A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  You dig into yourself and into the community to wage psychological warfare, you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings and possible mob violence; you stymie, by your mere physical presence, the anxious fear of the Negro community . . . you organize, pound by pound, small bands of people . . . you create a small striking force . . . The deeper the fear, the deeper the problems in the community, the longer you have to stay to convince them.18

  Fear was an understatement, for violence upheld white supremacy. On June 12, 1963, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated by a gunshot blast to his back. The year before, federal protection was required to guard James Meredith when he became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. White students rioted. Two people were killed, 160 people were injured, and 28 gunshot wounds were reported. The majority of those wounded were federal marshals.

  Danny Lyon, On the Road to Yazoo City, Mississippi, 1963 (from Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)

  This was the climate that SNCC operated in when they chose Mississippi to be their primary location to launch a voter registration drive. SNCC offices were firebombed and SNCC workers were routinely jailed, beaten, and shot at. Some were killed. SNCC fieldworker Frank Smith stated, “There is no protection against Mississippi . . . Only the Federal government can protect us and it won’t.”19

  SNCC poster, Is He Protecting You?, ca. 1963, photograph by Danny Lyon (copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos; image reproduction: Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and Radicalism Photograph Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University)

  One would expect that the vast majority of photographs that SNCC took in Mississippi would have documented the extreme levels of violence and police brutality. Instead, the opposite was the case. The majority of photographs that Lyon and other SNCC photographers took were images of organizing drives and movement-building: mass meetings, literacy training workshops, canvassing, voter-registration drives, and time spent simply hanging out together.

  Lyon’s photographs in 1963 include, among others, an image of James Forman talking on the phone inside the Greenwood office; Bob Moses, Charles Sherrod, and Randy Battle conversing with an elderly woman on her porch during a voter-registration drive in rural Georgia; and a young Bob Dylan playing guitar behind the Greenwood office while a small crowd gathers, some listening, some talking among themselves.

  What is so remarkable about these images is how ordinary the scenes are. One would never get the sense that these individuals were operating within one of the most dangerous counties in the United States. They are almost contemplative, lacking any sense of fear or violence—the antithesis of the types of photographs that mainstream media outlets were running in their coverage of the civil-rights movement. Instead, Lyon’s images project the “nit-and-grit” of daily organizing work, by the people who built the civil-rights movement.

  The reality of life behind the work was quite different, of course, in a place where simply possessing a camera could lead to arrest or worse. In 1962, Lyon was arrested in Cleveland, Mississippi, for taking photographs in the street near Amzie Moore’s house. The police officer told Lyon that he had to pay $1,000 bond to be “engaged in the business of photography.”20 His final warning to Lyon after letting him go: “If I see you anywhere I’m going to kill you.”21

  Danny Lyon, Bob Dylan Behind the SNCC Office, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963 (from Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)

  Mississippi Summer Project

  Lyon did not heed the police officer’s advice. He returned regularly to Mississippi throughout 1963 and 1964 and photographed SNCC activities throughout the state. In 1964, he documented SNCC’s most ambitious and controversial activity to date—the Mississippi Summer Project.

  In late 1963, SNCC laid the groundwork for a summer campaign that was designed with three goals: a statewide voter-registration drive, the establishment of freedom schools throughout the state, and the formation of a new political party—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.22

  The most controversial aspect of the plan was the recruitment of 1,000 white, middle-class college students, primarily from northern states, who would fill the volunteer ranks. Many in SNCC felt that the addition of so many white volunteers would disrupt SNCC’s race and class balance. SNCC was a black-led organization, and many of its positions in Mississippi were filled by those who were native to the state and had grown up as sharecroppers. Bob Moses, the director of the Summer Project, held the final word in the matter; he would not be part of an organization that was not integrated.

  Danny Lyon, James Forman Leads Singing in the SNCC Office on Raymond Street in Atlanta, 1963 (from Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)

  There were also tactical reasons for bringing in a thousand white volunteers. The mass media would scarcely cover events taking place in rural Mississippi, so SNCC reasoned that the “heated atmosphere caused by the presence of many volunteers, especially whites, would force the federal government to intervene—possibly with the use of troops.”23 Confrontation would result in media attention. Forman asserted:

  White people should know the meaning of the work we were doing—they should feel some of the suffering and terror and deprivation that black people have endured. We could not bring all of white America to Mississippi. But by bringing in some of its children as volunteer workers, a new consciousness would feed back into the homes of thousands of white Americans as they worried about their sons and daughters confronting “the jungle of Mississippi,” the bigoted sheriffs, the Klan, the vicious White Citizens’ Councils.24

  In early 1964, SNCC began visiting northern college campuses to recruit students. Each volunteer had his or her portrait taken and was asked to fill out a list with “names of the applicants’ Congressional representatives, the names of their college and hometown newspapers . . . organizations they belonged to . . . and ten people who would be interested in receiving information about their activities.”25

  Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, Missing, Call FBI poster (call number: Ephemera/Civil Rights/1964/Box 5, 1961–1969, MDAH Collection)

  The worst possible news to report came early on. On June 21, days before many of the volunteers had arrived in Mississippi, three civil-rights workers disappeared—two affluent white college students from New York (Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman) and one black Mississippian (James Chaney). The three had been arrested by the police in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and released late at night into the waiting hands of the Klan, who worked in collusion with the local police sheriffs.

