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Cover photo by Richard Conniff

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About this Issue

4

Introduction

6

May Day- What Happened?

It started with a dead body in the Coginchaug River, and escalated into a mass rally on the New Haven Green. By Ellen Katz.

Mlnlfeatures

11

Radical roomates ... the children's crusade ... welcome co-eds ... closing shop.

Features

16

The King's Conundrum

up

While radicals threatened to torch the campus, disgruntled alumni stopped giving mo~. President Kingman Brewster had to make sure the University sUTVived. By David Greenberg.

20

Adventures in Doonland GarryTrudeau's Doonesbury characters step out of the comics to talk about hippies, football, and the cartoonist's uncan'!)' skill. By Ruth Conniff.

28

Awaiting the Awakening During the strike, African-American professors demanded greater representation on the faculty and racial awareness at Yale. Sound familiar? By Motoko Rich.

32

On the Eve of Destruction Conservatives saw May Day as a betrayal of academic neutrality and the beginning of the University's decline. By Danul Panner.

38

Essay

42

Suspicion and Paranoia

Long <ifter fear swept the city in 1970, the public is Imming about a secret wiretapping scheme that involved Yale police and the FBI. By Jamie Workman.

A Shared History The author urges African-American students to reach out to New Haven's black community and recover a sense of their historical ties. By Gary Dauphin.

Profiles

26

Bobby Seale: Still Fighting for Freedom The former chairman of the Black Panther Party is now renovating dilapidaled buildings, marketing his cookbook, and earning a Ph. D. By Kathy Reich.

36

Kurt Schmoke: Reform, not Revolution The Big Man on Campus in 1970, Mayor Kurt Schmolce of Baltimore today leads the .fight to decriminalize drugs. By Jamu Slaughter.

Interview

45

John Hersey: A Survial That's Worth It The former master of Pierson College talks politics and reassesses the future he predicted 20 JIMTS ago.

The. New Journal/February 2, 1990 3

About this Issue/Ruth Conniff T h is semester marks the 20th anniversary of May Day at Yale. In the spring of 1970, across the country, campus radicalism was at its height.

Students at 450 colleges went on strike in opposition to the Vietnam War. Six of them were shot by National Guardsmen at Kent and Jackson State. The turmoil of the 1960s suddenly erupted at Yale when the national leader of the Black Panther Party stood trial for murder in the New Haven courthouse.

15,000 protesters rolled in from out of town for a massive May 1 rally on the Green. Professors, local shopkeepers and alumni remember that weekend vividly. The National Guard marched down York Street; a cloud of tear gas hovered over the campus; a bomb exploded in Ingalls Rink.

In addition to compiling these recollections, TN] writers sifted through files in Sterling Library's Manuscripts and Archives room. We uncovered mimeographed flyers that read "Power to the People" and "Pigs Must Die," and pored over hasty, handwritten manifestos by students busy planning th e strike, the university shut-down, the revolution . . .

Among the documents stuffed together in the library's May Day Collection, a menu, xeroxed onto a sheet of orange, recycled paper lists the meals available for 25 cents that weekend at Dwight H all: Familia, skim milk, fruit punch and instant tea.

On the back of the menu, an anonymous student has scrawled a few notes in a fervent shorthand: "institutionalism of racism is most important . . . New Haven people- Black, Irish, Russian, Italian . . . I came up thru structure and made it- and they can't." Further down in the margin, he has summarized his internal struggles with this pol itical insight: "2 conflicting desires- to get the final allencompassing analysis/perspective or to act on what I know."

Toward the end of the spring term in 1970, Yale suspended classes and allowed students like this anonymous scribbler to act- to respond to the injustice they saw around them. The arch ives contain a chorus of other notes, an nouncements and minutes from meetings that document the results of this experiment. These eager, earnest jottings have a familiar 4 The New Joumal!February 2, 1990

GET EDUCf\1ÂŁD tone. It is easy to imagine the authors, huddled together around dining hall tables, or staying up all night in their dorm rooms. Like us, they were troubled by the vast problems of racism and oppression. And they, too, felt ambivalent about their responsibility as Yale students to the city and the society around them.

In many ways, though, the student movement of the 1960s and '70s has made us more ambivalent. We romanticize the idealism of that era, even as we are cynical about it. Words like "Establishment" and "Power Structure" sound dated. All that talk about revolution, we are told, was just a lot of empty posturing.

Shortly after May Day, John Hersey wrote a book about student activism at Yale, the first chapter of which he titled "On Bullshit.'' Before we can understand the student movement of the 1960s, Hersey wrote, we must dig through the layer of rhetoric that obscures what was real and relevant about the changes of that time. This is the challenge we share with the anony-

mous writer working out a political agenda on the back of his menu. How can we students apply our new-found wisdom to society's most entrenched problems? How much of our insight is valid and how much is just a lot ofb.s.?

Finally, how much of the talk, the posture, and the idealism of the 1960s' radicalism can we laugh or sneer at in retrospect, and how much must we accept as shaping our political reality today?

In this issue, we make no pretense of giving a definitive account of the 1960s, or even of May Day at Yale .

What we have done is to assemble a few scraps of history: an unpublished poem by Allen Ginsberg, some of the early Yale cartoons of Garry Trudeau, and interviews with people who were¡ here back then- Rosey of Rosey's Cleaners, Bobby Seale, Dean Donald Kagan, Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, and others. Their memories and opinions offer us a glimpse of the bullshit and reality of May Day, and maybe tell us somethmg about ourselves.

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May Day- What Happened?

Ellen Katz "There ain't nothing wrong with taking the life of a inotherfucking pig!" Black Panther David Hilliard told 5000 Yale students packed into Ingalls Rink. The crowd booed, but Hilliard continued.

"Go boo me again, racists . . . . Go back to your humanities classes. Yale has a long way to go if they don't think we're hostile . . . and angered by the inactivity of a bunch of young stupid motherfuckers."

Down the street, Bobby Seale and eight other Black Panthers were on trial for murder. The Panthers' revolution had come to the Yale campus. "The Panther program was really asking of whites no more than our forbears 200 years before had asked of the British king and Parliament," said former Yale Chaplain and activist William Sloane Coffin, Jr. During the spring of 1970, Yale took up Hilliard's call to action.

Classes stopped as students went on strike and rallied in sympathy with the Panthers. On the weekend of May 1, thousands of demonstrators converged on the New Haven Green. "We were the center of the universe for a few moments," said William Porter III (DC '71), now a history teacher in New Haven and current secretary of his class. "We made national news."

It all began a year before May Day, when police pulled the body of Alex Rackley from the Coginchaug River 25 miles ncrth of New Haven. The Black Panther had been shot twice, and cigarette burns and ice-pick wounds scarred his body. A wire hanger encircled his neck. On March 13, 1970, Seale arrived in New Haven to stand trial for ordering the murder of Rackley, a suspected police informant. The Panthers claimed that the police had trumped up the charges as part of a conspiracy to destroy their movement and the cry spread, "Free Bobby Seale." Hilliard warned, "If anything happens to Bobby Seale,

there will not be any lights for days in this country. Not only will we burn buildings, we will take lives. We will kill judges." The party threatened to storm the Montville, Connecticut prison where Seale was incarcerated.

The Yale community began to rally to the Panthers' defense just before the trial. During pre-trial proceedings on April 14, Judge Harold Mulvey sentenced Hilliard and Panther Emory Douglas to six months in prison after they argued with a court officer who told Hilliard to stop reading a note.

Although Mulvey released the two

"We were the center of the universe for a few moments. We made national news."

men the following week, his overreaction lent credence to the Panthers' claim that white courts could not treat black revolutionaries fairly. "I had great sympathy for the Panthers," said Coffin, now president of a nuclear disarmament group, "if not as champions of justice then as victims of injustice." The Panther slogan "Power to the people" began to echo throughout the campus.

"The issue of racism in this trial brought something to our consciousness," said Porter. "We began to think that maybe this wasn't the land of the free, and people weren't innocent until proven guilty." More than 400 Yale students attended a meeting on April 15 w discuss how to show their concern. Suggestions included bombing

Yale, shutting off New Raven's water supply, and, as one law student proposed, the public shooting of one volunteer each day until Seale was freed. Their actual response was much more moderate. They called on the Yale Corporation to donate $500,000 to the Panthers' defense and declared a four-day moratorium on classes.

Meanwhile, Panther supporters announced a rally to be held on May 1 on the New Haven Green. They predicted 50,000 people would come.

Yale President Kingman Brewster feared that protesters arriving in New Haven for the rally would vent their wrath on the University, a symbol of the white establishment. Over the objections of some masters and faculty, Brewster decided to open up the campus to the out-of-town demonstrators in the hope of defusing their anger. The residential colleges would provide food and housing.

As administrators braced for the onslaught, students and faculty began to talk of striking. Many students felt they were wasting their time in class while events of national importance unfolded around them. "I came to see the need for some taking of time, some suspension of business as usual," said French Professor Peter Brooks. Yet some questioned what a strike would accomplish. "Were we going to stop the trial?" Porter wondered. "Was he going to get a fairer trial because we were doing this?"

After the rally at Ingalls Rink on April 21, students returned to their colleges to decide whether to strike.

Calhoun and Silliman voted strongly in favor of. the idea, while Saybrook came out against it. A group called the Strike Steering Committee pressed for the dismissal of charges against the "New Haven Nine" and, in addition, demanded that Yale provide unemployment compensation and day-care facilities for its employees, fund The New Journal/February 2, 1990 7

community housing projects, and cease buying up New Haven property.

Students began picketing LinslyChittenden and Harkness Halls with signs reading, "Skip class, talk politics." Some heeded only the first part of this exhortation. Porter said, "I didn't think of not goipg to class in a political sense. I thought of it more as 'Hey, I don't have to go to class today."'

But if some undergraduates spent their April days playing frisbee and suntanning, others took the strike seriously. Silliman coordinated a "teach-out" in which more than 500 students and faculty canvassed New Haven neighborhoods to publicize their concerns about the trial. The baseball team donated the proceeds from its games to the Black Student Alliance; the track team withdrew from the Penn Relays. Singing groups held jams to raise money for the Panthers' defense. A daily strike newspaper began publishing from Dwight Hall. In its first issue of April 24, it reported class attendance had dropped by between 65 and 75 percent.

More than 400 professors attended a special faculty meeting in Sprague Hall on April 23 to discuss the trial and the strike. While hundreds of demonstrators clamored outside the building, inside Brewster said he was skeptical whether black revolutionaries could get a fair trial in the U.S. -a statement that would cause a national uproar.

The faculty then overwhelmingly voted to "modify normal academic expectations" and Brewster issued a directive supporting the resolution.

Some professors kept teaching, some used class time to discuss racism and the trial, and others cancelled class altogether.

As May Day approached, tension on campus grew. A week before the rally $2500 worth of mercury, which is used to make bombs, was swiped from Sterling Chemistry lab. Just outside New Haven, several hundred shotguns with fixed bayonets were stolen from the back of a truck. Radical groups ranging from the Weathermen to Hell's Angels were rumored to be arriving in New Haven to torch Yale.

Administrators began removing vital records from the treasurer's office and valuable artwork from the galleries. The entire Sterling Library card catalog was photocopied.

Telephone linemen welded down manhole covers to prevent troublemakers from severing cables. Students 8 The New journal/February 2, 1990

packed up their stereos and television sets and left town.

The night before May Day, &ichard Nixon announced on national television that the U.S had invaded Cambodia: The disclosure enraged students already angry about the Vietnam War, and violence seemed more likely than ever. Attorney General John Mitchell dispatched 4,000 Marines and paratroopers to nearby military bases; Governor John Dempsey called 2,500 National Guard troops into downtown New Haven.

Brooks said hearing the news of the invasion was "the worst moment of that spring."

By the morning of May 1, the city was prepared for battle. Plywood panels covered the ground-floor windows of every building in the downtown area. Police positioned themselves on the far end of the Green, armed with clubs and tear gas. The National Guard stood several blocks away. While driving into New Haven that morning, Brooks said, he saw a long line of troops stationed in front of the Grove Street Cemetery beneath the words, "The Dead Shall Be Raised."

He recalled the heavy weaponry and the "rifle barrels sticking in every direction."

By afternoon, the climate had changed. It was warm and sunny as 15,000 demonstrators gathered on the Green. Loudspeakers blasted "Here Comes the Sun" and the message repeated, "It's all right . . . . It's all right." The sweet smell of marijuana

Demonstrators on Elm street for 1 variety of causes (above). A protestor holding a Panther paper outside the courthouse (right).

Slogans splashed across a buildin! at Yale (below).

drifted throu'gh the air. "It was an absolutely beautiful day," said Brooks Kelley, a historian of Yale. "That helped undoubtedly to defuse things because it was more like a country fair than a place where people were up in arms." A few shirtless youths took down the American flag and hoisted the banner of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's Yippie Party. A Harvard senior told Time magazine, "One just should be here, not to trash or fight, but to be on the right side."

The rally itself was a grab bag of moderate speeches; not even the violent rhetoric seemed too menacing.

"If the U.S. has lost face in Vietnam, it's going to lose its ass in Cambodia," Hoffman said. "If they find Bobby . . . and the Panthers guilty, we're going to pick up [the courthouse] and send it to the moon." Others preached nonviolence. It was not the time "to kill pigs," Panther leader Doug Miranda said.

He advised the crowd, "When you walk around the campus tonight, walk hiply, walk quietly."

Late in the afternoon, rally organizers opened the microphone to anyone who wanted to talk. "The result was that you got people who were for women's rights, gay rights, and any cause you can practically thing of," Kelley said. "You got these long, long speeches for things that had nothing to do with the issue at hand, and that had to help make it calm. People got a little bored." Demonstrators returned to colleges for a dinner of soup, brown rice, salad, granola and coffee. Some snacked on "civil defense survival crackers" that had been stored in university basements in preparation for nuclear war. Students reported the crackers were inedible.

As night fell, fighting broke out. A false rumor that police were arresting Panthers spread from college to college and demonstrators rushed to the Green. Hoping to stem the onrushing crowds, Coffin handed a police bullhorn to a young Panther, who ordered the crowd, "Back in the colleges, you motherfuckers. Anyone who stays on the Green is a motherfuckin' pig in civilian clothes." As the demonstrators retreated, Coffin suggested to Police Chief James Ahem, "Maybe you ought to hire that kid." Neither Ahem nor Coffin ever saw the bullhorn again, although it was heard periodically during the evening.

Sporadic clashes between demonstrators and police condnued for several hours. Some strapped on World War I gas masks and with rocks The New JournaVFebruary 2, 1990 9

Around midnight, glass shattered as three bombs exploded in a stairwell at Ingalls Rink.

