May Day Weekend at Yale
KENISTON, KENNETH
NEW HAVEN NOTEBOOK May Day Weekend at Yale BY KENNETH KENISTON How you judge what happened on May Day in New Haven depends partly on where you were standing. The more intimately involved you were...
...We sit in silence for about 10 minutes, spent and immobile...
...May Day + 1. Saturday, 2 A. M. The campus is quiet...
...I was out in the street [about 8 p.m.] and I happened to go to Branford College...
...A crowd begins to gather around them, mostly curious, yet partly taunting and frightened...
...You're dealing with pros...
...The trick is finally turned in their favor when one white radical visitor says to them, "We're more oppressed than you are because of our long hair...
...Finally, we carry her forcibly out of the office and take her home...
...Brewster has by now been loudly condemned from many quarters for his statement expressing "skepticism" about the possibility of justice for black revolutionaries in the courts...
...Guardsmen are deployed on the side streets, but neither they nor the police are visible from the Green...
...Out of Calhoun College strides Dr...
...Both groups feel that our criticisms are primarily and unjustly directed at them...
...The Dean of Yale College, after extensive consultation with various faculty members, issues a statement allowing students various grading options...
...Some of the marshals are identifiable in the crowd by their yellow armbands...
...A few days after the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings, Klebanoff resigned from the White House...
...The Masters of the Yale residential colleges meet to establish a unified policy on the attitude of the university toward the visitors who will be in New Haven next Friday and Saturday...
...we know that several hundred others wear no special identification...
...There was no one there...
...The rational and irrational terrors generated by anticipation of the weekend were dealt with by a vast amount of open dicussion and careful planning on the part of Yale students, faculty and administrators, local police and community members, and Black Panthers and their supporters...
...Don't run...
...Friday, 1 A. M. A few of us find ourselves in my office after a frantic day...
...He is one of the few older people...
...The President follows with a prepared statement in which he says, first, that the university cannot be neutral about justice in the courts, and second that he personally is "appalled and ashamed" that the day has come when he must be "skeptical" about whether black revolutionaries can obtain a fair trial in America —but he warns against allowing "political passion . . . to dominate the scene of the trial...
...All white, they are housed a few blocks from campus in a "collective"—a remodeled tenement filled with children of all colors and with animals...
...The faculty adjourns to allow one of them to speak...
...The Black Coalition of New Haven, consisting of community groups, has issued a long statement vehemently condemning the "racism" of white radicals who would exploit black issues for their own political purposes, but who have no real understanding of or genuine concern for the problems of blacks...
...Marshals appear on stage, commanding the microphones and pleading with the crowd to move back from the gates onto the Green so that gassed people can enter the Old Campus...
...They no longer will listen to us," he says...
...The Guardsmen are young and look frightened, too...
...I speak briefly with Pat Moynihan in Washington and describe the local situation...
...The thing struck me as I walked in, and I said to the guy I was with, Jesus, look at that...
...It is now the morning of the first day of the rally...
...And I said, 'Wow, that's why they had the banners...
...A vote for a strike is endorsed by a large majority at nine colleges that night, at three colleges the next night...
...He is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie...
...it takes strategy and work, not trashing...
...The momentum of the mass meeting, however, seems to me to have been lost...
...I call President Brewster's office to inform one of his aides that the Guard unit has moved...
...I finally intervene and lead him from the platform...
...Dean Robert Brustein of the Drama School is threatened by an anonymous phone caller...
...My own evaluation of what happened in New Haven is that, first of all, an essentially constructive human and social process occurred in the weeks preceding May Day and during the event itself...
...You don't even know how to handle these guys...
...The basic response to anxiety and fear was the coming together of all levels of the Yale community in a more solidary and united group...
...Something might come up...
...She makes it clear that she feels we are harassing her, but her answers are largely convincing...
...For those farther from the center, whether at Yale or in the country at large, the events seem equivocal, even disastrous...
...Gasmasked trashers who had come to town laden with bottles, clubs and rocks...
...The meeting votes down an amendment that would set a terminal date for the strike, and rejects a two-hour adjournment...
...I said, 'It's cool, you know, it's going to be cool...
...You will have to move your men back 30 feet and refrain from all further use of tear gas in this area...
...It calls for a "suspension" of academic requirements for an indefinite period, the setting up of a fund to support black defendants, a quid pro quo understanding on Yale destruction of community housing, and so on...
...Their spokesman is Kurt Schmoke, president of the Junior Class and member of the Black Students Alliance at Yale...