  The FBI found their bodies six weeks later. Each had been shot at point-blank range. The terrible outcome and the fear that it generated might have scared away many of the summer volunteers, but the opposite occurred. It strengthened their resolve. SNCC itself grew stronger, and its work expanded.

  SNCC’s emphasis on photography also grew in 1963 and 1964. Lyon was no longer the principal SNCC photographer. SNCC Photo was established and enlisted more than a dozen photographers to also document the movement. The multiracial group included black photographers Clifford Vaughs, Joffre Clark, Fred deVan, Rufus Hinton, Bon Fletcher, Julius Lester, Norris McNamara, and Francis Mitchell; the Latina photographer Mary Varela; the Japanese Canadian photographer Tamio “Tom” Wakayama; and the white photographer Dee Gorton.26 Additionally, Matt Herron, a white photojournalist from New York, organized the Southern Documentary Project, modeled after the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photography work in the 1930s.27 The driving concept behind the project was to document organizing activities other than demonstrations—in other words, everyday life. For a project adviser, Herron consulted with Dorothea Lange.

  Other photography “heavyweights” who lent assistance to SNCC included Richard Avedon, who helped train a number of SNCC photographers in his studio. He also convinced Marty Forsc
her, the owner of a famous camera shop in NYC, to donate film and more than seventy-five cameras to SNCC over a three-year period.28

  As photographers spread out across Mississippi and the southeast, darkrooms were built in Tougaloo, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama. Photographers became active participants in the movement. According to Leigh Raiford, “Almost all served in the field on voter registration, literacy training or direct action programs, visually documenting the people they worked with and the events, demonstrations, and projects they helped organize.”29

  Some of the images produced that summer included one by Matt Herron that documents a freedom school in Mileston—one of forty-one schools that were established that summer in Mississippi and were attended by more than 2,000 students.30 Other images depict door-to-door canvassing. During the course of the summer 1,600 African Americans were successfully registered to vote out of the approximately 17,000 who attempted to do so.31 But the numbers are misleading. Long-term gains ultimately eclipsed short-term loses. A flood of media attention focused upon Mississippi when Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney went missing. During the Summer Project, the SNCC Jackson office received two to three visits or calls per day from the AP, UPI, NBC, ABC, and CBS, along with extensive reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others.32 As a result of the media rush and the organizing campaign, the stranglehold that whites had over state and local politics began to crumble in the years that followed as more and more African Americans registered to vote and black candidates were elected into public office.

  Following the Summer Project, SNCC would undergo a sea change. A weeklong SNCC staff meeting in Waveland, Mississippi, in November ended with eighty-five new members—mostly white, northern college students who had been with the organization for less than six months—being added to the staff. This decision ruptured the racial and class composition of the group and led to future tensions that would tear the organization apart.33 Lyon left after the Summer Project. The SNCC that would emerge would become almost unrecognizable to him, and many others. In December 1966, Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as SNCC’s chairman. Nonviolence became a thing of the past. SNCC now stood for black power and the right to self-defense.34 By 1969, SNCC fell apart, for all intents and purposes, but their legacy and many accomplishments remain intact. From an art perspective, SNCC stands as one of the rare examples of a social justice organization that placed a premium on artists as key contributors within a movement. SNCC understood how images worked, and how they should be disseminated. While most organizations let outsiders from the mainstream press cover their struggles, SNCC knew better. It created staff positions for photographers—a decision that aided the movement and enriched the lives of the artists who joined their ranks. In a letter to his parents in February 1964, Danny Lyon wrote, “The Danville pamphlet, a poster that makes money for SNCC, even selling pictures and passing the check on to SNCC; these things have, for a brief moment given me a satisfaction previously unknown to me.”35

  19

  Party Artist: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

  EMORY DOUGLAS, MINISTER OF CULTURE and revolutionary artist for the Black Panther Party (BPP), was not one to make subtle images. Rather, his art was designed to rip the heart out of those oppressing the black community. Douglas’s July 4, 1970, poster image for the Black Panther Community News Service illustrates this point. In the foreground is a defiant African American woman staring angrily ahead, holding three weapons, including a butcher knife. On her shirt is a button that reads DEATH TO THE FASCIST PIGS. Behind her is a man without a weapon, foregrounding the woman as the primary defender of the household, and by extension the community. The text above the figures reads ALL THE WEAPONS WE USED TO USE AGAINST EACH OTHER WE NOW USE AGAINST THE OPPRESSOR. The text below paraphrases Malcolm X: BY ALL MEANS AVAILABLE.

