May Day@50: City Shutters, Shudders Anew

May 1970: Stores are shuttered. People shelter at home. Others don face shields amid fears of death and destruction.

May 2020: Stores are shuttered. People shelter at home. Others don face masks amid fears of death and destruction.

Those two scenes, a half-century apart, bookmark two remarkable moments in New Haven’s history.

Today the stores are largely closed and people are venturing with extra protection onto the streets in fear as a result of a pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic.

May Day 1970 represented a different threat of societal collapse: from unresolved fissures in society — over race, justice, public order — that were playing themselves out in New Haven.

The spark was a murder trial, New Haven’s political trial of the century. Two leaders of the Black Panther Party were on trial in New Haven on charges of conspiring to kill (wrongly) suspected informer Alex Rackley. The people who killed Rackley were caught and convicted. With little to no solid evidence, the federal government was looking to use the case as a reason to execute party leaders as part of a broader effort to stifle dissent, known as COINTELPRO. (Click here for a previous story about that murder, which took place in 1969; here for a story about how still-surviving Panther George Edwards confronted the late Warren Kimbro about why he tortured him along with Rackley; and here, here and here for some other stories about the case.)

Panther supporters nationwide called for a three-day rally in New Haven to support the Panthers. Some threatened to burn the city down. Many New Haveners packed up for the weekend and left town, or stayed home. Others — who on different days worked against each other — united to avoid a bloodbath that seemed to have the blessing of federal officials in D.C.

Then, as now, a sense of Armaggedon pervaded the city. Fears of long-term destruction mingled with a communal determination to preserve our city, and to survive.

Thanks to those efforts, some of which remained secret for decades, New Haven did survive May Day. Just fine. Unlike some other communities where America’s previous version of the political and culture wars were playing out.

How did it happen? Following is one version: an abridged version of a series of chapters about the 1970 May Day moment from ​“Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer,” a broader book about the case that I co-authored with Douglas W. Rae.

A Cambridge Preview

THE PANTHERS WERE calling on radicals from all from all over the country to descend on New Haven for a rally at the Green on May 1 on behalf of party leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, who were facing the death penalty for alleged conspiracy to murder Alex Rackley.

Usually, protest organizers highballed estimates of protesters, while authorities would downplay the numbers. This time, the Panthers and the FBI competed for who could invoke a scarier number of expected ruffians. Agents passed along Panther estimates as gospel. ​“As many as half a million persons,” an FBI teletype predicted the same day as the Hilliard jailing.

Anticipation spread up the New England coast. On April 15, in Cambridge, Mass., an offshoot of the white radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized a march at Harvard to protest the New Haven Panther trial. Fifteen hundred demonstrators showed up at 7 p.m. . — only to find the Harvard gates along their parade route locked shut. Incensed demonstrators rampaged through the streets. They smashed windows, threw rocks, lit fires in and around Harvard. The crowd of protesters swelled to as many as three thousand.

Two thousand police officers were called in from surrounding towns. Demonstrators threw bricks at the cops, and the bricks were thrown right back.
It took hours to disperse the crowd. Tear gas filled the air as police clubbed marchers, including women from Radcliffe College. Some 214 people were hospitalized; an estimated $100,000 of property was destroyed.

At the rally, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman vowed that the marchers would burn down Yale on May 1.

The patricians entrusted with Yale University’s future knew it was time to swing into action. First order of business: they arranged a picnic.

A Sturbridge Picnic

MARY BREWSTER FILLED the wicker basket with a meal fit for a king — or, more to the point, for ​“King,” Kingman Brewster, eleven generations off the Mayflower, president of Yale University.

Mary prepared Cornish hen. She packed a bottle of white wine and glasses of martinis for King and his friends.

Brewster and his young assistant, Henry ​“Sam” Chauncey Jr., traveled to the appointed meeting place beside a brook in a field in western Massachusetts town of Sturbridge. There they met up with a colleague from King’s days on the Harvard Law faculty, Archibald Cox.

Despite the bucolic setting, the world didn’t feel peaceful that afternoon. Cox was the top Harvard official dealing with campus unrest. He was investigating how such a smart institution could have handled a protest so unintelligently. Fresh from combing through the ashes, broken glass, and dried blood on Cambridge’s streets, Cox might help King figure out how to avoid an even messier implosion in New Haven.

The group originally considered eating at the Sturbridge Publick House. Upon reflection, they decided to seek privacy. Like the radicals at their wrought-iron gates, Brewster and Chauncey watched over their shoulders as they traversed the daily battlefield of 1970 campus life. They also imagined spies on their trail.

They had good reason for their imaginings. They knew that New Haven police listened in on private phone calls, and not only the phone calls of bookies or other outlaws. They eavesdropped on Yalies, too.

Brewster and Chauncey began each day with a 6 a.m. phone call. Starting in 1969, they noticed that information they had discussed in those phone calls would show up in other people’s conversations.

Eventually, they tested the tappers. They would pretend that a noted visitor was coming to campus; hours later, a reporter would call to ask for details on the visit. Like the Panthers, Yale’s vanguard caught on to the government spies and adjusted their movements accordingly.

Also, like the Panthers, Kingman Brewster drew the ire of the government. New Haven politicians resented Yale’s power, its privilege, its history of high-handed dealings with the townies.

The Nixon administration resented Yale, too. The Ivy League represented the old East Coast establishment, which never viewed Main Street Republicans like Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew as equals, as products of the right breeding, the right intellectual training, even the right kind of money.

The Brewsters hailed from the old Republican Party. With a mix of motives — noblesse oblige, class prerogative, financial self-interest — their families had opposed slavery, formed the American Civil Liberties Union, donated fortunes to the preservation of fine arts and the pursuit of intellectual inquiry. Socially, they were liberals.

Nixon, who came to public prominence hunting Communists, represented an ascending white middle-class and, eventually, working-class Republicanism. Spiro Agnew represented the self-seeking — eventually criminal — side of this invasion. They both played on hostility to elites. They echoed the idea that the Ivy League snobs, the liberal judges, egghead intellectuals, and scruffy upper-class rabble-rousers threatened America by weakening the nation’s military resolve in Vietnam or by supporting upstart blacks who could steal white jobs, move into white neighborhoods and schools.

To Brewster, Nixon and his ilk were dangerous. He saw the true threat to American values in 1970 as their anti-intellectualism, their contempt for civil liberties and for civil rights activists, and the escalating bombing in southeast Asia.

