Revolution Revolution - Eldridge Cleaver for President
Black Power
In 1966, Detroit cultural radicals, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw created Guerrilla, “a monthly newspaper of contemporary kulchur” and “weapon of cultural warfare.” The newspaper was a part of a larger project, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which was formed in 1964, “a local attempt in self-determination for artists of all disciplines.” Guerrilla mixed “humor, politics and music under the circus big top of surrealism and pop culture.” It was primarily a cultural review and included an international artistic perspective. Soon after its first issue appeared, Van Newkirk, who was an revolutionary anarchist with an antipathy for the hippie counterculture and slackers, split with the Detroit Artists Workshop and fired Sinclair, who was more aligned with the hippie counterculture. Despite their ideological and political differences, the two, in fact, continued to work together on Guerrilla, though Van Newkirk’s vision predominated. In subsequent issues, Van Newkirk included a series of oversized political posters, including this one.
The text on this poster reads: "A Rule Of Thumb Of Revolutionary Politics / Is That No Matter How Oppressive The Ruling Class May Be / No Matter How Impossible The Task Of Making / Revolution / May Seem / The Means Of Making That / Revolution / Are Always At Hand." At the center is information on a publication, Guerrilla with the quote "our purpose in entering the political arena / is to send the jackass back to the farm and the elephant back to the zoo." At the bottom is "Eldridge / Cleaver / For President / Minister of information/Black Panther Party".
Eldridge Cleaver was the controversial "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther Party. Cleaver, who edited the Black Panther Party newspaper, is credited with crafting a more radical and incendiary public rhetoric for the organization. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, was a best-seller, simultaneously praised and condemned, and much-debated. Cleaver was the presidential candidate for the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968, earning .05% of the vote. Following a deadly altercation with Oakland police that same year, Cleaver fled the United States, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and ultimately France, before he returned to the United States in 1975. An ideological split between Cleaver and party co-founder, Huey Newton, led to Cleaver's ouster from the party. Following his exile, Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian, dabbling in a variety of different denominations. He also participated in conservative politics through the Republican Party. Cleaver died in 1998.
Guerilla: Free Newspaper of the Streets
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
Black Power
Black Power
This 1968 poster, by Cuban designer and filmmaker, Alfredo Rostgaard, promotes the Black Power movement and revolutionary violence. The poster was published by OSPAAAL, the Organisation in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the main publisher of international solidarity posters in Cuba. Notably, these colorful propaganda posters were not designed to be posted on walls within Cuba, as others were. Instead, they were folded and stapled inside the magazine, Tri-Continental, where they were then distributed internationally. Rostgaard was the artistic director of OSPAAAL for nine years, beginning in 1966. A statement by OSPAAAL was included with this poster: “On the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, we have published a poster that is now being circulated all over the world. We are sending you herewith a certain amount of these posters, which may be used in your country for the activities to be carried out in this regard.” This poster was later re-purposed by the Black Panther Party as a part of the Free Huey! campaign. OSPAAAL published several posters by Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party.
Alfredo Rostgaard
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
The Black Panther, June 19, 1971
Black Power
This June 19, 1971, issue of The Black Panther includes items on: the case of David Hilliard, Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, who was falsely accused of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon that stemmed from a police attack in Oakland, California; a lengthy "revolutionary analysis" of Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song, written by Huey Newton; the murder of Jo Etha Collier in Drew, Mississippi; a critique of racial negligence in research on Sickle Cell Anemia; the trial of Huey Newton; a statement to the press by the "Richmond 5” in Virginia; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
June 19, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, January 9, 1971
Black Power
In this January 9, 1971 issue of The Black Panther, articles include: a statement of support for the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in the name of international solidarity; a map of the U.S. showing incidents of "Guerilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism”; an open letter to "revolutionary children" highlighting the activism and history of the Black Panther Party; coverage of the trial of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, including articles of support from allies of the Black Panthers and a letter from Huggins herself on "How to Love During a Revolution”; black draft resistance; the New York 21 case; the Jonathan Jackson Commune; the case of Monk Teba; the Juan Farina Defense Committee; Chicago Free Busing Program; G.I. Rights; police brutality in Baltimore, Toledo and Las Vegas; a U.N. Report on racism in the U.S.; a Solidarity Activities Calendar; international news shorts; the Ten Point Program; a statement of party rules; advertisements for The Lumpen, sponsored by the Chicano Revolutionary Party; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 9, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, October 16, 1971