...He speaks for no more than 45 seconds, softly and slowly...
...A mixture of Woodstock, a football rally, and a political meeting...
...He asks for discipline, long-term efforts, analysis, and hard work...
...The only Yale student among the arrestees was in a car where another passenger was brandishing a (loaded) water pistol...
...In a small seminar room in the gothic tower of Silliman College at Yale, my wife is teaching a seminar on the psychology of women...
...The stand-off is maintained...
...Don't panic...
...To be sure, the small group of faculty members already disturbed by what they considered Yale's permissiveness were almost completely silent before, during and immediately after May Day...
...On this sunny Sunday afternoon, about a thousand students march to the president's house, a stately federal red-brick home on the campus...
...5. The presence of strong and responsive moral leadership from the administration and from many of the faculty, who acted in concert with students...
...Friday, 8:00 P. M. A Yale College student who is quite radical politically describes the scene: "At May Day it was very, very heavy...
...3. The generation of plans for the weekend at Yale based on the premise of good faith, openness, hospitality and trust—this despite the very real and justified fear of violence, 4. The acceptance at Yale of decentralization of organization and decisions, a decentralization that was nonetheless coupled with complexmechanisms of coordination and communication...
...It's laid out!' "There was no doubt in my mind...
...In the evening a group from the Monitoring Committee meets informally to decide whether we should issue any final statement on the weekend...
...I fear for tomorrow...
...We ask him to join us on the grass...
...There is much laughter and ribaldry...
...Brewster puts the question on the black faculty resolution, and it is carried overwhelmingly by a voice vote...
...Finally one student says, "God, I'm depressed...
...They are obstructing the movement of our visitors...
...The daffodils are in bloom all around the edges of the campus...
...The ubiquitous Coffin urges Sacks to ask the helmeted, gas-masked, booted, and leather-jacketed demonstrators to move back as well...
...Occasionally he utters angry remarks about "American fascism" and the "pigs...
...I had gone up to her to ask where she was from...
...When I urge him to use his influence to assure that the National Guard maintains a "low profile" as long as possible, he recalls to me that we live in a Federal system, that the President's influence is limited, and that the National Guard is in any case controlled by the Governor of Connecticut...
...There were none...
...Mills gives an angry speech in support of the accused New Haven Panthers, attacking racism and repression...
...Among the specific factors responsible for the nonviolence, I think, were the following: 1. The consistent good faith, coolness and activity of blacks in New Haven, including black faculty members, black students, black community leaders and members, and Black Panthers...
...And Yale opened its doors wide to tens of thousands of uninvited, highly threatening visitors who had no connection whatsoever with the university...
...It was the most absurd thing...
...Most of the lights are out, except for floodlights on the rock group, whose playing seems particularly frenzied and orgiastic...
...All power to the people," he ends...
...He is surrounded by bodyguards...
...The town is quiet...
...But their judgments of it continue to be informed by their belief that Yale, like American higher education in general, has failed to take a firm stand against coercion and in defense of academic integrity...
...Five of us, including Yale Chaplain Bill Coffin, two undergraduates and one graduate student, meet with representatives of the pdc...
...understandably, he makes plans to leave New Haven May Day weekend...
...two people were injured, treated in the Yale infirmary, and released...
...It was so crystal clear to me...
...Even when we are blocks away, still trying to escape the wind-blown tear gas, we hear his distant, "Om, Om...
...Students are pouring water over him, covering his eyes and face with wet towels...
...My wife says at breakfast, "I envy you your role in this situation...
...Moving through the crowd are hippies with brightly painted faces, sullen-faced motorcyclists, crash-helmeted visitors with backpacks from out of town, and a few Yale students and faculty members...
...Professor Roy Bryce-Laporte, head of the Afro-American Studies Program, then reads a long and forceful resolution, far more militant than the one we had prepared...
...Someone suggests that we should congratulate the Black Panthers and the police...
...The campus seems unnaturally quiet...
...In the largest faculty meeting of Yale College anyone can remember, President Kingman Brewster urges the faculty to consider the "scope and limits" of its responsibilities with regard to the strike...
...We break up and go home to bed...
...My parents were sure that I was in the vanguard of the whole thing that was happening in New Haven—me personally—which was absurd because I really had nothing to do with it...
...We decide to go home...
...This gas drifts thinly up across the Green and disperses onto the Old Campus, where several thousand students and visitors are now gathered...
...Coffin in particular, an old hand at demonstrations and rallies, wants to know who will control the microphone, what the tone of the speakers will be, and what the response from the platform will be in case of provocation or violence...
