The Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children Program is probably their best-known initiative, the press finding an intriguing story juxtaposing the Panther’s tough-guy-in-leather-jacket image with the act of serving small children plates of hot food. Importantly, it was mostly women who led these survival programmes, and women made up a majority of the Panther membership. They served in leadership roles from ‘Officer of the Day’ (essentially the office – and people – manager for each branch), to organising the many details of a location’s breakfast programme to initiating and leading food justice, healthcare and housing programmes within neighbourhoods.
So why does the image of the Panthers as a masculinist and violent organisation persist? The answer lies in part with media distortion, influenced both by the sexism and racism that misrepresented the Panthers. There was also a misinformation campaign by the FBI, led by J Edgar Hoover, waged against the increasingly popular Panthers, which had an enduring impact on how people saw them.
In your two arms rocking I am quietly In my two arms rocking you are quietly In your two arms I am a child, listening. In my two arms you’re the child, I’m listening With your arms you hold me tight when I am scared With my arms I hold you tight and I’m not scared In your arms even the silence of death won’t frighten me. In your arms I’ll fall through death as though falling through a dream.
Shadow, Osaka, Photo by Daido Moniyama, 1995
‘Concrete Mirrors’
Concrete Mirrors deals with the iconography of space conquest during the 60s, back to a climate of suspicion and paranoia linked to the cold war. Presented as a fake photograph-documentary, this project puts together three corpus of images of different nature and status, combining types of reality, these are documents, and virtuality, those are places.
David de Beyter Photography
Mount Wilson & Palomar Observatories, Milky Way (negative print), +/- 1950, United States.
@pursimuove
Zaire, 1987
Chris Steele-Perkins
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Welcome. As I am figuring how to go about freelance writing, I want to partially support myself with Patreon. What you will get from me are weekly essays on Black pop culture/Black female sexuality/Black radicalism, long form essays on any of the aforementioned subjects and the occasional poem. I want to use Patreon as a platform to launch my writing and eventually photography and ink drawing.
Josef Sudek, the Wind, 1918-22