Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  The next day, the Yale College Student Senate, the school’s formal student government, approved a resolution calling for a student strike and asking classmates to endorse it. The same day, the Chicago Seven held a press conference in New York in which the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was the featured speaker. He urged liberals and progressives to join the May 1 rally in New Haven to support Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers. Abernathy said that the “racist justice” that drove Martin Luther King Jr. to the streets in the South “is now driving us to the streets of the North—New York, New Haven, Chicago, signaling the beginning of the end of the Mitchell-Nixon-Agnew-Thurmond era.” Denouncing the jailing of Hilliard and Douglas, he declared, “Southern-style justice has come to New Haven. . . . This is nothing more than legal lynching.”52

  Despite parallels to the recent Chicago trials, the Panthers understood that the political dynamics in New Haven were quite different. In Chicago, Seale had been tried on charges that were, on their face, absurd. He had not participated in organizing the Chicago mobilizations. He had been in Chicago for only a few hours, where he spoke once briefly, with little in his speech offering ammunition for his arrest. He had had almost no discernible role in instigating the rebellion outside the Democratic National Convention. The court’s decision to deny him his right to defend himself rested on shaky legal ground. Seale’s refusal to participate politely in a trial that appeared designed to railroad him had garnered broad political support. But New Haven was a different story. Alex Rackley had been brutally murdered. And while the Panthers argued that the FBI had gone to great lengths to frame Seale, murder was a serious matter. The allegations had to be addressed carefully. Open defiance of the court proceedings would be impolitic.

  In a private meeting on April 21, the Panthers met with Judge Harold Mulvey. The Panthers wanted to establish a cordial relationship, and so did the judge. Public outcry about the jailing of Hilliard and Douglas bode poorly for the judge should the relationship with the Panthers become polarized. So he and the Panthers agreed that Seale would apologize publicly in exchange for Hilliard’s and Douglas’s release. That day, Seale said in court, “I respect your honor very much for allowing me to have a fair trial. . . . I understand that you are trying to see that we defendants have a fair trial. . . . We also understand the necessity for peaceful decorum in the courtroom.” Hilliard and Douglas were released that day.53

  That evening, about forty-five hundred people—mostly white Yale students—gathered at Yale’s Ingalls Rink to decide whether to call a strike. Kenneth Mills, a black assistant professor at the university, told the crowd that the plight of Bobby Seale and the accused Black Panthers symbolized the plight of blacks generally in “Racist America,” and he called for action: “In recognition of the critical emergency, in recognition of the reality of oppression, in recognition of exploitation,” he said, it was time to “close down” the university. “This is the time to say ‘classroom space is not where it’s happening.’ The struggle for justice is much more important.” The audience shouted and cheered, pumping clenched fists and chanting, “Strike, Strike, Strike!” Students organized meetings in all of Yale’s undergraduate colleges and some of the graduate schools to mobilize support for the strike.54

  The following morning, April 22, 1970, Yale students went on strike for the first time in the university’s history. They set up picket lines surrounding classroom buildings and carried signs reading, “Don’t go to class” and “Skip classes, talk politics.” They handed out leaflets saying, “All academic commitments must be suspended so that we all may devote our full time and attention to the situation, educate ourselves, and act accordingly.” The university canceled all intercollegiate sports events for the week. Students in Yale’s undergraduate colleges passed referenda supporting the strike, and the undergraduate residence halls also voted to provide food, shelter, and first aid to Panther supporters who rallied on May 1. A university spokesperson estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of students were participating in the strike.55

  On April 23, about four hundred Yale faculty members and administrators held a closed meeting to discuss the strike. A group of black professors called for faculty to support the student strike. The faculty rejected a proposal to cancel all classes but voted overwhelmingly to grant all professors the option to suspend normal academic activities and devote their class periods to discussions of race and politics. Further, they instructed all faculty to “take a tolerant position in regard to assignments and papers handed in late and they should make as much time as possible available for the discussion of immediate and pressing issues.” The faculty also endorsed a proposal by the Black Students Alliance to hold a national conference of black organizations at Yale, as well as a proposal to establish a commission on “Yale involvement with the black community.”56

  With the trial scheduled to take place in New Haven, the May 1 mobilization at Yale promised to be significantly larger than the one at Harvard a few weeks earlier. Thousands of Yale students were mobilizing for the rally, and tens of thousands of supporters, many from out of town, were expected to join them. Eager to avoid disaster, Kingman Brewster Jr., the well-respected president of Yale, secretly met with friends from Harvard to learn from their experience. He decided that to protect Yale and his career, he would embrace the right to dissent, distinguish himself from Nixon, and distance Yale from the prosecution of the Panthers.

