Emory Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1943 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He served as the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the early 1980s.

In early 1967, Douglas joined the Panthers and began going on police patrols in Oakland, where he met many of the people in the community who would be the inspiration for and the subject of his work. Douglas is most noted for his political drawings and cartoons in the Black Panther newspaper of the police as pigs and a black proletariat armed for self-defense. The abuse that black people face when it comes to police officers has always been a problem, and he expressed his people’s pain and also power with posters.

At age thirteen or fourteen, Douglas was sent to the Youth Training School, a Youth Authority detention facility in Ontario, California, where he was introduced to art, learning skills in basic print and graphic design through its printing shop. In the mid-1960’s, after his release, Douglas continued his art training at the City College of San Francisco by taking courses on commercial art where he would gain valuable experience with design techniques, print publication, and art critique. In early 1967, he became involved with the Black Arts Movement as a set designer for the Black Communications Project at San Francisco State University.

In 1967, Douglas became the revolutionary artist and minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. He redesigned The Black Panther and switched to web press, which allowed for color printing and the use of graphics. He used the back cover and most of the front cover for his graphics and collages that aligned with the BPP message. Here he developed iconic images that branded the BPP, including the depiction of policemen as pigs. His graphics featured “pigs” bloodied or hanged to protest police brutality against African-Americans.

Haunts:

  • Black Panther Party Central Headquarters, 1048 Peralta Street, Oakland, CA 94607. As he was part of the Black Panther Party, Douglas has a very close relationship with Oakland.

~ by Redeat Kibebew ~

External Links: 

http://www.blackpast.org//african-american-history/douglas-emory-1943/

http://www.gclass.org/artists/emory-douglas

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