...Evaluation...
...Wednesday, April 22...
...Given the widespread rumors of impending violence, we urge that children, high-school students, and others unaccustomed to turbulent crowd conditions should not attend the rally...
...Saturday, 10 A. M. The Monitoring Committee receives a call from John Hersey stating that members of yawf are again talking up trouble in Branford College...
...They present Brewster with a petition signed by 1,500 students thanking him for his statement and supporting him...
...From the window, we can hear shouts of "Fuck you, Reverend...
...They were gone...
...The signatures have been gathered in less than 24 hours...
...A few Yale marshals are present, but those few cannot control the situation...
...Having been involved myself and having since discussed the weekend with students, colleagues, administrators, and alumni has made me realize that "what really happened"—down to the simplest facts—must be approached from multiple perspectives...
...May Day + 2. Sunday, 1:30 A.M...
...The more intimately involved you were with the Black Panther-support demonstrations, the more likely that you view what took place as essentially constructive, even miraculous...
...Black demonstrators...
...Tuesday afternoon the Monitoring Committee receives word that between 100-200 black New Haven high-school students will be at the rally, "armed for self-defense with knives and lead pipes," This information is relayed to the Black Coalition and the National Clearinghouse, another black community organization...
...You need professionals, you know, because you're dealing with professionals.' And I said, 'God, you're right.' They said, 'Look around you...
...A group of liberal-Left white faculty members has drawn up a carefully worded resolution supporting the cause of justice in the courts, permitting faculty and students to modify class procedures or attendance until after May Day if they wish, and condemning violence and coercion...
...2. The unusual discipline, restraint and professional behavior of the New Haven Police, which refrained from physical contact with demonstrators unless absolutely necessary, withstood provocation, and maintained minimum visibility throughout the weekend...
...The opening of the university to visitors is approved, subject to the decisions made by individual colleges...
...Approximately 20 arrests were connected with the demonstration...
...She experienced overwhelming anxiety, and had the fantasy that a rattling at the door of the theater would be followed by the firing of bullets, and that she would be killed...
...We decide to issue no statement whatsoever...
...They saw themselves...
...Students in the crowd shout, "Let him go...
...And then I immediately started hustling around trying to find more marshals...
...About 30 per cent of the Yale students have left...
...We later learn that some units have been instructed to place live ammunition in their rifles...
...In each one, independently, there is a discussion about a strike in support of the Panthers...
...one of the few wearing a suit...
...Then I realize that I do not...
...Tuesday, April 28...
...No ego trips, no dope...
...He harangues the crowd to behave nonviolently...
...Doug Miranda, New Haven Black Panther Captain, a 19-year-old San Francisco State College dropout, appears on the platform...
...Yale marshals soon arrive in quantity and the crowd disperses...
...You can deal with your fear by frantic activity, and maybe even make some difference...
...Then, for almost an hour, the group talks about dying and death...
...Move right and left as you leave...
...Within 10 minutes, three Black Panthers are in the college...
...There's nothing happening here...
...He lets us know that for him, the presence of helmeted policemen with clubs would constitute a "provocation" sufficient to justify "self-defensive" actions...
...He is booed by the crowd...
...It's blatant...
...You could just see them...
...We call the fire watcher atop one of the tallest buildings in New Haven, and he reports nothing anywhere...
...The much larger majority of student and faculty "moderates," "liberals" and "radicals" emphasize that violence and damage were minimal over May Day weekend, that the town and the university emerged more united than before...
...The Old Campus is a large area fronting the Green, enclosed by four- and five-story Victorian brick buildings that serve as dormitories for Yale freshmen...
...Saturday, April 25...
...In an alleyway behind the Yale Daily News building I meet Ken Mills...
...May Day got me more and more apolitical than I've ever been...
...Saturday, 10:30 P. M. Much tear gas has again been used throughout the campus...
...Secondly, this constructive and positive social process contributed substantially to the nonviolence of what could have been an explosive and disastrous weekend...
...The statement makes no explicit reference to the May Day weekend being organized almost entirely by out-of-town white radicals on the Panther Defense Committee (pdc), but it is widely taken as criticism of them...
...and can't sleep...
...It's planned...
...As she described the scene, I could not tell who were the police, who was good, who was bad, who was black, who was white...
...Whenever he refers to killing, he is repeatedly booed...
...Brewster soon announces that with certain changes in wording—for example, changing "suspension" to "modification"—the black faculty resolution would be acceptable to him...
