Co-Conspirator Comes Clean

Alex Bragg knew there was a reason New Haven didn’t blow up. Now, 45 years later, he discovered it.

Forty-five years ago, Bragg (pictured at left) was one of thousands of people who gravitated to the Green to see if in fact the city would explode. Whether riots would break out. Whether people would get shot. As radicals poured in from around the country for a three-day Mayday rally, downtown buildings were boarded up; tanks rolled down the street. Organizers vowed to ​“burn down Yale” and the city to protest the murder trial taking place in New Haven of Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins

As midnight approached on May 1, 1970, Bragg and a coworker walked downtown after completing their shifts at the Hospital of St. Raphael. They reached the corner of College and Chapel. Agitated people raced by. Cops were running. And the tear gas filled the sky.

But then something strange happened.

Nothing.

Forty-five years later, Bragg hiked upstairs to the Institute Library on Chapel Street this week to share his memories of that weekend for a taping of WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show. Also on the panel was Henry ​“Sam” Chauncey (at left in photo), who back in 1970 served as Yale President Kingman Brewster’s point man in trying to avoid bloodshed and destruction that weekend. On the panel, Chauncey revealed his role in a great conspiracy, one that went unnoticed at the time: Yale administrators were in league with the Black Panthers and Yippie organizers who were denouncing them, black Yale undergraduates caught between the streets and the elites, as well as the city police who were secretly wiretapping them all, to avoid having the rally turn violent. Hours before seeming to oppose each other in public, all parties met secretly in Brewster’s house to plan peacekeeping strategy. Yale secretly arranged to reroute a bus of radicals from Boston to strand them in western Massachusetts. Even Bobby Seale cooperated from prison, sending in a tape to broadcast to demonstrators to wait until the proper time (not that weekend) to confront the state.

“Bragg told McEnroe that he remembered thinking: ​“Somebody behind the scenes must be keeping the lid on this.”

“Now,” he declared, ​“I know what it was!”

(Click here to listen to McEnroe’s program.)

The way opponents worked together to prevent violence that 1970 weekend in New Haven served as an enduring bright spot in an ugly chapter of America’s post-civil rights movement, Vietnam War protest period. Just three days after Mayday, National Guard troops — operating under the same orders they had in New haven — shot dead unarmed protesters at Kent State University.

The lessons of that period, and some of the causes demonstrators championed back then, reverberate today amid a resurgent national movement for criminal justice reform.

Details of New Haven’s Mayday conspiracy have trickled out in the years since 1970, in newspaper articles, at annual commemorations, in books.

Now, in time for this year’s anniversary, Sam Chauncey has put it all together in a new book called May Day at Yale, 1970: Recollections. That’s why McEnroe put together the program. That’s why a similar panel will take place Tuesday night with Chauncey and others at the New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave., Tuesday night starting at 5:30. The book goes on sale May 1. (Although, according to hush-hush sources, you can find it already at Atticus on Chapel Street.)

Believe it or not, it’s a coffee table book. Chauncey contributes a personal essay, along with Henry ​“Skip” Gates, who was a Yale student at the time. Most of all, the book features photos, lots of photos, crisply and lovingly reproduced, by two men who watched it all unfold, Jon T. Hill and Thomas Strong.

The photos enable the reader to travel back to that time in New Haven and feel what it was like, in a way that text cannot.

Chauncey recalls how he and Brewster met secretly with a Harvard friend, Archibald Cox (who was later named the first Watergate special prosecutor), in western Massachusetts prior to Mayday. They wanted to learn what had gone wrong in Cambridge when pro-Panther demonstrators went on a rampage and clashed with police. They discovered that the key mistake at Harvard was closing gates in the demonstrators’ paths. Chauncey and Brewster decided to open Yale’s gates to the 15,000 demonstrators (not the100,000 that had been predicted). They hosted the visitors for the weekend, letting them sleep in Yale’s residential college and feeding them gorp for breakfast.

Chauncey reveals how he and other keep-the-peace conspirators at times saw the right wing, tied to Richard Nixon’s White House, as the greatest threat to peace that weekend. They believed Nixon was looking to see one campus ​“blow” to solidify a conservative backlash against left-wing movements. They wondered why administration staffer John Dean was quietly checking into town under an assumed name. And they confronted a backlash among alumni and leading conservatives against Brewster’s public declaration of skepticism that black revolutionaries could receive a fair trial in the U.S. (In the end, Seale and Huggins did.)

Chauncey writes of the lessons he drew from the experience: Protect the right to dissent. Hear out even ​“the most radical” protester in good faith, and try to find common ground.

“Radical ideas are not, in and of them themselves, bad. We learned to listen to them, because the radical ideas of today might well be the gospel of the future. Those who challenged authority in that period — on civil-rights, on the environment, on the rights of women, on sexual orientation, and on ill-advised war — were almost always right. Their methods were harsh and unsettling, but the principles they were fighting for were valid.”

Click here and here and here to read about some revelations about Mayday and the murder that brought Seale and Huggins to trial — of a fellow Panther named Alex Rackley, who was later admitted by even the Panthers of having been falsely accused of being an FBI informant.

Meanwhile, a police officer who tear-gassed demonstrators offers a different recollection of the day in this video.

Paul Bass is co-author with Douglas W. Rae of Murder In The Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, And The Redemption Of A Killer (Basic Books, 2006).