Brook Stephenson: Are you still creating art?

Emory Douglass: Basically I do art on my own. I’m not working in advertising.

BS: What type of art?

ED: I’m doing socially conscious art. That’s what I like to do. I have a list that I work off of from time to time.

BS: You have been doing that for the last 20 –30 years or so?

ED: As far as the art itself, I’ve been doing that since the Black Arts Movement, since the Black Panther Party, so you can say forty years or so.

emory douglass

BS: When did you first notice art as something you wanted to do?

ED: You start off like most little kids-draw on paper bags or scraps of paper, copy stuff out of magazines, cartoons and what have you. I [really noticed art] when I was in and out of juvenile as a youngster. The counselor had suggested that I should pick up art so I went on to City College. When I talked to the [ City College] counselor they suggested that maybe I take up commercial art. That was my first real training of any kind … studying different techniques and different styles working in these different areas. The field of commercial arts is pretty broad.

BS: Prior to working with the Black Panther Party you were working with another group.

ED: It was the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka had come out to San Francisco State. He was brought there to put on some plays so I asked him at that time if I could do the props, simple backdrops, for his play. That’s how I got involved in the Black Arts Movement. I was doing a lot of the flyers and materials for them at that particular time.

BS: What was going on with the Black Arts Movement for you when you were introduced to the Black Panther Party?

ED: You had a lot of young people who wanted to do something positive or wanted to get involved in the activity in the community because of the abuse that took on human rights violations of African-American peoples during the Civil Rights movement or protest. I was involved with the Black Arts Movement [and knew] there were some brothers and sisters [in that vein] out at San Francisco State. I used to go out there a lot. We would go to State because of all the cultural and political activity. They told me they were planning on a meeting. They wanted me to come to the meeting because they wanted to do a poster for this event. I had no idea what it was at that time.

When I went to the meeting they were talking about bringing Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, to the Bay area. They were talking about some brothers coming over to do security for this event. They came over the following meeting. That was Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. At that meeting they had introduced themselves and talked about who they were a little bit. After that meeting I knew that’s what I wanted to be a part of, what I had been searching for. I asked them how could I become a Party member. That’s how I got involved.

BS: How did that move from being part of the Party to the Black Panther newspaper take place?

ED: I used to come over to Oakland quite a bit and at the same time during that period they had to get somebody to write a letter to hopefully get Sister Betty Shabazz to come to Oakland. That person they got was Eldridge Cleaver. He was a follower of Malcolm while he was in prison. What happened was when she came out here for the event she went to Ramparts Magazine where Eldridge Cleaver worked. Huey Newton and them knew of Eldridge’s writing but they didn’t know him. They were trying to get in touch with him. When they did that, they connected. It was a place called the Black House in San Francisco where a lot of cultural activity went on downstairs- Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, many other poets and stuff. Eldridge lived upstairs and Marvin X coordinated a lot of stuff downstairs. Huey and Bobby used to come over to talk with Eldridge to recruit him to work on the newspaper. He was on parole at the time and he hadn’t been out too long or what have you.

It was one evening when I went over Huey and Bobby were there, nobody else there, and they were talking to Eldridge and I seen Bobby at the table putting together a legal sized paper saying this was going to be the first edition. I told him I had some materials that I could get from my house that maybe would help enhance the quality of what he was doing. I went home and came back. Took me about 45 minutes to an hour. They were impressed that I came back. At that time they said ‘you been hanging around, we know you, and we gone start this newspaper. We finished this first issue but we want you to work on the newspaper.’ It was there after that I became involved in the newspaper. They had a whole vision about the paper serving the community, telling our story, our point of view from our perspective and what have you.

BS: When you said you had materials was that imagery or what?

ED: I went to get art supplies. I went to get some rub off instant type that he could use for headlines. They were impressed because that was a commitment on my part.

BS: The Black Panther Party was known for documenting the police abuse of power in the community using the imagery of the pig to represent them visually in the paper. Was that an image you showed them? How did it come to pass?

ED: Huey and Bobby had created that whole concept of calling the police a pig. What happened was that one evening Huey and Bobby had come in talking after they were running around organizing. We were putting together an early edition of the paper- second or third whatever- and Huey had asked me to draw this pig. On the pig we were going to put the badge number of the police in the community that were harassing the people in the community. The badge number of the first one, that was a pig named Frye. That was the pig that got killed when Huey got shot in the shoot out in East Oakland.

At that point I began to evaluate the work that I had done on that particular piece of artwork. It came to me that maybe I could stand the pig up cause I just drew the pig with four hoofs and a badge number and had one hanging by a tail. After I thought about standing up on two hoofs, [next was] putting on some pants and a badge and shirt, keeping the snout and keeping the tail. That caught on and took on a life of it’s own. Not just in the black community but all over the country, matter of fact, across the world.

BS: I know that from there you started doing more illustrations and you did a lot of listening to the people and illustrating what they were saying or feeling. I was really wondering about the imagery you came up with. How did you get into that and how did it evolve. I really wish to hear about your process in creating it.

ED: Basically I used to do a lot of things. I used the creative mind but it is also a reflection of the politics we were involved in. Sometimes I would read a lot of books and quotes and stuff and look at the magazines. I started to do my artwork around images that reflected the community itself and putting the people in there. People used to come back and talk about the artwork and how they identified with some of those caricatures I used to do. They could identify with them as their brother or their sister or someone they knew like their uncle. It became very powerful and popular in the community. It gave me a sense of knowing that I was doing something that was getting the message across at the same time because people were identifying with the art.

BS: Did you take a lot of photographs of the community?

ED: We would use everything. We had our own photographers as we evolved but I also used stuff from black magazines and publications of black people during the day and stuff like that.

BS: Of the work from the paper did any of those pieces in particular really stand out to you or you got a lot of feedback from the community regarding?

ED: It was feedback on all of it. You had folks that liked different aspects but the pig drawing was the most humorous. People used to like and laugh at. The social programs too. People could see the seriousness of the ones about self-defense and what have you in the artwork itself.

ED: All of them. I don’t have favorites in the sense of that respect. I was just glad to be in the right place at the right time and be able to share my work and also be inspired to do the work that I did.

BS: The art you create now, how would you compare it to the art of the Black Panther Newspaper?

ED: The foundation of my art, subject, is the African American community but I try to do it in a way that can be universal as far as issues. I just did these prints that deal with war children. One is dealing with HIV. Another is dealing with the war. Another one is dealing with health as well. I’ve done those things. I’ve done a few on reparations and the prison industrial complex.

BS: In terms of the art you see others producing since your time at the Black Panther Party, how do you see your work affecting newer artists?

ED: They tell me how they were inspired or speak of the work. I never thought of it in that way except the fact that it’s out there and the feedback you are getting. I wasn’t trying to copy any people’s styles but was inspired by the work coming out of Cuba and Africa and Latin America and the Middle East at that time. I see it in that sense. A lot of young people who have access to seeing the work see what they want to do.

The art itself was inspired by the Black Panther Party.