This screen-printed poster by Sarita L. Johnson, possibly an amateur or student artist at the time, features a sketchy design of five Black women of various ages; it advertises a conference for Black women at Laney College in Oakland, California. During the sixties and seventies, Oakland was one of the main centers of political activism both in the Bay Area and in the country as a whole. It was a focus of the civil protests that ultimately resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Black Panther Party was founded there in 1966. In 1979, nearly half of Oakland’s population was Black and during the previous decade Black Women had established an increasing number of explicitly Black feminist organizations in response to their experiences of racial bias in of the Women’s Liberation and Civil Rights Movements.
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