Brewster was pushing the limits of Republican ideology. Years before it became more acceptable for establishment figures, Brewster joined his friend, New Haven Mayor Dick Lee, at a press conference to denounce the Vietnam War. Harvard President Nathan Pusey feared the protesters and avoided them; this mind-set led to the riot in Cambridge. Instead of hiding from student protesters, Brewster listened to them. He loved talking with students, mixing with them on campus.

In that sense, Brewster’s agenda diverged from that of the Black Panthers and the student radicals who were now trashing him in public. Both sides feared Nixon, opposed Vietnam, and spoke out against racism. But Brewster sought to save the system. He and liberals of his generation saw the rise of the CIA as an idealistic enterprise, an intelligence-gathering mission in the fight against the international evil unmasked in World War II. Brewster wasn’t troubled by the existence of cloak-and-dagger government agencies. He opposed the misuse of those operations by less-than-noble power seekers.

Meanwhile, the Panthers, SDS, and the Yippies saw the system as the problem. They wanted to replace it. They looked not to the New Deal or the ACLU for models, but to the Vietcong and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Kingman Brewster’s Yale trained the capitalists, the war planners, the liberal defenders of the status quo whom the radicals hoped ultimately to overthrow.

Archibald Cox (who would later stand up to Nixon as Watergate special prosecutor) and Sam Chauncey were Brewster’s kindred souls. They viewed ​“nobility” as a character trait to develop, a challenge passed down to better society, rather than a crown inherited as a license for complacency. Like Brewster, Chauncey descended from a line of elite New England WASPs, including a Yale founder and a Harvard president. Chauncey’s father founded the Educational Testing Service in 1947 in a quest to transform private colleges from bastions of inherited wealth into a meritocracy.

A generation later, Brewster opened Yale’s gates to black students; before Brewster, Yale classes had only a handful of African-American students. Yale also went coed in 1969 and welcomed more students of modest means, making Brewster a target of the defenders of the old order among Yale’s alumni. Conservative Old Blue William F. Buckley, incensed at the welcoming of women and blacks to the portal of power, led an effort to dethrone King from the presidency. To Buckley, Brewster and the Black Panthers belonged on the same side of the gates he wanted to slam shut.

At the picnic in Sturbridge, the gate metaphor became a literal imperative for Kingman Brewster. Archibald Cox relayed the Big Lesson of the Cambridge disaster: Harvard should never have shut the campus gates and blocked the path of the protest march. That frustrated the marchers. It focused their rage, originally targeted at the New Haven Panther trial in specific and the system in general, on the physical landscape of Harvard University.

When the tens of thousands of radicals descend on New Haven for the pro-Panther May Day protests on the New Haven Green, Cox advised, Yale should learn from Harvard’s mistake. Yale should keep the gates open.

The Magic Bus

COX ALSO CONVEYED to Brewster and Chauncey information he’d picked up from intelligence sources: A contingent from a violent underground group planned to travel from Boston to New Haven for May Day.

This worried Brewster and Chauncey. They felt confident about Yale protesters’ peaceful intentions. They had faith in Yale’s black student groups. Through Brewster aides Tracy Barnes (a former CIA agent, who helped plan the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation) and Ernie Osborne, Yale worked with the students and New Haven black community groups to keep the peace.

On the other hand, Yale had less confidence in the outside groups coming to town. Outsiders were unpredictable, capable of provoking violence for their own ends. There were white motorcycle gangs threatening to cause trouble, too. The Nixon administration could be counted on to heighten the tension.
Some of the white radical groups on the left, meanwhile, clearly were seeing New Haven and Yale as the next stop on the California-Chicago- Cambridge overground railroad of violent ​“heightening of the contradictions.”

On New York’s radical radio station WBAI, Abbie Hoffman predicted the biggest riot in history in New Haven.

Cox had surveillance photos of provocateurs from the Cambridge rampage. Chauncey took the photos back to New Haven. He and Brewster could use them as they continued cobbling together a strategy for saving their university.

Chauncey took the photos to Jim Ahern, the police chief whose brother’s crew was illegally wiretapping Chauncey and Brewster. Ahern’s intelligence network extended beyond New Haven, and Yale was going to need it.

Ahern also revealed to Chauncey that Mayor Bart Guida, who resented Yale and the protesters, had instructed him to leave Brewster out of the loop on plans for policing the protest. The plans included driving protesters onto Yale’s campus at any sign of trouble.

“I want you to know,” the Irish cop told Brewster’s WASP assistant, ​“I’m not going to do that.” Ahern made it clear that he, not Guida, would make the decisions on May Day. And he wanted Chauncey and Brewster in the loop.

The first matter of business for these newfound allies was thwarting the violent contingent from Boston.

Through intelligence reports supplied by Massachusetts police, Ahern learned that the group had rented two buses to take its members to New Haven. He hatched a plan with Chauncey: They’d arrange for state troopers to masquerade as the bus drivers, who would then prevent the radicals from coming anywhere near the rally.

Chauncey said Yale would cover the costs if the radicals trashed the buses as a result. He never had to put the guarantee in writing; Yale’s oral promise satisfied the bus company’s insurer.

An ideal spot to pull over was in the town of Hopkinton, a rural stop along the Massachusetts Turnpike. The troopers would have no trouble pulling over, popping the hood, disabling the engines. As darkness covered the hills of western Massachusetts, another trooper would ​“happen” to drive by right then and whisk the drivers away. The troopers would leave behind two stranded busloads of cranky, mayhem-bent radicals.

Black Students In The Middle

WHILE BREWSTER, CHAUNCEY, and Ahern could keep some of the more incendiary activists from coming to New Haven on May Day, Yale and the city still had to contend with those who were already in town and on campus. Inside Yale’s buildings, Doug Miranda, the young Panther leader sent from Boston to revive the New Haven chapter, urged students to burn the campus as May Day neared.

“Man, if you really want to do something,” Miranda exhorted one gathering, ​“you ought to get some guns, and go and get Chairman Bobby out of jail!”
Incredulous students shouted back objections. One of Miranda’s fel- low organizers retorted that the students should ​“at least” burn down Yale’s rare-book library. Miranda stepped back as a heated argument ensued; he smiled as the shouting continued. Then, feigning disgust, he reclaimed the floor to herald a dramatic exit from the room. ​“We’ll be back!” he vowed. ​“You all better get your shit together.”

