Black Power & Black Tigers,

During my student years I became fascinated with the story of American Blacks and their struggle for civil rights. Angela Davis became my hero, and I inspired by George Jackson's Sloedad brother letters from prison.
I designed an Angela Davis cover design for Negin, but the editor, concerned about Savac (the secret police), asked me to make it less obvious. To my dismay, I was asked to change the design couple of times, until finally he okay-ed it. I was worried that the final version looked like an ordinary hippy. 

However, when that issue was published, I saw it first in the office of Parviz Loshani, the editor of Zaman, who pointed to the cover, smirking like he has discovered the most important secret, "This is Angela Davis!" said he. Those days, you did not know what to make of a statement like that. Did it mean you are in trouble, I am going to report you, that you are silly to do this, or simply that I am not going to give you any commission. At that time, those statements weren't what was important to me. The important part was that despite the censors she was still recognizable.

Writing this section for my History of Graphic Design, brought to life a lot of sweet memories.

The war in Vietnam is illegal and immoral. The question is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of America, are killing babies, women, and children? We have to say to ourselves that there’s a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk; there’s a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not murder anybody who they say kill, and if we decide to kill, ‘were’ going to decide who it shall be. This country will only stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, "Hell, no, we aren’t going."
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There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. No man has the right to take a man for two years and train him to be a killer. Any black man fighting in the war in Vietnam is nothing but a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves the country where he can’t vote to supposedly deliver the vote to somebody else, he’s a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves this country, gets shot in Vietnam on foreign ground, and returns home and you won’t give him a burial place in his own homeland, he’s a black mercenary. Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, 1966, Berkeley, California

Blackmen born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many blackmen to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments. From the Prison Letters of George Jackson of Soledad Brother , 1970 10, June

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C., and refused to leave after being denied service. Additional students joined them over the following weeks and months, and sit-in protests spread through North Carolina to other states in the South. By April of that year the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded by the leaders of the sit-in protest movement, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and others encouraged the SNCC to serve as the youth wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). However, the students remained fiercely independent of King and SCLC, generating their own projects and strategies.

SNCC’s emergence as a force in the southern civil rights movement came largely through the involvement of students in the 1961 Freedom Rides, designed to test a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel facilities unconstitutional. The Congress of Racial Equality initially sponsored the Freedom Rides that began in May 1961, but segregationists viciously attacked riders traveling through Alabama. Students from Nashville, under the leadership of Diane Nash, resolved to finish the rides. Once the new group of freedom riders demonstrated their determination to continue the rides into Mississippi, other students joined the movement.

The voting rights demonstrations that began in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, sparked increasingly bitter ideological debates within SNCC, as some actvists openly challenged the group’s previous commitment to nonviolent tactics and its willingness to allow the participation of white activists. The Stokeley Carmicheal faction within SNCC did not trust whites, and since whites could not be trusted, then blacks would have to do everything for themselves if they were to control their own political and economic destiny.

In May 1966 SNCC’s election Carmichael was voted as the chairman. During the month following his election, Carmichael publicly expressed SNCC’s new political mantra ‘‘Black Power’’and soon during his speeches when he shouted out "What do we want ?", the crowd's responded: "Black Power", and the cry got louder and louder by each day. Carmichael and his supporters saw "Black Power" as a way of resurrecting "Black Pride" and African-American culture. Carmichael stated in 1966:

"We have to do what every group in this country did - we gotta take over the community where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs."

In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King agreed with Carmichael, stating;

SNCC staff members are eminently correct when they point out that in Lowndes County, Alabama, there are no white liberals or moderates and no possibility for cooperation between the races at the present time.

Nevertheless, he maintained that over the longer run;

effective political power for Negroes cannot come through separatism’’ (King, 48).

In 1968,  Carmichael adopted the attribute ‘Kwame Ture', an adaptation of the 2 great Afrikan leaders - Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Tou're, only to move to the Motherland to live for the remainder of his life. Upon leaving he said, “Amerikkka does not belong to the Blacks,” and advocated for his fellow Afrikans to follow his lead.

