Shooting the Movement:
Black Panther Party
Photography and African
American Protest
Traditions
T.N. Phu
Abstract: Although the failure of the Black Panther Party has often been
attributed to the violence which consumed it, the photographic record
suggests otherwise. This paper argues that the movement in fact
developed a striking and self-aware protest aesthetic. Moreover, this still
influential self-referential visuality emphasized the spectacular forms of
defiance, contributing, in doing so, to African American traditions of
protest conventionally rooted in the oral tradition. A focus on Black
Panther Party photography helps account for how the rhetorical violence
which focused the BPP’s protest aesthetic became complexly
indistinguishable from violent realization.
Keywords: African American photography, American studies, cultural
studies, visual culture, race
Résumé : Bien que l’échec du parti des Panthères Noires ait souvent été
attribué à la violence qui l’embrasait, les dossiers photographiques
laissent penser le contraire. Selon le présent article, le mouvement a en
fait développé un caractère d’autoprotestation frappant en matière
d’esthétique. En outre, ce phénomène de perception autoréférentiel qui
conserve toujours son influence a mis l’accent sur des formes
spectaculaires de défi et a ainsi contribué aux traditionnelles protestations
afro-américaines classiquement enracinées dans la tradition orale. L’accent
mis sur la photographie du parti des Panthères Noires permet de constater
comment la rhétorique violente sur laquelle s’est polarisé ce parti est
devenue complexe et impossible à distinguer de la réalisation violente.
Mots clés : photographie afro-américaine, études américaines, études
culturelles, culture visuelle, race
ß Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’e¤tudes ame¤ricaines 38, no.1, 2008
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
Forms of Protest
166
In April of 2006, Duke University played host to a series of protests,
which were conducted in a manner that clearly evoked an earlier
historical moment. The marchers, who adopted militant postures,
called for solidarity and urged African American men to unite in
armed defense of their victimized sisters. Not surprisingly, the case
was cast in black and white: an African American female student at
the predominantly black North Carolina Central University, who
also worked as an exotic dancer to fund her studies and support
her daughter, had accused three members of the Duke men’s
lacrosse team of rape. The case raised myriad controversies,1 and
clearly highlighted the deeply entrenched racial divide not only on
campus but also between the campus and the community.2
Particularly fascinating is the protest that surrounded the case,
which deployed a particular rhetoric (armed self-defense) and a
specific iconography (symbols of black militancy). This recently
staged spectacle deliberately referred back to the black protest tradition of an earlier era of radical politics. Assembled by an organization calling itself The New Black Panther Party, many participants
looked and sounded uncannily, or rather cannily, like its
long defunct namesake, the Black Panther Party, which had for a
startling time in the 1960s burnished its image on the popular imagination. That image, it would seem, endures to this day.
Photos taken of the April 2006 event focused in self-conscious ways
on affinities with this earlier form of protest, suggesting a bridge
between the current urgency for justice, on the one hand, and a long
history of injustice, on the other. Such a deployment also manifestly
attempted to revitalize a tradition of radical politics that the original
Black Panther Party (BPP) helped to develop, and a symbolism that
original party had defined and popularized. Despite the ideological
differences between the New Black Panther Party and the group
that inspired them—one so great that any link between the two has
been firmly repudiated by trustees of the original group’s legacy3—
the New Black Panther Party draws in obvious ways on the very
visual symbolics associated with that oppositional style, including
the flags, emblems, berets, and defiantly clenched fists. Although
the case is compelling for constellating the questions of racial, class,
and gender privilege in ever crucial terms, the concern here is
the spectre of 1960s black radicalism haunting today’s nascent
movement, a striking feature of the recent protest. The form, or
the aesthetics, as it were, of protest continually asserts its gripping
if sometimes ambiguous and contradictory power. What relationship did the aesthetics of protest have with the expression of
black power? To what extent was the form of protest linked to the
substance of its politics?
One of the most respected activists of the era, Angela Davis, affirms
this divide. Davis memorably maintains an abiding suspicion of
a politics reduced to fashion despite, or rather because, of its
mainstream incorporation. ‘‘It is both humiliating and humbling,’’
she confesses, ‘‘to discover that a single generation after the events
that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a
hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to
a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with
the younger generation demonstrate the fragility and mutability of
historical images, particularly those associated with African
American history’’ (171). In other words, the imaging of black
power in general, and of the Black Panther Party in particular, is
frequently dismissed as sensationalist, distorted, and inaccurate.
