Frank Cieciorka, designer for the Left, is dead at 69

Frank Cieciorka, a graphic artist, art director and watercolorist whose woodcut rendering of a clenched-fist salute was a model for the New Left's most ubiquitous emblem, died on Monday at his home in Alderpoint, Calif. He was 69. In 1959 Mr. Cieciorka (pronounced che-CHOR-ka), then a college student, was an opponent of American military intervention in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam and joined the Socialist Party. In 1964 he volunteered as an organizer during the Freedom Summer drive to register black voters in Mississippi and became a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which initiated many integration and voting-rights campaigns. It was "certainly one of the most profound experiences in my life," he is quoted as saying on The Rag Blog (theragblog.blogspot.com), "and helped shape my political consciousness to this day." Mr. Cieciorka had seen the clenched-fist salute when he participated in a Socialist rally in San Francisco. When he returned from Mississippi, "the fist was a natural for the first woodcut in a series of cheap prints," he noted in an interview with Lincoln Cushing, a political art archivist and historian. "It wasn't until we made it into a button and tossed thousands of them into crowds at rallies and demonstrations that it really became popular," he continued. He recalled later visiting a "lefty button maker in Berkeley" who showed him that dozens of organizations had incorporated the woodcut into their logos or used it in some fashion to promote a social cause or issue. His fist for the 1967 Stop the Draft Week became what Mr. Cushing considers "the iconic New Left fist–very stylized and easy to reproduce, picked up almost immediately by Students for a Democratic Society and others." Another, more detailed woodcut fist (which Mr. Cieciorka titled "hand") was also often copied, usually without credit to the artist. Although the Black Panther Party used a bold, streamlined Panther designed by Emory Douglas as its primary logo, versions of Mr. Cieciorka's so-called power salute appeared in its publications as well. Frank Cieciorka was born on April 26, 1939, and grew up in Johnson City in upstate New York. In 1957 he enrolled in the fine arts program at San José State College, in California, where his passion for civil rights was triggered. In addition to helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the official Democratic Party, in 1965 he wrote and illustrated "Negroes in American History: A Freedom Primer," which was then used in "freedom schools" throughout the South. The cover shows five hands reaching toward the sky, one of them a fist. Mr. Cieciorka speculated that this might have been the first time the fist was used in relation to the civil-rights movement. He also created posters for labor movements, including the United Farm Workers, was the art director for The Movement, a newspaper for activist organizers, and contributed to the Peoples Press Collective.