On the morning of May 1, 1970, the black spray paint of a graffiti board on Cross Campus read: “If you really know what’s going on, then you don’t have to know what’s going on to know what’s going on.” Two blocks north, J. Press, Cutler’s Record Shop, Broadway Wine Shoppe, Liggett’s, and Broadway Hiway Uniform boarded up their windows. Two blocks south, 15,000 people rallied together at the New Haven Green, listening to the press conference in front of the courthouse and dancing to emerging Black rock music from Elephant’s Memory, Polydor Records, and the Allnight Newsboys. The protesters overflowed into the then-gateless Old Campus. In a photo captured by Thomas Strong, ART ’67, on Elm Street between Trumbull and Saybrook Colleges, a one-lane road and a lone bicyclist are all that separate Yale College undergraduate activists on strike from school from two single-file lines of National Guard soldiers, armed with rifles and tear gas. Strong’s photo would become one archival material of hundreds in the 17 accessions of the Yale University Library’s “May Day Rally and Yale collection,” documenting the responsive uproar after the arrest of the “Connecticut 14” Black Panther activists, including party leaders Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale.
[National Guardsmen on Elm Street, photo by Thomas Strong]
Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae’s 2006 reportorial book, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer, situates the May Day rally in the long tension between the New Haven government and the growing New Haven Black Panther Party. According to Bass and Rae, on January 23, 1969, New Haven played host to the funeral of native son John Huggins, once the leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the Panthers. Huggins’s widow, Ericka, and their three-week-old daughter, Mai, traveled to Connecticut for the wake. Although Ericka Huggins and her colleague Warren Kimbrow had organized a chapter of the party in Bridgeport months prior, the chapter had fallen through. Huggins’s visit during the funeral catalyzed the creation of a new chapter in New Haven in the fall of 1969. The first Panther meetings were hosted in Kimbrow’s home on Orchard Street, where organizers taught political education classes and cooked free breakfast every school day for children attending neighboring elementary schools. The New Haven chapter’s “Basic Panther Platform” outlines in AIM Newsletter—the bulletin for the American Independent Movement—that Black communities are “unfree in much the same way as colonial subjects are unfree,” underscoring that racial subjugation manifests in the community’s economic and political institutions and culminates in police brutality. The local platform agenda concludes: “Police control is only one way that the Panthers see Black people being denied self-determination.”
On May 20, 1969, the murder of suspected FBI informant and 19-year-old Panther Alex Rackley in New Haven precipitated the arrests of fourteen total Black Panthers, including party leaders Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. Of the “Connecticut 14,” seven were women, two of whom were pregnant at the time of their arrest. Huggins and Seale were both denied counsel of their choice and, initially, the right to represent themselves in court. The Panthers saw this as the state and federal government’s concerted effort to rupture the Panthers’ agenda, its growing print media presence, and its popularity. As Angela Davis wrote in a July 1971 retrospective for Ebony, “Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale would have to stand trial for their lives because they had been unyielding in their efforts to forge liberating actions for Black people. And there were innumerable other instances of frame-ups and similar political reprisals.” The arrests of Huggins and Seale, along with the other members of the Connecticut 14, inspired a new wave of print activism on both a national and local scale. In New Haven, protest flyers were rapidly disseminated across Yale’s campus and surrounding shops. A flyer demanding the effective counsel of the Connecticut 14 reads, “FREE OUR SISTERS FREE OURSELVES,” prefiguring the rhetoric of Black feminist grassroots groups that emerged in the 70’s. Most notably, the motto resonates with the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement, which asserts, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
[New Haven Black Panthers flyer]
The New Haven Panthers’ fliers and newsletters moved community members to a series of protests, beginning in April 1970, which would finally culminate in protests on May Day. On April 14, 1970, New Haven high school students chanted in front of the courthouse and destroyed parts of Chapel Square Mall in protest. One day later, 1,500 protesters marched at Harvard University. By then, the Youth International Party leader and Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman had announced that the Panthers’ next rally would be at Yale—pressuring New Haven Panther leaders, undergraduate student leaders at Yale, University administration and then-University President Kingman Brewster, to prepare and accommodate.
Five years before May Day, in 1964, the record number of fourteen Black men matriculated to Yale, according to the archives of the Afro-American Cultural Center, which hadn’t been founded yet. In 1967, the Black Student Alliance at Yale was founded with the policy agenda of increasing Black enrollment, developing Afro-American studies, forging a relationship with the Black New Haven community, and establishing an Afro-American Cultural Center. However, the founding political activism of the AfAm house did not extend their policymaking to women. It wasn’t until the rising momentum of the New Haven Panthers that the inaugural class of undergraduate women matriculated at Yale: Yale Corporation voted in favor of full coeducation in the College in the fall of 1969. The AfAm House was founded the same semester. Ultimately, after Huggins and Seale’s arrest, BSAY wrote a statement to President Brewster, urging Yale to “take a vigorous stance on releasing these political prisoners” and called for a student strike from academic classes and activities and for a 500,000-dollar donation from Yale to the Panthers’ defense fund.
