American Historical Ephemera & Photography

12 1/4 x 12 3/4 in. string-bound adjustable album with red faux leather wrapped boards and "Scrap Book" in gilt lettering to front cover (wear to extremities) containing 98 mostly black and white snapshots, all 3 1/2 x 5 in., most secured to album pages with adhesive (some have come loose, with adhesive residue to verso). Handwritten ink captions on many album pages identify featured subjects and/or provide quotations/commentary, while inscription to front pastedown identifies the subject of the album as "The National Conference on New Politics / Aug 31 - Sept 4 1967 / Palmer House, Chicago." 

Subjects include Simon Casady (1908-1995), Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998), Julian Bond (1940-2015), Dick Gregory (1932-2017), Dr. Donna Allen (1920-1999), William Pepper (b. 1937), Hunter Pitts O'Dell (1923-2019), Clark Kissinger (b. 1940), James Foreman (1928-2005), Floyd McKissick (1922-1991) and others. 

Interestingly, at least two of the snapshots feature the lesser-known Michael Wood, a college dropout who blew the whistle on the CIA's secretive funding and use of the National Student Association to advance American interests. 

24 color photographs are included in the album, 17 of which feature H. Rap Brown (aka Jamil Abdulla al-Amin), a Black activist who served as the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from May 1967 to June 1968. Album caption reads "Rap Brown in New Orleans / Arraigned on carrying a weapon in interstate while under criminal indictment in Maryland for inciting to riot & arson." In 2002, Brown was convicted of shooting two Fulton County, GA sheriff's deputies, and is currently serving a life sentence for that crime. 

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, which extensively covered the conference in 1967, the National Conference for New Politics was the place and time for "politicos, activists, and anti-war advocates mixed and mingled to excite their base and prepare for the upcoming election season." The highlight of the weekend conference was undoubtedly a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in which he criticized the Vietnam War for exacerbating the hatreds between continents and races, and frustrating development in the United States. He called for a referendum on the war in the 1967-68 election so that the American people could have "an opportunity to vote into oblivion those who cannot detach themselves from militarism." He also poignantly called racism a "corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization."