Black Panthers, 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones

From July to October of 1968, noted California photographers Baruch and Jones were invited by Eldridge Cleaver to chronicle the Black Panther movement in and around Oakland, California, the headquarters of the organization.

The two Bay Area photographers--Baruch, a European-born Jew who faced discrimination in America, and Jones, a white man from Louisiana whose family had witnessed lynchings - set out to reveal "the feeling of the people" and to share their images with the public through a major exhibition. The resulting photographs were exhibited at the de Young Museum in San Francisco in the 1968 show "A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers." This exhibition brings together 45 photographs from the original exhibition.

The work of Baruch and Jones stands in radical contrast to mass media images of the time depicting the Panthers as thugs, criminals, or dangerous subversives. In October 1966 leaders of the Black Panther movement created a "Ten Point Platform and Program" for the new organization, demanding as its first point "power to determine the destiny of our black community." They added long-standing black aspirations for housing, education, employment opportunities, and an end to police brutality and murder. Their program called for blacks to be tried by juries of their peers, for black prisoners to be released because none had received fair trials, and concluded with a quotation from the Declaration of Independence, asserting the right to revolution. In 1968, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had vilified the Black Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States."

Jones and Baruch met as students and were married in 1949 at the Yosemite home of Ansel Adams. They were together until Baruch's death in 1997. Their work has been exhibited in museums around the country including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibition also includes documentary film footage by and about the Black Panthers. This exhibition coincides with Reed College’s celebration of Black History Month.

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery
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