William Farley, a Yale sophomore from Pennsylvania, and some of his fellow black students caught up with Miranda outside the room. ​“You ain’t serious about that shit you were running,” one of them asked, ​“are you?”

“This same shit worked at San Francisco State,” he answered.

​“But this ain’t San Francisco State! You can’t expect these Yalies to get guns and go marching down the New Haven Green to the courthouse!”

​“Hell no, I don’t expect those whites to do that,” Miranda agreed. ​“But they ain’t done shit yet except talk. We’re trying to get a strike going here, man! Now, you can’t just tell them, ​‘Strike!’ You’ve got to give them something more extreme, and then you let them fall back on a strike.”

If you want a fair trial for Bobby Seale, you don’t demand a fair trial for Bobby Seale, Miranda told Farley. You demand that people risk their lives to bust him out of jail.

“You may get some of these people hurt,” Farley objected.

“Man, I don’t care. I’m just using them to get Chairman Bobby out of jail. And I’ll use them any way I have to,” Miranda responded. ​“We’re in a fight for survival, brother!”

Miranda needed Yalies, black and white alike, to stir up the city, because the Panthers had drawn little active support from black New Haveners beyond a core of several dozen hard workers. To lure the Yalies, Miranda bobbed and weaved, sometimes jabbing, sometimes reaching out: one day, debating with would-be proletarian Yalies on the finer points of Marxist theory; another day, a call, before a rally at Woolsey Hall, for white students to shoot police ​“pigs.

Farley would later recall feeling caught between ​“pseudo-revolutionaries” and an unjust system. It was a position in which black students like Farley increasingly found themselves in 1970.

Miranda simultaneously irritated and intrigued Farley. Farley was one of 96 black students in the class of 1972, the largest contingent in Yale history. (By contrast, Yale had admitted just six black students in 1963.) They were drawn to New Haven as part of Kingman Brewster’s vision of a vanguard of leaders who would diversify America’s ruling class. Farley was on that road. Son of an agronomist and a social worker — one of only three black students at his high school in Mennonite- dominated Lewistown, Pennsylvania — Farley came to Yale determined to save the world. In addition to his studies, he ran Yale’s Ulysses S. Grant Foundation, which tutored black children from New Haven. He was already an emerging campus leader when events catapulted him to a central role in the oncoming May Day tempest.

Mixed emotions tore at Farley, just as they tore at the other black students who struggled with their roles at a changing Yale and in a changing America. The students contended daily with Yale’s culture, the product of centuries of almost exclusively white students. They felt the pressure of being the first generation with the chance to claim a black spot on white America’s highest rungs of power. They assumed the burden of opening doors of opportunity for ​“the race.”

From radical groups like the Black Panthers, however, they felt the sting of being branded Uncle Toms, of abandoning their people to pursue material success.

In spite of Miranda’s glaring lack of hand-eye coordination, Farley and his black classmates couldn’t ignore Miranda. They couldn’t ignore the Panthers. They couldn’t abandon them.

Nor could these students fully embrace the Panthers. The students had a stake in Yale. They wanted to improve it; they didn’t want to burn it down. Plus, they had committed themselves to causes important to New Haven’s black community, like pushing Yale to open a day care center for its employees’ children. The students feared that the frenzy over May Day would sap momentum from those efforts. They’d have to revive the campaigns once the May Day swarm left town for the next glitzy protest.

Whatever their views of the Panthers (generally sympathetic to their agenda, but opposed to violence), the black students cared deeply about injustices faced by black Americans in the criminal justice system. That was the central issue of the protests over the upcoming murder trials. It drowned out everything else. The students focused on the two celebrity defendants: Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins.

Another promising member of Farley’s class, Henry Louis Gates Jr., today head of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department, would later write of his peers’ soul wrestling: ​“What would becoming a true black leader entail — for ourselves, in the classroom, and for people outside those hallowed Ivy Walls? What sort of sacrifices and obligations did this special ticket to success bring along with it? We worried about this, and we worried out loud, often, and noisily.”

The Big Ask

DOUG MIRANDA PLAYED his trump card in a speech on Sunday night, April 19. Some 1,500 Yalies jammed Battell Chapel for a ​“teach-in” on the Panther trial. Miranda had good news for the students discomfited by his dares.

“I’m not going to tell white students to go out and kill pigs at this time, because that would be idealism,” he said.

Shoulders relaxed as Miranda proceeded to the Big Ask.

“The most minimal level you can participate on is a call for a student strike,” he declared. ​“We’re saying, take your power and use it to save the institution. Take it away from people who are using it in a way it shouldn’t be used. You can close Yale down and make Yale demand release. You have the power to prevent a bloodbath in New Haven.”

Miranda’s argument was that Yale, aka The System, controlled the courts. By shutting down Yale, by shutting down the classes that educate future corporate and government leaders, students could force Yale to have Bobby Seale freed, or at least fairly tried.

Miranda’s plan offered students an opportunity. They could do something to ​“free Bobby.” And that something required no bloodshed. It required no taking up of arms. Miranda cast the action as a way to prevent violence. The plan required little risk beyond missing a few days of classes.
Miranda — realizing that he had the crowd with him — pressed on, invoking the spirit of Yale’s football team mascot.

​“There’s no reason,” Miranda declared, ​“why the Panther and the Bulldog can’t get together! … That Panther and that Bulldog gonna move together!”

The assembled Yalies leapt to their feet, applauding. The artists in Yale’s Jonathan Edwards residential college got to work running off T‑shirts with the Panther-Bulldog logo. Activists pressed fellow students to support a strike.

“Shut it down!” they chanted, fists raised.

A Gentlemanly Handshake

The entire campus was now consumed with the Panther trial.

Law students formed a committee — cochaired by future First Lady, U.S. Sen. and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham (Clinton) — to monitor the trial, offer legal advice to demonstrators who got arrested, and help prevent violence at the May Day rally.

Rodham’s cochair was a close friend named Jerry de Jaager. (Bill Clinton wouldn’t arrive on campus until the following fall.) De Jaager would remember Rodham as a voice of reason whenever anyone grew too emotional about the course of events. Rodham’s calming influence be-came indispensable when, in the days leading up to the big protest, someone started a fire in the law school basement. Rodham was known on campus from the moment she arrived because of coverage of her anti – Vietnam War commencement address at Wellesley the previous year. She quickly made an impression as a careful, moderate voice of dissent. Even then, she came across as someone who knew better than to jeopardize her career with rash actions or comments.
Black undergraduates, many still wary of Miranda, joined the front lines of his march toward a strike.

