Red Power in the Black Panther

Abstract

A cover of the Black Panther newspaper depicting American Indian Movement leaders at Wounded Knee features Oglala elder Frank Fools Crow holding a ceremonial pipe in his uplifted fist, a gesture that resembles the Black Panther salute. The 1974 cover layers the iconographic programs of Native and Black social justice movements; it is a graphic statement of intersectional political resistance. Moreover, the paper’s coverage of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation and subsequent trials makes a radical visual argument for the ideological continuity of Red Power and Black Power. This essay proposes that the newspaper’s visual director, Emory Douglas, developed an intersectional liberation aesthetics that transformed the critique of structural oppression into a sustained call for radical revolution. Reporting in the Black Panther consistently addressed “all oppressed people,” a perspective that remains relevant for activists today.