Black Power
Articles in this issue of The Black Panther, include: prison riots in Joliet, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, Alderson, West Virginia, New Orleans, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, San Quentin, California and Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Attica, New York; the murder of Clarence Johnson; a boycott of Bill Boyette’s Liquor Store; extensive coverage of Huey Newton’s trip to China; an advertisement for a peoples tribunal aimed to indict New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Richard Nixon; criminal justice in Winston-Salem; a memorial poem devoted to fallen Panther George Jackson, who was shot during a prison escape attempt in San Quentin, California; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 16, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, August 15, 1970
Black Power
Inside this issue of The Black Panther are multiple articles that speak to the harassment by law enforcement against party members selling the Newspaper in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. This issue also highlights how the Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltrated the Black Panthers with trained informants and created a fake newspaper called the "Bay State Banner." Other items include an article on “revolutionary suicide”; short pieces on the Soledad Brother; Alabama Liberation Front; Chicago Liberation School; National Chicano Moratorium Committee; police brutality in Hartford; Joan Kelley; Bobby Seale’s appeal; a call for justice for the "Los Siete de la Raza”; a two page spread of letters written to Huey Newton from children at the Black Panther Party Liberation School in San Francisco thanking him and the Panthers for the school; a critique of the American Constitution explaining institutional racism, particularly in the prison system; a message from Huey Newton to the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention; a critique off integration; the N.C.C.F.; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August, 15, 1970
underground press
The Black Panther, October 9, 1970
Black Power
In this issue of The Black Panther, published on October of 1970, articles focus on the death of Joyce Annette Henderson; a tribute article and poem to Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter; diphtheria epidemic; the People’s Free Busing to Prison Program; police repression in Detroit; the aftermath and continued oppressive conditions inside of Attica Prison; the Angela Davis People's Free Food Program and the David Hilliard Free Shoe Program; a special tribute to "Heroic Guerilla’s”; a petition to indict Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller; a notice of Huey Newton's trial at the Alameda Courthouse in California and artwork by Emory Douglas
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 9, 1970
underground press
Movement, March 1969
New Left
The Movement was an underground press newspaper based in San Francisco, California. This issue, the "Huey P. Newton Birthday Edition,” was published in March of 1969. In a 3 page spread there is an interview with Bobby Seale about the status of Huey Newton's case, police brutality incidents in the Los Angeles area and questions regarding the Community Survival Programs of the Black Panthers. Also in this issue are multiple articles highlighting the student movement at various universities around the country, including Berkeley, Columbia, Yale, New York University, and San Francisco State University; a statement and manifesto from the American Deserters Committee for American Deserters living in Montreal, Canada; as well as various statements that cover other movements including the American Indian Movement (AIM). This issue ends with a poem from Ho Chi Minh's prison diary.
The Movement Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
March 1969
underground press
Los Siete de la Raza
Chicano Movement
In 1969, two plain-clothesed San Francisco police officers stopped several young Latino men moving furniture in the Mission District of San Francisco. An altercation ensued, resulting in one of the police officers, Joe Brodnik, being shot and killed with the other officer, Paul McGoran's, gun. Six of the young men (Gary Lescallett, Rodolfo Antonio (Tony) Martinez, Mario Martinez, Jose Rios, Nelson Rodriguez, and Danilo Melendez) were arrested and charged with murder, while another man (George Lopez) accused of the crime was never apprehended. Their court proceeding, which ran parallel to Huey Newton's more well-known trial, became a cause celebré within the Latino community and the New Left. Some of the accused had participated in local pan-Latino political activist groups, like the Mission Rebels, COBRA (Confederation of Brown Race for Action) and the Brown Berets. Member of the Black Panther Party and two of the Chicago 7 attended the trial. The men, who were ultimately acquitted, came to be known, popularly, as "Los Siete de la Raza," or "Los Siete."
Free Los Siete
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
underground press
Black Panther Newspaper Insert on People's Revolutionary Constitutional Convention, June 11, 1970
Black Power
This sub-set of pages from the June 11, 1970, issue of The Black Panther newspaper includes two pages on the proposed constitution emanating from the People's Revolutionary Constitutional Convention, as well as a petition to the U.S. government regarding political prisoners.