William Farley was selected as the head of a steering committee to plan for the strike. Secretly, he met with Kingman Brewster and Sam Chauncey.
They discussed details, not theory. Both sides wanted to prevent violence.

“If anyone comes to us” with questions about how to get involved in planning for May Day events, Brewster told Farley, ​“we’ll send them to you.”
​“You know,” Farley told Brewster at the conclusion of a planning meeting, ​“we’re going to close the university down.”

“We’re going to try to stop you,” Brewster responded. ​“OK,” Farley said. Like two Yale gentlemen, they shook hands.

”Boo Ho Chi Minh!’”

EVERYONE — FROM FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to frightened New Haveners making plans to leave town — believed the city was about to explode. Paranoia and overheated rhetoric from all sides contributed to that sense.

At a rally in New Haven’s Beaver Pond Park attended largely by black high school students, the Black Pasnther Party distributed a picture of Chief James Ahern labeled ​“Wanted Dead.” Elbert ​“Big Man” Howard repeated threats of ​“physical attacks” in the event of Seale’s conviction. On April 20, at the University of Connecticut, pro-Panther students beat another student, the dormitory ​“president,” with a tire iron, badly enough to hospitalize him, when he objected to the announcement over an intercom of a pro-Seale rally.

On the evening of April 21 a mass pre – May Day meeting convened in Yale’s whale-shaped hockey arena, Ingalls Rink.

The rally followed on triumphant news for Panther supporters, as well as for advocates of a fair trial. That day Judge Harold Mulvey reversed his decision to keep Panther court observers David Hilliard and Emory Douglas locked up on contempt charges. After a private conference, the Panthers agreed to apologize to Mulvey in open court. More important, Bobby Seale told the judge, ​“I respect your honor very much for allowing me to have a fair trial. …We also understand the necessity for peaceful decorum in the courtroom.”

In other words, Seale signaled his supporters to stay cool. Panther supporters could claim victory in the release of Hilliard. Mulvey had control of his courtroom. It was a turning point in the case. The judge then suspended pretrial proceedings until after the May Day rally.

In front of the 4,500 to 5,000 people spilling from the stands onto the floor of Ingalls Rink that evening, David Hilliard was introduced and hailed like a conquering hero. He took the podium surrounded by Panther bodyguards, who glared from behind dark glasses.

After the requisite call and response of ​“Power to the people!” and ​“Right on!” Hilliard stated that he had lied when he apologized to Judge Mulvey.

“That statement was necessary to allow us another day of freedom,” Hilliard said. ​“But just because we were crafty enough to outwit the stupid, demonic persecutors of black people in this country, we’re going to take the opportunity to say, ​‘Fuck the judicial system!’”

Hilliard proceeded to advocate murdering cops: ​“Everybody knows that pigs are depraved traducers that violate the lives of human beings, and that there ain’t nothing wrong with taking the life of a motherfucking pig.”

To his surprise, the audience started booing.

Spurned, Hilliard, the party’s national chairman now shot back at the Yalies: ​“Boo me right out of this mother- fucker! Boo me right back to Litchfield jail! Go boo me again, racists!

“Boo Ho Chi Minh! Boo the people that you pacifists are guilty of continuous bombardment. Boo all of your enemies. Boo the Latin Americans. Boo the Koreans. Boo the Africans. Boo the suffering blacks in this country.”

No way, Hilliard continued, would he ​“stand up here and let a bunch of so-called pacifists, you violent motherfuckers, boo me without me getting violent with you.” He dared someone to come up front, stab or shoot him.

“I say, fuck you!”

That stunned the audacious crowd into silence. Hilliard huddled with his entourage, then returned with a peace offering.

“Now you got me talking like a crazy nigger. You got me talking like your mothers and fathers talk to you. I’ve called you everything but long-haired hippies.”
In return, he asked the crowd to ​“repudiate your boos.” They complied with cheers.

A light-skinned man stumbled toward the stage. Hilliard’s Panther bodyguards pounced on the man. They tore into him with kicks and punches. Then they flung him back into the crowd, stunned and staggering.

The crowd, still stunned, started booing again. Hilliard tried to defend the beating as a ​“humane” response to a dangerous ​“reactionary.” This time the crowd remained against him. So Hilliard left the stage with two parting messages. To the Yalies, he called out, ​“Fuck you! All power to all those except those who want to act like a bunch of goddamn racists.” To his toughs: ​“Kick all these motherfuckers’ asses.”

The victim was later revealed to be a harmless Lebanese architecture student with mental problems, including a habit of disoriented wanderings.

Presidential ​“Skepticism”

DOUG MIRANDA HAD almost single-handedly brought a world-class university to a halt. Still, the reaction to the strike compromise was mild compared to the outpouring of vitriol that greeted a one-sentence comment Brewster made at a faculty meeting.

The faculty meeting took place inside Yale’s resonant Sprague Hall, normally the site of classical music concerts. More than four hundred professors showed up; one thousand students demonstrated outside. The meeting lasted several hours as different factions of professors debated proposals.

“So in spite of my insistence on the limits of my official capacity,” Brewster told the gathering, ​“I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”

Gasps were heard in the hall.

“In large part,” Brewster continued, ​“this atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers in many parts of the country. It is also one more inheritance from centuries of racial discrimination and oppression.”
From there, Brewster appealed for calm. ​“The first contribution to the fairness of the trial which anyone can make is to cool rather than heat up the atmosphere in which the trial will be held,” he said.

Then he responded to demands that Yale address problems in New Haven ghettos. Although Yale couldn’t ​“cure” in-justices, it had a ​“responsibility to do what we can,” he offered, inviting proposals.

Brewster sat down to an ovation.

Later that night, Yale released a text of Brewster’s remarks. The reation was swift and sharp.

​“An awful letdown to the courts, the police and to the community,” declared a prominent judge, Herbert S. MacDonald, Yale Class of 1929, in a public letter to Brewster.

As far as the critics were concerned, Brewster hadn’t questioned whether black revolutionaries could get a fair trial. He declared that they couldn’t. And to suggest that the criminal justice system dealt less than equally with notori-ous black defendants, in the view of the critics, was tantamount to treason.

“Dear Hub,” Brewster wrote back to MacDonald, ​“I am sorry that my statement of skepticism … was so distressing to you. Of course I did not intend to disparage the legal system, or those who administer it.”

