May 07, 2020 - Sale 2534

Sale 2534 - Lot 115

Price Realized: $ 2,375
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
(BLACK PANTHERS.) Poster and program for the important "Black Power and Its Challenges" conference. Poster, 17 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches; tape stains and remnants at edges, 1-inch closed tear, moderate dampstaining and soiling. With double-sided program, 11 x 8 3/4 inches, listing many additional speakers. [Berkeley, CA]: Berkeley Free Press, 29 October [1966]

Additional Details

Poster for a conference at the University of California Berkeley sponsored by the mostly white radical Students for a Democratic Society, but featuring Stokely Carmichael as the keynote speaker. Carmichael had been organizing with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, which had developed the iconic Black Panther logo to help with their voter registration drive. The panther logo is given a dominant role in the conference poster, and appears on the program as well. The conference was a success, with 10,000 attendees on hand to hear Carmichael speak.
This event--and this logo--helped inspire Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to launch a new organization in nearby Oakland that week, which they called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. We trace no other examples of this poster in libraries or at auction; it is important for both its history and its iconography.