Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, it wasn’t just Top 40 radio that played the latest hits. Over on the FM dial, underground radio had its own, very different set of hits. One of the biggest was Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” from 1971.
The title ended up having two meanings. The one Scott-Heron intended was that the revolution would happen in real life and not as a media simulacrum. “The revolution will not go better with Coke,” he declaims, “The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath.” Instead, “The revolution will be no re-run, brothers/The revolution will be live.” That’s where the later, second meaning came in, though: The revolution wasn’t televised because the revolution never did happen.
The closest thing to a revolution, many felt at the time, was the Black Panther Party. It had been founded in Oakland, in 1966 (a few months after Marvel published the first Black Panther comic, though the title of one and name of the other appear to have been unrelated). The Panthers remained centered on the Bay Area, but soon enough there were chapters nationwide, including in Chicago, New York, New Haven, and Boston.
Among those who most feared the Panthers was the head of the FBI. In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover called them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This was despite the fact that party membership never topped 5,000.
Many factors contributed to the Panthers’ seeming such a menace — or, depending on your politics, offering such hope. Image and image-making were high on the list. Male members dressed in blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, and black berets. This was attire as provocation: part uniform, part we-mean-business suit. The Panthers updated the white shirts, blacks suits, and ties of the Black Muslim movement, making it seem at once more casual and far more confrontational.
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Among the virtues of “Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party” is how it deepens, broadens, and usefully complicates the reality behind that image. The show runs through June 24 at the Museum of Fine Arts. It consists of 27 photographs taken by Stephen Shames, the Panthers’ official photographer, between 1968 and 1973. The MFA’s Karen Haas curated.
It’s a sign of the party’s media savvy that it had its own photographer, let alone one so able. Shames’s role wasn’t unprecedented. A few years earlier, Danny Lyon had served in a similar capacity with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Deep South.
Return to that uniform. As noted, it was male Panthers who dressed that way. The image they cultivated was flauntingly masculine (something all too common with movement politics of the time, white as well as Black). Yet party membership was 65 percent female. It’s true that one of the best-known Panther leaders was Kathleen Cleaver, the party’s communications secretary. Cleaver appears in one of Shames’s photographs. But she was more often identified as the wife of its minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, the best-selling author of “Soul on Ice.”
So the show’s focus on women is a welcome corrective. Related to that is the reminder it offers that activism expresses itself in various ways, something especially true of the Panthers. Activism can take the form of ideology, advocacy, political action, protest, even violence. (The most famous Panther image shows party co-founder Huey Newton seated in a throne-like rattan chair, holding a spear in one hand and rifle in the other.) The most consequential form of Panther activism, if also least appreciated by the general public, may have been its social work. Shames recorded multiple instances: teaching; distributing food, clothes, and shoes; testing for sickle-cell anemia.
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Such activities may seem mundane, but they can do far more to subvert authority than revolutionary rhetoric. No less an expert on such matters than Mao Zedong said “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” “Sister Comrades” is very good at showing both that sea and the Panther fish swimming in it.
The greater turbulence of the era does keep cropping up throughout the show, usually indirectly, and most notably through famous, canonical figures. Sometimes they appear in a photo (Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale); sometimes just by name, on a poster (Che Guevara, Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, the murdered Panther Fred Hampton); sometimes by association (a photograph of mourners outside of George Jackson’s funeral, several others of rallies to free an imprisoned Huey Newton). There’s also a photograph of someone herself famous by association, and that association in the future: a radiant portrait of Panther leader Afeni Shakur, the mother of rapper Tupac Shakur.
What may be the most startling photograph doesn’t involve anyone famous. Beret-wearing children of party members march in front of the Panthers’ Berkeley headquarters. In theory, it’s an image of uplift and community building. In effect, it’s highly unnerving — in the same way that the sight of any group of regimented, indoctrinated children is. Are these kids closer to Boy and Girl Scouts or Komsomol members? The look on their faces says tomorrow belongs to them.
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COMRADE SISTERS: WOMEN OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
At Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., through June 24. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.