PANTHER AND BULLDOG: RECALLING MAY DAY 1970

5 2 Y P A N T H E R A N D B U L L D O G R E C A L L I N G M A Y D A Y 1 9 7 0 P E T E R B R O O K S You couldn’t have asked for a brighter May Day – clear sky, the sun already warm when I walked the short mile from my house on Edwards Street down Whitney Avenue and Temple Street as the walls and turrets of Yale University began to define themselves before me. At the intersection of Grove Street, just down the road from the historic cemetery with its pseudo-Egyptian gateway proclaiming that the dead shall be raised, I came upon the sight I had been partly expecting – and dreading. But its reality was more than I was prepared for. The Connecticut National Guard in troop carriers and jeeps, deployed all along Grove Street, thus forming a cordon for the demonstration that was about to begin on the New Haven Green. What struck me most was the provocation of their weapons, out in plain view, pointing every which way. They looked neither disciplined nor alert; they weren’t in formation. They just looked sinister. It was only later that I learned that those rifles they displayed so conspicuously contained live ammunition. On 4 May would come the Kent State shootings, when the National Guard opened fire on student demonstrators. Those shootings might have occurred at Yale. My walk to Timothy Dwight College (one of Yale’s twelve 5 3 R undergraduate residences), in preparation for moving on to the Green at 4 p.m., wasn’t exactly to participate in the demonstration in support of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, on trial in the New Haven courthouse, which fronts the Green, for conspiracy in the murder of Alex Rackley, a nineteen-year-old Panther recruit whose tortured body had been found in a swamp near Middlefield, Connecticut, where it had been dumped after he was shot as a traitor by Warren Kimbro, a model leader of black youth in New Haven who had also joined the Panthers. Orders to ‘‘execute’’ Rackley had been brought from Oakland Panther headquarters; the theory of the prosecution was that their source was Bobby Seale. The prosecution’s case eventually proved very weak, however , entirely dependent on the testimony of one notoriously unreliable informant (George Sams, I.Q. 75), and Seale was never convicted. But Bobby Seale had become something of an obsession to J. Edgar Hoover and the o≈ce he established, cointelpro, to monitor political radicals intent on undoing the U.S. government. (A fine source of information on all this is the book by Paul Bass and Douglas Rae, Murder in the Model City, 2006.) I was on my way to Timothy Dwight in order to form part of a ‘‘faculty presence’’ among the students for this ominous Friday, 1 May 1970, which would see a weekend-long demonstration to ‘‘free Bobby’’ on the Green. I was part of the ‘‘monitoring committee’’ created by William Sloane Co≈n, Yale’s chaplain and a celebrated leader in the civil rights and antiwar movements, who had undertaken to negotiate between Yale and the city of New Haven – especially, the chief of police – to try to minimize the damage that might occur in this gathering that promised to include representatives of all of radical America, even some of its violent elements. The immediate provocation to the rally came early in the judicial proceedings against Seale and two colleagues: the judge sentenced two of the defendants, David Hilliard and Emory Douglas, to six monthsinprisonforcontemptofcourtforarelativelyminorinfraction of courtroom etiquette. Seale himself was already serving a prison sentence as part of the ‘‘Chicago Eight,’’ and the photos of him bound and gagged at the order of Chicago Judge Julius Ho√man had become the stu√ of posters. The trial in New Haven seemed to left-wing America like one more attempt to destroy the Black Panthers. Who gave the word to assemble in New Haven on 1 5 4 B R O O K S Y May isn’t clear...