He noted that ​“racial minorities and unpopular radicals have found it difficult to obtain an unbiased jury … and a hearing free of extraneous passion and prejudice” throughout the course of American history. ​“The chance of fairness seems to me especially problematical at the moment because of a politically prodded backlash against both blacks and radicals.” ​“To pretend” these problems don’t exist, ​“or to conclude that it is cynical to take notice of them, seems to me wrong,” Brewster concluded. ​“We badly need more willingness to admit the weaknesses of our institutions and a resolve to deal with these weaknesses.”

William F. Buckley penned a column called ​“The Metamorphosis of Kingman Brewster.” ​“Mr. Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale University, is a prime ex ample of what the mob can do to the leader,” Buckley told the nation’s newspaper readers.

The country’s highest-ranking liberal-baiter, Vice President Spiro Agnew, made a speech attacking Brewster. Echoing Marcus’s call, Agnew said Yale alumni should demand ​“a more mature and responsible person” to head Yale. He parroted Brewster’s skepticism about black revolutionaries receiving a fair trial: ​“I do not feel that students of Yale University can get a fair impression of their country under the tutelage of Kingman Brewster.”

A Phone Rings

A BANK OF black rotary telephones — there must have been fifty of them — sat like silent soldiers awaiting the call to combat.

Sam Chauncey, Kingman Brewster’s top aide in charge of preparing for the May Day weekend of protests, was inside Yale’s Alumni House, a three-story wood-frame house on Temple Street, a block north of New Haven’s Green. Chauncey monitored the phones with pride.

He had transformed Alumni House into Yale’s May Day command center. The beds, usually reserved for visiting alumni, would allow campus security officers to sleep in twelve-hour shifts; Chauncey wanted them staying nearby. The Green was visible from the second-floor window, where he would sit, monitoring the police radio. He would keep in touch with the masters of each of the twelve residential colleges, plus numerous other key people … on the 50 telephones.

Chauncey was showing the command center to Cyrus Vance, a Yale trustee, former secretary of the army, and regular passenger through the revolving doors linking the federal government and corporate boards. President Johnson named Vance his special assistant to investigate Detroit’s 1967 riot; Vance headed a team of envoys and prepared a report. Kingman Brewster lured Vance to New Haven to help him and Chauncey contend with May Day. Vance imparted lessons from Detroit, including the need to stay in contact with the media when trouble starts in order to keep exaggerated radio or TV reports from inciting crowds.

Vance considered Chauncey’s 50 phones.

“I’d like to hear one of those phones ring,” he said.

Ring? OK.

Chauncey called somebody up. He dictated a phone number and asked for a call back.

Rrrring! The call came. Chauncey and Vance stared at the 50 phones.

They had no idea which one was ringing.

Chauncey ordered new phones. These had lights that flashed when a call came in.

Chauncey still had time — a little time. May Day was fewer than 48 hours away.

National Alert

IN THOSE WANING moments before May Day 4,000 National Guardsmen were assigned to New Haven for the event. They would be reinforced by 2,000 state troopers plus thousands of Marines and paratroopers on standby in neighboring states.

Both Chauncey and Police Chief Ahern feared the troops would provoke violence more than prevent it. Ahern battled with the governor and state police chief to retain command of minute-by-minute deployments. Through Vance, Brewster and Chauncey made contact with emissaries whom the White House sent to New Haven, such as Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus.

It was enough of a challenge for Ahern to prepare his officers, many of them working-class whites who resented the taunts and lawlessness of student radicals. The chief also struggled to dampen the hysteria generated by the FBI. The New Haven FBI office, pressured by J. Edgar Hoover for a continuous flow of information and evidence of action, was forwarding every drip of hearsay that came its way.

Hoover had instructed the New Haven office, beginning on April 24, to file a daily report titled ​“Threatened Racial Violence New Haven, Connecticut; Racial Matters.” Local agents had always collected the tidbits from the New Haven police department’s wiretaps and vast network of informants.

Usually, they were careful to distinguish the nuggets of reliable data from the mass of gossip, casual conversation, speculation, and misunderstood messages. Now, it all went straight to Washington, on to the president, as ​“definite” threats.

The New York police department passed along a lead, clearly identified as unconfirmed, that some Weather Underground members involved in prior bombings planned to hit ​“bank and commercial buildings only.” By the time it reached the White House and the CIA, it had shed any trap-pings of doubt.

Ahern’s crew had called New York bus companies to disprove a rumor that black militants there had reserved 45 buses for May Day. Yet the FBI’s report, conjuring visions of a race war, merely passed the rumor along as confirmed, just the way it did with a supposed ​“plot afoot to attempt the blackout of New Haven.” Ahern had heard that same vague rumor surface before virtually every other major demonstration.

The FBI’s exaggerations shook Ahern’s faith in the quality of data on which the federal government based its decisions about the use of force. ​“Consciously or unconsciously,” he would later write, ​“the publicly announced decision to move elite combat troops to within striking distance of the May Day demonstration had been based in part on a combination of deception and willingness to believe the worst.

Adding to the conjured hysteria were genuine fears and confirmed facts: the theft of 18 rifles and shotguns from a Meriden sporting goods store; the theft of hundreds of bayonet-mounted guns from an unguarded truck; the disappearance of 140 pounds of explosive mercury fulminate, used in blasting caps, from a Yale laboratory; a suspicious fire in the Yale law school library’s basement.

“The current situation at New Haven is extremely volatile and appears to be building to an all-out confrontation between black and white extremists and supervisors with established authority,” J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the agents in charge of all mainland FBI offices. ​“Assistance in the form of funds, arms and personnel may be requested from throughout the United States.”

Downtown Lockdown

NEW HAVEN MERCHANTS feared random vandalism akin to what happened during the SDS ​“Days of Rage” the previous October, when white radicals ran down Chicago streets throwing rocks through windows

Downtown business owners boarded up their storefronts and closed for the duration of the siege. Resentment coursed through New Haven’s neighborhoods at the occupation of their city. Hundreds of Yale students had trimmed their hair, dressed neatly, and canvassed the neighborhoods to discuss the upcoming rally with New Haveners; they learned that white middle-class New Haven blamed them and the Panthers, not the police or the courts or the Man, for all this trouble.

The New Haven Black Coalition, which had kept its distance from the Panthers but also raised money for their legal defense, was immersed in planning to help keep peace on May Day.

