of The Black
Panther, Douglas offered his design skills. He realized The
Black Panther needed potent images to cut through the high
illiteracy rates in poor communities. At his disposal were
affordable graphic arts technologies—mimeographs, photostats,
prefabricated presstypes and screentones, along with offset
printing for the newspaper. Embracing inexpensive and available
means of commercial art production, Douglas turned his artwork into
a powerful visual megaphone.
On
diversity in the design profession:
The majority of the world is populated by
people of color.
Anything can be diverse if diverse people get involved in it.
Mornings, Douglas and other members would
wake up early to
distribute the paper. Along the routes they also wheat-pasted
Douglas's artwork on neighborhood walls. Each made the revolution
appear imminent and encouraged pride and self-defense in
communities otherwise broken by iron-fisted policing. His signature
bold lines formed the faces of an armed and defiant people who
refused oppression. Popularized by Douglas, "pigs" became part of
the greater language of protest as an alternative name for the
police. Many posters depicted violent ends for these "pigs": shot,
bayoneted, doused with acid, knifed and axed, among other fates.
Violence, however, defined only one side of Douglas's work for the
Black Panthers. As the Black Panthers expanded its scope to address
all forms of social injustice, many of Douglas's designs also
supported other revolutionary groups all over the world. Women,
children and neighborhood figures became popular subjects for
Douglas, and people began to recognize images of themselves and
their community in the artwork. "They used to buy the paper to look
at the art. They could tell through the artwork which direction the
Black Panther Party was going at that particular time," says
Douglas.
At its peak in 1970, the
paper reached hundreds of thousands of
readers across the United States, including those who saw it as a
menace. According to a 1976 congressional report, the FBI's field
offices hatched elaborate methods against the paper, including
pressure on airlines shipping its issues, calls for boycotts and
one unexecuted suggestion to secretly sabotage production by
spraying the printing room with Skatol, a fecal-smelling chemical.
Douglas was doing his job too well.
By
the early 1980s, the Black Panthers as he had known them
would dissolve as a result of law enforcement crackdowns and
turmoil within the party. Douglas now lives in his late mother's
home in San Francisco, after having moved in to tend to her
declining health. He is retired, but often works as an independent
graphic artist lending his talent to social and political issues
like black-on-black crime and the prison-industrial complex. "It's
an ongoing process, always changing and evolving, like life. We
have to overcome the obstacles and rise up to the challenges," says
Douglas of what he has learned from a lifetime in graphic arts. As
a grandfather, his recent works frequently feature children,
including a series on HIV/AIDS. Asked what he wants to do next,
Douglas replies, "To continue to inform and educate through my
work. It's an ongoing adventure."
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