[music] -My name is Emory Douglas, and I consider myself to be a social justice designer, graphic designer.

Graphic design grabbed me when I really got involved with the Black Panther Party.

I was asked to come to a meeting and they wanted me to do their artwork for that event, which was a simple poster graphic of Malcolm X.

-I'm speaking as a Black man from America, which is a racist society.

-They have whole visions about starting a newspaper and telling our story from our perspective, and I knew that's what I wanted to be a part of and was assigned to during the publication.

[music] -As a grassroots organization, the Black Panther Party did not have tons of financial means, and so they were using inexpensive printing as a way to circulate their messages quickly to their community.

-They were essentially on the run from the FBI for a lot of their existence.

This is work that was done on the cheap.

It was done quickly, but also with a sense of urgency because there was a need in the community and a message that they wanted to convey, but they were also being chased by those who were diametrically opposed to that.

-We had this great foundation of social justice activism that was unique to California during that time.

You have a history of it, an artwork that was the reflection of that.

We used to work out of studio apartments initially before we had a headquarters.

We had portable operations.

We could shift them anywhere.

-There was no production office, there was no press that they were working at.

They were working in people's bedrooms, living rooms.

-We would use natural light from the windows, just regular tables or we might-- if we had to have two little horses set up over the smooth door, use that as our layout table, whatever was accessible to us, we would use that.

[background noise] -There was something very scrappy about the way that they were producing things because they needed to get the message out to as wide an audience as possible to support this idea of revolution and activism.

In the late '60s, Emory Douglas joins up with the Black Panthers.

-At first I was doing production work, cutting and pasting things together.

Then I was given the green light to begin to do graphic artwork for the front and back page of the paper, but also having design elements within the context of the spreads in the paper as well.

-He was also responsible for logo design, poster design, flyers, booklets, their Ten-Point plan, and the manifesto that they would distribute.

-When they first initially started, it was small but as it evolved and grew at its height, it was 100,000.

It had a peak readership of 400,000, and it was taken all over the world.

The paper was a lifeline to the community.

-At its height, the Black Panther newspaper had the highest circulation of any publication in the United States.

It was a powerful influence.

-Black Panther Party is informing and calling all the people in the communities across the country to scorn and denounce the action of this capitalistic government's attempts to try to destroy the Black Panther Party, which has chapters and branches all across the nation.

-Emory Douglas gets positioned as a graphic activist, but also their minister of visual culture.

His role is really to not only be an activist but to transform the visual language of the Black Panther newspaper, which was a really vital publication that was used to inform the community of these changing pressures from police and discrimination, to talk about issues of housing, human rights.

-Health clinics, education, free breakfast to school kids, self-determination, the right to defend ourselves against injustice of all form and by any means necessary, quality of life concerns.

-When you consider the fact that the Black Panthers were feeding more children in the state of California than the state school lunch program, then you know that they were effective.

-One of the points of our Ten-Point Platform and Program, is we wanted decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.

I began to do illustration around that issue, and relationship to rent control and conditions the poor people had to live in with dilapidated houses infested with rodents and all these things.

I tried to apply that into that artwork.

-Emory Douglas saw that in order to get people excited about a message, it really took something visually engaging and interesting.

-See, the art was more of a not a me art, but a we art.

-It wasn't specifically about one's own personal self-expression around an issue.

It was about understanding what was useful to win a campaign and invite people into that conversation and move the needle on a particular issue.

-Is this the pamphlet you're talking about?

The pamphlet says that the Black Panther Party for self-defense calls and the American people in general to take careful note of the racious California legislature.

Why do you believe the legislature is racist?

-Don't you know?

You're part of it.

Isn't it obvious?

This is a white system.

This is obviously what we have.

-Do you believe everything that's in that pamphlet?

-Pamphlet speaks for itself.

-He talks about the fact that his posters, which are on the back of every newspaper, were for an audience that may not be reading the newspaper.

-My colleagues who worked in the Black Panther, New York Chapter, mentioned that they used to sell the paper each week by turning it over on the back because people want to see the illustrations.

-That could easily be translated into posters that could be hung up in the streets.

In fact, he called the neighborhoods where he lived in his gallery.

It really felt like it was important that this work really was out in the street and was being read by people in the community.

-You had a lot of rebellions took place in the '60s.

A lot of police murders, like it is today, always be justified.

Most of the inspiration was the listening to people and what their feelings were and the expressions were.

-I remember studying the protest art of the students in Paris in 1968, the posters that came out of the OSPAAAL collective in Cuba, and the work of Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party, and those really influenced what I understood as the visual vocabulary of protest and social change imagery.

-I was looking at political art.

The art that came out of Cuba was amazing.