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and bottles in hand, moved on the police; the cops responded by firing tear gas canisters. As the gas drifted onto Old Campus, people fled, leaving the quadrangle deserted except for the poet Allen Ginsberg, who sat crosslegged on the bandstand chanting ~om, Om." A few students came back to hold wet towels to Ginsberg's eyes as tears rolled down his face, and the oms went on.

Around midnight, glass shattered as three bombs exploded in a stairwell at Ingalls Rink. The blast shook buildings several blocks away.

Although thousands crowded into the rink for a rock concert, the rumor of Panther arrests had all but emptied the building. No one was se~t~ously injured, but the damage cost nearly $1 00,000 to repair.

Saturday was much like Friday, with calm speeches during the day and fighting between protesters and police at night. Because of diminishing attendance-only 7000 were on hand for the second rally- the afternoon passed quietly and o rganizers decided to cancel the activities scheduled for Sunday. Just after dark, however, a fire broke out at the rally headquarters on the corner of Church and Elm Streets, where the New Haven Savings Bank now stands. Spectators gathered, first on the' courthouse steps, then more of them on the Green. Once again, demonstrators threw rocks and bottles; again, police and National Guardsmen responded with tear gas.

The gas spread into colleges and seeped into dorm rooms, and students had to take refuge in the attics. Still, by the end of the weekend, the police had made just 37 arrests, including only one Yale student, and no one had been seriously hurt.

The National Guard began rolling out of New Haven on Monday-the same day troops in Ohio killed four students on the Kent State campus.

"What happened at Kent State was what my father was scared to death would happen here," Porter said. The relative peace in New Haven led Life magazine to conclude, "Yale proves :lissent doesn't have to turn out that

way."

The national media praised Yale's handling of the protests, and the Corporation unanimously backed Brewster's actions during the strike.

Some students began preparing for finals, while others continued to skip class as part of a national strike against the Cambodian invasion. Officially, normal academic activities resumed, with special grading procedures provided for work missed during the strike.

"I'm not sure what the May Day protests did really accomplish," Coffin said. "It certainly did not free Bobby Seale." But while the protesters did not stop the trial from going forward, Seale was eventually freed. On May 26, 1971, Mulvey dismissed all charges against Seale as well as fellow Panther Ericka Huggins after the trial ended with a hung jury. Mulvey figured that a second trial would only generate more controversy and result in a similar deadlock.

Twenty years after May Day, the issues ¡raised by the spring protests still reverberate on campus. If Seale's trial made Yale students think about racism in the judicial system, debates today over divestment, hiring practices and curricula indicate similar concerns about Yale itself. While in 1970 conservatives attacked Kingman Brewster for having violated Yale's neutrality by supporting the strike, President Benno Schmidt now draws cntJCJsm for not being outspoken enough. In 1970. the Strike Steering Committee called upon Yale to take responsibility for the welfare of the New Haven community by providing housing and day care; today, administrators discuss investment in the city and students volunteer in a range of community projects begun then.

By raising these issues, May Day profoundly affected Yale and the students of 20 years ago, and helped shape the generation that followed.

â&#x20AC;˘

Ellen Katz, a junior in Timothy Dwight College; is on the staff of TN].

Radical Roommates The official line was explicit.

"Remember that the colleges are not sanctuaries from the police," admonished a Davenport memorandum.

"They are free to enter the college and to make arrests for violations of drug, liquor, and weapons regulations.

Please be observant of these laws." A Timothy Dwight notice read, "Should violence occur in streets around TD th e gates will be closed . . . TD will not be a fortress or a political refuge but a center for aid." Not all students, h owever, adhered to the rules. "We h ad lookouts in the tower. We had people patrolling the courtyard. If anybody was being chased into Stiles, we had plans to close and bar the gates on the cop," said Jeff Lewis (ES '70).

In anticipation of the May Day rally, Yale students had chosen to "liberate" their residential colleges, offering shelter to the visiting demonstrators. Berkeley opened half of its rooms while T.D. restricted guests to "public spaces" such as the b u ttery, squash courts, ping-pong room and laundry room. In Stiles, Lewis said, "We opened up the entire college. Some took people into the rooms. Most camped m the courtyard."

T he visitors who occupied the couches and common-room floors ranged from Harvard friends to Black P a n thers. One respondent to a questionnaire issued after May Day described the people he hosted as "college kids (who J seemed fairl y harmless." Another characterized her guest as a "nice liberal guy with a gas mask." Other Yalies remember their guests as radical, militant, or just plain bizarre. "T here were all kinds of weird people," said Bruce McMurdo (MC '71 ). "Th ere were people from Antioch gathering in the streets, practicing

drills they'd learned from European student protesters." Master Richard Lewis of Calhoun wrote that counterculture icons Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin showed up at his house looking for ~ place to stay. He scribbled on the form: "Hoffman and Rubin not invited ... Rubin 'high' all the time." The word "not" was underlined twice.

Four Black Panthers from Harlem stayed with Mike Petru (BK '73), but they were too interested in the surrounding turmoil to hang around O ld

wrote in an unpublished account of the period, "R e flecting my own personal concern with certain valuables I owned, I didn't sign up to house demonstrators in my room." There were some scattered breaches of hospitality. Dan Horowitz (MC '71) said his stu dent guests stole from his room. "T hat kind of took the idealism out of the whole thing," he said. One Calhoun respondent to the questionnaire claim ed that his guests had engaged in a different sort of extralegal activity: "On e guy was a pimp, pimping off white chicks and giving money to the Panth ers." Such rumors and suspicion thrived in the chaotic atmosphere.

Still, on the whole, Yale students' willingness to assist the demonstrators superseded an y fears of abuses of the system. Many said they did not hear abou t anything going wrong. "Maybe this was just n aivete, b u t I myself wasn't in the slightest worried about it.

It j ust seemed so antithetical to the spirit of the time," said Robert Gordon (TD '73).

"T he spirit of the time" probably best explains wh y the students were so willing to op en up their residences in 1970 to total strangers. "It was a much Campus very long. "They were people more experimental crowd back then.

I didn't spend very much time with," The times were just so different," Petru said. On one of the evenings, Bruce McMurdo explained. "Students when tear gas spread through the now would be like, 'Well, I paid my streets, his guests left to check out the tuition,' and would see all th e people as action and never came back to Welch a kind of intrusion." It seems remarkHall. Bill Crawford (BR '70) spent a able today, as college committees work few uncomfortable moments talking to raise our consciousness about securiwith the visiting Panther contingent: ty and remind us not to prop open en"They tended to be sort of dogmatic. tryway doors, but that weekend, virThey were heroic in a kind of macho tually the only people Yalies barred the sense, but you didn't want them to gates on were the cops. open their mouths."

Some students were afraid to host anyone at all. Ed Samuels (SM '71) -Marie Ribbing

"They tended to be sort of dogmatic.

T hey wer e h er oic in a kin d of m ach o sen se, but you didn't want them to open their m ouths."

â&#x20AC;˘

The New JoumaVFebruary 2, 1990 It

The Children's Crusade In the converted firehouse on Highland Street which houses the Calvin Hill Day Care Center, preschoolers play with handmade dress-up clothes and miniature kitchen utensils.

As they put on costumes and cook up an imaginary lunch, the children are oblivious to the trouble it took to get them there.

To enroll the toddlers in a day-care facility , working parents face heavy competition. Calvin Hill, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, accepted only 30 percent of its applicants this year, and most other centers in the city are just as full. In Ne"-" Haven, the day-care crunch makes many .families desperate, and at Yale, a growing number of faculty members are vying for the prized spots in Calvin Hill.

While the center is renowned for its progressive child-care practices, it has strayed from some of the original goals of its founders. In 1970, students insisted on day care for low-income families of Yale's union employees. But today, Calvin Hill admits children of Yale professors and graduate students, and less than half of its children come from union families.

Twenty years ago, day care barely existed at all. The University had no plans to build up any family services until October 1969, when the firing of Colia Williams, a waitress in Jonathan Edwards Dining Hall, sparked student protest against the administration.

Williams missed a day of work to care for one of her children, and her dismissal became the focus of a union strike organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

Mary Pearl (DC '72), co-founder of the Calvin Hill Center and Kurt Schmoke (DC '71) urged the University to set up a low-cost day-care facility for employees like Williams. The only child-care service in New Haven at the time was at the Yale Medical School.

Pearl and Schmoke did not realize the difficulty of the undertaking they 12 The New Journal/February 2, 1990

Ch d&famiy Center

had proposed. "We were not very realistic," said Pearl. The student leaders, joined by Sam Chauncey, Seymour Lustman, master of Davenport College, and I.:.ustman's wife Kitty, director of the Medical School Child Study Center, formed a group to establish a permanent day-care center at Yale.

Schmoke, a football player, wanted to name the center after his former teammate Calvin Hill (PC '69), who was then attending theological seminary and starting for the Dallas Cowboys. Although he had no direct connection with day care, Hill , a Yale celebrity, agreed to give his name to the center and became its principal fundraiser.

Convincing administrators that day care needed University backing was more difficult. Not everyone was thrilled by the students' proposal. Pearl says that even President Kingman Brewster, who wrote to foundations on behalf of the program , once told her

not to hound him about funding when she sat next to him at a speech on campus.

The students, however, loved the idea. The Strike Steering Committee included an initiative on day care in its list of five demands for the University, and on May Day weekend, students in Davenport College organized an emergency day-care unit for the incoming protesters.

Pegnataro's, a local Italian grocery store, donated barrels of granola to feed the kids. A New Haven pediatri¡ cian spent the weekend in the master's house caring for a two-year-old girl who arrived with medicine for juvenile diabetes. Brewster himself stopped by several times with his golden retriever over the course of the weekend.

That first makeshift unit had none of the fancy toys or dress-up costumes that clutter the Calvin Hill Day Care Center today. The children of the vtsttmg prOÂŁesters who took over DaveRport's common room slept with

borrowed blankets, pillows, and sleeping bags spread out on the floor.

Although most of them seemed to adapt to their temporary surroundings, some brought traces of their parents' radicalism. "I remember seeing a somewhat angelic child write 'kill the pigs' all over the poster she was painting," recalled Pearl.

After May Day, children went home and students continued to rally for perm anent day care at Yale. Within the month, the administration promised to match any funds Pearl and Schmoke's group could raise. Donations totalling $ 17,500 came in from various sources, including the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the secret society Book and Snake. Over the summer, the rector of St. Thomas More House on Park Street offered the use of the church's recreation room, and in September, 1971, Calvin Hill officially opened its doors. The day-care center remains the only demand from the May Day strike ever tangibly realized.

Even in that first year, Calvin Hill d id not attract as many children from union families as its founders had expected. Only eight of the original 20 children had parents who belonged to Yale's unions. "It was a thing before its time," Chauncey said. "Many bluecollar workers were suspicious of day care. Many of them wondered what was going to hap pen to their children."

Today more working-class parents want day care, but they cannot be sure Calvin Hill will have spaces for them.

Although it remains the only Yale cen ter which provides care based on need alone, Pearl, now assistant director o f the Bronx Zoo and a mother of two young children, remains skeptical about the center she helped create.

"What was meant to be something geared toward union workers," she said, "has come to belong to the middle class."

â&#x20AC;˘

-Abby Young

Welcome Co-eds!

Women breeze in and out of the Center next door to Durfee's Sweet Shop all day. In a front room jammed with ragged couches, piles of posters, and free condoms, students check the chalkboard calendar for meetings and conferences. Right now, the calendar is especially full. It is the 20th anniversary of women at Yale, and celebratory events are planned for almost every week of the semester. But even without the recent events, the Yale Women's Center regularly invites over 10 groups to meet in its space. These groups address a variety of issues, from date rape to dieting to birth control.

As it has expanded since 1970, the Center has publicized women's concerns on campus. And over the years, the same concerns have come up again and again: paid parental leave, on-site University-subsidized day care, and more aggressive recruiting of female professors. Not until this year did Yale President Benno Schmidt agree to establish specific positions for women on the faculty.

While this year's 20th anniversary celebration spotlights female students, the first co-educational class at Yale spent its second semester thrown into a movement that did not champion the rights of women. Beyond the call for day care, none of the official May Day demands recognized women's interests.

A small group of women tried to capitalize on the spirit of social reform.

During the 1970 student strike, they circulated a list of demands, prodding the University to increase female representation on the faculty, end job segregation for non-faculty workers, provide paid maternity leaves, and strive for a 50-50 male-female student ratio. They also wanted better gynecological services at the Department of University Health Services and a department of Women's Studies taught and administered by women.

None of these demands was met until nine years later, when the University founded the Women's Studies program. Faculty numbers have risen from one female professor for every hundred male professors in 1970, to eighteen per hundred in 1990, an increase of less than one per year.

Women now make up only 45 percent of the student body. Most of the other demands from 1970 remain unanswered.

The women who spoke out that spring had not yet organized a formal movement, and represented a small percentage of the female population on campus. Often, they had a hard time even getting together. "None of us knew each other because 'of the way they divided us up into different colleges," said Virginia Diamond (BR The New joumaVFebruary 2, 1990 13

'73). Susanne Wofford, associate professor of English and a member of Yale's first co-ed class, does not recall a ny women's activism during that time. "My impression is that there wasn't very much that was done specifically for women by women," she said. Diamond, Wofford, and other women joined in the protests for the civil r ights of African-Americans instead.

In the midst of the demonstration, a few women managed to set up a temporary women's center on the second floor of SSS Hall. Throughout the weekend, visiting female protesters from colleges around New England could seek refuge there. The center scheduled workshops like "Sexism and Racism," "Women Revolutionaries," and "Venceramos Brigade."

Some women were angry that their concerns received little attention in 1970. A poster tacked up outside Mory's announced: "If we were black or Mexican-American or American Indian, would you understand our RAGE better? Why can't you translate your 'liberal' views into human rights for all people?"

Although the Black Panthers overshadowed feminist sentiment that term, women's activism did not subside when the Panther trials ended.

"The women's movement was still gaining momentum," said Diamond , now a labor lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. "In reaction to the male domination of the civil rights and antiwar movements, women were getting really interested in feminist issues."

Today Yale men, too, have joined the women's movement, particularly to fight for reproductive rights. The recently formed Yale chapter of "Students Organizing Students" is a pro-choice group led by both men and women. With the group, women hope that men will come to understand many of the other issues that concern them. To make institutional change, women and men will have to work together.

