On September 10, 1968 at 1:30 AM, some thirty hours after Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton was convicted of killing a member of the Oakland Police Department, two members of the force reportedly fired more than a dozen bullets at the Panther’s Oakland headquarters, seeming to take deliberate aim at posters depicting Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Hutton, who earlier had been killed by the police in April. An act of iconoclasm in which party leaders and those who follow are “killed,” the hole in Cleaver’s mouth also “silences” the Panther message. Cleaver’s image, moreover, appears above a bumper sticker advertising his candidacy for President of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket; his iconographic eradication thus forecloses participation in normative frameworks of political action.
Though carefully crafted, the Panther image was one that the party struggled against. As Singh argues, “[rather] than seeing the Panthers as the vanguard of a visible, guerilla insurgency in the country, they might be better understood as practitioners of an insurgent form of visibility, a literal-minded and deadly serious kind of guerilla theater, in which militant sloganeering, bodily displays, and spectacular actions simultaneously signified their possession and yet real lack of power” (emphasis mine). In short, writes Raiford, “[their] emergent visibility… represents not only an exhibition of power but a display of a true lack of power as well.” The violence enacted upon the image thus signals less the symbolic displacement of the real violence against the party onto the visual field than its metonymic instantiation. Disproportionate and deceitful, it carried a brutal lesson: only the state can justifiably exercise violence, and only the corporate media can legitimately inform.
The spectacular mediascape that was only coming into mature existence during the postwar period now informs our daily lives. Austin’s provocative question—“whether the impact of such [imagery] is a help or a hindrance to today’s activists”—may thus be expanded to encompass larger questions about the sociopolitical “visible.” To wit, groups like SNCC and the BPP evinced a visual sophistication that proves their conscious exploitation of political spectacle, however limited its ultimate impact may have been. They mobilized not only bodies on streets and helped build communities of self-empowerment, but did so within a swiftly changing public sphere characterized by mass mediation’s global reach. For Caddoo, this form of “media consciousness” constituted “their awareness of their positionality and place in a political and representational landscape that extended far beyond the borders of the United States.” Indeed, understanding political struggle and solidarity to be born of the interstices between nations and peoples and the ability of images to simultaneously overcome and acknowledge those very distances may be one of the most lasting legacies of postwar liberation movements.