It would seem that insiders and detractors alike blamed the shooting of the movement for its undoing. Such a charge reveals a
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For all the debate the Party inspires, the striking nature of its imaging is rarely contested. As Erika Doss observes, ‘‘with their black
berets and leather jackets, their Afros, dark glasses, raised fists,
and military drill formation, the Panthers made great visual
copy’’ (177–8). The effectiveness of this strategy has frequently
been disputed, however. Critics and former members alike remain
divided when it comes to the ends that this visual copy served and,
ironically, the issue that rages most intensely is the extent to which
this power is consistent with black power. Attempts to preserve the
legacy of the Panthers tend to resort to gestures that are effectively,
if unintentionally, iconoclastic. In her reflections on the role of
women in revolutionary politics, for example, former
Communications Secretary for the Panthers Kathleen Cleaver
finds herself musing, ‘‘could it be that the images and stories of
the black panthers that you’ve seen and heard were geared to something other than conveying what was actually going on?’’ (126).
Concerned about protecting the legacy of the Panthers (and here
Cleaver addresses a broader constituency than women), she insists
that we distinguish between the imaging of the BPP and the content
of its politics. The former, her remarks imply, seldom does justice
to the latter.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
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profound suspicion of the visual field. Nonetheless, these critiques
underscore, even as they attempt to undermine, the prominence
and endurance of such imaging practices. As Tom Wolfe’s satire
of white liberals in New York Magazine at the time illustrated, an
important part of the appeal of black power was the sense of
spectacular fascination that Wolfe eloquently called ‘‘radical chic’’
(1970). Despite the clear message that recent gestures towards a
black radical tradition have articulated, the ongoing controversy
concerning this tradition largely stems from the fraught entanglement, rather than strict separation, of content and form, fashion
and substance.
For these reasons, a careful assessment of the substance of the
Panthers’ politics also needs to closely examine its photographic
representations. From the time of its inception, the Black Panther
Party achieved prominence as the visible icon of black power,
underscoring the urgency of community programs as well as selfdefense, by playing—in often skillful ways—with photography.
Despite its initially modest numbers, the movement acquired
national exposure precisely by seizing not just the time, as Bobby
Seale proclaimed in his memoir, but also the photo-op—perhaps
most notably by providing protection for Malcolm X’s widow,
Betty Shabazz, in one of her first public appearances,4 and in a
public confrontation with police during their lobby against the
Black Panther or Mulford Bill (for the legislator who introduced
it), a piece of impending legislation on gun control. The theatricality
of this opposition, or what Nikhil Singh memorably calls the ‘‘guerilla theater’’ in which its politics plays, remains an important
touchstone for the imaging as well as imagining of black protest.
Indeed, the recent re-staging of this theatre at the steps of Duke
illustrates its continuing appeal. Here, it will be argued that the
photography of the BPP provided in vexed, sometimes misunderstood and frequently disavowed ways, a medium for its politics.
The visual field constitutes not a distracting betrayal of radical
politics, but rather a crucial site where the form of protest is fiercely,
even violently, negotiated.
Visual Violence
The distrust of the image that Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis
articulated above is directed especially towards stereotypical
accounts of the Black Panther Party, which stress the organization’s
ultimately self-destructive violence. Without considering the
context in which such a provocative stance was taken—the
perceived failures of the Civil Rights movement, the community’s
long-standing sense of disempowerment, and the gendered ways in
which this disempowerment was experienced (Ogbar 2004)—it is
tempting to conclude that, instead of establishing a coherent program, the BPP consisted of nothing more than a band of hoodlums
spouting hatred and promoting violence. Mass media images showing the aftermath of police shoot-outs, bullet-ridden neighborhood
blocks, and communities in disarray did little to dispel the moral
panic aroused by this call to arms. In a now de-classified document,
J. Edgar Hoover infamously declared the Black Panther Party
‘‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’’
(qtd. in Churchill 2001). Given that this public perception was not
only fostered by external agitators but also, as I will elaborate
shortly, by the BPP itself, it seems as though the material expression
of violence was the inevitable effect of a violent platform. The visual
record as a whole, however, tells a different story.
In contrast to the pictures of blighted communities and blasted
property regularly printed in the mass media, many of the photos
featured in the BPP’s intermittently published newsletter,
The Black Panther, provide a startling counter-narrative. Instead
of focusing solely on violent dispersal and disintegration, the
BPP’s self-imaging stressed coherence on a number of levels.
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Consider, for example, the well-documented ways in which violence was incited by police. In accordance with J. Edgar Hoover’s
domestic counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO)—designed
to disrupt and neutralize the activities of groups considered
seditious—FBI and police officers infiltrated radical groups, planted
seeds of dissension, and stoked already established rivalries.
