By Any Means Necessary: The Black Panther Black Community News Service and Revolutionary Material Praxis

• In Event: Black Activism through the Arts

Abstract

“By any means necessary” has long been understood as the promise/threat of armed revolutionary insurrection, as when the Black Panthers formed community defense leagues in 1966 and marched on the California statehouse in 1967. Yet the phrase is inclusive of other means of resistance and rebellion, and this paper examines those means in detail. Combining archival and interview research, it considers the material practices of the artists Emory Douglas and Tarika Lewis, working with community volunteers they trained on the job, in producing artwork for the Black Panther Black Community News Service—and on the material practices by state agencies trying to shut the paper down and discredit the Panthers. Produced weekly in varying locations and circumstances, the newsletter and its artwork were assembled using materials and practices meant to encourage revolutionary consciousness in people with varying degrees of literacy. Douglas and Lewis borrowed graphic styles from Red Army propaganda, Viet Cong posters, and Latin American resistance broadsides, but to do so required understanding how, for instance, to create a woodcut effect using magic markers and halftones, then reproducing that artwork on an offset press assembled from found and donated broken models. Such material constraints were matched in praxis that included weekly Maoist self-criticism sessions during which text and artwork were critiqued for their revolutionary impact. In this sense, “by any means necessary” extended beyond the simple promise of armed resistance to include what Michel De Certeau has called “la perruque” or making do with materials often arrayed against you. But making do was not the same as getting by, and this paper takes seriously and explores the means by which the Black Panthers enlisted their material and practical circumstances in the production of revolutionary artwork and consciousness, not as peripheral to the final product, but central to the process.

Author

• Nicholas Sammond, University of Toronto