Emory Douglas: When Huey Newton and Bobby Seale would come to San Francisco for community organizing, they were often confronted by the police and so they began to call them swine and pigs. Out of their conversations about the police came the definition of a pig: a no-nation beast that has no regard for rights, the law or justice and bites the hand that feeds it. So one day, Huey and Bobby gave me this clip art of a pig on four legs that they wanted me to draw. In American culture, pigs are animals wallowing in filth and dirty. So I took that thought and applied it to the pig drawing itself. Then once I put the pig on two legs, gave it a badge and had the flies flying around, it transcended the boundaries of the African-American community and became an international icon that everybody identified with as a symbol of oppression by government and the police. In the context of today, if a pig image was used in a contemporary way, I’m pretty sure it would have the same kind of impact.

Fahamu Pecou: It was about being able to speak to people on multiple levels, so of course you had the language, the text, which was informative and spelled out very clearly what the Black Panther Party represented. But these images also worked to operate on a different intellectual, psychological register that would get into people’s minds and help them not just read about themselves or know themselves, but see themselves as empowered, see themselves as agents of change. See themselves as heroes, and see the villains as they were. And I think those kinds of things are really powerful. It really speaks to the power of the visual art, to operate as a kind of text itself.

Jordan Casteel: I think everything here is about hope. Even if the guns are present, revolution isn’t always about destruction. It’s about re-creation. It’s about resurrection. It’s about new beginnings.

Seeking Justice