John T. Hill photo
May Day 1970 rally on the Green.
Allan Appel Photo
Notes from New Haven's underground.
This coming Saturday you might think it’s Feb. 22 and only Washington’s birthday — but not if you happen also to be at the New Haven Museum, where the under-appreciated Whitney Library will be time-traveling back to May 1, 1970, the historic May Day rally on the Green and at Yale.
Librarian Emma Norden and long-time staffer Eva Galanis will be laying out editions of AIM, Modern Times, View from the Bottom, and The Crow, hard hitting “underground” newspapers from the Black Panther and Black Power era in New Haven.
It’s part of the museum’s “What’s in the Whitney Library” series and invites you to prowl around from noon to 4 p.m. to leaf through the May Day rally edition; or to ponder the Aug. 7, 1969 edition of the colorful “psychedelic” newspaper View from the Bottom’s take on the moon landing — “Bullshit,” as there are plenty of unaddressed problems down here on earth.
While the most dramatic material features articles on the rally protesting the arrest and prosecution of Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins, and other Panthers for the murder of Alex Rackley — and how violence was averted when Yale President Kingman Brewster and city authorities allowed the Green and Yale to be “occupied” — the archive “is also a reflection of the underground newspaper movement,” so critical to that period, said Galanis.
She also wears another hat as a teacher of Black and Latino history and digital story-telling at the Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS).
Organizers Emma Norden and Eva Galanis.
When she first mentions “Black Panthers” to her students, she reported, their association is with the movie! (Many of those students, by the way, are expected to come to Saturday’s event, as it’s extra credit.) “But once they’re exposed, the students are captivated because it happened here!” she said.
“ ‘Who brings you free breakfast? And health clinics? And sickle cell anemia research?’ is the way I introduce it,” Galanis said of her lessons, as she and Norden toured this reporter around all the surfaces of the library festooned with the newspapers, posters, and other paper ephemera.
In fact one of her and Norden’s big takeaways in preparing the archive for exhibition, Galanis said, was that the moment in history was as much about community building as radical politics.
“What was most captivating to me,” she said, “was I thought it was more of a political moment, but it was community. Not only a movement to protest those arrested, but also galvanizing New Haven around child care, rent control, things that are still issues today.”
You can see that in issues of other newspapers. While View from the Bottom — with its avatar Rufus the Radical Reptile — is the most jazzy, there’s the Black newspaper The Crow that published in 1969 and 1970, or AIM, which grew into Modern Times.
These newspapers, explained Norden, were established by community members like organizer Fred Harris and tracked, for example, the development of the Hill Parents Association (which Harris also founded) protesting the conditions of the bathrooms without toilet paper in their kids’ school or the lack of enough physical education periods each week, and other inequities.
Centerfold of the View's May Day edition showing, at left, Panther, Handsome Dan, and Rufus the Reptile, with the Pig on the Green.
“Fred Harris realized,” Galanis added, “that in the Black community not everybody was on board with revolutionary politics. When you read the sources, it’s a more nuanced picture.”
“We want to let people know we have these unexpected collections,” said Norden.
In addition to that nuanced picture of the Panther era, the show also works, said Galanis, “as a reflection of the underground newspaper movement. By 1969 almost every city with a college had an underground paper. You see the psychedelic counter-cultural movement [as in View from the Bottom],” and in AIM there is more of a labor, issue-oriented focus in the local underground journalism.
During Occupy New Haven and the Black Lives Matter Movement, Facebook and Twitter functioned as the organizing tools, said Galanis. “That’s what these newspapers were.”
What FBI informants and agitators were to that era — planting articles, trying to sew chaos using the press of the time — is like how we have bots and phony stuff online aimed to discredit, she added.
She said she finds it a tad disheartening that so many of the issues are still with us today but the picture that emerges from this archive, of what Norden called “mutual aid,” is the opposite of disheartening.
Other What’s in the Whitney Library Series — which are just one-day events — will include harvesting materials from other up-to-now under-used archives such as those of the Hill Family Association and also the collection of Katherine Rorabeck. She was the attorney who was not only the chief litigator for Panther defendant Erica Huggins, she also represented Estelle Griswold in New Haven’s historic Planned Parenthood Supreme Court case in 1965.
You can also pick up, as part of the day of fun and learning, your very own photocopy of the counter-intelligence file (COINTELPRO) that the FBI kept showing their efforts to surveil and discredit the Panthers and other lefty groups in the Elm City.
Some of the material in Saturday’s event is going to be incorporated into the library’s America 250 exhibit, Norden reported.
That’s the museum’s future full-scale exhibition marking our country’s semiquincentennial (do we get credit in this newspaper for using the word first?) — the good, the bad, and the underground.