Young woman at Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA

Author
Nina Zurier

Decade

1960s

Tags

Activism
Black Panthers 
Community Chairs Photography 
Racial Justice

In early summer 1968 Ruth-Marion Baruch met with Kathleen Cleaver, the communications secretary of the Black Panther Party, who then made arrangements for Baruch to meet Eldridge Cleaver, the party’s minister of information. Cleaver invited Baruch to take pictures at a Free Huey rally at DeFremery Park in Oakland. Baruch’s husband, Pirkle Jones, accompanied Baruch to the rally, and the two collaborated on the project over the next several months. It was exhibited at the de Young Museum and traveled to The Studio Museum in Harlem, to Dartmouth College, and to UC Santa Cruz. In 2003 the BAMPFA exhibition The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, curated by Stephanie Cannizzo, presented forty-five images from the series.

In this photograph by Baruch of a young woman at the rally, one can see a poster with the iconic portrait of Huey P. Newton seated in a rattan chair. This image of Newton also appears in the window of the Black Panther Party National Headquarters, photographed by Pirkle Jones following an attack by the Oakland police. The portrait of Newton was taken in 1966 or ’67 by Blair Stapp, another alumnus/faculty of SFAI, and was reproduced and widely distributed as a poster. Newton and Stapp share the photo credit on the poster. The poster has a quote from Newton, who was the Panther’s minister of defense: “The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.”

In 1946 Baruch and Jones were among the first students enrolled in the photography program at the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI), studying under Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston, among others. Her 1961 photographic essay Illusion for Sale documented women shopping in San Francisco’s Union Square district; it was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), as was her collaboration with Jones on another project, also in 1961, Walnut Grove: Portrait of a Town. In 1956 Lange had invited Jones to join her in documenting the final year of the Berryessa Valley before it was flooded to accommodate a new reservoir, the present Lake Berryessa in Napa and Solano Counties. The project was commissioned by Life magazine but remained unpublished until 1960, when Aperture, of which Lange was a founder and contributor, reproduced the photographs in a special issue. Baruch documented the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

For more, see Black Power * Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth Marion-Baruch (Novato, CA: Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2012).

 NZ 

Links

The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, BAMPFA, 2003

Huey Newton poster, Oakland Museum of California

Pirkle Jones biography and works, SFMOMA

Over 6000 images from Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones archive at UCSC

In 2011 SFAI alumna Jane Levy Reed completed the film Pirkle Jones: Seven Decades Photographed, combining still images, archival footage, and recent interviews

Secondary Connections