Harvey's Hotline #8: A Memory from May 1970

 I was a first-year graduate student at Yale in the spring of 1970, when against the backdrop of the Vietnam War protests and a series of criminal prosecutions against various members of the Black Panther Party, most notably against Bobby Seale, the New Haven Green became a rallying point for much of the American public that today would be defined as the “American Left” but that was then defined mostly as “critics of the policies of the Nixon Administration.”

Beginning with the pretrial proceedings in May 1970, tens of thousands of supporters of the Panthers arrived in New Haven individually and in organized groups. They were housed and fed by community organizations and by sympathetic Yale students in their dormitory rooms. The Yale college dining halls provided basic meals for everyone. Protesters met daily en masse on the New Haven Green across the street from the Courthouse (and one hundred yards from Yale's main gate) to hear protest speakers.

Among the speakers were Dr. Benjamin Spock, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin (all famous anti-Vietnam activists). They were joined by another celebrated activist, the Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who stated the following: “All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts.” Finally, the Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr., my first Yale President, issued the now-famous remark, “I personally want to say that I’m appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.” Even if President Brewster's generally sympathetic tone upset many of the University’s alums, thereby heightening tensions within the school community, it is generally believed that his actions helped defused the worst of the friction and perhaps saved Yale from much violence and vandalism.

As I am fond of saying even now, it was a time when even the Slavic Department went “on strike” from May Day until the end of the term. And if the Slavic Department went “on strike,” it meant that the level of student commitment at Yale truly was exceptional.

It was a time of what we thought were, or would be, great and lasting changes. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Still, I remember those days and the “Kent State Massacre” of May 4 with great emotion. It was a time when protesting was a normal state of affairs; and in the early 1970s there seemed to be so much to protest against!