Black Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
June 11, 1970
underground press
Huey Newton Trial in Oakland (29 images)
Black Power
Huey P. Newton was a revolutionary black leader and co-founder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966. Newton was born in 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana, one of the most racially violent parishes in the entire South. Following WWII, the Newton family moved to Oakland as a part of the second wave of the Great Migration. Though his family moved around the Bay Area quite a bit, Newton always felt like he had food and shelter and love. He was arrested a few times as a teenager, including for gun possession and vandalism when he was 14. Newton later reflected that during his childhood in Oakland, he was often made to feel ashamed of being black. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote, “During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.” Newton graduated high school in 1959 without learning to read, though he went on to teach himself. In 1966, he earned an associates degree from Merritt College and took classes at the San Francisco School of Law. During this period, Newton began to ask questions about his family and the world around him, which led him to get involved with the civil rights movement. At Merrett, he joined the Afro-American Association and a fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma, and helped get the first Black Studies course organized on the campus. Newton began to read political and theoretical works by radical thinkers, like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Emile Durkheim and Che Guevara. It was also at this time that he met Bobby Seale and they formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in response to police brutality against local African Americans. The group was influenced by Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, practiced a militant self-defense strategy and developed community survival programs related to employment, community health, education, nutrition, food security, prisoner’s rights, and other grassroots issues. The Panthers practiced “revolutionary socialism” and articulated their platform in a manifesto, “Ten-Point Program.” The Black Panther Party was willing to work in alliance with other revolutionary organizations, including white radicals. According to Newton, “We don't hate white people, we hate the oppressor: If the oppressor happens to be white, then we hate him.” FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover labelled the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and subjected the group to a range of repressive tactics as a part of COINTELPRO.
Huey Newton was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for a 1964 stabbing and served six months in prison followed by a period of probation. After the end of his probation, on October 26 and 27, 1967, while out partying with friends, Newton and his compatriots were pulled over by an Oakland police officer, John Frey. When back-up forces arrived, a shoot-out ensued, leaving Frey dead and another cop, Herbert Heanes in serious condition. Huey Newton was shot in the abdomen. The circumstances surrounding the incident were and remain cloudy and contested. Convicted in 1968 of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of officer Frey, Newton was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. In 1970, a California Appeals Court ordered a new trial, which twice ended with a hung jury. The prosecutor declined to retry the case for a fourth time.
Throughout these trials, the Black Panther Party organized a powerful “Free Huey” campaign, which caught on nationally and became a point of focus for the broader 1960s New Left. The campaign cast Newton as a revolutionary martyr of systematic state oppression and built him into a political icon similar to other figures at the time, like Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. As Gilbert Moore wrote in A Special Rage, “There was an inevitably about the Huey Newton trial which drove me fairly insane. The smell of manifest destiny was everywhere. A giant ferris wheel, spinning, controlled by a conspiracy of faceless robots. In its path lay Huey Newton." Poet Langston Hughes wrote a poem, titled, “Black Panther”:
Pushed into the corner
Of the hobnailed boot,
Pushed into the corner of the
"I don't-want-to-die" cry,
Pushed into the corner of
"I don't want to study no more,
"
Changed into "Eye for eye,"
The Panther in his desperate boldness
Wears no disguise,
Motivated by the truest
of the oldest lies.
Black Panther Party leaders recognized “that a potential black martyr could galvanize young blacks of all persuasions, in a way that they couldn’t otherwise.” Inflammatory Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, said, "At this moment our leader, Brother Huey P. Newton, is being tried by old baldheaded racists who are predetermined to send him to the gas chamber. But they will carry out the sentence over our dead bodies. There seems to be little hope of avoiding armed war in the streets of California and of preventing it from sweeping across the nation. If there has to be a war, then let there be a war." Earl Anthony, author of Spitting in the Wind, wrote, "If you so much as touch a hair on Huey's pretty head, you better give your soul to the Lord because your ass belongs to the Black Panther Party." Newton himself stated, “There will be no prison which can hold our movement down…The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.” He embraced the idea that he was committing what he called, “revolutionary suicide”:
“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.”
After his release from prison, Newton credited the grassroots protest for his freedom, saying, “That was the true power of the people - they freed me. I was just sittin’ up in my 5x7 cell, in my 5x7 hell, up there on the 10th floor of the Alameda County Jail.
