Judiciously—or luckily—scheduled to run during the ascendency of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Norton Museum of Art’s “Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers” exhibition is both a time capsule and a subtle contemporary indictment. If the militaristic garb of the Panthers’ uniforms looks quaintly chic by today’s standards, the goals they were fighting for—raising African-Americans out of poverty, eradicating hunger in inner cities, and especially battling police brutality and corruption—seem depressingly familiar to today’s black activists.
This small (22 photographs) but absorbing exhibition features the work of two photographers who would emerge as the Panthers’ official chroniclers: Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones. Appropriately enough for an issue that is fundamentally binary, the images are shot entirely in black and white and on street locations, mostly outdoor rallies for imprisoned Panthers co-founder Huey Newton.
A husband-and-wife team, Baruch and Jones’ photographic eyes are as different as their genders. Jones’ images are bold statement photos, of Panthers in full regalia waving flags on the steps of a courthouse, or strategizing on a park bench. His provocative point of view resonates through searing images that speak for themselves: the bullet-riddled headquarters of Newton, after the controversial leader received a sentence the police felt was too lenient; a bundle of newspapers screaming the anti-cop headline “Pigs Want War.”
Jones’ wife, by contrast, was a humanist first and a rabble-rouser second. Baruch trained her lens on the ralliers, the mostly middle-class (African-)American families listening in quiet throng to their charismatic advocates. A man cradles his newborn baby; a young couple embraces at a rally, the wedding ring on the man’s finger positioned prominently in frame. Her photographs seem to say, the Afros may be big and the dashikis exotic, but listen up, white America: These are people too, and they just want what you want.
Not surprisingly, Baruch and Jones’ work met with criticism from their peers. Ansel Adams dismissed their exclusives as propaganda. To be fair, it was: As much as Fox News, in its own way, views itself as a “balanced” corrective to a liberal-slanted mainstream media, Baruch and Jones’ portrayal of the Black Panthers represented an overt attempt to correct what they viewed as the mainstream media’s demonization of the Party as terrorists.
Indeed, periodicals presented under glass at the Norton paint vastly different pictures of the Panthers, with the mainstream press scolding them for inciting violence and the Panthers’ internal publications citing the police for bearing arms first. It’s hard to get past the cognitive dissonance in a pair of Boston Globe stories, on the same page of newsprint, from 1967: A report on the arrest of 30 Black Panthers is followed underneath by a sunny missive headlined “Police, Negro Relations Improve.”
The historical record on the Panthers still needs correcting. As recently as 2008, conservative media in this country railed against a voter intimidation case, later dismissed, involving two members of the New Black Panther Party. Though unrelated to the original, pioneering Black Panther Party, the recent incarnation raised the specter once again of Newton’s allegedly extremist, nativist organization. “The Summer of a ‘68” is agitprop, to be sure, but sometimes we need a little agitation and propaganda to shake up our misconceptions—and force us to see beyond institutional bigotry.
“The Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers” runs at least through Nov. 29 at the Norton Museum, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach. Admission costs $5 children and $12 adults. Call 561/832-5196 or visit norton.org.