â&#x20AC;˘- Milena Navy and Motoko Rich

H The New Journal/February 2, 1990

Closing rip Shop May Day cost Rosey's Cleaners on Wall Street a lot of money. "It cost me $350 dollars just to board the place up," said Herbert Rosenberg, or Rosey, as he is known throughout Yale and New Haven. Like dozens of other shopkeepers who own stores downtown, Rosey closed his business and fortified his showcase windows with layers of plywood. Although no one came into the shop for two days, Rosey said' the place was swamped beforehand with students rushing in to pick up their clothing before heading home to avoid what they thought would be a full-scale riot. "They were all scared to hell."

Rosey and his sister Georgiana both remember seeing protesters walking by their shop on their way to the Green , some with clubs and bats in their hands, one even brandishing a fencing foil. In his 62 years in the business, the tailor can remember no event like May Day. "We were closed for three days then, and we never close, except for deaths in the family," he said.

"Business came to a halt," said David Battista, who used to run the shoe store on Temple Street that still bears his name. "We were told not to open because the situation was pretty

critical. No one knew what to expect."

Since his store was literally only a stone's throw from the Green, Battista was particularly worried about his windows. Nonetheless, he did not board up his shop; instead he called his insurance agent. "I knew that we were involved in a very serious situation in which many stores could get destroyed or looted," he said. Battista was relieved to hear that his store was covered under a civil-disorder clause.

Not all storeowners in the area saw May Day as a danger. Rafael Dilauro, the owner and manager of Group W Bench, said he thought of those days as just "a regular weekend." (Dilauro sports a beard at least a foot long and describes himself as "very liberal.") At the time he ran what he calls "a head shop" on Edgewood Avenue. His store, which has since moved to Chapel Street, sells, among other things, colored beads, psychedelic jewelry, exotic musical instruments and carved wooden pipes. Dilauro stayed open and kept normal hours during the protests. Unlike most shopkeepers in the area, he thought that May Day had positive effects on the community. "I kind of liked it. It put some national focus on New Haven." He said the

Publisher David King Editor-in-Chief Ruth Conniff Managing Editors David Greenberg Motoko Rich Business Manager Jerry Hwang Designer Stephen Hooper Production Manager Lisa Silverman Photography Editor John Kim government's reaction of calling in the National Guard wa!! unnecessary. "It was total overkill. The whole thing was over before it started."

One thing Rosey the tailor remembers about the period was the change in fashion among students. "They started to wear a lot of khakis and blue jeans," he noted. "You know I think th at all started with the Beatles, I really do."

There is perhaps no better judge of Yale fashion than Paul Press, owner of J. Press on York Street, whose upscale shop sells clothing ranging from the classic navy blue blazer to the multicolored scarves associated with each of Yale's residential colleges. Press said that business during those first days of May was particularly slow, but added that in those days students weren't flocking to J. Press anyway. "The undergraduates were reluctant to buy our clothes because of the lifestyle then. They were wearing awful-looking things and everybody would be ashamed to come in and buy a suit. If they did, they kept it quiet." Although he hired two "well-armed guards" to protect his store, windows were broken and a few small items were stolen from the displays.

"This was something you would never have expected to happen at Yale because of the background of the boys that were here a nd their educational and cultur~ training before they were at Yale," said Press, who is ske ptical of the motivations behind the protests. "I t was just a good opportunity to raise hell and so forth ."

Dilauro looks back on th e events of May Day with nostalgia. H e claims that the years since then h ave lacked the spirit and unpredictability of those times, but he expects that the '90s will bring in a new age of activity.

"Something is hap pening. I'm not exactly sure what it is," he said, smiling.

Rosey, on the other hand, would probably not agree. From his vantage point behind the counter of h is cleaning b usiness, he continues to watch Yale and New Haven carefully, and remains confused by May Day. "Those people out there on the Green," he said, "they were all fighting and shouting out against the establishment.

The~"re all in the establishment now."

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The New JournaVFebruary 2, 1990 15

The King's Conundrum

David Greenberg

Just after midnight on the morning of May 1, 1970, two cars drove up to the president's house. A small group of well-known radicals made .their way up the front steps and into the foyer, where Yale President Kingman Brewster waited to escort them to his capacious living room. The radicals- three of them members of the Chicago Seven, on trial for conspiring to riot at the 1968 Democratic convention- stood uncomfortably for a few minutes, looking at one another: Tom Hayden, the scruffy founder of Students for a Democratic Society; John Froines, a Yale Ph.D. and leading academic voice against the Vietnam War; his wife Anne; and David Dellinger (YC '36), the middleaged veteran of the peace movement who was to direct the next day's rally.

Brewster had arranged this secret negotiating session on the eve of May Day to find out what the radicals had in store for tomorrow's demonstrations.

Hayden described the meeting in his memoir. "Everyone graciously tiptoed around the issue of what would happen in the street," he said, until he took it upon himself to break the ice.

"After the d ip lomatic niceties had gone on for half an hour, I interjected: 'Look, let's be very clear. We are not necessarily your friends and allies. But we- the Chicago defendants- agree with the Panthers that there should be no violence here this weekend." The comment was what Brewster and Yale 16 The New Journal/February 2, 1990

Corporation member Cyrus Vance, who had skipped his daughter's graduation to be there, were wait'lng to h ear. The two had feared that the May Day rally would degenerate into a huge brawl. ¡ ¡ T he demonstration leaders were nervous, too. Rumor had it that the governor was calling in the National Guard to encircle the Green with bayonets, and Hayden and his cohorts demanded that Brewster keep the troops away. After long deliberations,

"There was something of the swashbuckler in him. Confrontation fit his style." the rally leaders pledged to keep the crowd calm, in exchange for a promise from Brewster to try to reposition the Guard. But what the radicals did not know was that the troops would not be there anyway. "We had already worked it out with the Guard not to be around the Green," Brewster told an interviewer later. "But I had to have some bargaining power."

Kingman Brewster had pulled off another of the diplomatic masterstrokes that made him famous during May Day. Always cultivating the

image of approachability, the president invited the Chicago defendants into his living room, just as he welcomed thousands of radicals into the college that weekend. Yet all the while he was working in the back room, orchestrating the "events to make sure they stayed under his control.

Throughout the turbulent spring of 1970, Brewster continually maneuvered . between leftwing students who denounced him as a symbol of Establishment authority and conservative alumni who decried the liberal reforms he brought to Old Yale.

Representatives of both sides took issue with Brewster's behavior during May Day. "We have endeavored to be good Yale men," wrote one member of the class of 1905. "Brewster is a better Black Panther than he is a Yale man . . . Yale, as always, should be for God and for Country and run by true Yale men." Meanwhile, Yippie leader Jerry Rubin made his case to a group gathered in Woolsey Hall. "Fuck Kingston Brewer," he explained. "The pressures were on all sides," said Professor Emeritus of Political Science Robert Lane, who stayed on campus for the weekend.

But it was precisely during such challenging times, colleagues say, that Brewster was at his best. "There was something of the swashbuckler in him," said Professor of French Georges May, dean of the college during May Day. "Confrontation fit his style ."

Indeed, . from the beginning of his

President Kingman Brewster managed to keep things calm. presidency, Brewster found himself in one duel after another. A liberal Republican and the scion of an old New England family, Brewster came to Yale as the protege of Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, a family friend.

When Griswold died in 1963 , Brewster became president. While the Old Blues expected him to live up to his patrician image, he instead began to toss aside their most cherished traditions.

Under Brewster's leadership, Yale dropped its coat-and-tie rule and widened its admissions policies. The University began actively recruiting minorities, admitted women as undergraduates for the first time, and abandoned its favoritism toward prepschool kids and sons of Yale graduates.

"He had an astounding ability to turn off alumni," said Brooks Kelley, who wrote a history of Brewster's presi-

dency. While Brewster succeeded in making Yale more diverse, the University paid a price- in dollars.

Upset because they thought the president had compromised Yale's integrity, or simply because their sons weren't being admitted, alumni stopped giving and the endowment suffered. Many saw Brewster as an upstart. "They were used to being treated in a certain way. Then there was a shift," Kelley said. "It seemed like a snub."

Even as an undergraduate in the elite Yale of the 1930s, Brewster felt no tie to tradition for its own sake. When his peers dutifully lined up on the Old Campus on secret society tap night, Brewster hid in a closet in Davenport College to avoid being selected for Skull and Bones. The Bonesmen found him and tapped him anyway, but Brewster held to his egalitarian

principles and refused to join.

Brewster's readiness to defy tradition helped him to meet the challenges of the spring of 1970. "Because he didn't worship at the altar of Eli Yale, he was able to think of original things to do," Lane said. In his decision to open the University to the demonstrators, Brewster broke with the prevailing wisdom of the day. Administrators at Columbia, Corn"ell and numerous other universities adopted a hard line against protesters, while enraged students torched buildings and rioted.

Brewster and his special assistant Henry "Sam" Chauncey, Jr. thought it might make sense to try something different. Rather than chaining up Yale like a fortress, they decided to throw open the gates and allow the demonstrators to eat and sleep in the colleges as guests of the students.

Chauncey said the decision reflected Brewster's pragmatic mind. "I don't want to disillusion anybody, but this wasn't some high and lofty principle, saying let's open our arms and welcome the opposition," . he said.

"This was a pragmatic decision. If we didn't open the colleges, what would happen? The answer was it would probably cause a hell of a lot of trouble." After an April 15 rally in Cambridge, where demonstrators laid waste to Harvard Square, Chauncey, Brewster and others began to worry.

"A lot of people left town because they felt we were being invaded by the Visigoths," May said. "The physical danger was real-of fire, of firearms."

On April 27, a fire broke out in the Law School library, damaging $2000 worth of books, and on May Day weekend the Panther headquarters burned down. Chauncey and Brewster figured that if thousands of demonstrators came streaming toward Yale after the rally on the Green, determined to get in, they would probably succeed. To try to keep them out would only antagonize them.

"The opening of the colleges was a lot easier a decision than you might imagine," Chauncey said. "Getting other people to buy into the decision was a lot harder." Conservative critics argued that opening up the University constituted nothing less than caving in to the radicals. Many of the college masters, moreover, were teluctant to let so many strangers into their college rooms and courtyards, fearing for their The New Journal/February 2, 1990 17

students'- and their own- safety.

Brewster intended the statement as a Brewster the diplomat went to work. gesture of conciliation toward the He spent hours on the telephone, over Panther supporters. "For black faculty, lunch at Mory's, and in his office, it indicated a concern about what was cajoling and convincing the masters important to them," Kelley said. "A lot and faculty into accepting his proposal. of this was symbolism." Brewster said "He was a great politician," May said. that although the sentiments he ex"He knew that he could have his way as pressed were genuine, he was acting long as most of his constituents were strategically as well. "This was for the going to support him." purpose of trying . . . to unify the Slowly, Brewster and Chauncey faculty," he said. As Chauncey put it, wrung concessions out of the masters. "He wanted to keep the place from They began by asking that students be falling apart." Still, not everyone was allowed to host one guest apiece. After convinced. Dean Donald Kagan the masters agreed, they pushed it up thought the statement was a "sell-out," to two. "We did things gradually," and radicals doubted Brewster's Chauncey said. sincerity .

In the weeks before May Day, ,, Brewster c irculated among the colleges, chatting with . students and faculty, hearing their concerns. "He would go to students' meetings in the colleges and be available for questions," Lane said. "He talked easily to the faculty. He was just generally responsive." Whether Brewster was making the rounds actually to hear student complaints or simply to give the impression of being a receptive president, he succeeded in winning a large following among stuChauncey, who had helped Brewster dents and faculty alike. "He was a very attractive and charming guy in small draft the speech , said that he had not groups," said Kelley. "He was good at expected the skeptici~m remark to defusing pent-up emotions." attract so much attention. The Still, tensions ran high that spring as national news media quickly picked it the University became increasingly up, however, and no less a figure than involved in the Black Panther trial. the Vice-President of the United Black students and faculty called for States, Spiro Agnew, entered the fray.

Yale to donate money to the Panthers' In a tirade against Yale at a defense. Brewster insisted the Uni- Republican fundraising speech in versity could not take a political stance Florida, Agnew denounced Brewster without undermining its academic and Yale with his characteristic mission. Yet at a faculty meeting on demagogic zeal.

April 23, he said: "In spite of my He called the Panthers "an organiinsistence on the limits of my official zation dedicated to criminal violence, capacity, I personally want to say that I anarchy and the destruction of the am appalled and ashamed that things United States of America," and should have come to such a pass that I recommended, "it is time for the am skeptical of the ability of black alumni of the fine old college to revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial demand that it be headed by a more anywhere in the United States." Al- mature a nd reponsible person. though as president of Yale he could President Brewster of Yale has also not involve himself in the issue, as a stated that he does not feel that black private c itizen, he said, he sympa- revolutionaries can get a fair trial within our judicial system. I do not feel thized with the Panthers.

"If the Establishment hates him, there must be something good about him."

18 The New JournaVFebruary 2, 1990

that students of Yale University can get a fair impression of their country under the tutelage of Kingman Brewster."

Agnew's philippic backfired. If anything, his denunciation rallied support for Brewster on campus.

Students who otherwise attacked Brewster as a figure of authority and oppression now began to wonder if he was not on their side after all.

Chauncey summarized the popular opinion: "If the establishment hates him, there must be something good about him." May said that Agnew's remarks also swung the moderates to Brewster's side. "Even people who did not support Brewster felt if you had to make a choice between the two of them, you were not going to choose the Vice-President." Brewster received one petition of support signed by 438 professors and another signed by 3000 students.

A week and a half later, with May Day safely behind him and Yale still standi.ng, national attention focused on Brewster again. On May 11 he brought a contingent of 1200 Yale students to Washington D.C. to lobby their congressmen to end the Vietnam War. Calling up senators and representatives who had graduated from Yale, Brewster arranged for them to meet with the students. Fifteen buses left Phelps Gate at 2:30 a.m. carrying students to the capital.

Meanwhile, Brewster, who had spoken out against the war before, flew down with Vance, trustee William Horowitz, Professors Edmund Morgan and James Tobin, and four students in tow. Students broke down into groups according to their home states and visited with their representatives; Brewster's group spent the day with nine congressmen, including two Republicans named Gerald Ford and George Bush. After the meeting Bush remarked that he had gotten a "full-court press from the Yale students."

Again, Brewster's motives mystified many. Why would he stir up more controversy so soon after he had survived the greatest challenge of his

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"ESPRESSO LOUNGE" tenure? First he backed a group of black revolutionaries and now he was broadcasting his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Whatever his motivations, Brewster framed the trip as an example of Yale's unity; it showed that students, faculty, trustees and alumni could work together.

This was the unity he had worked so carefully to preserve throughout the spring. During May Day, he said, Yale had negotiated a course between the attacks of the counterculture and of the government. "It did unify the institution," he said, "giving the institution quite a lot of pride in its accomplishment, not falling into the hands of either the Hoffmans and the Rubins or of the Mitchells and the Hoovers, both of whom really had a death wish for us."