Newton’s iconic status was also double-edged. Former Panther Hugh Pearson recalled, “From the mouths of Free Huey activists, Huey began to sound like a messiah. Their enthusiasm to see Huey set free paralleled the Christian enthusiasm for the second coming…Young radicals and militants of all persuasions began preparing for the rebellion they were sure Huey would lead.” But, as actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who wrote and starred in the award-winning play, “A Huey P. Newton Story,” reflected, "Yeah they freed Huey. Then Huey came out and they wanted Huey to free them and I keep trying to tell the people, I say people, that's the true power of the people, you freed me, you freed Huey, now why don't you all go ahead and free yourself? But see, they can't do that can they? They can't do that cause the people always have to create what they call a leader and a leader is everything that the people want to be but the leader is everything that the people can never be so then when the leader fails, he's gonna fail, he's just flesh and blood, he's gonna fail, when the leader fails then the whole construction of the concept of leadership fails and then it just becomes a matter of contempt. And that's when they assassinate you and then put your image on a postage stamp so they can keep lickin' you in the grave."
The images taken here by Roz Payne were outside the Oakland Court House.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
No More Bullshit
Electoral Politics
In 1969, at the prompting of feminist leader, Gloria Steinam, author, cultural critic and activist, Norman Mailer, made an outsider bid for mayor of New York City. His campaign ran as a ticket with Jimmy Breslin, the raucous New York Daily News journalist who was seeking to become the President of the New York City Council. At the time, New York was facing a growing list of problems, including rising crime rates, increasing poverty and deindustrialization, middle-class suburban flight, congestion, pollution and political stagnation. In response, Mailer, whose campaign slogans were “No More Bullshit” and “Throw the Rascals In,” set out an outlandishly bold set of initiatives. His primary proposal was the “51st State” plan, a scheme whereby the five boroughs of New York would secede from the rest of the state in a bid to secure more independence, greater political representation, resources and power. Once independent, Mailer envisioned a radically decentralized political order with the city “splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies." In addition, he advocated a ban on private cars in Manhattan, replacing them with cabs and a monorail system that would circle the island; a citywide free bicycle rental program; and policies that would eliminate pollution, reduce taxes, and establish full autonomy for public schools. According to campaign literature, at the collegiate level, the campaign promoted “vest-pocket campuses built by students in abandoned buildings” that would restore “a sense of personal involvement that is lost in the large university campuses.” In perhaps his most utopian proposal, Mailer urged the creation of “Sweet Sundays,” which would mandate, once a month, that all mechanical transportation stop and elevators close down so that New Yorkers could decompress from their hectic urban lives and avoid breathing exhaust fumes.
Campaign events were often chaotic. At one, Mailer quipped, "The difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm no good and I can prove it." At another, he called his own supporters “spoiled pigs.” After learning that bars would be closed on election day, Jimmy Breslin complained, “I am mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.”
Many New Left activists and libertarians supported the Mailer-Breslin ticket. The Black Panther Party also endorsed the duo after they backed the release of Panther leader, Huey Newton. To some, the campaign was a lark, to other a serious challenge to the established order, and to others an outright offense.
In the end, Mailer finished in fourth place during the Democratic mayoral primary, edging out state Assemblyman, Charles B. Rangel, who would go on to be elected to Congress in 1970 and remain in office until 2017. Even in defeat, though, Mailer’s campaign was seen by many leftists and libertarians as an important attempt to move from the realm of ideas into programmatic politics.
________________
Norman Mailer first gained fame in 1948 with the publication of his now-classic war novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was based in part on his own WWII experiences. In 1955, he was a part of a small group that established The Village Voice, an influential alternative newspaper located in Greenwich Village, which continued publication until 2018. Also an influential essayist, Mailer published “The White Negro” in Dissent in 1957, a controversial analysis of the “hipster” in post-war American culture.
