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50 years ago, before the Black Lives Matter movement, there was the Black Panther Party. The organization began as a movement of radical thinkers who questioned society by addressing the political turbulence of the time, where people of color openly struggled against oppression, systemic racism and great injustice.
The exhibit “Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers,” which opened Oct. 19, at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, coincides with the release of a book bearing the same name, written by Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. It features 24 photos by renowned photographer Stephen Shames that chronicle the early days of the Black Panther Party.
The Black Panther Party was born defiantly from the civil rights movement where its people mobilized a social movement in demanding that society restore and return “economic justice and power for all people.”
Originally known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization defended the black cause.
The organization was first founded in Oakland, California on Oct. 15, 1966, with its core aim being to arm and defend its citizens as well as monitor the behavior of police officers and challenge police brutality.
In recollection, Shames was just a simple student who attended U.C. Berkeley when he first encountered and photographed Seale in April 1967 at an anti–Vietnam War protest. Seale went on to be a mentor to Shames, who became the most trusted eyes of its movement. Through his photography, Shames served as a testimonial witness, a chronicler and an inevitable disseminator of its ideology.
Shames remained a close personal confidant to Seale, supporting his campaign for the mayor of Oakland in 1973, where Seale amazingly finished in second place.
Much of the white public feared the Black Panther Party, as then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly called it “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Hoover secretly supervised an extensive program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, with many other tactics which were designed to undermine the Black Panther Party.
The government funded an initiative against the Black Panther Party and its leadership, incriminating members, discrediting and criminalizing the party, and draining the organization of resources and manpower.
With the gift of hindsight we can review in less threatening terms the Black Panther Party, whose mission was like many other historically significant movements of its time, such as the feminist movement.
Both the exhibit and book shed light on the relatively unknown social programs, which were organized and run by the Black Panthers to support black American communities. The Black Panthers initiated approximately 60 different community programs, which it funded, organized and ran—programs addressing the lack of black education in urban schools, the lack of medical and social aid, free meals and food programs for its children and seniors, as well as its movement party publication.
Shames’ photos document these programs.
“Power to the People” is not just a coffee table book, it’s a manifesto that gives readers a reflective page-by-page history of the Black Panther Party. Today Shames is not only a photographer, but a noted historian, a social philosopher, a scholar who dares to write history through its framed snapshots images of oppression and inequality.
Shames’ treasured photographs kept a movement alive for many new generations, following in the historical honored tradition of social reform photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.
The exhibit and book are testimony of the power of Shames’ photography, which became a historical witness to the Black Panther Party, effecting radical change through service.