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12.
Li’L Bobby Hutton and Bobby Seale storming the California State Capitol at Sacramento, May 2, 1967.
Photographic poster, glossy paper, probably printed digitally. No place (Berkeley, CA?): Inkworks Press (?), no date (c. early 2010s?). 44.5x56cm. SIGNED by Bobby Seale in the lower left field using a blue marker pen.
A relatively recent poster-size production of Wade Sharrer’s famous photograph of Li’l Bobby Hutton, the first recruit to the Black Panthers, and Bobby Seale in the California State Capitol during the Black Panther Party’s armed lobbying trip to Sacramento in May 1967. The participants were charged with disrupting the legislature while it was in session and conspiracy to commit criminal acts, though several had the charges against them dropped later on.
The event attracted national attention to the Panthers for the first time, and also drew the attention of the FBI whose Director, J. Edgar Hoover, called them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and demonised them as “black nationalist hate groups” (the Panthers were never a black nationalist organisation, though their argument that gun ownership is a legal right and that it’s for self-defence was later adopted by the far right and white nationalists).
Fine.