African American organizations in general were the primary targets
of this campaign, but by the late 1960s the Black Panther Party was
its principal object. Although the notorious police shoot-outs left
many injured and dead, violence was justified as self-defense in
the Panthers’ official platform. Indeed, in many cases the influence
of police was all too discernible, from the shooting deaths of Bobby
Hutton and Fred Hampton; the framing of Geronimo Pratt for
murder; the provocation of the rivalry between the BPP and
Ron Karenga’s United Slaves (US), which led to deadly shootings
in Los Angeles; to the manipulation of ideological differences
between leaders that led to the expulsion and public denunciation
of key members of the BPP, including Eldridge Cleaver.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
Perhaps most notably, the very symbols feared by the state in general and considered especially threatening to public order were
those around which the movement united. The black leather jackets,
sunglasses, defiant expressions, and raised fists were more than
mere props (Figure 1). Their deliberate resemblance to the guerrilla
garb associated with oppositional movements in Africa, South
America, and Asia expressed solidarity between black radical politics in the United States and anti-colonial resistance in the Third
World (Clemons and Jones 2001). Moreover, the evocative angle
from which protests were shot served an important purpose.
Photos were often taken from a lower height and carefully
aimed upward, highlighting the humanity of protest participants.
A significant effect of this photo technique was to celebrate the
proud body politics of protest participants. Though this form of
politics is often associated with cultural nationalism, its leaders
insisted that the BPP marked a break from other prominent
African American nationalist movements at the time and an
increased affinity with extra-national organizations.
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Figure 1: Black Panther demonstration in front of the Alameda County
Court House, Oakland California during Huey Newton’s trial, 30 July1968;
ß Pirkle Jones,1968
Other ostensibly contradictory aspects of the BPP were connected
through this strategy. Most notably, the platform of armed selfdefense—one of the more controversial aspect of the BPP’s
famous ten-point platform (see Appendix) became symbolically
continuous, even inseparable from, more widely supported community programs, especially the Free Breakfast for Children
initiative (Figure 2). Rather than compromising and canceling
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Figure 2: Free Breakfast for Children program; courtesy of Stephen
Shames; ß Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
each other out, the power promised in the raised fists encompassed
both militant self-defense and community service.
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The visual coherence of these images functioned to unify not only
the platform of the Black Panther Party but its members as well.
Shots frequently featured the geometric alignment of protestors
(Figure 3). And, as the collaborative work of Ruth Marion-Baruch
Jones and Pirkle Jones illustrates, the macho features of the movement did not necessarily undermine the unity of its participants.
Stressing the coherence of the BPP, the photos affirm unity within
diversity. Assembled by the Joneses to provide a more balanced
view of the BPP’s membership and activities, The Vanguard exhibition first opened, despite initial obstacles, in San Francisco in the
late 1960s. The images compiled for display give rousing testimony
to the mass support received by the BPP, with their focus on symmetric alignment of uniform bodies, the capturing of coordinated
movement, and the suggestion of kinetic force in the angles from
which these bodies are photographed. Such photos tend to depict
black power as a grassroots movement, which is why the camera
often points upward from the ground—straining not towards the
sky, or nature in the abstract, but towards concrete agents who
sought to reach the sky. In marked contrast to Martin Luther
King’s dream, a privileged trope of civil rights activism, the subjects
of the black power era, clenching their fists and clutching their
Figure 3: Black Panthers from Sacramento, Free Huey Rally, Bobby
Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, 25 August 1968; ß Pirkle Jones,1968
guns, promise an awakening from that dream. Even when the
camera is mounted above the people, the focus remains
on the people, who are neither distracted nor abstracted from the
movement in which they participate.
This emphasis on unity tended to subsume women’s liberation to
the greater imperative of black liberation. The photos, accordingly,
mask gender difference by illustrating the participation of women,
some of whom adopted the tropes of militancy and bear arms.
Thus, it is not only (though, it must be said, it remained mostly)
men in combative poses, clutching guns or clenching fists. In a
remarkable poster, for example, Kathleen Cleaver grasps a rifle
and runs for office under the slogan ‘‘Bullets or Ballots.’’5
Although a gender hierarchy sexualized the contributions of
women (Wallace 1970), others recall in more positive terms
the opportunities the BPP provided for women (Brown 1994;
Matthews 1998; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998). For the latter, women were
able to lay claim to power through the symbols of black power
(Figure 4).