...He later refused all offers of psychological help...
...I'm very down on crowds...
...the volume is completely deafening...
...He looks worn and depressed...
...I am on my way home...
...Ann Froines, wife of the only acquitted member of the Chicago Seven, is the chief spokesman for the pdc...
...Some rocks and bottles are thrown...
...most students and visitors have been tear-gassed two or three times in the course of the evening...
...Medics with their white red cross armbands...
...They're provocateurs...
...When we leave, the undergraduates are more reassured than Coffin and I are...
...Tension is mounting...
...Those of us who have prepared the resolution are afraid it will be considered too radical to be accepted...
...We learn that the National Guard has been called up and will be deployed, and that Federal troops are being held ready in Massachusetts and Rhode Island...
...President Brewster is asked to yield to a spokesman for the black faculty...
...Allen Ginsberg now sits cross-legged, almost obscured by the billowing gas...
...It is again a sunny, balmy day...
...In front of us on the grass is a Women's Liberation group from either New York or Boston...
...A crowd of 100-odd people is directly below the window, surrounding and taunting a group of Guardsmen stationed awkwardly across one corner of the Green opposite the Hotel Taft...
...As he continues his tirade, a dazed-looking young man wanders onto the platform and tries to interrupt Hilliard...
...It becomes increasingly clear to the audience that he is disoriented and confused...
...In the background, however, is a white man who has allegedly been expelled from another radical group because of his fondness for violence...
...The sunlight shines in through the high glass windows...
...They want leadership and commitment from the faculty...
...An explosion of unknown origin occurred Friday evening in the rink during a small rock and roll concert...
...He is still talking in a rambling way...
...Study, educate yourselves, he urges...
...Don't commit suicide, don't respond to the fascist pig provocateurs...
...But most people, including me, have to just sit and wait and be afraid...
...He picks imaginary specks of dust from the lectern...
...Sacks does and they, too, move back...
...We question her intensively on plans for the weekend's events...
...John Hersey, ex-war correspondent, novelist, and Master of Pierson College at Yale—a tall man of great moral strength, sensitivity, and distinctive bearing?walks up to the commanding officer of the Guard unit, introduces himself, and says, "I must ask you to move these men back one block immediately...
...Helmeted white young men and women, many gas-masked, shout at the Guardsmen...
...The Yale College faculty as a body has never before allowed a strike, approved the establishment of a defense fund, or taken a position on Yale-community relations...
...Herbert Sacks, child psychiatrist, wearing a borrowed white coat, a stethoscope (purchased for the weekend) around his neck, long white hair flowing...
...As soon as the first tear gas bomb went off, the people who started it split...
...This is a medical area...
...While these vignettes inevitably reflect where I stood before, during and after the weekend, they may allow the reader to form his own evaluation about the wisdom or lack thereof, the courage or lack thereof, the permissiveness or lack thereof shown at Yale during the demonstrations...
...They communicated through my brother to tell me to get out of New Haven...
...Thereafter, much of the cordiality of our previous relationship with police officials and the Panther Defense Commitee disappears...
...About 20,000 people are on the New Haven Green, almost all out-of-towners...
...Walk...
...There was little physical contact between police, National Guardsmen and demonstrators throughout the weekend...
...In the midst of the ensuing discussion, the president's assistant informs Brewster and the Dean of the College that there are approximately 1,000 students waiting quietly outside...
...They saw their own irrationality, and they were terrified by it...
...There is much, of course, that cannot be explained except in terms of extraordinary good luck...
...He and the marshals are unable to move the crowd away...
...The sky seems unusually brilliant and blue...
...Friday, 6:00 P. M. When the main rally on the Green breaks up, the National Guard moves into positions of extremely high visibility, blocking all side streets except those leading directly to the university campus...
...Wednesday afternoon I interview a research subject, a black woman in her early 20s...
...But the praying Pente-costalists were clearly caught in the crossfire, and she knew they would die...
...No vote for a strike is called...
...There is a clanging of symbols and Indian instruments over the pa system and the steady, monotonous, soothing sound of his chanting, "Om, Om...
...Tuesday Evening, April 21...
...People are too complex, and creating a society that is way too complex...
...Just the way they started chanting...
...Yale marshal are trying to argue with them, but are having no luck...
...We had just been wandering around, like, all day...
...A friend and I are sitting on the grass listening to the speakers...
...These are agitators...
...Why do they do that...
...The meeting is run by an ad hoc coalition of "Third World" students and community members...
...They are armed with rifles, but standing at ease...