  Behind Douglas’s veneer of violence is the ideology of the BPP’s Ten-Point Program and Platform—the manifesto that launched the BPP and a revolutionary movement out of Oakland, California. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the BPP, had coauthored the program and on October 15, 1966, printed more than a thousand copies and distributed them throughout inner-city Oakland.1 Each of the ten points, framed by the phrases “What We Want” and “What We Believe,” began with a concrete demand followed by how each demand would be realized. Point seven read:

  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.2

  Starting in 1966, BPP members began shadowing Oakland Police Department squad cars as they patrolled the inner city. When a police officer would pull over a black motorist or stop to question a pedestrian, the Black Panthers would also pull over. Panther members would then step out of their car armed with law books, cameras, tape recorders, and loaded shotguns to make sure that the police were not violating the rights of a community member. In each case, their guns would be in plain view and pointed upward—all of which was legal under California law. If the person being questioned was arrested, the Panthers would bail him or her out of jail.

  Emory Douglas, poster from The Black Panther, July 4, 1970 (copyright 2013 Emory Douglas/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York; image courtesy of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

  This community service was born out of necessity. The civil rights movement brought about progressive legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, among others), but it did not end poverty, unemployment, substandard housing, and social programs. Neither did it end the climate of despair and anger in poor black communities across the United States. This created a tinderbox waiting to explode—riots or, better stated, rebellions—erupted in numerous cities, including Watts (1965), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967), among others. The spark that ignited the fuse was often police harassment, police brutality, or the death of a resident at the hands of the police. In Oakland, the police force was notoriously racist; it contained nineteen African American officers out of a total of six hundred.3 Local white retailers all but refused to hire African Americans, and the city’s paper of record, the Oakland Tribune, avoided addressing issues and concerns relevant to the inner-city population.

  Newton and Seale’s response was to form the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense—a revolutionary party based on Marxist-Leninist principles. It called for community control of all institutions—including the police—a complete redistribution of wealth, and solidarity with all oppressed peoples and nations fighting U.S.-led capitalism and imperialism. Central to the formation of the party was the gun. Panther members holding a loaded shotgun, dressed in a black leather jacket, black pants, black beret, and a blue shirt sent a powerful visual message. To those outside the inner city it pronounced: We will protect ourselves and stand up to racism and police brutality with force—a message intended to make police officers think twice before brutalizing the black community. To those inside the community, the gun and the uniform served as a recruitment tool and said: Join us. One of the earliest BPP recruits was a twenty-two-year-old artist from San Francisco, Emory Douglas.

  Revolutionary Artist

  “I was drawn to it [the Black Panther Party] because of its dedication to self-defense. The Civil Rights Movement headed by Dr. King turned me off at that time, for in those days non-violent protest had no appeal to me. And although the rebellions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark were not well organized they did appeal to my nature. I could identify with them.”

  —Emory Douglas4

  Douglas was a California transplant. When he was eight, he and his mother moved to San Francisco from Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1955, at age twelve, he landed a nine-month s
entence for truancy and fighting and was sent to the Log Cabin Ranch, a juvenile correctional facility north of the city. Later, Douglas was sentenced to fifteen months at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California. Both provided work experience for his future role in the BPP. At the Log Cabin Ranch, Douglas’s job was to take care of the pigs on the farm. At the Youth Training School, he worked in the print shop and learned the basics of commercial printing.

  His interest in the printing trade led him to enroll at the City College of San Francisco, where he studied graphic design. He also joined the Black Students’ Association and designed theater sets for LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), who was a visiting professor at San Francisco State University and one of the leading voices in the black arts movement.

  Douglas also frequented the Black House in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco—a space established by author Eldridge Cleaver, playwright Ed Bullins, and Willie Dale in early 1967.5 Douglas happened to stop by when Newton and Seale were visiting with Cleaver, and when Seale was laying out the first issue of the Black Panther Community News Service—a crudely produced mimeographed paper with a print run of 1,000. Douglas took interest and told Seale that he “could help improve the quality of what was being done.”6 Douglas’s talents quickly gained Newton and Seale’s confidence. He was asked to join the Party and become the “Revolutionary Artist” and minister of culture, responsible for creating the images, graphics, posters, and visual iconography for the BPP, along with the layout, design, and overall production for the weekly newspaper.7 By May 1967, he was at work redesigning the Black Panther. He shifted production for the third issue to web press, which allowed for two-color printing and a more polished, professional-looking newspaper where photographs and graphics could flourish.8 He also redesigned the masthead and included an image of Huey P. Newton in the far right corner. Most significantly, Douglas reserved the back cover and much of the front cover for full-size reproductions of his drawings and collages that visualized the campaigns and the ideology of the BPP. In this space, he created the iconography of the party: Panther warriors, community members battling the police, the bootlickers gallery, and most notably, the image of the pig.