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Figure 4
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This insistence on the unity of the masses does not contradict the
resounding message of another group of photos, in which homage
is paid to the individuality of those who led the masses. Among the
key figures are Huey Newton and Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver,
who are often depicted in flattering close-ups. Like the images of
mass movement, the individual portraits use what could be called a
humanizing angle, with the camera low to the ground, and emphasizing the prominence of both the leaders and those community
members whom they serve. The ostensible conflict between
mass movement and the individuals comprising it was visually
reconciled through the relational harmony proposed by the photos.
While it may come as no surprise that an appeal to the masses
would be made by photographers sympathetic to the Black
Panther Party, this humanizing strategy should not be taken for
granted. To appreciate how unexpected such an appeal was—not
just as something attractive to the masses but as a technique to
render the masses, in effect, visually appealing—we need only
remember that the masses tend to have little place in revolutionary
theory. Marx famously found little use for the masses in general,
and notoriously dismissed the lumpenproletariat (Marx 1969; 1976).
Accordingly, the emphasis on the masses was unusual for a politics
of liberation as well as, arguably, for the visual representation of
that politics. Indeed, one of the few who felt otherwise about the
lumpenproletariat, Frantz Fanon, was influential to the BPP’s analysis of revolution. Conceiving of the struggle for black liberation in
the US as analogous to post-colonial struggles elsewhere, Cleaver
and other leaders turned to the blighted ghettos for recruitment.
Such a strategy was faithful to Fanon’s prophecy that
the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, the petty criminals,
urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle
for liberation like stout working men . . . . These workless lessthan-men are rehabilitated in their own eyes and in the eyes of
history. The prostitutes too, and the maids . . . all the hopeless
dregs of humanity, all who turn in circles between suicide and
madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward,
and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened
nation. (130)
Appropriately, the photography of the Panthers served to dignify
the masses, but with mixed results. For critic Chris Booker, so-called
‘‘lumpenization’’ was the undoing of the Panthers, who became for
him nothing more than a band of thugs and hoodlums.
Criminalization can be viewed from another perspective however.
Conceived as a discourse that creates the very group it ostensibly
only describes, the term ‘‘criminalization’’ functions as a way of
de-politicizing black radical struggle. As Angela Davis insists,
former Panthers who remain in prison are in fact political prisoners,
especially Mumia Abu-Jamal, although the state treats them as
criminals.
Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the phenomenal public
relations campaign known as the ‘‘Free Huey’’ rallies. These gatherings were held in the late 1960s in support of the Black Panther
Party’s co-founder, who was then in prison awaiting trial for the
murder of police officer John Frey.7 Although Newton’s incarceration was supposed to have sounded the death knell of the still
young movement, instead it helped to demonstrate the relevance
and urgency of the BPP’s platform in such an effective way that
new members were regularly recruited through the ‘‘Free Huey’’
rallies. At a moment when the BPP was particularly vulnerable,
its members shrewdly revealed how the crisis symptomatized the
very problems for which it offered solutions: aggressive police
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Not only do the photos reveal a direct engagement with imaging as
intrinsically political in that they are both reflection and management of Panther politics, they also demonstrate an awareness of
how political struggle itself is handled through imaging practices.
In this way, many of the images are striking in their self-reflexivity:
they enact and, in complex ways, interrogate their struggles for
political representation in terms of a representational struggle. This
self-reflexivity is so prominent that it may be tempting to conclude
the BPP was narcissistic, especially if we focus on Huey Newton’s
evident fondness for self-portraiture. The stakes are far greater than
mere mugging for the camera, however, as a extraordinary image
of Newton suggests.6 Taken by Annie Leibovitz, the photo is an
undated portrait of the leader with camera, and is striking in how
it distorts its subject’s form altogether. This unusual gesture
towards abstraction underscores the importance of the process of
development, revealing the crucial roles that picture-taking and
image-making played in the Panther photos. Just as importantly,
it illustrates the profound manner in which imaging practices themselves proved foundational to the BPP’s platform. As even the
police and FBI were aware, much of black power and the influence
of the BPP lay in the power of photography.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
enforcement—even harassment—in black communities, as well as
unfair treatment in the court system. It comes as no surprise, then,
that the most prominent symbol of the ‘‘Free Huey’’ campaign was
visual: a now famous poster of a regal Newton settled on a wicker
chair, defiantly clutching a spear in one hand and a rifle in another.
A much coveted artifact, the poster’s importance is revealed in its
remarkable doubling: the depiction of the rallies focuses on a curious but effective representation of the image (Figure 5). So central is
imaging for the rally that the focus of the photograph is the photographic poster. While demonstrators collected and carried that
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Figure 5: Protestors with Huey Newton posters; ß Dr. Huey P. Newton
Foundation Collection, Stanford University
image, subsequent police action revealed how well authorities
understood the key role that imaging played for the Panthers.
