Sandra K. Friday
Fast-forward twenty-five years to another "ready room," that of the "Black Panther Headquarters in Berkeley, California,"
in 1969 (
HPA
, p. 259). Just as the five pilots gambling in the Ready Room in 1943 are revolutionaries fighting for their civil rights, so the five Panthers in Parks' photo are waging a revolution for the rights and very lives of black people in this country. Parks said he spent about three weeks with the Black Panthers, shadowing them and often risking injury and death, to learn and document through photos what life as a Panther was like and to show solidarity.
The Black Panther Party was born out of the civil rights groundswell of the 60's to protect local communities from police brutality and racism. Formed in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the group also ran medical clinics and provided free food for school children, feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school.
(3)
But they were widely seen as militant revolutionaries who stood up to the white patriarchal establishment over injustice long perpetrated on Blacks in this country. I was there when the Black Panthers came to New Haven and the National Guard rolled in with tanks and turned the New Haven Green and outlying streets into a war zone. My church, First and Summerfield United Methodist, at the corner of Elm and College, on the New Haven Green, served as a refuge for the Panthers.
The Black Panthers became a target for police harassment and raids that led to shoot-outs in which the Panthers lost twenty-five of their members in cities such as Chicago and Oakland. The more one reads about the assaults planned and perpetrated on the Black Panthers, one comes to understand the tension and suspicion in the faces of the five Panthers in Parks' photograph, "Black Panther Headquarters
,
Berkeley, California",
1969. They had evidence to believe that at any given moment the police or the FBI might come bursting into their offices or their apartments and homes and open fire on its occupants. It had happened in Chicago. J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as
"
the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," and he wanted them crippled.
(4)
Unlike the fighter pilots focused on a game of cards, the five Panthers in the photo all have their eyes trained on us as if "we" are players in "their" game. And it is a serious one. Or, they see the lens as an inconvenience, distracting them from their work. Unlike the blackboard that is the backdrop behind the fighter pilots with names and missions spelled out in orderly columns, there is something spontaneous or make-shift about the posters and scraps of paper taped and tacked to the walls behind the Panthers. One poster reads, "REVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, Eldridge Cleaver." On another there is a photo of a man, probably a Panther, but I cannot make out who it is. Behind the men and between the cluster of three Panthers on the left and the two on the right, a wrap-around counter is stacked with piles of papers and perhaps a portable copy machine, the tools necessary to their labor. Both the fighter pilots and the Panthers are gathered around a table. The table around which the Panthers are gathered contains an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes, an aluminum container that might hold baked-goods, a drink cup and more papers. There is no "office furniture" in the Panthers' headquarters, no fancy equipment.
In order to write a
caption
,
dialogue
and
story
for this photo, students will need to do some research on the Internet, where they can find a wealth of information.