History of the CollectionĬBS News commissioned Connecticut sketch artist and painter Robert Templeton to produce several large drawings of the trial to broadcast on the television news.
At a meeting with Yale faculty and administrative officers, Kingman Brewster (Yale 1941), President of Yale University, made a statement that shocked his colleagues: “I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” The trial lasted for many months and after five days of deliberation, the jury deadlocked and the case was declared a mistrial. Yale opened its gates to the crowds, and many students joined the protest. On May Day, 1970, some 15,000 Panther Party members and their supporters came to New Haven to protest the trial. Many speculate that the charges against Seale and Huggins, neither of whom was present during the commission of the murder, were issued in an effort to destroy the Party.
The state charged Bobby Seale, founder and national chairman of the Black Panther Party, and Ericka Huggins, head of the Party’s New Haven chapter, with conspiracy to kidnap and murder Rackley the prosecutors sought the death penalty. A victim of the resulting paranoia among some Party members, Alex Rackley was murdered by fellow Panthers who suspected him of being an informant. At the time of Rackley’s murder, the organization had several thousand members operating in regional chapters in major American cities the Panthers growth and their call for violent action against racist institutions made the Party a subject of investigations by local and federal law enforcement agencies. Rackley was a member of the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary Black Nationalist organization founded in 1966 in California. On May 21st, 1969, police found the body of 19-year-old Alex Rackley on a riverbank in Middlefield, CT.