The uprising of the New Haven Panthers and their campus supporters met opposition. The Student Fair Trial Committee, a conservative student organization against the rally, disseminated fliers against the May Day events and wrote letters to President Brewster, arguing that “disruptions at Yale will also have the effect of further alienating the elements in the New Haven community—including, perhaps, the judge and the jury in the Panther case” and “the Yale community should not destroy its political efficacy merely to express ‘solidarity,’ when it might be needed much more desperately sometime in the very near future.”
Residential colleges were divided in supporting the May Day rally, however, Davenport College set forth a referendum to reallocate their budget for the Panthers’ Defense Fund, opened rooms to house visiting protestors, and transitioned their courtyard into a first aid station and a soup kitchen. In a photo captured by Strong in the archives, a white, ten-foot banner states in red text “CHILD AND FAMILY CARE CENTER: Trained Personnel Present” hangs from the college entrance on York Street. In another, taken by an unnamed student photographer, a young Black boy rides a tricycle above chalk that says “Liberate the Courtyard.”
[Davenport College Panther Defense Fund referendum]
Finally, on April 24, 1970, Yale College faculty voted to allow class suspension for the week following the May Day rally, the nod of approval that the strike was still on. A day before at a faculty meeting, President Brewster said that he was “appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that [he is] skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” The statement was controversial—it garnered national media attention and calls for his resignation. At a Florida fundraiser on April 28, then-U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew even called on Yale alumni to ask that Brewster be fired. In the same week, the Yale Strike News published their May Day issue featuring a spread mapping locations of telephones and first aid stations throughout campus, and includes a pocketlawyer for police confrontations. Another spread reprinted “Prison, Where is Thy Victory?,” an essay written by Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton after Huggins and Seale’s arrests. Newton’s essay concludes, “The prison cannot gain a victory over the political prisoner because he has nothing to be rehabilitated from or to. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the system and refuses to participate.”
By May Day, the Yale Strike News reports, 28 Panthers had been murdered by police force. Just the day prior, President Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger announced the United States’ assault on Cambodia during the Vietnam War—above the New Haven Green, where over 15,000 protestors gathered, a plane skywrote three peace signs. The May Day rally began with a press conference in front of the courthouse and featured speeches on the Green from participating organization members including Hoffman and fellow Chicago Seven defendant Dave Dellinger, political activist and French novelist Jean Genet, and Venceremos Brigade leader Carol Brightman. Thomas Strong’s photo collection at the Beinecke, alongside that of John T. Hill ART ’60, pulses the archival memory of the May Day crowds that the New Haven Green no longer remembers: in a photo of Hill’s, five Black boys stand next to the bordering gates of the park, the two in front with pinned papers to their shirt collars that read “HUMAN RIGHTS NOT VIOLENCE.”
In the afternoon, Black rock music reverberated through a crowd of thousands at Ingalls Rink and jazz music, featuring “Huey P. Newton Movement,” an original composition by trumpeter Cal Massey performed by the Ro-mas Orchestra. The sun had set, and the improvisation and dancing did not stop. Late that night, local New Haven police and National Guard troops used tear gas to “control demonstrations” that had involved bottle and rock throwing—several of these gas bombs exploded at the end of the rock concert. Despite the tear gassing, both immediate and long-form coverage described the May Day rally as “peaceful” and “nonviolent,” neutralized by the news and eventually overshadowed by the Kent State University antiwar protests three days later, where Ohio National Guard troops opened fire at student protestors, killing four and injuring nine.
[Map of New Haven from the Yale Strike News] (Source: Office of the President, Yale University, Records Concerning the May Day Rally; Contributor: Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)]
In the aftermath of May Day, the Yale Strike Steering Committee formed four demands for President Brewster, unveiled at a meeting in Dwight Hall on May 20, 1970: that the Yale Corporation demand that the State of Connecticut end the injustice of the trial of Bobby Seale and the New Haven Panthers; that Yale recognize its responsibility to provide daycare for children of the Yale community and establish facilities for that purpose; halt all development of the Institute of Social Science and the Social Science Center to establish at least an adult education and high school teacher training program; and pay unemployment compensation to its workers until January 1, 1972. Brewster did not meet any of the Committee’s demands.
Nearly 54 years later, on March 29, 2024, the Yale Daily News reported that approximately 100 Yale students and New Haven community members gathered on the New Haven Green, demanding city officials to call for a ceasefire for the war in Gaza. In 2021, the Black and Brown United in Action and Unidad Latina en Acción organized on the Green, celebrating Indigenous cultures and calling on Congress to welcome migrants. The Green remains to be animated by protest, albeit on a manifold smaller scale. With the exception of these ripples of protest, the Green is largely known today by Yale students as the stigmatized division between campus and city—where the university ends, and what’s left of New Haven begins. An afterlife of the Green also exists in the Yale University Library’s “May Day Rally and Yale collection.” The archives speak—and in doing so—survive the memories of the Green and the legacy of the May Day rally, but to know what is going on requires the living to gather. As Cappy Pinderhughes—New Haven Black Panther Party Lieutenant of Information—articulated to AIM Newsletter on behalf of the party, “We are saying that in order to defeat racism you have to fight racism with people solidarity. People getting together to define their own situation and act accordingly, and, if those people choose to come together, then so be it, we act on that basis.” Perhaps what has been going on is still going on.
