The Art of Liberation

This article describes an under-reported success of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Through a creative team led by the party’s Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, who was also the Black Panther (BP) newspaper’s designer and main illustrator, the Panthers visualized compelling alternatives to post–Civil Rights Black assimilation in the United States. Douglas and the other artists filled the paper’s pages every week with drawings, cartoons, and posters that empowered people who were historically relegated to subservient representations in mainstream media. Douglas’s larger posters were wheat-pasted on walls in Black communities, creating advertising for psychological liberation as the struggles for complete liberation continued on several fronts. Through textual and visual analysis of BP newspapers from 1968, clear visual strategy and intentions are deconstructed in a way that illuminates the party’s more visible words and public actions and explains why their “revolutionary art” resonates into the twenty-first century.