...One of the speakers is David Hilliard, Black Panther Chief of Staff, who has just been released from a six-month contempt charge after promising to "be good" at the local court where the New Haven Panthers are being tried...
...No need for paranoia, everything is going to be cool.' I walked into Branford College just as this provocateur came on...
...Glass breaks as bottles and rocks are thrown...
...The president's aide laughs and says, "But John Hersey shouldn't get all the credit for things that Kingman arranged...
...Only shoot in self-defense...
...Then he gets up and strolls again into the crowd...
...Several truckloads of guns are stolen near New Haven...
...And then the provocateur comes on [announcing falsely that two Black Panthers had been arrested and urging the crowd to avenge them], and immediately they're up with the banners going...
...Then he begins to speak: "This is a small step for mankind but a big step for me...
...These changes and an amendment condemning coercion and violence are accepted as friendly by the black faculty members present...
...I felt like I was Paul Revere that night...
...One well-placed bomb, one well-aimed bullet, one well-lit fire would have totally altered these impressions of the weekend...
...Like I was talking to the cops, you know...
...The lights go out except for light machines playing on the dark walls of the dormitories...
...The group is flanked by enormous eight-foot loudspeakers...
...Students are warned by out-of-town friends that their colleges will be bombed or burned...
...They cheer loudly whenever "our oppressed sisters" are mentioned...
...But on the dark stage as we flee...
...Because I went to all the first-aid stations and no one knew anything about it, because there was no one there at Branford when the thing started...
...He says that my description accords with his information...
...We are coughing, choking, blinded by the gas...
...May Day?0...
...He ends by calling for a nationwide college strike: "Close them down to open them up to reality...
...Strike banners flap idly in the spring breeze...
...The rumors intensify throughout the week, many of them raising the possibility of black violence...
...We tell her to leave, but she refuses...
...I just can't see how any political system can deal with that, how any political system could deal with the problems...
...In addition to the customary ones, they may request a "Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory" grade for work done until April 23, if the instructor of the course has seen enough of the student's work to give him a grade...
...Out-of-towners, many of them helmeted and gas-masked, stand taunting and jeering the Guardsmen...
...Even those who participated in the May Day events saw them differently...
...They no longer respect us...
...New Haven Police Chief Ahearn indicated that, throughout the town, the number of arrests on the May Day weekend was lower than on a normal weekend...
...A great university sanctioned a "strike" in support of avowed black revolutionaries accused of murder in the local courts...
...The students unanimously decide not to meet the next week, but several of them later ask my wife if they can talk with her alone...
...Jerry Rubin was there, saying, 'Come on, this is not where it's at...
...You stupid Yalies,' they were saying, "you don't even know...
...I mean, I'm down on people...
...There are constant rumors of violence, especially from Weathermen and Minutemen...
...This is a long haul, he says...
...A friend and I go to a window of a dormitory overlooking the Green...
...By herself, she looked lonely...
...This is full of shit.' And I just watched it, and it was just like a flash, just a cosmic flash sort of out of the blue...
...The loudspeakers emit eardrum-piercing electronic screeches...
...They are saying that the Black Panthers are "bourgeois" and "counterrevolutionary," that they had not come to New Haven to cool it in the face of the police and National Guard tear gas...
...This is how it happens...
...As we walk onto the campus, we come upon about 150 Guardsmen lined up on York Street, across the middle of the campus...
...Then the yawfs put on their crash helmets, buckled up their gasmasks, took their clubs out of their back pockets, and started leading the charge, trying to get people enraged...
...Several thousand people immediately begin to move out through the rather narrow gates on the side of the Old Campus away from the Green...
...The colleges have independently taken somewhat different positions, although all except one have agreed to some kind of open-door policy...
...No one starts to leave...
...There is another long silence...
...The pa system is poor and it is hard to hear...
...We see Edwin P. Newman, the nbc television correspondent, wandering about rather aimlessly...
...A number of students and visitors twisted ankles running from tear gas, and several were bruised by flying canisters...
...Saturday, 5 P. M. Kenneth Mills speaks at the afternoon rally immediately after Jerry Rubin...
...Please contact your superior officer...
...The young man is pulled off the platform and roughed up by Hilliard's bodyguards...
...They burst into dense clouds that blow directly onto the Old Campus, penetrating all windows and smothering the area in thick, flowing fog that hangs low on the ground...
...As in the Japanese film Rashomon, where the "same" event is seen totally differently by the different observers, so May Day, once one begins to study it, starts to lose substantiality even with regard to facts...
