Surrounded by Pantone markers, tubes of gouache, Liquitex acrylics, and an airbrush with inks, Emory Douglas sits at his drawing table in his home studio in San Francisco, beaming over a new illustration he has made of one of his four granddaughters for her sixth birthday. As a young graphic artist in the late 1960s, Douglas might not have seen himself down the road as a proud, gentle grandfather creating family portraits. A generation ago, as the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture, Douglas was one of the era's most influential and controversial radical artists. Since a 1934 labor strike put it on the activist map, the Bay Area has symbolized radical political thought in the U.S. The emergence of the Beats—including writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Kaufman—in the 1950s preceded the mid-'60s free-speech movement, born at the University of California at Berkeley, and the counterculture movement, which grew from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Both movements espoused freedom of speech, civil justice, and an end to the war in Vietnam. At that time, African-American students at San Francisco State College and City College of San Francisco were also organizing events to combat injustices in the Bay Area's black communities.
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