Artspace explores Black Panther movement 50 years after New Haven trials
The revolution will be podcast.
Fifty years ago, the trials of three Black Panther members who’d been accused of murder provided a public platform for widespread protests and debates about racism, abuse of authority, community violence and many other social ills. The protests themselves led to infringements on the civil rights of city residents. The events of May 1970 continued to shake up New Haven for decades afterwards, and resonate today.
Artspace, the progressive, community conscious arts organization in New Haven, was planning to mark the 50th anniversary of the city’s infamous Black Panther trials with an arts exhibition and other events devoted to that 1970 historic convergence of law, politics, police corruption, social unrest, civil rights and community spirit.
Due to the coronavirus, the gallery exhibit, a summer youth apprenticeship program and most other aspects of the project have been delayed and modified. The gallery show was originally scheduled to open May 9. It is now postponed until at least July, and the artists have been allowed extra time to work on their pieces.
But “Revolution on Trial” has begun, thanks to a weekly podcast produced by New Haven journalist Mercy Quaye’s social justice media group The Narrative Project.
A new episode is posted every Friday, and can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and the Artspace website, artspacenewhaven.org/podcast-revolution-on-trial.
Like the other parts of “Revolution on Trial,” the podcast sees the events of half a century ago as open to interpretation, artistic or otherwise. It finds the human qualities in the narrative, appreciates the environment in which they happened, and pushes connections to present-day cultural concerns.
“Every person involved in this story has a justifiable distrust of people they don’t know, of authority figures and of the government at large,” Quaye explains in her podcast. “Here’s why: on May 19, 1969, members of the New Haven Black Panther Party fell accused and stood trial for the kidnap, torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther who they suspected of being an FBI informant. Several members of the party were put on trial for it, even though one, Warren Kimbrough, had confessed to the murder. The details of this incident would get hashed out over the course of a trial that kicked off in October 1970. During that time, the Panthers suffered ongoing surveillance, state-sanctioned wiretapping by local and federal authorities, and were harassed to no end. But it’s important to know: There was so much going on in New Haven before the trial even began.”
Sarah Fritchey, Artspace’s gallery director and curator, describes the path that led to her conceiving a multifaceted arts project about the Panthers. “The trials happened before I was even born, but you can’t live in New Haven without hearing about them. …
This project originated from an interest in telling the story of a living archive. When you think about it, it really is a conceit of the art coming out of the Black Panther Party itself: Emory Douglas [the party’s minister of culture] said revolutionary art flows from the people.”
The overall “Revolution on Trial” project began with Artspace organizing three day-long “community engagement exchanges.” Fritchey invited “Panthers who are still around, lawyers involved with the trial and those furthering Black Power movements today,” among others. The February exchange featured some artists involved in the exhibit, including the youth program Ice the Beef, which uses music, dance and other forms of creative expression to build opposition to gang violence. Some of the ex