Critical to the attack on the Panthers, then, was an attack on their
image. Indeed, this message is precisely what the self-reflexive
image makes transparent. Furthermore, the bullets are not solely
aimed at the image; they also target the bodies holding
the images close to heart. In the close-up of the after image, the
poster is so destroyed that parts of Newton’s body are no longer
visible. The shooting of the shooting casts a provocative light over
the rhetorical terrain on which this ideological battle was fought—a
battle that only too easily spilled beyond rhetoric and into the
no-less-spectacular realm of physicality.
Even in an unambiguously playful context, such as the community
picnics attended by BPP children, violence enters the picture.
Stephen Shames’s extraordinary photo ‘‘Pig Piñata,’’ for example,
stages a blindfolded child beating a piñata in the shape of a pig/
policeman. A witty literalization of what still remains powerfully
dismissive slang for the sloppy and indifferent extravagance of the
law, Shames’s photograph highlights, in compelling ways, the
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In the following photos, the Joneses played wittily with the conventional temporal pairings of ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ shots in order to
underscore the manifold valences of this particular form of violence
(Figure 6). The two photos illustrate the aftermath of a police
shooting, and, in doing so, highlight the importance of photography—imagistic shooting—in shaping public opinion. Framing the
event, in effect, as the shooting of a shooting, the Joneses’ photographs insist on the ways in which the violence conventionally
ascribed to the Panthers was, in turn, framed for rather than
caused by them. More importantly, they demonstrate that this
violence had profoundly visual elements. While the rhetoric of
violence is plainly legible in this pair of images, it is not the kind
frequently associated with the Panthers. If the image depicts
violence, it is directed against, not initiated by them. Indeed, it is
a violence that begins with the image of the Panthers. Such visual
violence, these photos suggest, is only the first step in the dismantling of the BPP, even as the strategy is subverted by the Vanguard
exhibition’s effort to render transparent the process by which
such dismantling takes place. As we can see, violence is itself
framed not only as a physical, but also as a rhetorical—a markedly
visual—strategy for both sides.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
(a)
(b)
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Figure 6: Before and after: the aftermath of a police shooting
dilemma that faced the Panthers’ rhetorical play. For, although this
is a special kind of rhetoric—child’s play— its all-too-adult double
is right alongside the juvenile terms established by the photo. A
child’s fable, which casts picnicker against pig piñata, hovers dangerously close to its adult rendition, which cast black militants as
panthers against pigs, who were not piñata effigies but flesh and
blood policemen in the all-too-real enactment. The child’s fable
captured in the photo has, in other words, its nightmarish negative
in the ostensibly more adult versions from which the fable drew its
language and imagery. In this way too, the adult fable caused the
very scene that it had staged (a rhetorically strategic form of violence) and that which had been set up for it (politically meaningless
violence which ultimately consumed and discredited the BPP) to
collapse, with devastating effects. Shames’s photo, then, casts in
ironic relief the fabulist terms in which BPP struggles were coded,
cleverly highlighting the terrible, perhaps inevitable, slippage
between child’s play and adult action.
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If the BPP’s strategies can be thought of as an analysis of and
response to an ongoing urban crisis—one which found greater
impetus in its affiliations with an international context of social
struggle—the particular solutions it offered were complex and
contradictory. Although they advocated armed self defense—at
least in the early stages—members shunned the expression of violence, holding fast to their right to bear arms and to the letter of
the law, which had protected that right. Newton famously carried
a law book and insisted he preferred not to shoot at police
but rather, in a remarkable reversal, to read to them his rights.
The irony which found Panthers engaging in a deadly battle
against the law rather than insisting on its fair application
cannot simply be explained in terms of judicial shifts such as
the passing of the so-called Panther Bill, which banned the
public bearing of arms and effectively ended the controversial
Panther Police Patrols. The images of violence, read literally by
a fearful public unaccustomed to African Americans who fought
back—years of civil rights struggle had made a wholly different
rhetorical use of nonviolence by contrast—led to a critical failure,
or rather a failure of criticism. An overzealous FBI and an
exhausted public could neither perceive nor tolerate this show
of arms for anything other than it became: a meaningless loss of
lives. Indeed, as T.V. Reed cogently observes in his analysis of the
relationship between culture and oppositional movements, the
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
costly mistake made by the BPP was failing precisely to maintain
‘‘the distinction between theatrical violence and violent theatrics’’
(62)—a failure, we may add, subsequently repeated by law enforcers and observers alike.
