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New Haven: The Connecticut Panther Defense Fund, [1969]. Poster, 17.5” x 11.125”. Ericka Huggins autograph in ink to the left of “Ourselves.” CONDITION: Good, slight separation at left along old central horizontal folds and light edgewear, moderate toning, pinholes at right margin.

A scarce poster, signed by Ericka Huggins, calling for “a massive demonstration” in New Haven to support six female Black Panthers being held at the Connecticut women’s prison in Niantic.

The protest was scheduled for November 22nd and would consist of “A march…from Beaver Pond Park, eight blocks to the New Haven Green, 500 feet from the court-house in question.” Participants are invited to “bring your children!” and day care would be available “for those who want it.” The reasons for the protest are detailed above, and the prisoners’ plight—“Three of these women are pregnant. Their babies will be born under armed guard and then taken away from them. NONE HAVE BEEN TRIED OR FOUND GUILTY OF ANY CRIME!”—is identified as just one link in a global struggle against oppression, “an extension and reflection of the conditions forced on all women,” be they “in Vietnam, Bolivia, the California grape vineyards, Angola, or a Chicago ghetto. New Haven is the crucial place where the government has chosen to try to destroy the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale will be brought to trial in New Haven. Come to New Haven on November 22!”

A list of demands begins with “Freedom for all political prisoners” and ends with the right for the imprisoned mothers “to make their own arrangements for the custody of the children,” although this last is followed by the explanation that, “Although we do not believe that children are the private property of their mothers,” the State’s inadequate treatment of children—in orphanages, foster homes, institutions, and through the welfare system—has proven it to be “an unfit guardian for human beings.”

Behind the text is the striking half-tone profile of Ericka Huggins, fist raised in the Black Panther salute. Her signature, with a heart before the “e,” appears to the right of her head. Huggins, whose husband John was killed in 1969, just a few weeks after the birth of her daughter, was arrested in New Haven on the same charges as Bobby Seale: the murder of Alex Rackley, a suspected police informer. It took some four months to select the (heavily white) jury, and, as the poster points out, “An air of secrecy” hung over the trial: “No radio or TV coverage or cameras, not even sketching, will be allowed in the court room. Lawyers and their aides and all people connected with the case have been forbidden to speak to the public…” Charges against Huggins were ultimately dropped, and she was finally released on May 25th, 1971. Angela Davis called her “the strongest, most courageous Black woman in America.”

OCLC records just two similarly-titled holdings, at Yale and Northwestern, though the example at Yale is likely a different broadside, which appears in an article in The Yale Herald. That broadside has no illustration and different text, and was evidently printed later, since, among other variations, it notes the traumatic labor and delivery of the first of the three pregnant women to give birth.

REFERENCES: Arakaki, Connor. “Let the Archives Speak: May Day, 1970 on the Green,” The Yale Herald, April 8, 2024, online; Davis, Angela. “A Letter to Ericka from Angela,” in If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (San Francisco, CA: The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, 1971), p. 123.

Item #10194

Price: $950.00