After the Selma to Montgomery March, Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC organizers entered the rural area between Selma and Montgomery the notorious Lowndes County Alabama, not a single black person in this county, whose population was 80 percent Black, was registered to vote. In fact, no Black person in this county nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes” was known to have been registered to vote in the entire 20th century. Remarkably, in less than a year, despite violence that included the murder and the attempted murders of civil rights organizers, Blacks were a majority of the registered voters in Lowndes County. This success in voter registration was assisted by the August 1965 signing into law of the Voting Rights Act.

Carmichael promoted the idea of an independent Black political party. That party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) pioneered the development of written and visual materials clearly illustrating through words and pictures the importance of the vote. In 1966, the LCFO, which its symbol was a black panther, fielded candidates for county offices and the party’s instructions were simple: “Pull the Black Panther lever and go home. Inspired by LCFO success, in October 1966 Bobby Seale and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Oakland, California, aiming to overthrow the oppression of the black people in the United States. They rejected any assistance from the white liberals, adhering to the argument that:

What does it mean if black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that blacks' ideas about inferiority are being reinforced. Shouldn't people be able to organize themselves? Blacks should be given this right. Further, white participation means in the eyes of the black community that whites are the "brains" behind the movement, and that blacks cannot function without whites. This only serves to perpetuate existing attitudes within the existing society, i.e., blacks are "dumb," "unable to take care of business," etc. Whites are "smart," the "brains" behind the whole thing.

Within a couple of years the Black Panthers in Oakland were feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school.The leaders of the Black Panthers were influenced by the ideas expressed by Malcolm X in the final months of his life. The Panthers therefore argued for international working class unity and supported joint action with white revolutionary groups. The Black Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group. The activities of the Black Panthers came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover described the Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and in November 1968 ordered the FBI to employ "hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures to cripple the Black Panthers". Prominent members of the Black Panthers included Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Fred Hampton, Fredrika Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, David Hilliard, Angela Davis, Bobby Hutton and Elaine Brown.

The Black Panthers had chapters in several major cities and had a membership of over 2,000. Harassed by the police, members became involved in several shoot-outs. This included an exchange of fire between Panthers and the police at Oakland on 28th October, 1967. Huey Newton was wounded and while in hospital was charged with killing a police officer. The following year he was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. On 6th April, 1968 eight BPP members, including Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Hutton and David Hilliard, were traveling in two cars when they were ambushed by the Oakland police. Cleaver and Hutton ran for cover and found themselves in a basement surrounded by police. The building was fired upon for over an hour. When a tear-gas canister was thrown into the basement the two men decided to surrender. Cleaver was wounded in the leg and so Hutton said he would go first. When he left the building with his hands in the air he was shot twelve times by the police and was killed instantly.

In the early hours of the 4th December, 1969, the Panther headquarters in Chicago was raided by the police. The police later claimed that the Panthers opened fire and a shoot-out took place. During the next ten minutes Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. Witnesses claimed that Hampton was wounded in the shoulder and then executed by a shot to the head. The panthers left alive were arrested and charged with attempting to murder the police. Afterwards, ballistic evidence revealed that only one bullet had been fired by the Panthers whereas nearly a hundred came from police guns.

In 1961 Angela Davis enrolled in Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. While at Brandeis, Davis also studied abroad for a year in France and returned to the U.S. to complete her studies, joining Phi Beta Kappa and earning her B.A. in 1965. Even before her graduation, Davis, so moved by the deaths of the four girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in her hometown in 1963, that she decided to join the civil rights movement. By 1967, however, Davis was influenced by Black Power advocates and joined the SNCC and then the Black Panther Party. She also continued her education, earning an M.A. from the University of California at San Diego in 1968. Davis moved further to the left in the same year when she became a member of the American Communist Party. In 1969 Angela Davis was hired by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as an assistant professor of philosophy, but her involvement in the Communist Party led to her dismissal. During the early 1970s she also became active in the movement to improve prison conditions for inmates. That work led to her campaign to release the “Soledad (Prison) Brothers." The Soledad Brothers were two African American prisoners and Black Panther Party members, George Jackson and W. L. Nolen, who met each other 1966.