A month later in his commencement speech, Brewster saluted the graduating class for its relentlessness in pressing for change. "Important was your success in bestirring your elders to reconsider how Yale should be run," he said. He hailed also their willingness to work within the system and to remain ("by Hoffman-Rubin standards anyway") civil. The class of '70 reciprocated his praise with a standing ovation. Winning the stude n ts' admiration by professing admiration for them was another typical B rewster move. "Brewster had a capacity to make whomever he was talking to feel that he genuinely respected them," Chauncey said. "And by doing that, he commanded respect."

When Kingman Brewster died in November, 1988, mourners at his memorial service remembered him for his willingness to listen to his critics.

Whether they be radical students or reactionary alumni, Brewster tried to make his attackers feel as though they were being heard- to have them believe he would respect their point of view, even if he disagreed. That was what he believed a university was all about .

•

David Grunbtrg, a· senior in Btrkeley Coll~ge, is Managing Editor of TN].

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The New Journal/February 2, 1990 19

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Adventures in Doonland Ruth Conniff Charlie "the Doon" Pillsbury (DC '72) sits behind a big oak table in the Fair Haven Masonic Temple. Occult symbols and ornate marble carvings decorate the room. As he nibbles his lunch, the Doon talks softly about the "uncanny" quality of Garry Trudeau's cartoons .. "Garry was original. Sometimes so original he was describing things that hadn't happened yet, or that he didn't know had happened," he says, shifting in his chair. "That was his intuitive genius." Peering through a pair of round glasses, Pillsbury looks like the main character in Trudeau's Doonesbury strip. "It's true that they called me 'the Doon' in college," he explains. He acquired his nickname when he and Trudeau (DC '70) were in prep school together. "It was a boarding school term for people who do outlandish things," he says, "people who aren't afraid to make fools of themselves."

The character Mike Doonesbury, whose name is an amalgam of "Pillsbury" and "the Doon," came into the world as an awkward, skinny freshman in the comic strip Bull Tales, which Trudeau drew for the Yale Daily News as an undergraduate. While B.D., the campus football hero, 20 The New journal/February 2 , 1990

,,

performed feats of exaggerated prowess on an imaginary field, his roommate Doonesbury lurked in the shadows at mixers, fumbling his way through a series of ill-fated attempts to pick up girls. Around 1969, the characters Megaphone Mark and Zonker, also based on real people at Yale,

"Garry was original.

Sometimes so original he was describing things that hadn't happened yet."

entered the picture. As radicals and freaks took over leading roles in the cartoon strip and at school, Mike Doonesbury developed into a figure of rationality and calm at the center of Trudeau's loony world.

Doonesbury became nationally syndicated right around the time Trudeau and his friends left college. The

cartoonist continued to make up adventures for the characters he invented at Yale. Meanwhile, Charlie Pillsbury spent two years doing civil service work as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, before returning to New Haven to attend both Yale Law School and the Divinity School. Today he runs an or-ganization called Community Mediation out of his peculiar temple/office, helping to settle disputes among landlords, tenants and neighbors in Fair Haven.

Doonesbury never imitated incidents from real life, Pillsbury says. Nonetheless, there are some striking parallels. For instance, there is the case of the Reverend Scott Sloane- "the fighting young priest who can talk to the young"- a parody of both Yale's Reverend William Sloane Coffin and Trudeau's friend Scott McClennan, a Davenport senior. McClennan now serves as chaplain at Tufts University.

"His life has taken almost the same path as the role in the strip," Pillsbury says. "That's why the strip has that sort of uncanny, intuitive side."

Between 1968 and 1970, Trudeau documented the arrival of coeducation on campus, the draft lottery, the Black Panther¡trial, and Kingman Brewster's

battles with stodgy alumni and selfrighteous student protesters. "It was quite a surprise to those of us who thought he couldn't draw," says Mark Zanger (SM '70), the former leader of Yale's chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and the inspiration behind the character Megaphone Mark. "Originally it was all about football. So you had this sort of crudely drawn huddle, and then words came out of it. Now all of a sudden he was drawing, like, three quarters of a body, and people with hair. These were things we hadn't seen before."

Trudeau refined his satirical style in his junior and senior years, poking fun at everyone from dumb jocks to SDS. While B.D. -modeled after Brian Dowling (BK '69)- and Zanger never actually met each other, Trudeau brought them together as players in the same off-beat drama. "His recollection of me is probably the same as mine of him, which is only through the comic strip," Dowling says of Zanger, who was in the class below him in school.

Dowling remembers relatively little about the upheaval on campus in the late '60s. I wasn't really politically active," he says. "Basically, my extracurricular involvement was in athletics." In Dowling's senior year the biggest event of the season was Yale's 29-29 tie with Harvard. Up until that day the star quarterback, much like his caricature, had won every game since the seventh grade.

A recent issue of Sports Illustrated dubbed Dowling "the last AllAmerican"- an old-style football hero, who played in the twilight of an era when men were men, the game was The Game, and girls went to Vassar.

Today, Dowling owns a closed-circuit televison company called Ivy Communications, which broadcasts small college football contests to alumni. True to cartoon form, most of what he remembers about his undergraduate years revolves around sports.

"I think not only Yale but a lot of schools were a lot different 20 years ago," he says. "If you had one football game on T.V. on a weekend that was a lot. Now you have five or

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Zanger, on the other hand, vividly remembers the tiny guerrilla war he waged between 1968 and 1970 against the Establishment in general and Yale President Kingman Brewster in particular. Like Megaphone Mark, Zanger found himself continually thwarted by Brewster. "He would never do the stupid thing that would put everybody on our side. He wouldn't call the cops to smash our heads. He wouldn't let us into the building . . . I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to fathom this guy in order to be able to embarass and defeat him. And I really did come to admire his cleverness in that scenario."

Sitting in his house in Boston , where he has worked as a journalist and a union organizer for the last 20 years, Zanger recalls the Movement and his obsession for taking over administrative offices. "Building take-overs were it. They were the 195 7 Chevy of 1970. You had to have one.. " In 1969 Bull Tales ran a series on

o..v .. .

Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer's futile attempts to take over the president's house. In reality, Zanger and his crew took over a University business office to protest the firing of a campus worker. Brewster reacted with maddening poise. The incident ended when a group of college deans came to write down the students' names, and asked that they please leave. "We all got suspended suspensions or something, and that was the end of it," Zanger remembers.

Before May Day, SDS staged a number of more successful protests against ROTC. "My thing was I was so angry at the University that I was more in favor of the tactics than the goals," Zanger says. "Shutting down the University I thought was a great idea. Equal rights for all was something I'd have to think about." As the banjo-player in the SDS jug band, Zanger wrote a song, which became fairly popular on campus, called the ROTC Calypso: Tbe New JoumaVFebruary 2 , 1990 21

R -0-T -C I Keepin' all the people in slavery /Whether you're black, white or brown/You're gonna be glad when we shut it down.

Mark, with his megaphone, singing with the SDS jug band outside Yale's ROTC building.

He came up with the tune, he says, while working at a con struction job one summer . (Later, the Trudeau cartoon depicted Megaphone Mark ·attempting to enlighten the proletariat on a similar job, only to be beaten up by hardhats).

As Zanger became increasingly radical, he found that he had less and less in common with his hippie peers. Midway through his junior year, he cut his hair and stopped taking drugs. He started spending most of his time organizing groups like the Student Worker Alliance, and described himself as a committed Stalinist.

"Basically, the political trip became much more hard core."

By the time May Day rolled around, the whole campus had become in-

volved in a general student strike, and extremists like Zan ger were squeezed out. "I kept proposing that we do building take-overs," he remembers.

"But.! was constantly out-voted."

Freshmen and sophomores who were interested in a looser countercultural agenda broke away from the militant SDSers. "You can see the split in some of the propaganda of the time," he says. "In Garry Trudeau's cartoon, the character Megaphone Mark originally had a foot in both worlds. Then, right around that time, I think he introduced the ·character of Zonker Harris."

Zonker's origin and identity are more mysterious than the former SDS chief lets on. While Zanger implies that the mellow freak is a spin-off of

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Megaphone Mark, many Yalies have c.ontended otherwise. One of Trudeau's close friends associates Zonker with a crazy guy in Davenport College. "My impression-and Garry never discussed these things, you sort of drew your own conclusions- was that he was a guy in D-port named Richard Khalidi," says Timothy Bannon (SY '70), who co-edited the Yale R ecord humor magazine with Trudeau. "But no one really knows."

Members of the society Saint Anthony Hall swear that their own David Wilk (CC '72) is tpe one and only Zonker.

For sheer physical resemblance, Wilk makes a very convincing candidate. The 39-year-old poet, who retreated to the woods of Vermont for several years after graduation, still has

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David Wilk's friends say he is the original Zonker. long hair and lines around his eyes that look like parentheses. "I was interested in rock-n-roll and drugs and the cultural changes going on all over the country," Wilk says of his undergraduate days. "For me, that was more important than SDS." Wilk was the literary program director of the National Endowment for the Arts until Reagan took office, when he decided he no longer fit in. For the last eight years he has owned a small New H aven company wh ich distributes feminist books.

"I think there were a few great places to be in the late '60s, and Yale was one of them. It knocks me out that I was here," says Wilk, a sophomore during May Day. "I got in right when they changed the admissions policies away from the Big-Man-on-Campus theory,

and started letting in more unusual people . It was a miracle."

Wilk describes Yale in 1970 with a soft, rhythmic intonation , sprinkling his sentences with the word s "I remember." "There was so much going on. I remember I was writing poetry and involved in a magazine. And there was a coffee house in the basement of the church next door to Calhoun, where, I remember, I used to go every weekend to hear music and poetry.

There was an underground newspaper called The View from the Bottom, where I learned to do lay-out and design. And I remember there was an organic food store on Whalley, where we started a food co-op."

Among the things Wilk remembers best about May Day are the h u ge vats of brown rice that bubbled all weekend

on Old Campus. This, for him, marked an important cultural change.

"It really had a major effect on the dining halls. May Day introduced them to brown rice and vegetables, and after that you could get vegetarian food," he says.

Zanger, who in recent years has become a restaurant critic, has a very different recollection of that particular change. "They made us all eat granola for three days . . . It was hideous. One of my major political gestures of the weekend was to take some New York radicals of my acquaintance out to locate a source of pastrami, so we could get some cholesterol."

Today, both Zanger and Wilk find the split in Yale's youth movement sad.

"It's a pity," said Zanger. "I mean, yet another of the fragmentations of that era. Had they stayed together, politicos like me would have been looser and more open to psychological change, and the hippies would have been more rooted and less silly." Wilk feels sorry for people who were too serious to experience the cultural awakening of the late '60s. "Losing yourself is a good thing. A lot of people didn't, and they missed out. They didn't go to Woodstock or Chicago.

You can only do these things once." He worries that students now are so hindered by college loan debts that they don't have the same opportunity to travel and explore that he did .

Despite the striking resemblance,

Wilk denies his friends' claims that he is Zonker. "They think I am, but I think it was Mark Zanger. I never even knew Trudeau." But then, Zanger and B.D. barely knew Trudeau either. Both remember him as a quiet guy who slipped in and out of the Daily News office. As is his habit, the cartoonist himself politely declines to be interviewed.

Timothy Bannon probably knew Trudeau best. While the rest of the campus was in a turmoil at the end of

"Building take-overs were it. They were the 1957 Chevy of 1970. You had to have one."

left the White House on August 9, 1974, which was a Saturday. I remember pretty clearly because I got married that day," Bannon says. "We went to Mory's afterwards and Garry brought a television set. We all had dinner together and then over dessert we watched the President resign."

Most of Trudeau's classmates scattered after graduation. The class of 1970 was pretty much broken up by the end of the year anyway, after the protests and the strike on campus.

Bannon moved to a beach house in Connecticut to finish his senior essay and Pillsbury became deeply involved in the antiwar movement, travelling to other campuses around the country to participate in demonstrations.

Even though they have gone on to pursue their separate lives, the people Trudeau observed at Yale remain connected through the Doonesbury strip.

The characters they inspired continue to act out their political drama on the nation's funny pages, still magically, hilariously true to life. "A lot of times it's really more a case of life imitating art," the Doon says. He pauses to stare off across the room, and for a moment he gives the impression of one of those repeat panels in the comic strip, when nothing happens for a moment, before someone delivers the last line.

the '60s, Bannon and Trudeau were having a great time matching wits over Dunkin' Donuts at 4 a.m., and typesetting the Record by hand in Trudeau's dorm room. Bannon wrote, while Trudeau drew, and the two kept up a running satire of campus life and national politics. "We were early funmakers of the Nixon administration," Bannon recalls.

In 1974, when Trudeau became a graduate student at the Yale School of Art and Bannon entered the law Ruth Conniff, a senior in Jonathan Edwards school, the two stayed in touch. "Nixon College, is Editor-in-chief of TNJ.

â&#x20AC;˘

The New JoumaVFebruary 2 , 1990 25

Bobby Seale

Still Fighting for Freedom

Kathy Reich He does not sound much like a violent revolutionary. Occasionally he slips into radical rhetoric, when he is condemning Establishment politics.

But Bobby Seale, former chairman of the Black Panther Party, generally seems like a liberal, thoughtful man committed to peaceful reform. "I never believed that I was outside the system," he says. "I was part and parcel of it to begin with. For me to d r op out of the system I would have to drop out of the universe."

Now in his early fifties, Seale is working toward a doctorate in AfricanAmerican Studies at Temple Univer26 The New JoumalfFebruary 2, 1990

sity. "My thesis is tentatively titled 'Cooperative Humanism,'" he says-a theory of coalition politics that offers to bring together diverse groups of oppressed people. Seale says he is dedicated to freeing society from "corporational, capitalist control of the state."

In recent years, though, the former Panther chairman has had some direct involvement with capitalism himself.

Recently, he published a cookbook entitled Barbecuing With Bobby, marketing his patented recipe for ribs.

Seale is irked by charges people have leveled against him since the book's

publication that he sold out his ideals.

"I needed to have some cash flow to help me support social change in a grassroots way," he says. Royalties from his book were to finance a p lan to renovate dilapidated buildings for the homeless in Philadelphia.

His enthusiasm for the project, he claims, led him to overdraw on his advance for the cookbook; he was recently indicted in O h io for writing $7,500 in bad ch ecks. "But f ve cleared that up," he says. Meanwhile, the renovation program remains in the planning phase. "T he id ea was to b uy up these houses-ther e are 10 to

15 thousand abandoned row houses in Philadephia. We would get young blacks, Hispanics, and poor whites to renovate the houses for poor battered women with children."