They used to have some rays in some of the art that they were doing in solidarity with people's struggles around the world, so I was kind of inspired by that.

-The iconography of sunrays is it useful way to show movement forward and resiliency.

We're very good at articulating what we're against, but how do we articulate what we're for?

What is a vision for the community that we want to build?

-You had this whole climate of young people wanting to do something, make a change all over the world that transcended borders.

-Black Panther Party probably joined hands with the liberation movements of third world, [?]

Babylon.

Those people were Afro-Americans.

Emory Douglas is Afro-American.

-David Emory used a visual language that made the struggle of black people universal.

-He was representing what was the message of the Black Panthers at the time.

It's not just about strength and power, but there's a lot of humanity in it.

He was trying to depict people from his life, from his community.

-He was showing himself, he was showing his sister, his neighbor in a way that hadn't really been shown before.

There's also this emotion of pain that's underneath the graphics.

I really feel like Emory and the Black Panthers were at this point of enough is enough.

-We might not be back, I might be in jail, I might be anywhere but when I leave, you remember I said, with the last words on my lips that I am a revolutionary.

I am a revolutionary.

-The initial icon was a pink drawing, symbolizing the authority who were abusing their power in the community, particularly the local police at that time.

A white police force, a lot of them being from Oakland during that time, or were being recruited from the south who were members of the Klan, and all those things that took place.

-The other thing that's important about his work, which really defines a lot of his style of illustration, are these really heavy, thick lines.

-I tried initially to do with cuts but it was so time-consuming that I began to mimic with markers and pens that kind of bold look to something [?].

-Using these heavy lines covers up any misalignment that might happen.

It's interesting how this technical limitation really informed what the art ended up looking like.

Then at the same time, the art itself just has such a big, bold graphic look because of responding to that constraint.

-One of his pieces, there's a young black boy holding up a newspaper being depicted in a way that was not only humanizing, but it was empowering.

-Well, it was just a simple ink drawing, black and white, and then I applied some prefabricated texture to it and give tone to the skin.

I used those sheets and patterns that had 10% texture or 20% to it so that you got these contrasting tones, so you get some more fullness to the images when it was used in that way.

Then because we only using one color ink, that ink became the background behind the paper board.

The limitations then is that we couldn't afford but one color.

-Before he joined the Black Panther Party, the Black Panther newspaper was a black and white publication that was mainly textbase.

He had the brilliant idea to change the way that they printed the paper from a standard offset print to a web press which allowed the introduction of two colors, black and one other color.

He's really, really brilliant in how he uses color in a way that draws interest that makes some depth to the page despite that limitation.

-It was nine Pantone Colors that we will shift from each week for nine weeks, then come back to the next color.

-They didn't have access to tons of typographies so you see him creating his own typographic language.

He's creating lettering that's custom, that's woven into his figurative and graphic images.

-We're looking at the letters, what we used to use for the format to make up your words.

For example, like you've got the words here, "Free the GIs."

That's coming from using the format text, but you'd cut it and paste it in position.

-Also, part of the visual language of his designs have a graphic component that's referencing the printing press.

You see dots and graphic forms in some of the textures of what he's making.

-Letter tone is actually a rubdown pattern which he would add to a lot of his work to get these different layers of depths without having to add more color.

-Artists like Emory came up with such effective visuals that were steeped in the tool that he was using.

We don't have the limitations he, had but we have the inspiration from this study that we can still carry forward.

[music] -This idea of having to create a visual language that's responding to another shooting in the moment or another act of violence or another protest is in the spirit of this rapid way that Emory Douglas and the Panthers were assembling their messages.

-There still is an urgency that you have in over 50 years' difference.

The context of the urgency had to come out of the graphic designers today in the context of how they feel, and what their connection is to the social justice movement.

-One of the things you see in a lot of Emory's posters specifically is real simplicity in the messaging.

They were often done in very bold block San Serif letters, but they're also done with imperfection.

I see today when you go to a protest and when you see the kinds of signs that people are making now, you can see a lot of connection to the way that he thought about a message and a poster and how letters need to be seen but they also need to be human and feel like they're coming from the person that's actually speaking them.

-If I was a historian 50 years from the future looking back at this time, I think some of the things that we'll remember are these interesting contrasts between the way that we can connect digitally, but also still the longing for human connection.

-Today, there is a lot of turmoil and there are people who want to get a message out.

It's really helpful to look back to a period in which this was true as well.

The late '60s really was the height of that kind of emotion.

-In our efforts to reframe stories and disrupt dominant narratives, I hope that we can keep helping each other do that really well, do that in a way that's accountable, and have that humility to really take that critical feedback that makes us better designers and more useful to our movements.

[music] -This program was made possible in part by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, LA County Department of Arts and Culture, and the California Arts Council.