180
Although ‘‘radical chic,’’ as satirized by Tom Wolfe, fetishized
the violence to which white liberals were initially attracted and
from which they ultimately recoiled, there was substance to
the rhetoric—however misunderstood it proved to be as a way of
lending credibility to these liberals. As Nikhil Singh astutely
observes:
Rather than seeing the Panthers as the vanguard of a visible
insurgency in the country, we should understand them as being
the practitioners of an insurgent form of visibility, a
literal-minded and deadly serious guerilla theatre in which
militant sloganeering, bodily display, and spectacular actions
simultaneously signified their possession and real lack of power.
The Panthers [sic] emphasis on self-presentation, in this sense,
provided a visual vocabulary that was a key component of their
politics. (83)
The revolutionary violence, in complicated ways one of the integral
platforms of the BPP, was, as these photos demonstrate, an aesthetic
of protest. Violence was a prominent signifier of the BPP not only
as a founding feature of their rhetoric, but also as a tragic enactment
of it.
African American Photography and Protest Traditions
This is hardly the first article to ponder photography’s relation to
protest. In the catalogue accompanying the pioneering 1989 exhibition ‘‘Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social
Protest,’’ curator Deborah Willis suggested that image-making, historically the privilege of white subjects, itself constituted for African
Americans a powerful statement and, thus, constituted an act of
defiance. Anticipating the work of Christopher Pinney and others
in the recent photo-colonial anthology Photography’s Other Histories,
Willis contended that, for African Americans, photography was
tantamount to protest. As a consequence, the exhibition surveys a
range of genres, located in both street and studio, that expands
how we conceive of photography’s relationship to racialization
and resistance, from the inception of photography to the Civil
Rights movement. Stopping short of the Black Power period, this
collection excludes images of overt violence, whether of victimization or aggression.
While I hesitate to speculate on the exhibition’s motives for such
exclusion, I agree with what I take to be its implication: defining
representational violence is trickier than it would first appear. In the
burgeoning field of visual studies, representational violence has
often been understood in terms of exclusion and erasure, even
when, as we see in this exhibition, exclusion and erasure appear
to have been the means of redressing the violence to which activists
are averse. Photography studies too treats violence, as Laura Wexler
has cogently put it, in a ‘‘tender’’ way: not by attending to overt acts
of aggression or even to the depiction of that aggression, but to the
subtle process of sentimentalism, for example, as the domestic alibi
for American empire-building.
A productive way of framing the issue might be: How can African
American protest photography account for and respond to this kind
of representational violence? What is the relationship between protest and violence? Although a full answer likely requires a breadth
and depth of analysis that, unfortunately, exceeds the scope of
this discussion, let me close by briefly considering how the more
established, and perhaps familiar, genre of protest literature may
offer some insights into these issues for the still emerging form of
protest photography. In his widely cited essay ‘‘Everybody’s Protest
Novel,’’ James Baldwin charges Richard Wright’s approach to protest with repeating the very sins that Wright was keen to denounce
(1998). Wright condemned the sentimental tradition made famous
by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which privileged
affective identification as the means to arousing political sympathy
for racial victimization. Although Wright offered the social realist
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What, then, about the image? Can we think about it as not being a
means of imposing or as a means of contesting, representational
violence? The critical context which, on the one hand, refuses
to look at violence and, on the other hand, defines violence
(or registers protest) by strategically excluding it, has yet to offer
a convincing framework for understanding the image as itself the
target of violence. Following Saidya Hartman’s call to attend to the
violence of the everyday, as voiced in her influential book Scenes of
Subjection, I want to suggest that, rather than being fascinated by the
spectacles of domination, we attend to the ways that the image as
target of violence merges the everyday with the spectacular.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
novel that stressed violence as the preeminent means of disidentification as an alternative, he remained bound, Baldwin insists,
within the very conditions he diagnosed. As Baldwin eloquently
puts it:
182
Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then
within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not
effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though
this very striving were the only notion needed to spring the trap
upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against the
cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is
precisely through our dependence on this reality that we
are most endlessly betrayed. (16)
In the case of protest literature, the violent content—whether
emphasized for the sake of identification (and possible transcendence), as in the case of Stowe’s pamphleteering fiction, or
disidentification, in Wright’s naturalist treatise—sacrificed content
for form, aesthetics for politics. In doing so, it undermined
the politics which this writing so blatantly wore on its sleeve. The
violence did not simply depict characters as victims; rather, it
victimized them.