As he diSC\,lsses his plans for such benign social programs, it is easy to forget that in May, 1970, Bobby Seale was on trial for first-degree murder.

Actually, murder was only the most serious of the charges that Seale faced.

The state of Connecticut also accused him of kidnapping, conspiracy to murder and binding with criminal intent- all in connection with the murder of Alex Rackley, an alleged informer about the Panther movement. Seale claims he did not know about Rackley's death until one night in April, 1969, when he came to speak at Yale. After his speech, party member Ericka Huggins drove him to New Haven's Panther headquarters, he says, and left him in the car while she went inside. Seale dozed off. He woke when a party field marshal came to the car to tell him that another Panther, George Sams, had beaten someone up. "I said, 'What the fuck?

George Sams isn't in the party. I kicked him out of the party eight months ago. He goes around beating people up, so I kicked his motherfucking ass out of the party.'"

Sams was arrested for Rackley's murder and, according to Seale, agreed to testify that Seale ordered Rackley's death in exchange for a lesser sentence. "It was a set-up on the part of the federal government and the local state's attorney," Seale contends.

"During the closing argument of the trial I went to sleep in the courtroom, it was so trumped up."

In May, 1971 , all charges against Seale and Huggins, his co-defendant, were dismissed when the jury could not reach a verdict. "In effect, I won the case," Seale says. According to him, the jury actually reached a not-guilty verdict in his case, but was stymied when considering the charges against Huggins.

Outside the courtroom, protesters who sided with Seale added to the Pressure of the trial. "Student support

did not surprise me," Seale says. "I had spoken at Yale to 2,000 students. The Panthers used to circulate 200,000 newspapers each week, and 50 percent of those were to college students." He was most impressed that the May Day demonstrations did not center exclusively on the Panthers. "I love the idea of students who are multi-issued, not single-issued. Women's groups, African-American groups- they must understand that they are tied in together. That trial, the massive support- all that solidified my belief in human liberation."

In 1966, Seale and Huey Newton, then students at Merritt College in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party, championing socialism as the only way to combat

"I am still a political revolutionary.

Revolution means to me to revolve the power back to the people." racism and human oppression. They also espoused violence when necessary for self-defense. "I do not run around advocating that every organization pick up some guns," Seale says. "As long as the power structure doesn't attack us, fine. But prior to the founding of the Black Panther Party, peaceful protesters- black, white, yellow, blue, purple and polkadot-were beaten."

Seale claims responsibility for another, often forgotten tenet of the Panthers, the "Community Programs Concept." The party established service organizations such as health clinics and voter registration centers in several cities, and served free meals to inner-city schoolchildren. Seale cites the latter program as a model for the

California school system's free breakfast plan. "This is the character of the Black Panther Party that I tried to promote," he says.

For a few years, such projects flourished, but by the mid-'70s the party had disintegrated because of rifts in its leadership, negative publicity and harassment from the FBI. Seale, however, remained in the public eye.

In 1973 he ran for mayor of Oakland, hoping to earn 20 percent of the vote.

Although few saw him as a serious political contender, he forced a runoff against the Republican incumbent. He eventually lost the final election, but in the process he won 43,719 votes to the incumbent's 77,476-only two years after the Rackley trial had closed.

With the "Inter-Community Synergic Project, Inc.," Seale has turned to more populist politics. "If I can show two youths how to make a profit roofing a house, they don't get into selling drugs," he says.

Seale's emphasis on youth may stem from his experiences as a father. When he boasts about his children, he seems more settled than his passionate rhetoric suggests. He has three children, a daughter, 11, and two sons, 18 and 23. "My oldest son, MLK Seale, is trying to do some rap music; he's trying to get people to understand what the '60s were about. We being adults, my wife and I were put off at first by rap music, but to hear him put positive content into it really blows our minds."

Although African-American politics have changed over the years, Seale says his own goals are the same. "I am still a political revolutionary.

Revolution means to me to revolve the power back to the people. We said, 'all power to all people'- power to the prisoners, power to the students. If it's women's rights, I stand for those rights. When we talk about black liberation, when we talk about women's liberation, we are talking about human liberation."

â&#x20AC;˘

Kathy Reich is a freshman College.

1n

Pierson

The New JoumaVFebruary 2, 1990 27

Awaiting the Awakening .Black Students and Faculty Continue to VtiJrk for Reform Motoko Rich Walking back to his dorm room one night in the spring of 1970, William Farley (SM '72) worried he might get k icked out of school. He had just volunteered to represent the Black Student Alliance at Yale on the Strike Steering Committee, of which he was soon elected chairman. "I realized that I was in the process of making a decision whether I was going to throw away my whole Yale education. If things went badly, I would be one of those held to blame," he said. Many students, African Americans especially, feared consequences to their academic careers if they were perceived as too radical. "Being black wasn't going to help you if all hell broke loose," said Elwyn Lee (SY '71 ), an active member of the BSAY. Although they couldn't guarantee anything, _the African-American faculty members saw it as their job to protect black undergraduates from academic disaster. "We had to make sure that the students were capable of going on and serving the struggle after their Yale days were over, and the only way we could assure that was to make sure that their academic careers remained intact," said Ray Nunn (BR '69), who worked for the dean's office in 1970.

Today professors are more concerned about restoring students' memories. Houston Baker Jr., Yale instructor of English in 1970, worries that black undergraduates have forgotten the activism of that era, that the memory of an event like May Day is fading fast. "I don't find on the part of many b lack students to whom I talk a clue about the '60s, that it existed, that it should be a legacy to them," said Baker, current director of the Black Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "They are missing a great deal if they don't have some involvement with that world of Afrocentric ideas, events and concerns."

Back in 1970, though, students at Yale were thrust into that world, primarily because of the black faculty.

"We viewed ourselves as being in the same situation as blacks in the commu~ity because of a historical Black Panthers stirred up support among Yale students.

28 The New Journal/February 2, 1990

legacy," said Roy Bryce- Laporte, the firs t director of Yale's AfricanAmerican Studies program . The events of the spring intensified these ties. "Blacks saw a special commitment to taking a stand because Bobby Seale was black," said Sheila Jackson, (BK '72) a leader in the BSAY. In addition to demanding a fair trial for the P anthers, the African-American scholars pushed the University to pay more attention to blacks on the faculty, in the student body, in the curriculum, and in New H aven.

"We saw o urselves as academic activists," said Baker. "We were interested in ch anging the character of scholarship so that it would empower the lives o f black people in urban communities in America." A look around New Haven 20 years later shows that some of the May Day demands could bear repeating today.

The predominantly black Dixwell and Hill neighborhoods that surround the campus are stagnatin g in poverty, and Yale still h asn't stopped expanding imo the city.

When R alph D awson (P C '71 }, former moderator of the BSAY, Kenneth Mills, assistant professor of philosophy, mulls over a speech returned to the University a few years during a meeting at Ingalls Rink. back, he found p adlocks chained to many of the campus gates he had time." on down, had any long-range p lans fought to open two decades ago. Back Yet the program that Bryce-Laporte with respect to dramatic increases in then , activists wan ted improved worked so hard to build up is now b lack faculty or black students," said community relations so that the slipping at Yale. With the past year's Baker. Over the past 20 years, total University wouldn't have to shut the resignations of J ohn Blassingame and numbers of blacks on the faculty have neighborhood o u t. "There was a belief Edmund Gordon as chairmen of the actually decreased by six percent, that change was possible in terms of program, African-American Studies at although the number of tenured blacks making the University realize that one Yale has not overcome the conditions has increased by 41 percent. Student of the reasons you've got to put locks Bryce-Laporte and his colleagues tried ratios have risen by only three percent.

While battling to increase their on gates is because of how you relate to to alleviate. Since it is still not a the community," said Farley. department in its own right, African- numbers in the student body, African At the same time, inside the American Studies does not have the Americans clashed among themselves.

University, Bryce-Laporte, who now power to grant tenure or appoint Farley remembers when a group of teaches African-A't'"lerican Studies at professors. Hirings in other disciplines black freshmen marched up to PresiColgate U niversitt, introduced new do not always meet the needs of the dent Brewster's house to demand a academic goals. "Within the midst of program, and when Blassingame left, minority recruitment program . They this political situatio n , it seemed an he criticized the University's weak were intercepted by some black upperclassmen. "What are you guys opportune time to demand some commitment to affirmative action.

The black faculty leveled similar doing? You ' re going to ruin leriousness toward the importance of Afro-American Studies as an academic criticisms in 1970. To Baker, everything. This isn't how things are discipline," he said. "Many of the Brewster's celebrated l ibera l done here," Farley recalled the developments in Afro-American administration d id not seem progres- upperclassmen saying. The freshmen Studies had their roots in the demands sive at all. "I don't really feel that the responded defiantly. "You guys are that were being m ade during that administration, moving from Brewster Uncle Toms and we're going to take The New journal/February 2, 1990 29

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things into our hands!"

Yale's black students and the Black Panthers also came head to head.

Some felt that attending college meant the b lack students were betraying their race. "I th ink that b lack faculty and students on a campus situated right in the middle of a traditionally black neighborhood feel the guilt of being chosen, while a large percen tage of the population they represent are subjected to genocidal conditions," said Baker. "The Panthers thought they could exploit the guilt the blacks felt for being there," said Nunn. Fervent screaming matches erupted belween the Panthers and the leaders of the BSAY over what kinds of demands they could . reasonably make of the University. "We were constantly taking a lot of heat and verbal abuse from the Black Panther party and had to translate that into palatable demands for the University," said Farley.

At meetings where students argued with the Panthers over strike documents, Bryce-Laporte and K enneth Mills, assistant professor of philosophy, often sat in the back of the room.

The two men formed the pillars of Yale's black community. "Mills was the spiritual leader of the student demonstrations," Farley recalled. The dynamic, intellectual Marxist appeared at every major event that spring, riveting audiences with his electric speeches. "If there was a key player on the African-American black front , it was certainly Ken Mills," said Baker. Though chiefly described as a revolutionary dedicated to political reform, Mills was not without his inconsistencies. "His stated positions were ones of radicalism," said Nunn.

"But the man did drive his girlfriend's Ferrari around New Haven." Mills died in 1983 of Chron's disease.

Although not always as visible as Mills, Baker came out as a vehement spokesman against the Osborne Committee, set up to study May Day under the chairmanship of black

professor Ernest Osborne. AfricanAmerican faculty saw the committee as a blatant example of tokenism, and Baker wrote an angry letter to the Yale Daily News saying so. The committee was dissolved soon after the letter appeared.

"These committees are endlessly formed," said Baker. Even now, committees seem to be the favored bureaucratic gambit among University presidents. Last year Benno Schmidt established the Rodin Committee to study minority hiring. In a 1989 report, the group exhorted the University to establish target numbers for people of color on the faculty.

Schmidt finally responded to the report in JanuarY., agreeing to strengthen minority recruiting at Yale.

In the spirit of excitement and defiance of 1970, the black faculty met almost daily, furiously collaborating on a .resolution to present at the general faculty meeting of April 23.

Baker and two colleagues hurriedly pounded out a draft on a typewriter one afternoon. They kept the resolution secret, purposely not circulating any copies of it at the general faculty meeting. "It was not the intention to ask for the input of the whole faculty," said Nunn. "We wanted to minimize having it diluted."

On April 23, the African-American faculty sat together in Sprague Hall.

Even when augmented by black administrators, graduate students, and community leaders, they could barely fill the front r ow. In their resolution, they called for the suspension of all academic functions of the University and a moratorium on all Yale plans for land expansion . "Th ese were outrageous resolutions, by all standards of the University," Baker said. BryceL aporte revealed the document, asserting that the black faculty would accept no modifications. At one point during the meeting, Mills threatened that if the faculty did not yield to the blacks' demands, they would walk out.

Finally, · the faculty settled for a

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Overall, May Day produced a generation of African-American scholars who have tried to incorporate their politics into formerly untouched areas of their lives. "I really cannot overexaggerate the importance for me of the 1970 moment. I learned so much," said Baker. May Day changed his career; he arrived at Yale to teach British Victorian Literature, but by the time the demonstrators cleared off the Green, Baker h ad shifted his commitment to African-American

"I don't find on the part of many black students a clue about the '60s, that it existed, that it should be a legacy to them." literature, a pursuit he has followed ever since.

Baker speculated that many students experienced similar conversions: "I think that Yale moment was transformative for many of the black students, who like me had come to school with the idea of doing fairly standard disciplinary work and with the idea of going into the world as fairly standardly trained folks ," he said. "They suddenly found themselves plunged into this world of Afro-centric ideas and social activism."

Most of those involved in the May Day movement criticize the oftmentioned conservatism of students in 1990. But that a ttitude was already around in 1970. "P eople look back on the Strike Steering Committee and say, this was Yale's radical crescendo.

But this was not a radical group at all.

The most reasonable cut Flower

I'm sure most of the people who were and plant prices on campus. involved are lawyers or bankers or whatever," said Farley. Farley, a n attorney, is not far off the mark: Dawson is a labor litigation lawyer and China Hut R estaurant J ackson practices law as well as serving as the first black woman on the 245 Crown St., New Haven H ouston City Council; Lee teaches (College & Crown St.) law at the University of Houston and 777·4657 Nunn is senior producer in the 772-1483 documentary unit at ABC News.

Nunn thinks that the students of COUPON with this Ad 10 percent ofT for: I . Eat-in, or non-delivery takeout 1970 were more pragmatic than 2. Minimum $30 delivery, takeout conservative. "By senior year, I would see that black students were some- DELIVERY available within 3 miles I. Minimum $1 2 where between being co-opted, being 2. Routine delivery after 5:30 p.m. worn down, and being more realistic 3. Delivery before 5:30 p.m. for group about how long the struggle would orde rs only take," said Nunn. Although the former black activists from May Day have put away their bullhorns and moved on in the struggle for racial equality, they 300 York St. haven't quite entered the mainstream.

New Haven "No matter how much they think we've 777-7431 assimilated, we really haven't. What we have done is mastered the ability to work in several different worlds," said Nunn. Many of New H aven's black residents, however, are doing all they can to survive in the city, which for them hasn't changed much since May Day. Baker feels hopeful about the possibility of a cohesive AfricanAmerican movement in the '90s. H e places his faith in a small group of black undergraduates around the country, who he believes are deeply concerned about black liberation, social justice, and structural change.

"I look to this minority of black students as the saving remnant," said Baker. "Despite all the conservative policies, there are certain things afoot nationally on an Afro-American agenda that will cause that minority to grow.