Growing up at a time of great political unrest and racism in the United States, Angela Davis was exposed to multiple socio-economic beliefs. From these many experiences Davis was able to distinguish herself as one of the foremost activists of the twentieth century in the crusade for racial equality. Davis initiated everything from militant demonstrations to non-violent protests designed to focus public attention on the plight of minorities. From her childhood in Birmingham to her career as a professor at UCLA Angela Davis fought for racial as well as political equality in the face of danger regardless of possible consequences.

Davis’ time in jail inspired her to champion against what she refers to as the “prison industrial complex” – a cause she still valiantly takes on to this day. Her case inspired songs from popular entertainers of the time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono recording the song “Angela” to show their solidarity in 1972; The Rolling Stones "also recorded a track, “Sweet Black Angel,” in honor of Davis that same year.

The trial of Angela Davis lasted 13 weeks and ended on June 5th 1972. She was found not guilty of all three charges by an all-white jury: kidnapping, conspiracy and murder. The crime: Her gun had been used by a friend to kidnap a judge in order to free three prisoners. In the shoot-out that followed her friend, the judge and two of the prisoners died. Under California law at the time she was, strictly speaking, party to murder since it was her gun. But they could not prove she wanted anyone dead or knew what her friend was up to (conspiracy). A white service station owner said he saw her with her friend on the morning of the shoot-out but it turned out that he had a hard time telling black women apart, even light-skinned ones with Afros. When they arrested her the state hoped to prove she had political motives to use violence to free the Soledad Brothers and others from prison, thus the shoot-out (though it was not the Soledad Brothers themselves who were being freed in that instance). But when it came time for the trial they could no longer use that argument: by then she had become world famous as a political prisoner, putting America to shame, a country that prides itself on supposedly not having any political prisoners.

Nolen introduced Jackson to Marxist and Maoist ideology. Jackson’s Soledad Brother was published in the fall of 1970. His book Blood in My Eye was published posthumously in the fall of 1971. These were political manifestos, which became bestsellers and brought the radical prisoner a great deal of international attention.

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met black guerrillas—George “Big Jake” Lewis, and James Carr, W.L. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Torry Gibson.…We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality. —Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

Jackson's prison letters he authored between 1964 and 1970 showcase him as a young man grappling with a cruel and unjust society towards the black youth. In his intimate letters to Georgia and Lester Jackson, the son honestly struggles to comprehend and make sense of the American economic system and its values and their impacts on the black families like his own. His letters portray him as a deeply curious and analytic reader who carefully explores the ideas of various socialist thinkers, ideologues and activists as Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong. Jackson was inspired by the powerful events of the Cuban revolution and the struggle of the people of Vietnam, as well as the anti-colonial rebellions going on all over the globe.

Jackson became one of the most prominent intellectual and activist prisoner. While in Soledad Prison Jackson and W. L. Nolen, established a chapter of the Black Panthers and later Jackson became a Field Marshal of the Black Panthers Party. In 1966 he co-founded, with W.L. Nolen, the Black Guerrilla Family, which was rooted in the ideas of Marx and Mao. In 1969, Jackson and Nolen were transferred to Soledad Prison. Jackson's political transformation was seen as insincere by prison officials, with San Quentin associate warden commenting that Jackson "was a sociopath, a very personable hoodlum" who "didn’t give a shit about the revolution". On January 16, 1970, the three of Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were charged with the murder of a white prison guard John V. Mills at in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three black Muslim prisoners during a prison fight in the Soledad's exercise yard.