  At the April 23 faculty meeting, Brewster pronounced that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” Later that week, U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew called for Brewster’s ouster, accusing him of pandering to students on the “criminal left that belong not in a dormitory but in a penitentiary” and of subverting the American judicial process. Yale students rallied to Brewster’s defense, with more than three thousand of them signing a petition supporting his statement.57

  Seeing the government’s prosecution of Seale as an act to silence political dissent, thousands of Yale students had joined the Panther cause. By making the university a target and disrupting academic activities at Yale, the Panthers forced the university to take a position on the trial in New Haven. Initially, the administration responded with systematic repression, expelling students who disrupted regular academic activities in support of the Panthers. But as support for the Panthers grew, the administration changed course. Most of the Yale faculty and the broader New Haven community did not endorse the Panthers’ politics but were strongly liberal. Few supported Nixon’s Law and Order politics, and many felt threatened by it, seeing the repression of the Panthers as part of an overarching pattern of strong-arm repression. In this context, the administration was wary of heavily repressing Panther supporters and becoming a target of broader ire. To avoid that fate, Brewster publicly questioned the legitimacy of the U.S. judicial system and allowed the disruption of normal academic activities.

  While Brewster sought to de-escalate the conflict, Connecticut governor John Dempsey—beholden to a more conservative electorate—expressed “shock” at Brewster’s position and readied for May Day by dispatching two thousand state troopers to New Haven. Further, at the request of Governor Dempsey, U.S. attorney general Mitchell sent two thousand army paratroopers and two thousand marines to the region to assist the National Guard if necessary. Yale spokesperson Sam Chauncey said he was “surprised” and “upset” at the decision to deploy federal troops.58 White House emissaries, including Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, traveled to New Haven to monitor the situation.59

  Yale’s chaplain offered a refuge for people who wanted to retreat should the May Day protests turn into violent clashes with police.60 John Hersey, college master at Yale and executive of the Connecticut Bar Association, established a “defense trust” to raise funds for the Panthers’ legal expenses in the New Haven trial.61

  Before May Day even arrived, the Panthers had won
Yale. With Yale now supporting their right to dissent and Yale’s own president questioning the fairness of the American judiciary, the Party knew that violence by its supporters would work against the defendants in the New Haven trial. The Panthers called a press conference, and Assistant Minister of Defense “Big Man” Howard urged protestors to stay nonviolent.62 On behalf of the Black Panther Defense Committee, Ann Froines held several meetings with the New Haven chief of police to work out logistics of crowd control for the upcoming street mobilizations. She explained to the New York Times that violent protests “would not serve the interests of the defendants.”63 Panther allies Ann Froines, John Froines, David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden met with Kingman Brewster to coordinate strategy in order to avoid violence.64 Working with the Panther supporters to stem potential violence, Kingman Brewster announced that Yale would open its gates to May Day protestors.65

  The governor and U.S. attorney general, however, prepared for war. Marines, U.S. Army troops, and Connecticut Guardsmen—armed with rifles and bayonets, armored personnel carriers, and tanks—surrounded downtown New Haven. Officers instructed soldiers, “You will not be successfully prosecuted if you shoot someone while performing a duty. . . . There is nothing to fear concerning your individual actions.”66

  The next morning, about fifteen thousand people filled the New Haven Green for the May Day protests. The event was mostly peaceful and included marching, chanting, music, and speeches throughout the downtown and Yale’s campus.67 After a tense long day of protest in the face of police and heavily armed troops, someone pretending to be a Black Panther, later accused of working for the FBI, grabbed the microphone and falsely claimed that police had arrested three black people for walking on the green after dark. Protestors charged out to confront the police. Doug Miranda took the microphone and encouraged the audience to stay calm, explaining that the report was false. About fifteen hundred people confronted the police, a few throwing rocks. But the Black Panthers used their sound truck to urge rock throwers to disperse until peace was restored.68

  The Chicago Daily Defender ran an editorial, “Yale U. and the Panthers,” saying that the relatively peaceful New Haven rallies were likely to inspire similar protests at other campuses:

  The demonstrations were staged as evidence of a lack of trust in the integrity of the American courts and their capacity to conduct a fair trial, especially in cases where the Black Panthers are involved. . . . Yale has now become the focus for justice for the Black Panthers. With the singular exception of a few isolated incidents, the New Haven institution is going peacefully and serenely about the business of transforming a sick society into a healthy consortium. Other universities are sure to follow this lead and graft the Black Panther movement into the body of their own pleading for social change. Though a new force in the political horizon, the Panthers may provide the dynamism for the reformation of American society.69

  NATIONAL STUDENT STRIKE

  On the eve of the May Day protest at Yale, Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The action was wrenching for the nation. Nixon’s claims that he would promote “Vietnamization” of the war effort and gradually roll back the military draft appeased many, and the antiwar movement had become increasingly moderate by mid-1970. The anti-imperialist activists who built the student antiwar movement were gradually marginalized. But the Cambodia invasion threw into doubt Nixon’s claims of de-escalation, shattering the fragile faith of many that the government would end the war and the draft without a fight.

