Black Panthers: 1968

 

EbonyJet.com interviewed legendary photographer Howard Bingham recently about his upcoming book, Black Panthers: 1968, a series of photographs and essays that resulted from an assignment by LIFE Magazine. Bingham and LIFE writer Gilbert Moore followed Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver for two months but the resulting article and hundred of photos were never published.

Bingham is perhaps best known for his longtime friendship and association with Muhammad Ali as both personal photographer and confidante.

EJ: When LIFE brought you on for this assignment was it similar to the TV stations that hired Black reporters to cover the Watts riots? Did they hope that a Black photographer would be able to get better access?

No, it wasn’t that at all.

LIFE wanted to do an article on the Black Panthers and the only way they could do it was through Eldridge Cleaver, and Eldridge was in jail. They had to go to him for permission and he told them the only way it could be done is if it was Howard Bingham taking the photos.

The thing is, I didn’t know Eldridge and didn’t know that he knew me. But he had heard of me through the media and through my work with Muhammad Ali. So Life called and asked if I was interested.

They may have wanted to use someone Black since it was a militant Black organization but that’s not how I came to it.

(© 2009 Howard L. Bingham - Courtesy of www.ammobooks.com)

EJ: So you came in to the Black Panthers with a relationship of trust?

No, I didn’t really. LIFE had a writer there, Gilbert Moore, who met up with me in Los Angeles. He was from Jamaica and had written a famous article, “I’ve never been bitten by a rat”. He had never been around people like Eldridge or people who would be considered “militants”.  So I met him and he seemed like a nice guy, and after a couple of days we flew up to Oakland and met up with Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver.

After a couple of days with them, Eldridge called me over and said “Hey Man, I know you - but this motherfucker over here,  “I think he’s a pig!”. I just explained to him that the guy had never really been around that kind of environment and had more of a middle class thing going on.

We ended up hanging out and doing what we need to do. Eventually it turned into a couple on months with the Panthers. The story turned the writer around 100% . After we finished he went back to LIFE. LIFE wanted him to write it one way, and he wanted to write it the way he saw it.

He ended up leaving LIFE, and the story never got done. He wrote a book on his own in 1971. The Stressful Rage and we used some of the pictures, but this is the first time the pictures were used as a whole.

EJ: So for all these years that have passed since that time have you been holding these photographs somewhere in your house? Did you have a sense of their historic value?

I’ve always known what I’ve had. In fact, I probably have books galore that I’m sitting on. Now that I’m 70 years old I ‘m really beginning to just start putting them together. One of the things I’m angry at myself at right now, or I should say I’m disappointed in, is that I didn’t put a book out on the Year 1968.  I was involved in a number of assignments then – the Chicago Democratic Convention, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy…

EJ: But there’s still an incredible interest that period though, right?

Absolutely.  You know, I ‘ve been a very fortunate guy to have amazing access over the years to a number of subjects – the civil rights movement, Ali. I could probably do a book a month on Ali alone. And Bill Cosby. I’m working on a few exhibits that are coming up but I’ll get to them eventually.

EJ: You shot the Black Panthers at the pretty much the height of their cultural popularity, but a year before the Fred Hampton incident in Chicago and before COINTELPRO infiltration had really begun to take its toll…

They had organized in 1967. We shot them in 1968, and we had complete access. It was right at their peak. I traveled with them to the United Nations and with Eldridge until he left for Nigeria.

EJ:  So, if it were a year or two later do you think you would have had the same access or would things have been too heated to get that close?

I think I would have. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve never had a problem with access. People know that I won’t do anything that would jeopardize their image, and the pictures won’t show up somewhere they don’t want them. But the main thing is that I love me -  and I won’t do anything that will get me hurt or hurt me, or them.

EJ: The writer on the LIFE project with you, Gilbert Moore, had a bit of a political switch in the process of reporting. Did you have a similar transformation – or affirmation for that matter – of your politics?

I just take pictures, man. I go in to do a job. I hear and I don’t hear. I see and I don’t see.  With Ali for example, we don’t talk about religion. We’ve been friends for decades, but I think one thing, he thinks another. We don’t argue about it. We get along fine.