Although committed to freedom and equal rights for African Americans, Bannister did not often directly represent those issues in his paintings. In one work, "Hay Gatherers", Bannister depicts African American field laborers that combines his rural landscapes with a representation of the racial oppression and labor exploitation that marked Rhode Island, particularly in South County, where most of the state's plantations once were. Through the geometric composition of the painting, which divides the figures and the landscapes into triangular sections, Bannister combined a seemingly idealized landscape with his early political practice, visible in his humanist portraits such as "Newspaper Boy".