Black Panther Coloring Book
The Black Panther Coloring Book is a 1968 pamphlet whose true origin is still disputed: was it Black Panther propaganda, an FBI forgery meant to discredit the Panthers, or an internal Panther drawing the FBI later weaponized against its own creators.
The 46-page booklet, drawn in the style of Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, traces a march from the kidnapping of Africans through the Party's founding to armed confrontation with police drawn as pigs. FBI memos describe distributing the book to white households as part of COINTELPRO, the Bureau's campaign to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" Black nationalist groups. Historian Ward Churchill later traced the drawings to Party member Akinsanya Kambon, whose artwork was reportedly ordered destroyed by Panther leadership before a Los Angeles chapter member distributed copies anyway. This edition reprints the imagery with its original text stripped away.
Regardless of who drew it first, the book endures as a document of COINTELPRO's methods and of how easily political image-making can be turned against the people it was made to serve. Its 2016 reissue by artists Corey Presha and Bill Sullivan asks viewers to look again at images once judged too violent for the Panthers' own children.
