Description
The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. From the earliest days of the party, visual language and visual rhetoric were crucial features of the Panthers’ activism. The Black Panther newspaper was a primary vehicle for recruitment and fundraising throughout the history of the party. Iconic illustrations by Emory Douglas and photographs lined the information-heavy pages of this radical newspaper. Through a thematic analysis of Panther photographs and illustrations featured in twenty-eight issues of The Black Panther from 1967 to 1972, this thesis will promote a new method for analyzing the BPP’s visual history. Too frequently, historians and other scholars of Panther visuals have ignored photography in favor of the provocative aesthetics of illustrations from the paper. This approach has limited the potential for a comprehensive analysis of Panther imagery that views photographs and illustrations as a holistic body of sources that are constantly framing and reframing the identity of the party. Using eight generalizable themes that encapsulate and summarize the images featured in The Panther, I have outlined and developed a large-scale qualitative analysis of Panther images to indicate the frequency of different themes as well as how these themes developed and changed over time. To further complicate this analysis, I also place these themes in dialogue with oral histories from the San Diego Black Panther party as well as other Panthers from various spaces within the BPP. Through this, I attempt to reinforce the themes I have identified as a means of analyzing Panther sources. I advocate for broadening this method of thematic analysis to a larger data set to deepen our understanding of Panther visuals. Beyond this, I also propose placing Panther images in dialogue with oral histories to identify how Panthers at various levels identify with and reflect on the imagery of The Black Panther.