The kinds of structural shifts that they're going to help bring about are going to leave a permanent change on the idea of the American university."

A

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Motoko Rich, a junior in Branford College, is Managing Editor of TNJ. The New Journal/February 2 , 1990 31

On the Eve of Destruction How the Conservatives Saw May Day

Daniel Panner As throngs of chanting protesters packed the New Haven Green, Edward Thomas Veal (BK '69) founder and first chairman of the Tory Party, sought refuge at a friend's beach house.

"We took along a fair quantity of food and beer, and sat around and waited calmly for the end of the world." Not all campus conservatives thought that May Day h eralded the. crumbling of civilization, but some, like Veal, sensed that the Yale they had known, the Yale of genteel debate and green cups at Mory's, had given way. It is impossible to say what percentage of the Yale population opposed the changes that swept the University that spring, for if these people shared any one trait, it was a lack of outspokenness.

Throughout the late '60s, before anyone at Yale had heard of the New H aven Nine, conservatives were overwhelmed by the liberalism dominant on campus. Much of the time they seemed to wage a campaign just to keep people from taking things too seriously. As new committees broke out all over the University, one rightwing group's constitution prohibited it from convening a meeting. "There was a good deal of humor that pervaded all of these organizations, particularly the POR," said Edward Young (GRD'71), who chaired the party in the fall of 1970. "We used to have debates that would go on until four in the morning on topics such as, 'Resolved, that God does and should exist.'"

J ohn Taft (CC '72), who wrote the book May Day at Yale, and now works as a historian, writer and film maker in Washington, D.C., believes that the conservatives' small numbers and earlier setbacks such as the abolition of R.O.T.C. created "a fundamental dis32 The New Journal/ February 2, 1990

couragement that was not related to the May Day events."

If campus conservatives despaired, they could turn to the Yale Daily News for moral and rhetorical support.

Editorial Page Editor Douglas Hallett OE '71) set the paper's tone early on with a number of columns opposing the University shut-down. On)y after the shootings at Kent State did the more liberal editors succeed in overriding¡ Hallett and endorsing the national student strike.

"The faculty were sheep. They were sheep for the entire period."

"There was a feeling that I had swung the paper too far to the right, and they didn't want that to be the permanent national image of the Yale Daily News," said Hallett, who practices law in Los Angeles. Radical students marched on the News building to protest Hallett's writings, and Black Panther Doug Miranda vilified him before a crowd in Woolsey Hall, exhorting the audience to "silence the pigs." Hallett was not deterred. "There was a feeling of exhilaration at the opportunity to have first principles tested as they were during that period."

Despite his writings, Hallett held other Yale conservatives in contempt.

"They assumed a sort of pose of wanting to be persecuted. They were very

affected, they adopted upper-class English mannensms. They really weren't players on the scene at all , except as objects of ridicule or avoidance," he said.

But in the opinion of the man who chaired the POR during May Day, Yale's overbearing liberalism forced conservative students into a corner, where some say they remain to this day. "Campus opinion isolated people who were right of center. It drove them to those extremes," said Charles Tharp (BK '72), now treasurer of Oberlin College. Tharp eventuaJiy quit the party when he saw it becoming "too narrow or even fascist in tone." Taft agrees that only the most entrenched right-wingers could hold their ground.

"To be socially and politically conservative in those days, you had to be extreme, very set in your ways."

While conservative students long felt pressure from their liberal peers, they had never seen anything like that spring. "Until May Day it was not as serious and not as threatening," said Young, now an attorney at a Boston law firm. The Yale Student Senate meeting of April 20 in which the group voted to support the strike, demonstrated that campus radicals could generate what one observer called "an atmosphere of terror."

Before the meeting began, people who had no connection to the University filled the back rows of the hall to heckle and jeer at the senators. The combination of the visitors' shouting and the vitriolic speeches delivered by radical speakers intimidated even strike supporters. The following year, a student told an interviewer, "I talked to some of the members, and they admitted that they voted out of terror."

After the meeting, Berkeley Master

Robert Triffin, the Senate's founder, was so frightened that he asked several students to escort him home.

Gary Johnson (BK '72), a member of the Student Senate, was not so taken aback, but he disagreed with the radicals' aggressive tactics. "There really wasn't a lot of room for a moderate, and that meeting was another event that made that clear ."

If moderates felt edged out of the political scene, they found there was more than enough room for them in Yale's half-deserted classrooms. Yale College Dean Donald Kagan, who arrived at the University that year, staunchly refused to cancel his courses or even discuss the current turmoil d uring class time. But one beautiful Apr il afternoon , amazed by the high turn-out, he simply couldn't help himself. "On a nice spring day without any strikes you're not going to get eight out of ten very often, right? So I asked them, what are you all doing here?

And one kid, he was a pole vaulter, a lacon ic kid, said, 'Well, the way things are around here these days, this seems like the place to be,' And we went back to work."

M ost conservatives simply could not grasp the logic behind the strike. "The whole thing was a completely irration al reaction," said Veal, now an attorney for an accounting firm in Washington, D .C. "Even if one completely believed every word of the radical line about Vietnam and U.S. society, people studying Catullus at Yale were not in fact inflicting any casualties in Vietnam, nor would Vietnam have been any better off if Catullus had been utterly forgotten ."

Even though the colleges all voted to strike, conservatives saw this as just another indication of the liberal tyranny of the time. According to May Day at Yak, no more than half of Yale's students voted at all. Many were swayed when they had to declare their position in public. In Saybrook, a strike resolution passed easily during the open referendum. But in a secret ballot the next day, Saybrook students Voted against the strike by a total of 214 to 135.

Most conserva t iv es k ept to the m selves during the demonstrations .

Conservatives today claim that apes." "If you called th e Gay-Lesbian students are still afraid to say what they Co-op "Nimrod apes," there would be really think, fearing intimidation and a committee formed and you'd be name-calling from the "politically expelled," said Steinberg, "Yet that correct." Veal points to the Wayne article was just seen as fun."

Dick affair as evidence. In that 1987 The POR's own sense of fun has gotincident, a student came before the ten it into trouble in recent years. After Executive Committee on charges of a toasting session at Mory's in harassment after he distributed posters December, 1987, seven members of satirizing Gay and Lesbian Awareness the group were discovered shouting Nazi slogans in the basement of Days.

"It would have been unthinkable in Timothy Dwight College. "It was," 1969 for a student to be disciplined for said Steinberg, who was not among the making fun of anything, or to have sort seven, "a really stupid thing to do." In of a sacred set of beliefs that you had to the ensuing furor, those involved avoid treading upon ," Veal said. For- resigned from their offices in the mer POR chairman David Steinberg Political Union, though they insisted UE '90) also sees a double standard on that they only meant to parody the campus today. He cites the example of stereotypes that dogged them.

The same trouble-maker image has a recent column in the Nrws which referred to POR members as "nimrod plagued conservatives for the last 20 The New JournaUFebruary 2, 1990 33

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years. When Tharp and his friends tried to set up a series of "counterdiscussions" in 1970, University administrators refused to provide a room for such talks and the group abandoned its plans. "The impression I got was they thought anything the conservatives did would be provocative," Tharp said .

Students on the right felt especially betrayed by the faculty-guardians of reason succumbing to the baying crowd. "I thought the faculty were sheep, they were sheep for the entire period," said Hallett. "Very open to manipulation, very unprincipled."

Kagan blames sheer terror for the reticence of the few conservative faculty members on campus. "You had a little French R evolution feeling about what was going on, and there was a lot of intimidating talk. Where would anybody who was not a very brave person have had the guts to speak against what was happening?"

When the May Day weekend finally arrived, a lot of conservatives left New Haven. Tharp stayed in his room.

Young wandered to the Green to watch, and he was depressed by what he saw. "It was very sad to see the National Guard on campus. The possibility · that it was no longer a matter of intellectual argument but that either side could have provided the spark . . . It was very fortunate that it didn't happen."

At least one ideologue revelled in the spectacle. Veal remembers one of his friends, even by his standards "a fervent right-winger," who reacted to the events with enthusiasm. "I think he was hoping that the National Guard would fire. Maybe he had some sort of vision of the U.S. government bringing in Cossacks, like something out of Dr. Zhivago." Though he never got to witness combat, Veal's friend did manage to capture his very own tear gas canister as a souvenir.

The tear gas eventually blew away, and Veal and his friends returned to discover Yale still intact. Kagan, who saw the violent upheavals at Cornell while he was on the faculty there, believes the May Day events were "mainly just a blip." But if the University emerged from the turmoil physically unscathed, in many ways May Day was the end of the world at Yale for conservatives.

Those who believed passionately in the value of academics found in May Day a distressing precedent. After all, the majority of the faculty essentially voted that the activities of the University were less important than

what was happening out in the streets.

For Kagan, Yale's refusal to defend the importance of scholarship was one of its most critical failures. "It seems to me to be absolutely vital for a university like ours to say: No, we are serving society in the most powerful way that we can and in the way that only we can when we do exactly what we do every day- teach our classes, study our subjects, and engage in scholarly activity."

Taft argues that Yale sacrificed the academic neutrality essential to its purpose: "I think it's very important that universities prevent one group from intimidating another, and for the most part they don't. They tend to discourage conservatives and encourage liberals."

Not only did radical students dominate their peers, but they also proved they could seize control of the University from administrators and faculty. Key concessions- the suspension of academic expectations, the decision to feed and house visiting protestors- made it clear to conservatives that the administration would not try to maintain any pretense of discipline or neutrality. "I think that there was a basic failure during that time period in university communities, particularfy Yale, for students to be confronted with the fact that they were not the center of the universe," said Hallett.

In . retrospect, some conservatives regret that they did not do more to counter the radicals. "I'm not sure that in the atmosphere they had created that was possible," said Veal. "But I think that once the radicals had gathered their critical mass, there was too much of a tendency on the part of the conservatives and moderates to just sort of shrug their shoulders and retreat into their shells and wait for better days." In a way that may have been inevitable; much of what led people to oppose the strike and the rallies was exactly their desire to do their homework and avoid the politicization that had engulfed the University.

Tharp still gets angry when he thinks about that time, and he regrets the damage that was done to argument and debate at Yale. "In this case, freedom of discussion went by the boards. For a college or university to allow that to happen, what at the end of it have you got left?"

•

Daniel Panner is a senior m jonathan Edwards College.

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Kurt Schmoke

Reform ~

not Revolution

Jamie Slaughter Kurt L. Schmoke (DC '71 ), mayor of Baltimore and trustee of the Yale Corporation, laughs about it in retrospect.

Sitting in a red leather chair in his City Hall office, Schmoke recalls the day he burst into a closed faculty meeting in Sprague Hall, bullhorn in hand. No student before him had ever interrupted an official convocation of the Yale College faculty .

Two thousand students had gathered outside, waiting to hear if the faculty was going to endorse the student strike. Inside, more than 400 professors packed the room. All was quiet as Schmoke strode up to the podium.

He spoke only a few sentences: "There are a great number of students who are confused and many who are frightened. They don't know what to think.

You are our teachers. You are the people we respect. We look to you for guidance and moral leadership. On behalf of my fellow students, I beg you to give it to us."

Schmoke's mildness surprised the teachers, who were accustomed to the angry rhetoric of radical students and Black Panthers. "I wanted to say to the faculty, many of whom felt confused and besieged themselves, that most of the students still wanted some leadership," Schmoke recalls. His audience responded with a standing ovation. A few minutes later, they voted to support the strike. Schmoke's speech helped to unify the campus and avoid the type of generational rift that crippled other colleges at the time.

As a varsity football and lacrosse player, an activist in Dwight Hall and a member of several administrative committees, Schmoke was a natural choice to represent the student body before the faculty. "There was no big man on campus, but I had just been elected secretary of. the class, so at least a few hundred people in my class knew who I was," he says.

Schmoke went on to study at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a law degree from Harvard in 1976. I n 1977, President Jimmy Carter ap36 The New Journal/February 2 , 1990

pointed him assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, and in 1987 he was elected mayor of Baltimore. Last year he joined the Yale Corporation.

The distance he has traveled from student activist to Corporation member sometimes surprises even Schmoke. "I think about it from time to time and I smile. There is a certain irony to it." For the most part, however, Schmoke has led a consistent career; he has always, for one thing, played the role of conciliator.

When striking students marched up Hillhouse Avenue to the President's house with a list of five demands, Schmoke persuaded them to post the list on a tree instead of nailing it to Kingman Brewster's front door. "I was fairly moderate politically," Schmoke

says, "and so I was not a big supporter of some of the more radical factions.

But I also wanted to see changes. I guess I wanted to see reform, not revolution."

Schmoke served on the monitoring committee, a student-faculty body that acted as a liaison among the police, the Black Panther Party and University officials. "As a part of the committee I went everywhere," he says. "I met with people in little back alleys and dark rooms as well as some of the big brass of the University in the Corporation room."

In 1988, Schmoke made headlines as the first prominent public official to suggest that the United States consider legalizing drugs. As President Bush pours more and more money into his anti-drug war, a few voices including

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Schmoke, William F. Buckley, Jr. and former Secretary of State George Shultz are calling for decriminalization. "My second or third year as state's attorney I must have been prosecuting about 12,000 drug cases a year and things weren't getting better. So I started reading about Prohibition and saw some rough analogies to what was going on now," he says. "We are being about as successful in achieving a drug-free America as we were in achieving an alcohol-free America during the '20s."

Schmoke's reasoning on the drug issue is consistent with another feature of his career: his concern with issues that directly affect the community around him. As a public official, he stresses his efforts to involve all elements of society in fighting urban

"If you're concerned about social issues don't look beyond your own backyard." problems. "The job of the mayor is to care about people in the community," he says.

H e argues that the government should handle drug addicts as people to be treated rather than as a monolithic threat to society. "My view is better described as medicalization rather than legalization," Schmoke says. If drugs were made legal , government could regulate their use, and keep them out of the hands of children. Users could also have the assurance of sterile needles. "The connection between AIDS and drug abuse made me think you've got to approach this thing as a public health issue," he says.

Legalizing drugs, Schmoke says, would also eradicate much of the crime that is destroying urban neighborhoods. "The thing that really got rne thinking about legalization," he says, "is that a friend of mine, a police

officer, was sh ot in a drug deal that went bad. H e had a body wire on, so I had to listen to him die, and then make a decision on whether to prosecute the guy who killed him for the death penalty. That was a very emotional, very difficult time for me, and I started thinking about the problem in a different way."

Other programs the mayor of Baltimore has devised include a joint effort with business leaders to guarantee a job or college financial aid to any high school graduate with a 95 percent attendance record. He has also targeted adult illiteracy. One of Schmoke's pet projects has been the development of a new day-care facility, which opened last October. To raise the $665,000 to finance the center, Schmoke has tried to foster cooperation between the public and private sectors.

