[African-Americana] [King, Martin Luther, Jr.] Photograph Album Documenting the National Conference for New Politics

Chicago: Palmer House Hotel, etc., August 31-September 4, 1967. Folio. 21 leaves, containing 99 mounted black and white and color photographs, each measuring 3 1/2 x 5 in. (89 x 127 mm); many with manuscript captions on mounts, identifying subjects or providing commentary. String-bound red faux leather boards, stamped in gilt; several photographs now loose; scattered glue residue present from now loose photos, some wear in same areas.

A fine photograph album depicting scenes from the 1967 National Conference for New Politics Convention (NCNP), "one of the most ambitious attempts to forge a broad political alliance of antiwar organisations, New Left insurgents and the radical wing of the civil rights movement in 1960s America" (Simon Hall, On the Tail of the Panther: Black Power and the 1967 Convention of the National Conference for New Politics, 2003, p. 59). Featuring dozens of snapshots of the Convention's participants, including Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Simon Casady (1908-1995), 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), H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdulla al-Amin), and others.

The Convention grew out of meetings held during the summer and fall of 1965 between several peace and civil rights activists, student leaders, and New Left radicals, and whose goal was establishing a political coalition between various anti-war activists and civil rights groups. As Hall notes, the "coalition was based around four broad objectives: ending the Cold War and US military intervention abroad, establishing racial equality, encouraging world disarmament and constructive relations with Third World revolutionaries, and using America’s growing productive capacity to meet the needs of her inner cities and depressed rural areas" (p. 62). Several organizations were represented, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Socialist Workers Party, Vietnam Summer, National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), and others.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shown here in five photographs, gave the keynote speech on the Convention's opening night, 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."

Twenty-four color photographs are included in the album, 17 of which feature H. Rap Brown (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. Two 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.

This lot is located in Philadelphia.

Provenance

From the collection of Justin G. Schiller

[African-Americana] [King, Martin Luther, Jr.] Photograph Album Documenting the National Conference for New Politics