“Black Panther demonstration, Alameda Co. Court House, Oakland,
CA, during Huey Newton’s trial,” Pirkle Jones; 1968.
It’s been nearly half a century since FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover vilified the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” His fear of the Constitution being upheld and justice being served lead Hoover to enact one of the most counterrevolutionary movements of the twentieth century: COINTELPRO.
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Directives under COINTELPRO required FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of movements and leaders associated with Civil Rights. Think of the times. It was the summer of 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated on the balcony only months before. The government was on a killing spree, and they aimed their sites on the Black Panther Party.
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Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College in Oakland, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. Since its inception, the BPP’s core practice was armed citizen patrols to monitor the behavior of police officers and to challenge police brutality in Oakland, California. The BPP employed legal means to challenge the police, and the result was a counterrevolutionary operation sponsored by the government that resulted in deaths and arrests, eventually dismantling the BPP’s national reach by 1972.
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It was during the summer of 1968 that Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, a husband and wife photography team, decided to photograph the BPP. The idea to photograph the Panthers was originally Baruch’s. She proposed her idea of an exhibition expressing “the feeling of the people” to Jack McGregor, then director of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. McGregor agreed, and the de Young Museum would host the first exhibition of the work in December of that year, to record crowds. The show would later travel across the country. The public was ripe and ready for positive and empowering images of the black power movement.
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“Plate glass window of the Black Panther Party National Headquarters, the morning it was shattered by the bullets of two Oakland policemen, September 10, 1968”, Pirkle Jones; 1968.