Jackson was born in Chicago and moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of 14 As a teen, he had a number of juvenile problems, which landed him in trouble with the police and resulted in him spending time in the Youth Authority Corrections facility in Paso Robles, CA. At 16, he was accused of stealing $71 from a gas station for which he received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life in which his case was reviewed annually. Jackson was never granted parole and spent the rest of his life in prison. In 1962 he was transferred to San Quentin Prison for a series of infractions. There he came under the tutelage of an older inmate, W. L. Nolen. Under Nolen's influence Jackson  began to see his crimes and imprisonment in a political context, and he quickly became a leader among the growing faction of politically-charged inmates at San Quentin. He developed strong ideas viewing capitalism as the source of the oppression of people of color, and became the leader in the politicization of Black and Chicano prisoners in Soledad. The fate of the Soledad Brothers became an international cause célèbre, which focused on the treatment of blacks in prison. The publication of Jackson’s book "Soledad Brother" that same year added to his visibility. For many supporters, the issue was the belief that the Soledad Brothers were victims of a prison conspiracy.

George L. Jackson (1941 – 1971) was a Black American revolutionary, activist, and theoretician who became a member of the Black Panther Party while in prison. Similar to Malcolm X, he studied while behind bars and became a leading figurehead behind the revolutionary prison movement. Jackson was born in Chicago and moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of fourteen. As a teenager he had numerous run-ins with the law and at the age of eighteen he was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station. Although there was evidence of his innocence, Jackson’s court appointed lawyer told him to plead guilty to the armed robbery charge because it would mean a lesser sentence. He did and received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life.

On August 21, 1971, three days before he was to go on trial, George Jackson was gunned down in the prison yard at San Quentin during an alleged escape attempt. The official report said that he was armed and had participated in a prison revolt earlier in the day, which had left five men (two guards and three prisoners) dead. Accounts of this incident remain conflicting to this day and many believe he was murdered in an attempt to silence his cause. Many in the Black Power Movement and the New Left eulogized Jackson as a martyr and a hero.

On August 7, 1970, George’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan burst into a Marin County courtroom with automatic weapons, freed three San Quentin prisoners and took Judge Harold Haley as a hostage to demand freedom for the three "Soledad Brothers." However, Haley, prisoners William Christmas and James McClain, and Jonathan Jackson were killed as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse. The case made international headlines. The state claimed that Judge Haley was hit by fire discharged from a shotgun inside the vehicle during the incident. The weapon was said to have been attached by wiring, tape, and/or a strap of some sort, and/or held beneath his chin. The shotgun was traced back to Angela Davis

One year later in August 1971, three days before he was to go on trial, George was gunned down in the prison yard at San Quentin in what officials described as an escape attempt. Jackson’s death was eulogized by Archie Shepp, Bob Dylan and Steel Pulse songs, such as Shepp's “Blues for Brother George Jackson”, Attica Blues album, Dylan's “George Jackson” and the British reggae band, Steel Pulse's “Uncle George” on their 1977 album Tribute To The Martyrs.

The San Francisco 8 were eight former Black Panthers who were arrested in January 2007 for their alleged involvement in the 1971 murder of Sgt. John V. Young at Ingleside Police station. Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim were already incarcerated. Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Ray Boudreaux, and Hank Jones were arrested in California, Francisco Torres was arrested in Queens, New York, and Harold Taylor was arrested in Florida.Bail amounts were originally set between three and five million dollars each.

In January 2008, charges of conspiracy were dropped against five of the defendants, and Richard O'Neal was removed from the case all together. On June 29, 2009, Bell pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Young. The following month, charges were dropped against Boudreaux, Brown, Jones, and Taylor, and Muntaquim pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit voluntary manslaughter. According to the website of the Committee for the Defense of the San Francisco 8

Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim have been in prison in New York for almost 40 years on similar charges based on the US Government's COINTELPRO actions to disrupt and destroy radical organizations, especially the Black Panther Party.

On May 2 1973, Black Panther activist Assata Shakur, was pulled over by the New Jersey State Police, shot twice and then unjustly charged with murder of a police officer. She was targeted because of her activism and leadership in the BPP and the Black Liberation Army. Assata spent six and a half years in prison under brutal circumstances before escaping out of the maximum security wing of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in 1979 and moving to Cuba in exile. The US government has tried several times to extradite her and went so far as having the FBI list her as a domestic terrorist offering 1 million dollars for her capture in 2005. She continues to write and speak out against institutionalized racism.