Schmoke actually began his work with day care when he was at Yale. It was his idea to include employee child care among the five demands of the May Day Strike Steering Commitee.

Throughout 1969, Schmoke and Mary P earl (DC '72) had struggled to establish a day-care center, and they saw May Day as an appropriate time to revive the issue. "What Mary Pearl and some other students and I tried to say was that if you're all upset and concerned about social issues, don't look beyond your own backyard. There are things happening right here on Yale campus that should have your attention. That's why we were so insistent about the day-care issue." Schmoke and Pearl were able to get Davenport College designated as a child-care area over the May Day weekend and eventually helped establish the Calvin Hill Day Care Center.

As a new member of the Corporation, Schmoke will have the chance once again to address issues that affect the community in and around Yale.

Meanwhile, his backyard continues to grow.

•

Jamie Slaughter is a junior in jonathan Edwards College.

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Suspicion and Paranoia The Secrets of the May Day Secun¡ty Machine

Jamie Workman A 30-year-old man with glasses and light thinning hair stepped out of the city heat into the air-conditioned lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel. He approached the desk, asked the attendant for a room, and checked in under a false name. None of the employees noticed, but someone else did.

Unbeknownst to this man, every move he made was monitored by a hidden video camera located behind the counter. The camera relayed the scene to a screen several blocks away, at the New Haven Police Station. There, an officer zeroed in on the man's face, and then on the guest book, and called over his boss, Chief of Police James F. Ahern. The two quickly determined the stranger's true identity, and suspected that he registered under a false name.

"He called me up one day and said there's a guy named John Dean that just checked in," said Sam Chauncey, operational head of University activities during the Panther trial protests.

John Dean was at that time the 38 The New Journal/February 2, 1990

assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell, and would soon move into the White House as counsel for President Richard Nixon. Opinions vary on what exactly Dean was doing in New Haven in the weeks leading up to the Black Panther trial and demonstrations. In his book, Blind Ambition, Dean briefly states that while he was in jail after the Watergate scandal, he met a guard he had spoken with several years earlier while on assignment near Yale. "He and I had shot the bull one afternoon back in 1970 when I was covering a pro-Bobby Seale demonstration for the Justice Department," Dean wrote.

"That's just a lie," said Chauncey.

"He was not the official representative from the Justice Department. We were already working with someone else who was appointed for that task." Dean never contacted the police or the Yale administration the entire time he was in New Haven. This made men like Yale President Kingman Brewster and Chauncey wary, for it was common

knowledge that Nixon hated Brewster and his liberal university administration.

Chauncey and Brewster filed a claim under the Freedom of Information Act to look at the Justice Department documents on them. "Just about every one of them was whited out for reasons of national security- why our activities were considered a matter of national security I'll never know- but it was clear that M itchell had given Dean some instructions," Chauncey said.

Two events took place while Dean was in New Haven. One was the bomb that blew up in Ingalls Rink at the end of a rock concert given by a group from the Divinity School. The second was the burning of the "Peace Building," which was the radicals' headquarters on the corner of Elm and Church Streets. The police declared that the fire was deliberately set, but no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for the crime.

Both acts were evidently the work of professionals, for while the campus

police found many other pipe bombs, Molotov Cocktails and homemade devices around New Haven, only the one at Ingalls Rink worked well enough to actually explode. And since both acts targeted campus radicals, some suspected th~ destruction was the ¡ work of provocateurs, designed to raise tensions and incite a riot.

"I think that's classic anti-police paranoia," said J. Daniel Sagarin, assistant U.S. attorney at the time.

There is no telling whether federal officials were involved in either of the two incidents. But in New Haven, as in the rest of the country, police, leftists and University administrators had good reason to distrust each other.

"There was an immense amount of anger, and the belief was common among radicals in those days that nothing short of violence would represent progress," said Bill Chickering (BK '70), a leader of the unarmed marshals who worked constantly to keep the peace without the use of force.

In the weeks preceding the protests, Chauncey stayed in continuous contact with James Ahern and his brother Chief Inspector Steven Ahern, and was kept well informed on potential threats to the peace. The Ahern brothers earned national recognition for their ability to keep control of the situation. Communication and information, rather than the use of force, were the elements that James Ahern emphasized. "It was a well-planned wheel, run very smoothly, and I was just one of the spokes," said former Yale University Police Chief Louis Cappiello.

Seven years passed before the public learned about the inner workings of the Ahern brothers' security machine. The May Day demonstrations marked the peak of an illegal wiretapping operation which involved the New Haven Police, the Southern New England Telephone Company, and members of the FBI who targeted "gamblers and left-wing militants" as subversive individuals. Included among the names of those tapped were nine attorneys, three Yale College masters,

several other Yale teachers and clergymen, and assorted students, Panthers, and radicals living in New Haven. Eventually, 1,251 people successfully filed suit and collected damages from the City of New Haven, SNET and the Ahern brothers.

It began as early as 1958, when Richard Sulman, an electrical engineering major at Yale, took out an advertisement selling electronic listening devices. Steve Ahern visited Sulman's apartment several days later.

"He seemed very interested in the technology of eavesdropping," Sulman told a Police Board hearing in 1977.

Sulman, a wiretap expert, testified that he sold Ahern two devices at their first meeting, and several more over the next few years. The court never deter-

"Jim Ahern's primary concern was to keep New Haven from turning into a bloodbath." mined when the New Haven Police began using illegal wiretaps to monitor conversations, but the high point of the operations-in 1969-1970, when New Haven became a center for antiwar activity- coincided with the tenures of the Aherns.

The police ran their wiretap operation from a room on the fourth floor of the Powell Building on Church Street, and later expanded to a larger building on Court Street during the Aherns' tenure. The closets and rooms were fuled with various machines like the "pen registers" which recorded any phone numbers dialed, and other machines plugged into the switchboard by an employee at SNET. "There was a person within the phone company who did supply this service . Of course, for payment," Deputy Inspector Vincent

DeRosa, who participated in the wiretaps, said at a police board hearing.

In the course of the hearings, it emerged that former Mayor Biagio DiLieto, then chief of police, told Sergeant Francis DeGrand to dump three wiretap machines into the harbor. Instead, DeGrand bashed them with a hammer in his basement, and left them there incapacitated. The battered machines were introduced in 1977 as prime evidence of the operations.

Sergeant Walter P. O'Conner, an intelligence officer until the summer of 1969, testified that in 1969 or 1970 the telephone wiretaps were expanded from gambling and organized crime figures to radical political groups. His partner, Sergeant Pasquale Carrieri, added that several FBI agents became involved in the operation after it moved to the Powell Building. These agents were identified as Raymond Connally, William Glossa and Theodore Gunderson.

Carrieri declines to discuss the case t~ay. "I've thought about it a great deal. It was a painful time for all of us, and I would not like to talk about it," he said. "You're asking the wrong guy, pal," said former Sergeant Robert Lillis, in response to questions about the wiretap disclosures. Coming in the wake of Watergate, the city probe that investigated the police wiretaps in 1977 provoked popular outrage. But in 1970, many citizens were grateful to the police for maintaining order during a frightening time, and few asked questions about their methods. "In those days, the practice of wiretapping was honored by a wink," said Sagarin, who represented the Ahern brothers.

"You know, people don't remember that violence was prevented as a direct result of the wiretaps," Sagarin said. "[The wiretaps] had been used to prevent at least one bombing. They forget that there was a murder which was unresolved. And they forget that some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were the families of convicted bank robbers."

Chauncey agrees with Sagarin's analysis that "Jim Ahern's primary concern The New JoumaUFebruarv 2. 1990 39

DiLieto told a sargeant to dump three wiretap machines in the harbor. was to keep New Haven from turning into a bloodbath."

The disclosures of the entire wiretap operation not only cost the City of New Haven and the police department great sums of money (the phone company paid $150,000 in damages, the Ahern brothers $35,000, and the City of New Haven $1.85 million), it also hurt the esteem and reputation of the same forces which had been praised so highly several years before. When the police board asked Inspector Nicolas Pastore why he and others involved had not reported the wiretapping, he replied, "Keep in mind I was working for a person !Steve Ahern) who had a supercop image . . . probably commended 100 times or more. His brother was a nationally acclaimed police chief. Who was I? I did what I thought was best for me. I ran."

The irony is that while the individuals involved knew they were acting against the law, they did not know they could have done the same thing legally.

By simply requesting a warrant from a federal judge, they could have run the entire operation with immunity. "It wasn't a case of law and order running amuck," said Sagarin, "but simply of well-intentioned cops uneducated in the letter of the law." According to the former assistant U.S. attorney, far more wiretaps are employed today than during the Nixon Presidency.

"You've got telephones legally tapped for up to 300 days at a time. Not one warrant for a wiretap has been refused by a judge in the past decade," Sagarin said.

To their credit, the Ahern brothers succeeded where almost every other city police force failed. There were no lives lost, no serious injuries, and the damage to Yale and New Haven buildings was minimal. But there are still those who question the price paid for such success. Did New Haven unknowingly exchange open violent

confrontation for a Big Brother state?

In addition to the covert audiovisual devices used to monitor subversive activity, the New Haven Police used questionable methods in apprehending their suspects. "Ahern was able to get through FBI sources descriptions and photographs of these people and he did in fact- I'm not sure if it's legal or illegal- arrest them all as they came into town," said Chauncey.

"Every time he saw one, checking into a hotel or whatnot, he would pick 'em up and put 'em in jail and 't'en days later they'd be let out and it was all over."

Although Sagarin does not believe that the federal authorities were behind the Ingalls Rink bombing, he said that Jim Ahern was worried that the federal government wanted the New Haven demonstrations to get out of hand.

Ahern made sure to keep the National Guard out of the center of town. "He was very concerned about the possibility that federal troops would intentionally precipitate violence like that at Kent State," said Sagarin.

In the weeks preceding the May Day demonstrations in 1970, the assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell was sent with mysterious orders to monitor

Sam Chauncey, Kingman Brewster's special assistant during May Day, had the all-important job of making sure Yale survived. Providing security, monitoring radical activity, devising strategy for protecting the University-all this fell under Chauncey's purview. To ensure that events would not get out of control, Chauncey said, all sorts of preparations preceded May Day, many of them top secret.

Chauncey and New Haven Police Chief James Ahem were particularly concerned about agitators coming in from out of town for the sole purpose of tearing down Yale. -These were people who were not part of any i~ group like the Panthers," he said. "'These were people who in those days just roamed from town to town causing trouble."

Particularly worrisome was a radical splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society called Weatherman.

Weatherman had broken from the national student organization to pursue an agenda of terrorism and violence. In late April, Chauncey and Brewster drove out to an empty field in Western Massachusetts to meet with Archibald Cox, then an administrator at Harvard and Jater special pi'OICC\l&Or

had confronted Weatherman in Cambridge weeks earlier, gave Chauncey plaotographa and infonnation about the group, including the news that they wore chartering two buses from Boston to New Haven for the rally.

First, Chauncey and Ahem went to Greyhound and took out an insurance policy on the two buses. "Then," said Chauncey, when Friday arrived, â&#x20AC;˘we replaced the driven with two state police officers." The Weathermen boarded their buses and set otT down the Maasachusetts Turnpike. Following Ahem's plan, Chauncey said, "'The lead bus pulled over as though ~thins had gone wrong, and the MICOnd bus pulkd over behind it. And the _two driven huddled underneath the hood. AD of a sudden a police car came along and picked the two up and just left. the Weathermen right there on the Mass Turnpike. They picked a place where you could walk five miles in any direction and still not get anywhere. They all got out and went left and right and were never seen again, as far as New Haven was concerned.â&#x20AC;˘

in the Watergate hearings. Cox. who

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leftist radicals. This man was in turn illegally monitored by the local police.

The local police were acting under the cover t supervision of members from the Federal Bureau of I nvestigation.

The head of the F BI was tak ing orders from h is boss, who also hap pened to be the attorney general. And the attorney general's boss, Richard N ixon, hated Kingman Brewster.

Paranoia struck deep.

But it was a paranoia that had no loyalties to the left or to the right.

Those who wanted to keep order were j ust as worr ied as those who wanted to overthrow order. Even the brave a rmband-wearing student m arshals, who stepped between the National Guar d's wall of fixed bayonets and the thousands of rock-throwing demonstrators, were not sure if they could trust one another. "There was the belie f that demonstrations in and of them selves were useless, the normal political process was useless. W ith all the rage at the time was the belief that the only way to bring about the Red Revolution was the radicalization of all these sweet liberal arts students," said Chickering. "There was a theory at the time that you wanted the cops to break heads. T h rough police intervention you would radicalize new soldiers for the revolutionary movement. I didn't agree with that."

C ops did not break heads, and the revolution never got underway in New H aven. But today the far-reaching impact of legalized wiretaps still helps p rotect us again st criminals who threa ten society. Although we no longer live in an era of upheaval and confron tation, it is possible that we wou ld feel more comfortable if we did .

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The New Journal/February 2, 1990 41

Essay/Gary Dauphin

A Shared History Few of the students who hang out at the African-American Cultural Center know much about May Day. A turnover every four years and short memories make even the antiaparthied movement of the mid-1980s seem like a myth. Faculty have their own problems to deal with, and reminding aggressively upwardly mobile college students of the glory days of campus radicalism is not high on their agenda. May Day, 1970 starts to become a lost piece of history in need of recovering, an enterprise usually reserved for articles produced and consumed by white students.

This is ironic considering the extent to which Yale's African American community was implicated in what occurred in New !iaven that school year of 1969-1970."The series of events which climaxed during the night-time riots on the weekend of May 1 , 1970 anti-racist struggle had been inverted, revolved around us, our particularly directed inward instead of outward at African-American bodies and their racist structures. Black-on-black right to be. If contemporary black violence always serves the interests of Yalies want the visceral and lasting racism, as it leaves the work of marker of their connection to that destroying African-Americans in our particular moment in history, they own hands. By 1970, the fate intended need do nothing more than look at for African-American radicals was so themselves in the mirror. Even among obvious that on the first weekend of the gothic towers of Yale University, May, thousands gathered to show we are and remain African-American their outrage as well as their support people, in the exact same way that for the Black Panther Party.

Alex Rackley was an African-AmeriThe truth of the matter, which can person, at least until he was wasn't at all discernable on May 1, was reduced to a bullet-ridden corpse, that this gathering was the Party's photographed and displayed, the proverbial swan-song. May, 1970 was too early to gauge the long term impact central exhibit in a murder case.