Coalition members found time to write a devastating attack on ​“so-called allies of the oppressed,” who claimed to pursue justice for the Panther defendants but truly sought the thrill of violent confrontation.

“From their sometimes contradictory rhetoric and frantic posturing, blacks can see that the white radicals are only different in method from their daddies and granddaddies in the callous manipulation of the lives of black people,” read the coalition’s statement. ​“The truth in New Haven, as in most of the country, is that the white radical, by frantically and selfishly seeking his personal psychological release, is sharing in the total white conspiracy of denial against the black people.”

Black Coalition organizers hoped to keep as much of black New Haven, especially young people, in the neighborhoods away from Yale and the Green on May Day — and to keep the largely white pro-Panther invaders out of the residential neighborhoods.

Some of the marshals would stay by the Green, ready to intercede with any local people causing trouble, and would keep an eye on police brutality.

Two days before May Day, riots erupted at Ohio State University. Guardsman and Columbus police shot hundreds of rounds of tear gas and pepper gas at students, trying to prevent students from gathering on the second day. Hundreds were arrested, scores injured.

From the Oval Office to Kingman Brewster’s Woodbridge Hall, from dorm rooms to Middle American living rooms, foreboding, a sense of inevitability, loomed.

Then, just hours before May Day, President Nixon went on TV to announce an expansion of the Southeast Asian battlefield. U.S. troops, he said, would invade Cambodia, until then neutral territory in the Vietnam War.

Within hours, Nixon’s announcement about Cambodia would plunge universities across America into convulsions. Brewster and Chauncey heard from a Yale alumnus who was an active, moderate Republican; this alum reported that Nixon and Agnew wanted one university to explode in violence in order to fan hostility toward academia among the majority of Americans.

At the very least, Chief Ahern reasoned, Nixon knew the announcement of the Cambodia invasion would provoke outrage from the antiwar movement — at the very moment thousands of the movement’s most de- voted shock troops were streaming into New Haven.

More than six hundred credentialed reporters from around the world arrived in New Haven awaiting the bloodshed. Many checked into the Park Plaza Hotel a block south of the Green. Chief Ahern had someone surreptitiously photograph every hotel visitor. He told Sam Chauncey about one of the faces that ap- peared in the camera: White House Counsel John Dean. No one in Washington had said Dean was coming.

May Day Dawns

THIS TIME MARY Brewster spared the Cornish hen. She had another spread to prepare for one of Kingman’s furtive get-togethers.

This one was taking place after midnight, hours before the opening of the planned three-day pro-Panther May Day gathering.

Kingman invited a diverse group of guests to the two-story living room of the Yale presidential mansion on Hillhouse Avenue. Mary put out beer, booze, and milk with cookies.

The guest list included Kingman’s former Yale classmate and radical attorney William Kunstler, who was in town to join the Panther/ Yippie brigade. Other organizers accompanying Kunstler included David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, and Yippie Jerry Rubin. Unbeknownst to the multitudes ready to congregate in protest hours later, these movement heavies were meeting with the avatar of Yale power and privilege.

The protest leaders and Brewster got along like old college buddies. In these final hours, their agendas, even the police chief’s agenda, had fully converged. The movement and the establishment — at least the New Haven wing — were on the same page.

Brewster and Chauncey agreed with the protesters that Yale must do its best to keep gates open in the event of trouble and to try to move the invading army of guardsmen and state cops as far away as possible from contact with the hordes of ralliers on the Green. For their part, the radicals needed to hammer the nonviolent message home.

When dawn broke on May 1, people were still digesting the previous night’s stunning news of Nixon’s Cambodian invasion, as well as the breaking news of a police raid on Panthers in Baltimore. Even so, Bobby and Ericka would remain the focus for the day’s outrage in New Haven.

Visiting demonstrators, who were guests in the residential colleges, lined up for breakfast served by volunteers in the college courtyards. Other volunteers set up first aid stations.

Vietcong flags filled the air; gas masks were distributed. Slogans screamed from banners in the colleges, from graffiti, from bedsheets, from impromptu chants: ​“Seize the Time!” ​“Burn, Babylon.” ​“End U.S. imperialism around the world!”

Tanks took up positions on the roads leading into New Haven. On the Green, a fresh coat of grease on the pole protected Old Glory from potential flag burners.

The First Battalion of the 102nd infantry, based in New Haven, assembled for duty, joined by the Waterbury area’s Second Battalion, the 192nd infantry’s Third Battalion from Stamford and Greenwich, and the 242nd Engineer Battalion from Stratford.

At a battalion meeting at the Goffe Street Armory, Guardsmen received ammunition, gas grenades, and a pep talk: Expect to see 50,000 people out there on the Green. Don’t worry if you feel a need to use weapons.

“You will not be successfully prosecuted if you shoot someone while performing a duty for the State of Connecticut. There is nothing to fear concerning your individual actions.”

500,000 Become 15,000

A mostly white sea of disaffected American youth, peppered with young black Panther supporters, filled the Green for the noon start of the Big Rally, Day One.

The half million hadn’t materialized. The 50,000 hadn’t, either. The total was closer to 15,000.

Still, the Green felt like a liberated zone for New Haven’s white radicals. They stripped down. They tossed Frisbees. They smoked joints. And they were not being arrested.

Battle-ready law enforcement officers and uniformed National Guardsmen remained just off the Green on adjoining blocks. They kept their distance as rock music blared from the stage.

Local COINTELPRO chief Ted Gunderson of the New Haven FBI office had a dozen long-haired informants mingling in the crowd, with a phone number to call in case of trouble. He’d imported them from other cities. He and his fellow FBI agents were to be on duty for three 24-hour days; they caught catnaps in the hotel room out of which they were working. They took photos of the crowd, including a clear shot of a naked male protester doing calisthenics.

At one point an informant called with a sighting of a wanted Weatherman fugitive. By the time Gunderson’s men arrived in search of the fugitive, he had disappeared.

The unkempt white protesters and fastidious black radicals converging on New Haven’s Green presented just the image President Nixon and the FBI’s Hoover wanted America to see. By provoking violence — through COINTELPRO’s dirty tricks against the Panthers, through a militaristic approach to student demonstrations — the federal government led the white mainstream to view the hippies, the Black Power advocates, and the peaceniks and integrationists as dangerous threats to the American way.

The FBI kept intelligence flowing all day to J. Edgar Hoover, who then sent teletypes to the offices of President Nixon, the vice president, the CIA director, and the attorney general.

