This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

If Only All Barriers Could Be Removed...

Rough streets of Oakland, protected by Panthers. Commissioned by the Swedish magazine, Vi: Untitled

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

The Black Panther Party Below, you will find selections from the Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones Photographs and Papers collection. Both Ruth-Marion and Pirkle were photographers and had interest in many documenting progressive movements happening in and around San Francisco in the late-60's and early-70's, now an inseparable component of the Bay Area's mythology. Their archive feels like a cross section of many of the changes California was undertaking during their lifetimes, and their photographs of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement are especially interesting due to their position as outside supporters, allowing us to see a subjective record of the events from an interestingly negotiated position, and even outtakes and unpublished iterations of photographs that have been digitized by the Library. Some of these photographs were included in a 1968 exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the next year traveling to Harlem's Studio Museum, and later they were published in The Vanguard: A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers.

The Black Panther Party was an institution headquartered in Oakland, California, founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. This was a community-based organization aiming to protect Black folks from police violence, mainly through the means of "cop-watching", an armed, open-carry citizens' patrol monitoring police activity and educating citizens of their rights, and later, to provide healthcare, a political education, a party newspaper, and free breakfast for children.

Since they directly focused their efforts upon the roots of injustice, they became a node upon which the carceral state focused its efforts, California banning open carry with the 1967 Mulford Act, signed into law by then-governor Ronald Reagan in response to their visible armaments.

The introduction to "Prison, Where Is Thy Victory" by Huey P. Newton, as published in If They Come in the Morning... connects the popularity and power cultivated by the Party's efforts in Oakland to the responses of police and government:
"The increasing influence of the Black Panther Party in the Black community, their vehement defense of the rights of their people inevitably engendered violent, hysterical reaction in the police force and in government. On October 28, 1967, a policeman radioed to his headquarters that he was following a 'Panther car.' Shortly afterwards Brother Huey had been shot four times in the stomach. One cop was dead, another wounded. Huey P. Newton was charged with murder."

In addition to pushback in the form of police violence and legislature, the Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltrated branches of the Party as well as other Leftist, Black Power, environmentalist, and even American Indian organizations under the COINTELPRO program in order to sow discord, conduct psychological warfare, falsely imprison, or otherwise stifle any individual or organization making claims against the United States. In one of the most damning known cases of federal covert interference, the conspiracy to drug and assassinate Illinois BPP Chairman and Nat'l Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton under the guise of a middle-of-the-night, no-knock raid by the FBI, Chicago Police, and the Cook County State Attorney was in the end ruled a "justifiable homicide".

Considering the vast amount of covert misinformation and violent psychological operations undertaken by the federal government in the name of "national security", the Black Panther Party remains an important model, not only as an organization situated against status-quo structural racism and violence, but also as an antithesis to many of the most pervasive forms of power wielded by the state.

As an organization that did not rely on the state in order to advance its goals, and thus an organization that maintained a level of autonomy from the determinism of state power and definition, the Party exemplified the ideal of abolitionist futures via alternative organization, something that Angela Davis calls for in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
She writes,
"How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance."