The desperate violent approach to the situation of Civil Rights is fascinating to me as it is just so no nonsense and so radical that it's clear why it wasn't accepted, as it was too extreme for those peacefully protesting, and if anything it just further aggravated those people trying to keep black people down at the time. But simultaneously there's a sort of idealistic, cinematic element to how they acted, going all guns blazing
against the society that had once kept them as slaves. Even today there is a lot of anger and repressed rage concerning the whole issue, which has improved since the 1960s, but obviously is nowhere near perfect, as police officers can kill innocent black teenagers and not even lose their job, let alone be brought before the law. There's a sort of accepted ideology in society that we're all civilised and above fighting in the street (civilised warfare is separate from humanity, focused on strategic plans and mechanical weapons), but its easy to sympathise with the extreme views of the black panthers on some level, as how could they see a solution to hundreds of years of being repressed without some sort of explosive emancipation? The way the media works today is that fearmongering garners more hits, more comments etc, so the situation is constantly presented as dystopian and hopeless, and this sort of representation is dangerous in the way that it makes people feel hopeless, and when people are cornered, they fight to get out. 
Keeping with this imagery and the sense of having had enough of the way things are, my own visual explorations are based on representing the people as powerful and iconic.