As in a child’s game of telephone, the information was distorted as it made its way up, down, and across the tangled chains of command. Facts mingled with rumors to convey imminent doom: ​“30 Weathermen Faction of SDS members were on campus with Abbie Hoffman.” ​“Armed” Blackstone Rangers and Hartford Panthers were ​“attempting to secure trucks and buses to come to New Haven.”

All the while, the neighborhoods stayed quiet.

On the Green, speeches began around 4 o’clock. They went on for two and a half hours.

A succession of Yippies resumed swearing at Kingman Brewster and, of course, the cops. Black Panther speakers decried the Seale-Huggins prosecution. While the rhetoric was militant, everyone kept true to their promises to Brewster and to each other. The speakers counseled staying calm, and the crowd was with them.

Soon everyone dispersed for food, more speeches, and rehashed arguments in Yale’s residential courtyards, which had been opened to the visiting protesters while classes shut down.
 

Darkness Descends

SCENES OF COMIC absurdity mixed with the fiery speeches in Yale’s courtyards that evening. A knot of white visitors, frustrated at a Black Panther’s exhortation to cut the talk of violence, shot back, ​“We’re more oppressed than you are” because of ​“our long hair.”

The beat poet Allen Ginsberg recited a poem he had written for the occasion. In 21 lines, Ginsberg managed to pay homage to the rites historically performed on May 1 (before it became an international holiday honoring workers), the personalities, the national political currents, the holiday, countercultural aspirations, and even the New Haven landscape.

Ginsberg called the poem ​“May King’s Prophecy.”

Spring green buddings, white blossoming trees, May Day picnic O Maypole Kings O Krishnaic Springtime
O holy Yale Panther Pacifist Conscious populace awake alert
sensitive tender
Children’s bodies — and a ring of quiet Armies round the town— Planet students cooking brown rice for scared multitudes—
Oh Souls all springtime prays your bodies
Quietly pass mantric peace Fest grass freedom thru our nation
thru your holy voices’ prayers
Your bodies here so tender & so wounded with Fear
Metal gas fear, the same fear Whales tremble war consciousness Smog city — Riot court paranoia — Judges, tremble, Armies
weep your fear—
O President guard thy sanity
Attorneys General & Courts obey the Law
And end your violent War Assemblage
O Legislatures pass your Creeds of order
& end by proper law illegal war!
Now man sits Acme Conscious over his gas machine covered Planet— Springtime’s on, for all your sacred & Satanic Magic!
Ponds gleam heaven, Black voices chant their ecstasy on car radio Oh who has heard the scream of death in Jail?
Who has heard the quiet Om under wheel-whine and drumbeat Outside railyards on wire tower’d outroads from New Haven?

Around 9:30 P.M., a black teenager crashed the gathering in Branford College’s courtyard. He claimed to be a Panther. He wasn’t.

Whom he truly represented, who sent him, no one would ever know.

He shoved Jerry Rubin from a microphone to announce that police had arrested black men for entering the Green after dark.

That, too, would prove a lie. No one had been arrested.

The teen exhorted the crowd to crash the Green to confront the cops.

“To the Green!” chanted motorcycle-helmet-wearing white youths from a militant outfit called Youth Against War and Fascism.

Rubin reclaimed the mike.

“Don’t go down there!” Rubin yelled. ​“This is full of shit!”

Too late — the fragile peace was broken.

Other provocateurs stormed a rock concert on the Old Campus. They brought the same false message to Ezra Stiles College, where Abbie Hoffman had just finished urging people to stay calm.

A fired-up band proceeded out of Stiles. ​“The streets belong to the people!” they chanted, and proceeded to smash the windows of stores apparently owned by non-“people” on Broadway.

By 10 p.m., the streams converged in a parade of more than 1,000 violence-bent white people, many of them from out of town. They marched to the end of the Green opposite the courthouse. Hundreds of National Guard reinforcements arrived to supplement the four hundred who were already there from the afternoon. Walls of Guardsmen and local police fenced off the courthouse steps.

Calls for help went to the Panther Defense Committee headquarters.

Doug Miranda raced all over, chasing after hot spots. He took the Old Campus stage and convinced crowds of protesters to remain in place.

Then he sped to the Green. He joined teams of student and Panther monitors who fanned out and urged the marchers to return to campus.

Throughout the center of New Haven, dozens of Panthers — one estimate ran as high as hundreds — worked the streets. After all the suggestions across the country of a violent Panther outbreak, the party had a chance to ignite Armageddon, to pull the trigger on the starting gun for the great Panther-hippie revolt in the streets. Instead, party members frantically worked to keep the peace in concert with every stripe of ​“pig” found in the Black Panther bestiary.
 
Most of the great May Day assemblage heeded their words.

The hold-outs in front of the courthouse ignored the present and prior pleas of Panthers, the black and white Yale student monitors.

A bottle was thrown at the Guardsmen and police. Bricks and cherry bombs followed.

Finally, the police responded by shooting tear-gas canisters into the crowd. They pushed the demonstrators away from the Green.

The demonstrators, still ignoring the marshals’ furious pleas, regrouped a few blocks southwest, at Temple and Chapel streets. Through megaphones, marshals read a statement Bobby Seale had released through his wife, Artie; it called this kind of confrontation dangerous to the Panther cause.

Most of the demonstrators chilled out. A few resumed hurling bottles and rocks. Again, more tear gas.

The police pushed them toward Phelps Gate, the Old Campus entrance planned to absorb crowds at moments of trouble.

Marshals formed lines to separate the holdouts who continued facing down the cops from the majority ready to retreat into the Old Campus.

Just then, Sam Chauncey’s longstanding order somehow got lost as an on-duty police officer started closing the gates. This was the nightmare scenario Chauncey and Brewster had worked so hard to avoid.Chauncey received a call at the command center on Temple Street. He furiously phoned the campus cops and ordered the gate opened.

A statement from William Farley was read over a sound system telling the crowd it could find shelter inside Old Campus.

The majority of the protesters joined the rest of the assemblage in the Old Campus courtyard. Refugees from the clash washed their eyes at first-aid stations.

Allen Ginsberg was at the microphone tapping universal Buddha consciousness amid the stinging cloud.

“Ommmmmmmmmm,” Ginsberg chanted, as he had done in the midst of the police riot in Chicago a year earlier. People dabbed at his eyes with wet towels.
 