Mailer became a ubiquitous cultural figure in the 1960s. In 1960, he published "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," an essay in Esquire on the rise of John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention. He continued to see JFK as an “existential hero” for a new era. That same year, Mailer was convicted of assault for the stabbing of his wife, Adele, and served three years of probation. Mailer was also one of 29 prominent Americans who co-founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which opposed the hardline anti-Castro stance of U.S. politicians and military leaders during the early-1960s. The group achieved widespread infamy in 1963, when it became public news that Kennedy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a member. In 1967, Mailer made a mark with the best-selling political book, Why Are We in Vietnam? and played an ongoing role in the anti-war movement, including signing the 1968 “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” a pledge to withhold tax payments to the U.S. government as opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Again that year, Mailer covered the turbulent Democratic and Republican National Conventions, work that he later published as, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). In that book, Mailer portrays American politics cynically as a crass and self-interested exchange of political power. Reflecting back later on the party politics of the 1960s-era, Mailer wrote, "If you played for a team, you did your best to play very well, but there was something obscene… with starting to think there was more moral worth to Michigan than Ohio State." To Mailer, there was little difference between the disgraced Richard Nixon who left the White House after the Watergate scandal and Lyndon Johnson, whose liberal Great Society was derailed by the failed Vietnam war. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Mailer is also seen as a pioneer in what came to be known as the “New Journalism,” a form of creative nonfiction that used some of the style and devices of literary fiction to write fact-based journalism. His most significant work in this vein was Armies of the Night (1968), a nonfiction novel about the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Mailer also wrote books about the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, a response to criticisms of him and other male authors by feminist author, Kate Millett, and an account of the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Forman in Zaire.
In 1979, Mailer published The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize. The “true crime” novel focuses on the execution of Utah murderer, Gary Gilmore. His final novel, Harlot’s Ghost, published in 1991, explored the hidden history of the CIA from the end of WWII through the mid-1960s. Mailer, who also wrote drama and screenplays for films, died in 2007.
_____________________
Jimmy Breslin was an outspoken journalist and novelist who was known as a tough-talking representative of working-class residents in his hometown, Queens, New York. In 1962, Breslin wrote a best-selling book on the New York Mets baseball team, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? In 1963, he was covering southern civil rights activism in Selma, Alabama, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. While other journalists wrote stories about the fallen president, Breslin secured an interview with Malcolm Perry, the Parkland Hospital doctor who had tried to save him. He followed that up with a powerful column about Clifton Pollard, the man who dug Kennedy’s grave. As journalist David Shedden later wrote, “It’s a plainly told story -- no breathtaking sentences here -- but the style is effective in its Hemingway-esque directness. Breslin moves from the gravedigger’s perspective, to a more omniscient view of the funeral, back to the worker. We like the passage about Jackie Kennedy, its moving description of her particular, telling gestures. But the piece’s central power lies in Breslin’s juxtaposition of the cemetery workers, the small details of the scene’s sounds and sights, with the enormity of the event." From there, Breslin secured positions as a columnist for a succession of New York newspapers, gaining a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and injustice. Like Mailer, Breslin was seen as a pioneer of the New Journalism movement and often mixed his own experience with his journalistic reportage of political events. In 1969, he published the true-crime book, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, about mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his band of bungling baddies. The book was made into a film in 1971.
Breslin continued to be an influential writer until his death in 2017. In 1973, he wrote another novel, World Without End, Amen. In 1977, Breslin again gained notoriety for a series of compelling articles on the infamous “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz. In response to those essays and in the midst of his killing spree, Berkowitz wrote to Breslin: “Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.” The murderer continued, “J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative.” In 1978, Breslin received a sizable advance to co-write a book about the Son of Sam murders with Dick Schaap, titled, .44. Many viewed the book as exploitative and in poor taste so soon after the traumatic events. In 1986, Breslin won a Pulitzer Prize, in part for his writing about the AIDS epidemic in New York City, as well his broader work championing the causes of ordinary people. In later decades, he published a memoir, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (1996), as well as a non-fiction account of a Mexican construction worker in New York who was killed on site when a building collapsed, The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), and a final book about the mafia, titled, The Good Rat (2008). Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith described Breslin, "like an Irish wind that has blown through Queens and Harlem and Mutchie's bar. It is a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin." Following his death in 2017, Tom Wolfe called him, “incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era.”
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
button
Off the Pig (Black Panther)
Black Panther Party
<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://archive.org/embed/Black-Panther-Film-FBI-1968" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Internet Archive
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
May Day (Black Panthers)
Black Panther Party
"On May 1, 1969 the Black Panther Party held a massive rally in San Francisco. Speakers Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Charles Garry present the rally's demands for the release of Huey Newton and all political prisoners. The film includes footage of the police raid on Panther headquarters in San Francisco a few days prior to the rally and the Panther's Breakfast for Children Program." (Roz Payne Archive) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rD8hKpFDIIo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
film