  Then on May 1, as Yale students mobilized support for the Panthers, Nixon denounced student activists in his strongest language to date. On the morning of May 2, the New York Times published the president’s comments in a front-page story alongside coverage of the Yale May Day mobilizations: “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities in the world, and here they are burning books and storming around.”70 Where the Panthers and their allies had won cautious acceptance from Yale, Nixon, in his pursuit of Law and Order politics, sought to strengthen his support by attacking the activists.

  Later that day, about two thousand Panther supporters met in Yale’s Dwight Hall to build upon the successful New Haven mobilizations and respond to the invasion of Cambodia. They formed the National Student Strike Committee and drew up a plan for further national action. At an afternoon press conference on the New Haven Green, Tom Hayden announced the call for the nationwide strike. He said students across the country should boycott classes until three demands were met. The following day, the New York Times summarized the three demands in a front-page story about the Yale mobilizations:

  The United States must end its “systematic oppression” of all political dissidents, such as Bobby Seale, and all other Black Panthers.

  The United States must cease “aggression” in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and unilaterally and immediately withdraw its force.

  Universities must end their “complicity” in war by ending war-related research and eliminating Reserve Officer Training Corps activities.71

  In a survey of U.S. college students for the John D. Rockefeller Foundation at the time, 79 percent of respondents strongly or partially agreed that “the war in Vietnam is pure imperialism,” and a full 71 percent of college students surveyed said they “Definitively believe” that Black Panthers “cannot be assured a fair trial.”72 With students across the country feeling betrayed and angered by Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and by his insults, and excited by the successful mobilizations at Yale, the call for a national student strike quickly spread. The Yale students, by targeting their own liberal university and making it take sides on the Panthers, had influenced national political debate. Others students sought to emulate their model. On May 3, editors from the student newspapers at eleven major eastern colleges—including six of the eight Ivy League universities—adopted the demands of the Panther allies in New Haven. Meeting at Columbia University in New York, the editors agreed to run a common editorial the following day calling for “the entire academic community of this country to engage in a nationwide university strike.”73

  Columbia University administrators attempted to undercut student support for the national strike by declaring a one-day moratorium on classes for Monday, May 4, and by holding a convocation to discuss possible responses to the invasion of Cambodia. At the convocation, Rich Reed, a black leader of the campus’s Third World Coalition, accompanied by a Black Panther member, seized the microphone and declared that talk of peace in Vietnam would be meaningless unless people moved “to build a mass movement against the source of imperialism and racism which is closest to us—Columbia University.”74 Reed criticized the School of International Affairs for assisting in the development of oppressive foreign policy strategies and denounced the consignment of black and Latino workers to the lowest-paying and dirtiest jobs on campus. That afternoon, about three thousand students gathered in Wollman Auditorium and voted overwhelmingly to strike, taking up the three demands issued in New Haven. The following day, thirty-five hundred students and campus workers rallied. Featured speaker William Kunstler—a high-profile lawyer for the Panthers and the Chicago Seven—called for all charges against the New York Panther 21 to be dropped. Protestors marched from Columbia to the City College of New York behind a banner declaring, “No more racist attacks on third world people. US out of Southeast Asia; Free all political prisoners now.” As the group marched through Harlem, members of the crowd chanted the Black Panther slogan, “Power to the people! Off the pig!”75

  The call for a national student strike quickly gained steam, and by May 4, student activists had gone on strike at schools across the country, including Brandeis, the City University of New York, New York University, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Princeton, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia.76


  One of the most heated protests took place at Kent State University in Ohio, a campus with a history of SDS activism against the war in Vietnam and in solidarity with the Panthers.77 On May 2, after the mayor of the city of Kent called in the Ohio National Guard, someone set fire to the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) building there. The following afternoon, the conflict escalated. Students sat in at a downtown intersection, and the National Guard charged them, stabbing several with bayonets and arresting many others. Students pelted the guardsmen with stones. And then on May 4, guardsmen opened fire on the students, shooting thirteen students in a hail of bullets and killing four.78

  The killing of the four student protesters fanned the flames of anti-imperialist fervor. On top of Nixon’s Law and Order rule, the Cambodia invasion, the continued Vietnam War and draft, and the heavy repression of the Black Panthers, the killings undermined many people’s faith in American democracy. The actions at Kent State showed that if students challenged the interests of those in power, they—like the Vietnamese and the Black Panthers—could be killed.