What is interesting to me is not someone’s starting point but their journey. My journey as a photographer started during the 1960s when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. I became an artist of the struggle. I got to know the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War and the Black Power movements, including Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panthers, who became a mentor. Seale and the Panthers taught me how to see a community that was not my own from the inside.
The Black Panther Party was one of the most influential responses to racism and inequality in American history. The Panthers advocated armed self-defense to counter police brutality, and initiated a program of patrolling the police with guns and law books. Their enduring legacy is their programs, like Free Breakfast for Children, which helped to inspire a national movement of community organizing for economic independence, education, nutrition, and health care. Seale believed that “no kid should be running around hungry in school,” a simple credo that lead FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to call the breakfast program, “the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
Stephen Shames
