The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture

As powerful (and as popular) as they may have been, commonly cited slogans such as “Black is beautiful,” and “I'm black and I'm proud,” urging Black men, women, and children to embrace, rather than apologize for, their appearances and identities, could never fully encapsulate the protracted negotiations over the cultural representation of Blackness that marked the late 1960s. Even within the movements for civil rights and Black power, often taken as representative of the two sides in a struggle to define Black racial identity in that era, a variety of individual perspectives can be found. In  The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture  Jo-Ann Morgan highlights a few of the more focused and explicit efforts to give visual form to the political and cultural identity of Blackness in the late 1960s. Split into two sections, the book offers an account of Black arts, and then of the Black Panthers in American visual culture, without a great deal of dialogue between the two. In the first section, after recounting the familiar story of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in 1965, Morgan tells the lesser-known stories of the Organization of Black American Culture and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, both formed in Chicago between 1966 and 1967. Bringing the section to a close, she discusses the “New Perspectives in Black Art” exhibit, held at the Oakland Museum in 1968. As Morgan points out, the title of that show suggests, surprisingly, that in only three years, Black arts had gone from being virtually unheard of (at least within the circles of institutional art history) to being legitimate and in need of fresh voices. The real irony of that shift, of course, is that, despite the museum's suggestion that the legitimacy of work that was often explicitly political and antiracist was obvious, the city's police (helped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation) were attempting to quash the political and antiracist activism of the Black Panther party.