The debate about African American protest literature helps shed
light on why Panther imaging, conceived as protest photography,
tends to be dismissed. Not only were a handful of white liberals
imaging the movement, many others, as Tom Wolfe noted, hypocritically consumed it. The image of the Black Panther Party was too
often recovered as ‘‘everybody’s protest photo,’’ and, through that
process, drained of content. It was the theme of violence made
explicit in the unifying props of the photos (the raised fists, the
guns, and black leather) with which so many wished to identify,
to which even more laid claim, and few of whom, it turns out, fully
understood.
And, yet, protest photography does not fit so easily into the restrictive parameters of protest literature that Baldwin delineated. After
all, violence was not only a force promised through the imaging.
It was, importantly, also a force exerted upon it. Moreover, in this
regard, violence might be said to link form and content together.
Although violence was an important feature of Baldwin’s assessment of the failures of protest literature, it functions with more
complexity when it comes to protest photography. Understanding
race in the visual field requires approaches to the problem of
representational violence beyond just exclusion and distortion.
Moreover, it requires that we consider other forms of opposition
besides subversion.
Gordon Parks, a pioneering African American photographer, provides an intriguing perspective on the vexed relationship between
the visual and violence. Parks, whose career highlights included
stints with the Farm Security Administration (under the direction
of the famed Roy Stryker) and Life magazine, also photographed
black radicals, including Malcolm X, and members of the BPP who
hoped to continue the slain leader’s legacy. For Parks, the message
of empowerment articulated by the BPP was simultaneously compelling and limiting. Although his own experiences with material
deprivation and discrimination made him sympathetic with
the BPP’s platform, he could not countenance even the rhetoric of
violence. For him, protest could constitute a number of approaches,
but in a startling move he explicitly opposed one from another:
photography was, he argued, ultimately more effective
than violence. In an interview with Martin Bush, Parks recalls a
conversation with a Panther concerning the appropriate responses
to state repression:
Taking pains to establish connections in their mutual struggle,
Parks nonetheless insists on a fundamental difference. Despite
adopting the familiar trope of arms to describe the practice of
photography, he explicitly separates himself from the violence associated with this trope, as photography to him is a means of protest
which is in marked contrast to protest that adopts violence as its
privileged signifier and method. It is an alternative to violence.
The representation of violence in photography as itself the site of
Revue canadienne d’e¤tudes ame¤ricaines 38 (2008)
Well, you know, I’m in the fight the same as you are. I ride
with you every night. You have chosen a gun; I have chosen a
camera. I know there is a policeman following us. Every night
we are trailed. They are waiting to shoot us up. Do you think
their bullets are going to miss me and go to you because I’m
Gordon Parks? I’m taking risks to show that you might have a
voice. Because so far, nobody in the big press is listening to
what you have to say. But here and now Life magazine is
riding with you. I’m risking my life just being with you. So,
my weapon’s here with me; your weapon is in your pocket.
You’ve got a .45 in your pocket. But I think my weapon is
stronger.’’ (42)
183
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
violent protest—a key component of the Black Panthers’ struggle
for representation—is not part of Parks’s arguably simplistic
analysis, however.
184
This keenness to rescue protest photography from violence
resembles the desire of the curators of the ‘‘100 Years of Protest’’
exhibition to expand the concept of photography to most imaging
practices: both gestures want to ascribe a wholly positive
political dimension to the medium and, it would appear, cannot
reconcile these aims with the indisputably negative components
of black power visuality. Neither, however, could the Black
Panther Party itself: the rhetoric of violence, as we know, all too
often exploded into actual violence.
As we have seen, visual and physical violence cannot easily be
disentangled. The links between them can be discerned, for example, when images are attacked (as in the shooting of the shooting).
Moreover, directed attacks affirm, as all iconoclastic gestures tend to
do, the very influence that these images hold. Similarly, the violence
against the image also acknowledges an inextricable part of its rhetoric: that is, violence itself. Not only was violence directed against
images, but the images themselves, in many cases, featured that
violence as part of a frequently misunderstood strategy of selfempowerment (as in Shames’s photo). This conflation of rhetoric
and action, visualizing the promise of violence and the acting out of
its threat, helps in part to explain the ambiguous, often paradoxical
legacy of the Panthers. Whereas defenders and detractors alike
polarize on the issue of whether the BPP was in fact violent or
only symbolically so, whether they acted or only reacted violently,
our close examination of imaging strategies illustrates the inseparability of rhetoric and (re)action. Although bloody street battles
seem to be a lasting legacy of the BPP, the visual field nonetheless
proved to be a crucial site in which the struggle for black power
was fought. As this survey of photos has demonstrated, the selfreflexive thematization of violence attempts to register a powerful
protest against it. Shooting the movement in the imaging of
the Black Panther Party meant that conceiving of the possibility of
protest in photography, of something like a tradition of protest photography, needs to take account of violence. Finally, this means we
need to understand better how the self-imaging of black protest,
which, as we have seen was both playful and poignant, became an
important target of racialized violence.