Out on the street, holdouts refused to abandon their stare-down with law enforcement. Officers stood with bayonets pointed. More rocks and bottles flew. The guard set off 30 grenades; reporters and protesters struggled to breathe and see through the thickest, most debilitating gas fog they’d experienced yet in America’s ongoing ​“youth rebellion.”

Reporters scurried to Crown Street, the last band of protesters to the Old Campus.

Allen Ginsberg was still chanting; he paused only to blow accentuating notes into a harmonium. Some of the soaked, disheveled protesters chanted with him.

Eventually, Doug Miranda took the mike and excoriated troublemakers. Out in the streets more gas was released. Students fled to residential colleges away from the Old Campus, seeking refuge on top floors where they could gasp more air.

Midnight Bombing

Minutes before midnight, the clashes over, gas clouds still covering the blocks in and around the Green, a more peaceful assembly was breaking up four long blocks north.

Rock bands had just finished playing for hundreds of May Dayers inside the Yale Whale, aka Ingalls Rink, site of the beating of the deranged Lebanese graduate student during David Hilliard’s speech a week earlier.

Two bombs exploded from the basement beneath the stage just as the last band finished packing up.

The force was strong enough to blow out glass from both ends of the rink. The whale’s ceiling arch cracked.

Miraculously, everyone escaped serious injury.

Inside the Alumni House, Cyrus Vance’s advice flashed in Chauncey’s mind. He called the news desk at the local AM radio station.

Chauncey knew the reporter on the desk, and he assured him that the situation was not nearly so serious as it may have sounded on the police radio. As emergency response personnel raced to assess the crowd and collect evidence, the story stayed off New Haven’s midnight airwaves.

Investigators, combing through the wreckage, found no definitive signs of the perpetrators. Chauncey and Brewster wondered about the motive. Although no one could be sure, it seemed to them that the perpetrator had to come from the right; a bombing served the right’s purposes, not the left’s, by portraying the protest movement as violent and scary in the eyes of mainstream society. They suspected dirty tricks from the Nixon administration. They could never prove it.
 
May 1 ended with New Haven intact. On film, it looked like war in the streets around the Green. Thousands of participants certainly tasted the chemical air of catastrophic confrontation. Yet in the end, it was more of a full-costumed rehearsal, frightening and dangerous enough for those at the scene.

A few windows were broken. Citywide, police made only 21 arrests all day, mostly on minor charges, some unrelated to May Day.

Two police officers and a few demonstrators went to the city’s two hospitals, which had geared themselves for massive emergencies. The injuries were minor, the victims released not long after being admitted.

Of course, the city couldn’t relax yet; there were still two days of scheduled protests ahead.

Day 2

Arriving home at midnight, Hugh Keefe got a call — from his National Guard sergeant, who’d been looking for him all day.

Keefe, newly graduated from University of Connecticut School law school, was representing two of the Panthers charged in the case and had been on the Green that day. He also was a Guardsman.

Keefe reported immediately to New London to join his battalion. He caught a few hours’ sleep in the armory there.

Before dawn on Saturday, the unit headed back to New Haven for another day of patrols, M16s in hand.

The comments of his fellow Guards- men over the course of the day made Keefe shudder. They had no understanding of the protests, about the un-derlying complaints about the Panther case, about the war in Southeast Asia.

Keefe thought back to comments he heard from recruits in basic training in 1967 about their mission to ​“fight and kill Commies.” This sounded eerily similar.

As he drove the colonel’s jeep around New Haven, Keefe feared the Guard more than he feared the crowd on the Green. He took heart in his empty M16; Chief Ahern had insisted the Guard patrol without bullets.

In the afternoon the Panthers and the Yippies returned to the Green. The crowd had dwindled from the day before. A pilot made a peace sign in the sky; it reflected the tone of another day of celebratory, pacific protest, although it took effort to maintain high energy.

“Fuck Kingman Brewer — or whatever his name is!” proclaimed Jerry Rubin.

“Fuck Jerry Rubin!” some local protesters responded.

Artie Seale played a tape-recorded message from her jailed husband Bobby Seale about the injustices inherent in his trial.

From the May Day stage came the first announcement of a nationwide student strike called for the following week, over the invasion of Cambodia. Doug Miranda offered a fiery call for disciplined revolution — organized resistance to America’s racist power structure. He continued the theme of avoiding suicidal May Day weekend attacks on the cops. Then he closed with a reassurance to militants that the Panther hadn’t lost its roar, that it’ll strike, sure enough, once the time is right. He told the crowd that New Haven could still be ​“leveled at any time.”

“All power to the people,” Miranda called. ​“And when the word is given, all power to the good shooters!”

There would be no Day Three to May Day weekend in New Haven. After a final speech from SDS leader Tom Hayden’s speech, organizers decided to cut off the rest of the gathering.

Practically everyone was leaving town anyway. New conflicts beckoned elsewhere in the country; a new chapter was beginning in the war at home over the war in Southeast Asia.

Even John Dean had seen all he needed to see. According to his account of his visit to New Haven, he spent an uneventful day ​“in the company of personnel from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Office, local law enforcement and Department of Justice.”

That night, another fire would hit a left-of-center target, a building off the New Haven Green housing a reform Democratic organization called the New Politics Corner. Investigators concluded that the fire was an accident, the result of a faulty oil burner. Inside sound trucks, Panthers shooed people away, branding the fire the work of provocateurs hoping to incite violence. Either way, it didn’t cause much damage.

The last remnants of the white militants did confront the Guard and the cops, in smaller numbers, with fewer bottles and rocks. They got to taste some more tear gas; the Guard had had enough.

“Send them back to Africa,” remarked one Guardsman.

“If they grab your weapon,” a company commander instructed the troops on the way to this last confrontation, ​“break their fucking arms.”

The Show Moves On

Then it was over. Call it luck. Call it brilliant planning. Call it a conspiracy between the Man and the Panther.

Whatever the reason, death and destruction passed by New Haven.

America wouldn’t be so lucky.

Two days later, on May 4, National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio, armed with the same weaponry and orders as their brethren in New Haven, shot into a crowd of unarmed student protesters. ​“Four dead in Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young would sing of the victims.

Stunned, outraged, students poured out of dormitories coast to coast. Police shot to death two more students, black students this time, one a high schooler, during a riot at Mississippi’s Jackson State College. The apocalyptic warnings of the violence-prone suddenly sounded true.