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19.
The Black Panther Black Community News Service Volume II, #18 (San Francisco, CA: December 21, 1968).
Tabloid format newspaper, published weekly. 24pp. (incl. cover).
Christmas-themed issue with front cover artwork by Emory Douglas depicting a Pig dressed as Santa emerging from a fireplace and being held at gunpoint by Black youths. The back cover, also by Douglas, is headlined “Black Revolutionary Xmas Wishes” and illustrates various armaments with the caption below reading: “… In Order To Get Rid Of The Gun… It Is Necessary To Pick Up The Gun”. In addition, the editorial by Brenda Presley on page 4 asserts that “Point Number 3 of the Black Panthers Ten-Point Platform makes Black people aware of racist holidays used by Pig thieves (avaricious businessmen) to exploit oppressed people…”.
Page 2 prints a photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with fists raised at the Olympics, together with a letter congratulating them from Shirley Graham Du Bois (widow of W.E.B. Du Bois). On the same page, Kathleen Cleaver writes “About Eldridge…”, who had recently skipped bail and was living in exile, and the following page reports on the Black Student Union at SF State College striking in protest at the firing of BPP Minister of Education George Murray, an English tutor whose outspoken political views were not tolerated by the board of trustees.
Considerable coverage is devoted to the Montreal Conference “To End the War in Vietnam”, attended by Bobby Seale, where the NLF recognized the BPP as the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in the US (in return the BPP gave full recognition to the NLF as the legitimate government of South Vietnam).
The centrespread prints “Pronuciamento” by Eldridge Cleaver, an address given at Berkeley Community Center, accompanied by a small drawing by Emory Douglas, and page 15 prints a report on the BPP’s plans to work with an Episcopal church to provide free breakfasts “for Oakland’s school children in the Black community”, one of their hallmark programmes (the BPP also established community support systems including food and clothing banks, clinics, transport for families of inmates, and legal seminars).
Old, faint central horizontal fold, o/w Very Good plus.
