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21.
The Black Panther Black Community News Service Volume III, #12 (Berkeley, CA: July 12, 1969).
Tabloid format newspaper, published weekly. 24pp. (incl. cover).
Front cover artwork by Emory Douglas depicts a poor Black mother aiming a gun at a rat hole outside her front door, with two large rats in the foreground close to her small baby (the newspaper reprinted the same artwork on the back cover of its September 12, 1970 issue with the caption: “Kill the Greedy Slumlords!”).
Page 2 prints Huey Newton’s experience of prison life, and pages 6-7 are devoted to the Panther 21, who were arrested and accused of planned coordinated bombing and long-range rifle attacks on two police stations and an education office in New York City in 1969 (all were acquitted by a jury in May 1971).
Much coverage is given to the United Front Against Fascism (see item #22), including an interview with its chairman, Bobby Seale. The centrespread prints “Somewhere in the Third World”, Eldridge Cleaver’s essay on Panther ideology in relation to “oppressed peoples struggling against capitalism and imperialism”, while a full page is devoted to the International Committee to Defend Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile (signatories included James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Julius Lester, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Malvina Reynolds, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Stokely Carmichael).
Old, faint central horizontal fold, o/w Very Good plus.