Notes
1 Protestors have been taken to task for presuming the guilt of the
accused, and insisting that the judicial process does not serve the
ends of justice. Although the case has, as of this writing, been
dismissed, the visual display and historical references invoked by
protestors nonetheless attests to the continuing symbolic legacy
of Black Panther protest.
2 Duke has the dubious distinction of ranking fifth for town-gown
relations according to a recent Princeton Review report. Moreover,
although Durham is a mostly black neighborhood, Duke’s student
body is overwhelmingly white (only eleven percent are black), and
its annual tuition fees of $45,000 exceeds the median income of
households within the town.
3 The Huey Newton Foundation issued an official statement that
rejected connections between the BPP and its self-proclaimed
inheritors. Among the objections articulated by trustees are the
New Black Panther’s widely publicized anti-Semitism and
presumption in laying claim to the BPP legacy.
4 In this respect the New Black Panther Party also turned to their
role model. They offered protection for the victim, who
had apparently received threats. This offer was then rejected
by her family.
6 Unfortunately, this image cannot be reproduced here, due to
prohibitive permissions fees. This image can be found, however, in
the Newton Foundation collection at Stanford University Library.
7 Convicted of manslaughter, Newton spent three years in prison.
The decision was subsequently overturned by a higher court, and
even the jury in the original trial was not wholly certain who shot
whom.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel.’’Collected Essays. New York:
Library of America, 1998. 11–8.
Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Anchor,
1994.
Bush, Martin H. The Photographs of Gordon Parks. Wichita, KS: Wichita State
U., 1983.
Revue canadienne d’e¤tudes ame¤ricaines 38 (2008)
5 I am, unfortunately, unable to obtain a clear image for
reproduction, but this extraordinary poster for Kathleen Cleaver’s
campaign for office through the San Francisco Peace and
Freedom Party can be found in select 1968 issues of the Black
Panther newsletter.
185
Churchill, Ward. Agents of Repression: the FBI’s Secret War against the Black
Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston, MA: South End,
1988.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
Cleaver, Eldridge. Post-Prison Writings and Speeches. Ed. Robert Sheer.
New York: Random, 1969.
186
Cleaver, Kathleen and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination, and
the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy.
New York, and London: Routledge, 2001.
Davis, Angela. ‘‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia.’’ Picturing
Us: African American Identity in Photography. Ed. Deborah Willis. New York:
New Press, 1994. 171–80.
Doss, Erika. ‘‘Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation: Emory
Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther.’’ Cleaver and
Katsiaficas, 123–7.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1965.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Jones, Charles, ed. The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Baltimore: Black
Classic, 1998.
LeBlanc-Ernest, Angela. ‘‘The Most Qualified Person to Handle the Job:
Black Panther Party Women.’’ Jones 305–36.
Matthews, Tracye. ‘‘‘No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Role in the
Revolution Is’: Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1966–71.’’
Jones 267–301.
Ogbar, Jeffrey. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.
Baltimoreand London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.
Reed, T.V. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights
Movement tothe Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota
P, 2005.
Singh, Nikhil. ‘‘The Black Panthers and the ‘‘Undeclared Country of the
Left.’’ Jones 57–108.
Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman. New York: Dial,
1970.
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2000.
Willis, Deborah. Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Protest.
Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art 1989.
Wolfe, Tom. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers. New York:
Farrar, 1970.
Appendix
October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program
What We Want What We Believe
1
We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black
Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to
determine our destiny.
2
We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated
to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe
that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the
community can organize and employ all of its people and give a
high standard of living.
3
We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
4
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing
to our black community, then the housing and the land should be
made into cooperatives so that our community, with government
aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent
American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our
role in the present-day society.
187
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We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we
are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules.
Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will
accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our
many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel
for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six
million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of
over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a
modest demand that we make.
Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (2008)
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a
knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and
his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to
relate to anything else.
188
6
We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the
military service to defend a racist government that does not protect
us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who,
like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and
violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever
means necessary.
7
We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by
organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and
brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that
all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8
We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city
prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many
jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial
trial.
9
We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of
their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the
Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States
Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The
Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a
right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar
economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical
and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a
jury from the black community from which the black defendant
came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that
have no understanding of the ‘‘average reasoning man’’ of the black
community.
10 We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as
our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held
throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be
allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people
as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s
God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.
189
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We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;
that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more
disposed to supper, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But,
when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same
object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their
right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new
guards for their future security.