Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 151

Price Realized: $ 3,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
RARE PANTHER PRODUCED PAPER (BLACK PANTHERS.) Black Unity. Volume I, No.1. Newspaper, 8 pages, large folio. Front cover by Emory Douglass, centerfold poster with "The Functional Definition of Politics by Huey Newton" with a portrait of Newton. Camp Pendleton, August, 1970

Additional Details

the rare first issue of this radical newspaper, produced by the panthers on the army base at camp pendleton. no copies are located in oclc. The masthead declares: "This is your personal property and cannot legally be taken from you." The end of the 1960's and early 1970's saw the beginnings of real dissent among black soldiers who had come to see the war in Viet Nam as a "White Man's War." Slogans such as "No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger," were common among black recruits. In the centerfold of this newspaper Huey Newton expounds on war and politics: "Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed." The Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of blacks ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the U.S. involvement, 1965-69, blacks, who formed 11 percent of the American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam and 20% of all casualties. Prints "Letters from the Brig," and other articles directly bearing on black in the Armed Services. Danky (1059) locates only 1 copy of this publication at Wisconsin Hist. Society together with vol. 1, number 2, the only 2 issues published.