For African-Americans aware of of the Rackley murder, both upon the their own history, the truism of the internal politics of the Party and the mirror carries with it other lessons, one Party's relationship to its constituents. of the more important being that Instead of marking the demise of a blackness works out to mean that movement, it seemed to mark quite the supposedly inalienable rights are opposite. The weekend saw a broad actually alienable. The charges of coalition of progressive forces coming physical and psychological abuse together, and was a moment when leveled against the police by the 14 Yale's student body, black and white, Black Panther Party prisoners, thrown seemed solid in their support of the in jail as a result of Rackley's murder, Party. If the picnic on the Green wasn't were indications of the brutality of quite the revolution everyone was talking about, at least it seemed at the white supremacy in America.

If, as is commonly alleged, the time that it wouldn't be long before Federal government hired another something happened.

A few things did. The first is that it African-American to murder Rackley, +2 The New Journal/Febr uary 2, 1990

started to become obvious that the war in Vietnam could not continue any longer. As this hope became a reality, widespread white interest in radical movements collapsed. The next thing that happened is that the early victories of the civil rights movement, specifi¡ cally school desegregation efforts and effective affirmative action policies, produced a generation of African¡ American college students who passed through a system that seemed to work unusually well for them. This gradually caused a general shift in African-American students' attitudes.

More securely bourgeois than their predecessors, these students could afford more reformist political postures, that is when they ev~n thought about politics. T hose who sull harbored more radical tendencies were as ineffective in confronting the systemic face of racism as their more conservative classmates. These students usually waged forms of warfare which were specificallY academic and of little use to communities outside of the universitY¡ The developments of the last 20

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act1v1sts, whose rank and ftle was composed of the young men facing the ~~~;:;;.,.1(1 draft and the possibility of participating in the war in Vietnam.

These movements shared similar rhetorical postures, borrowing freely from each other, from the rhetoric of Marxism as well as from the emerging rhetoric of feminism, the third major progressive movement of the era.

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Their major o f divergence that once thepoint war ended, so did was the essential moral and political problem which had so agitated white college students, while racism existed - ---.,_.,...L-1,__ unabated in America as it has for nearly 500 years.

Also there was the inherent contradiction presented by an antiwar posture that called for some measure of pacifism, not to mention that many years were definitely not the future ant iwar activists were simply envisioned at May Day. When frightened. The first lesson which the Douglas Miranda, a group leader of Black Panther Party taught was that it was a human right to defend oneself the New Haven Chapter of the Black Panther Pa~ty, addressed a crowd of against violence, with violence, to the Yale students with "There's no reason point of killing one's antagonist. Given why the bulldog and the panther can't such different cardinal principles, it is clear that the relationship between get together," there was both a plea and a plan in his words. The plea was white student radicals and Mricanfor Yale to support the pressure the Americans was in many ways Party and its supporters were bringing contrived. to bear upon the State of Connecticut To suggest- nearly 20 years to free the prisoners. The plan was that later- that this union of diverse this enterprise was one step along a interests and peoples was actually a journey, the pathway of which was to union of convenience or even a mere be shared by both black and white flirtation is not meant as an attack upon the ideals and commitment of radicals. those whites who supported the Party.

The problem with this plan is that the campus Miranda stood before was It is an analysis of what Mricanone caught in the grip of two distinct American students consider to be the progressive movements. On one hand obvious: white students on American stood Miranda, the rest of the Black college campuses, including Yale's, are Panther Party, the Black Student apathetic if not outright antagonistic to Alliance at Yale and a large cross- the interests and agendas of their section of New Haven's African- African-American classmates. If anyone wants proof of this they need American population. Their movement was an historically specific only examine the well-publicized moment in the the ongoing struggle for instances of racist violence and harassment at the University of African-Americans' rights and safety !he struggle against white supremacy Massaschusets at Amherst, at Columbia University, at the UniIn America, the long term thread of which connects Malcolm X to So- versity of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and journer Truth. Their partners in this so on throughout the Reagan Era, on great enterprise were Yale's antiwar down the list to Mother Yale.

As if these dynamics did not pose enough problems for African-American student progressivism, there is the already mentioned concern that what passes for student activism in the contemporary context is a far cry from what it once was. The changes in the class position of incoming students is a piece of the explanation. Another major piece is the increasing social and political distance between AfricanAmerican students at Yale and their counterparts in the New Haven community.

Once upon a time, when the Black Panther Party or any New Haven resident spoke of police violence, black Yalies knew what they were talking about. One of the first things to happen in the fall of 1969 was a party thrown by the recently opened AfroAmerican Cultural Center. No descriptive record of the party itself exists today, but one can easily imagine: Think bell bottoms and Sly and the Family Stone, exchange fade cuts for Afros and you get the picture .

The party was advertised in New Haven by means both official and informal, and much like a House party today it attracted a fair number of New Haven's college-age youth. One can't be sure if this was the first time this had ever happened but what happened next is a familiar occurence in New Haven's African-American communities: The New Haven police arrived in force and started arresting any black men they could fmd.

This was not unusual on the border between Yale and New Haven. The unusual aspect of this particular night was that the hosts of the 111en being shoved into police vans, the BSAY, protested the treatment of their guests as any good host would. The police went about their business, ignoring the BSAY's arguments that no one at the center had calJed them, that there was a party going on, that people would come to parties. A rock was thrown, and a police riot eruptc:d. A large group of about 70- a few students and many more New Haven residents- ran away from the center en masse, The New JoumaVFebruary 2, 1990 43

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throwing objects at their uniformed pursuers. By morning there had been 50 arrests, including the BSAY's moderator.

What makes this incident noteworthy is that in 1990 it simply wouldn't happen. New Haven residents still come to parties at the Cultural Center (it's cheaper than a club) but not only do Yalies usually steer clear of the locals, but Yale regulations stipulate that a Yale police officer must be present. The theory is that the University's private security force is needed to protect Yale property and Yale students. The practice is that when a Yale police officer catches a student doing something relatively stupid -while not felonious-the worst that could happen is that he or she is taken home and reported to a residential college dean. New Haven residents are handed over to New Haven police, usually to the relief of their Yale counterparts.

Our historical ties must be acknowledged, excavated and nurtured.

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The New Journal thanks: Timothy Bannon Arthur Bradford Drew Burch Henry "Sam" Chauncey, Jr. Richard Conniff Gary Dauphin Masi Denison George Fayen Albert]. Fox

Liz Hopkins Brooks Kelley Shelley Kephart Laura London Todd Lynch Milena Novy Michael Palmer Daniel Panner Tom Perrotta

Kathy Reich Mark Ribbing Jamie Slaughter Tom Strong Strong-Cohen Rebecca Vollmer Jamie Workman Abby Young

The current situation is the result of real class differences within the African-American community, but it is also a symptom of the AfricanAmerican students' willingness to let their class position under white supremacy dictate their relationship to their own community. Although few grew up in New Haven and fewer remain after they graduate, our connection to the local community for the four years that we are here is vitally important. It is a relationship based not only upon the empirical reality of common race, interest and culture, but also upon a host of historical ties, such as May Day. Such ties must be acknowledged, excavated and nurtured.

Without them all of our struggles here in the University, whatever they may be, become isolated, parochial andjust that much harder.

•

Gary Dauphin is a semor in Jonathan Edwards College 44 The New J o urnaVFebruary 2, 1990

A Survival That's Worth It An Interview withJohn H ersey John Hersey (YC '36) gradWJt~d from Yale the last 20 years. repressive years in terms of everyone during the Great Depression and went to but those who have. And there has not work as a newspaper correspondent during TNJ: Are you surprised at the way yet been a response on the part of the World War II. He won the Pulitzer Prize things turned out after 1970? Did you younger generation that might correct for his first novel, A Bell for Adano, in think that there was more of a danger that.

1945, and wrote Hiroshima a year later of repression, or that it was more likely TNJ: What sort of a response did you when he visitedjapan after the dropping of that students were really going to expect after May Day? the first atomic bomb. In 1965, he returned change society?

Hersey: Well, it was very exciting to to New Haven to become master of Pierson Hersey: I suppose that I put the issue see the way students reacted to what in very stark terms in Letter to the AlumCollege. was happening in the world. And at Dun'ng the protests of 1970, Hersey super- ni. But in a way the movement has Yale there was a deep set of issues that vised a makeshift first-aid station, and ex- been toward the less desirable of the came up then having to do with the erted a calming influence on his college. He two alternatives that I talked about. I purpose of the University and what was an enthusiastic supporter of Kingman think the Reagan years have been Yale should be teaching its students.

Brewster, and befriended student radicals as Hersey listening to students outside Branford College. well.

Shortly after May Day, as his term came to an end, Hersey composed Letter to the Alumni, a lyrical account of the late '60s at Yale. "It is a marvelous, flawed generation, " he wrote about the graduating class in Pierson, "I speak of it, and of them, with love andfear. But I fear us, who are older, more. • Hersey saw 1970 as a turning point in history, and warned parents and alumni against belittling their children's ideals.

He predicted two possible futures in his book. One he called "American repression"- a racist, anti-intellectual future, characterized by the disillusionment and alienation of the young.

Greed will go hog wild. Tomorrow i.r uncertain; better grab today. Congress, lobbied goofy, will protect by law the discharge of industrial wastes into waterways, highway mortality, deforestation, oil spills, and the exhaust of hydrocarbons into the air ... The blacks will seethe.

Troops of vigilantes will be formed . . .

In its final incarnation, American repression would resemble Nazism, Stalinism and Fascism, Hersey wrote. "We are capable of this future. In fact, this is the easy future to reach. AlL we have to do is keep on going the way we are now." · The second possibility Hersey envisioned was a more hopeful future he called "a survival that's worth it, • led by a new youth movement: "The non-violent revolution of trust and decentralization . . . a revolution of blacks and whites together; of alumni and students together; of parents and children; of all."

Shortly before New Year's Day, 1990, in ~ Flon'da K eys studio where he is working on a new novel, Hersey spoke with TN] about students, politics, and the chonges of The New J ournaUFebruary 2, 1990 45

Yale did change in several very impor- lot of the students were not that tant ways, but I wish it had held on to serious? some of the very important com- Hersey: I would say probably a mamittments it made at the time. jority of students were not engaged, TNJ: How do you mean? and a great many left on May Day and Hersey: I think that promises were had disdain for what was going on. made, or understood anyhow, in 1970 The issue of whether these were kids that have not really been fulfilled. Yale playing games of politics- that's a little has worked out a comfortable peace bit cynical, because if you take the with the establishment of the city, in position that people with edu cation terms of accomodating its buildings- and who are engaged in serious profesdeveloping stores underneath its new sions and teach should refrain from constructions and so forth. But the playing games of politics, what do you whole issue of Yale's relationship to have? blacks in New Haven, to minorities in TNJ: Maybe it's unfair to pick on your general and to the poor has not been book in hindsight, but what you wrote faced. It has not been faced by society about students' contempt for careerism at large. I think that we've just seems ironic now-"If American buspostponed these issues, issues that are iness could persuade young people . . . going to have to be dealt with at some that careers in business would enable time in the future. them to relate and to help, then they TNJ: So are you disappointed in the would flock into business. Until that political climate on campus now? day, they will flock into every available Hersey: Well, there's no point in being avenue of social service, politics, disappointed. The best you can do is reform and revolution." What has haphope that some of what's happening in pened to that shining generation? the world will restore a sense of public Hersey: Well, I think a surprising service among students. ·number of the students who . were TNJ: What about the question of the radicals turned around. But they didn't role of the University-what do you become yuppies. They went into law think of the argument that it was · a and medicine, and are practicing as travesty that Yale cancelled exams and very serious and positive contributing suspended academic work for the citizens. They have managed to bring Bobby Seale trial, that the academic about some important social changes environment was politicized and com- quietly, in a piecemeal fashion. promised?

TNJ: What about when you were a Hersey: That, I think, is a rational student here? People talk a lot about conservative argument. But if you take the shift away from the Old Yale in the as a much more extreme example of 1960s. Do you think things have come what was happening then what hap- full circle? pened in Beijing last spring and sum- Hersey: Well, · no. Things have mer, and what's happened in Eastern changed a great deal. When I was a Europe recently, you see that univer- student it was at the end of the Depressity students were out front on the need sion, and I was a scholarship student. for change. And they had to suspend Then you had to figure out how you the real meaning of their lives in were going to earn three meals a day education for what seemed more im- when you graduated. After I gradportant. I don't mean to argue that uated I lived on a dollar a day for food May Day had that kind of dimension for a couple of years. It was not an easy to it, but reducing the scale, that's the time. It was the time of Roosevelt, and issue. There were questions that had to so there was a tremendous sense of the be dealt with, and for a short time kind of social responsibility that I've anyhow, it was appropriate that Yale been mourning the want of, at this moment, in the air. suspend its main function.

TNJ: It seems like there was a very TNJ: Was there the same sense that strange mix of attitudes at the time. To students had a special role, that they some degree, here were these privi- were the bearers of idealism or radileged children enjoying themselves in calism then? all the excitement, and at the same Hersey: There was not much raditime these were very serious issues they calism at Yale, I must say. Yale was a were confronting. D id you think that a very conservative place. We had maids 46 The New Journal/February 2, 1990

who cleaned up our rooms. We had printed menus in the dining rooms with choices for dinner, served to us by waitresses. It was a privileged world, no question. Most of us were going on to take responsible positions in business and government. But as I said there was also a sense of social responsibility. I think that students went out and lived up to the challenges of the time, in small and indirect ways through the lives that they led.

TNJ: So in that sense, at least, the Yale student's role has not changed.

Hersey: Yes, although the state of mind of greed is so deep-seated now that any politician who even murmurs that he may have to raise taxes is im· mediately defeated. Roosevelt would have said to us that we owed our country some kind of retribution that would justify raising taxes. And that seems to be the thing that you would hope students would see today, and begin to do something about in small ways: TNJ: You mean by going into social service work?

Her·sey: Yes, and even through the professions- through teaching and law and medicine and business itself.

Business has been the most irresponsi· bl(! in terms of ruthlessness and greed.

There is lots of room for change in the climate of the business community.

TNJ: If you were going to write another letter to the alumni now, would you bring up different issues?

Hersey: Well, as I said earlier, I think that our society has postponed dealing with the issues of poverty and race.

And I would still express the wish that our students could be thinking seri· ously about those problems and how to deal with them in our society.

And then, I think that the way change comes in our country is in terms of an accumulation of effort, not always dramatic or violent, on the part of a large number of people. So I think that there has to be a change in the state of mind. And here's where the University could help, in giving stu· dents a sense of history, for example. I think most students, certainly in the time when I was at Yale, graduated without knowing much about history.

We've got to have more of a sense of where we've come from and where we might go.

•

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