...Later, provisions for possible overflows are made: Buses are readied in case additional visitors need to sleep in the Yale Bowl...
...But he defends Yale and attacks those who call for violence and "trashing...
...I couldnt even believe it...
...In the morning the Monitoring Committee, after having met repeatedly with police officials, marshals, community leaders, rally organizers and other concerned parties, issues a public statement...
...Many of us believe it has been used unnecessarily and excessively...
...No human or social process can make violence impossible...
...The crowd is festive...
...He looks hot, uncomfortable and out of place...
...Michael Lerner says, "We've been making believe all week that we could really control this...
...The gas has cleared, except for a faint trace that still brings tears to the eyes...
...All the days this week are sunny, dry, and warm...
...They need the faculty to be with them...
...The president of Yale announced his "skepticism" that black revolutionaries could receive a fair trial anywhere in the country...
...He walks up to out-of-towners and introduces himself...
...I wonder whether he understands what is happening...
...Her anxiety lasted for several hours...
...Bill Coffin is among the demonstrators, trying to persuade them to disband...
...We call Black Panther Headquarters in New Haven to tell them what is happening at Branford...
...They talk about the need for revolutionary discipline and the insanity of provoking or being provoked by the police...
...This is how these things...
...Rock concerts and political workshops are planned...
...I am later told by his friends that the young man, a graduate student from the Near East, has been disturbed for several weeks...
...We indicate our conviction that all parties involved in the May Day rally sincerely desire a nonviolent demonstration...
...Windows on shops in the area surrounding the Yale campus and the New Haven Green are now being boarded up...
...Images: Helmeted, war-painted faces of hippies...
...The officer, surprised, goes to the radio in his jeep and returns in a few moments saying, "They will be out in three or four minutes...
...And when the word is given, all power to the good shooters...
...Vice President Agnew, the New York Times, and many alumni have joined in the attack...
...She is a recent graduate from a predominantly white college, a brilliant linguist who happens to be working in New Haven...
...Despite the strike vote the day before, many of the students in the seminar show up...
...And crowds just like, wow, you know...
...The discussion first focuses on the students' fears—their fear of violence, the possibility of killings, bombings or arson, incidents on the streets, and their fear of blacks...
...We talk with the pdc for almost two hours...
...But people are watching for something to happen.' So, more tear gas...
...Thursday, April 30...
...But we cite six specific areas where we believe preparations have so far been inadequate...
...Ann Froines seems irritated, but remains cool...
...My parents wouldn't even communicate with me...
...The New York Times features prominently a story intimating that Boston radicals are buying guns for the New Haven demonstration...
...Get your heads together, he shouts...
...It was absurd...
...Wednesday, April 29...
...He addresses the National Guard lieutenant: "Officer, I have 150 severe cases of conjunctivitis in this building...
...A national student "strike" is now under way protesting the Cambodian invasion...
...Later in the hour she tells of an anxiety attack she had while watching a movie in which this scene occurred: A group of praying Pentecostal revivalists found itself trapped between two other groups—one of men shooting from a tower, the second of men on the ground...
...Maybe I had better stay here tonight...
...And again and again I see the face of a girl from Cornell, a heavy girl, not attractive, with lanky black hair...
...Friday, April 24...
...On Saturday evening an unexplained fire broke out in the Coalition for Concerned Democrats' office, but none of the 30 people in the office at the time were injured...
...At one end of the Old Campus a rock group is playing on a platform...
...Meanwhile, Michael Lerner of the Monitoring Committee is in regular contact with Arthur Klebanoff, a recent Yale graduate who is also on President Nixon's staff, about the National Guard and Federal troops...
...Throughout the meeting there is chanting, many shouts of "Right On," and much waving of fists...
...The Guard has been withdrawn to its armories...
...And it was just people watching...
...The black neighborhoods of New Haven, patrolled by members of the black community, were particularly quiet...
...There is another long silence and he again speaks, in a more and more rambling and confused way, about a recent letter to his mother...
...The crowd threw up its own madness onto the stage...
...Plans to serve 150,000 extra meals over the weekend are drawn...
...Finally, toward the end of the two-hour seminar, the topic veers to the subject of sex...
...Monday, 10 A. M., April 27...
...Sunday, April 26...
...and that the mood of Yale since May Day has been one of good morale, of diversity, and of noncoerciveness...
...The students at the rink return quietly to Yale's 12 residential colleges...
...I just watched it...
...For three hours I was like trying to keep people back, trying to keep people off the streets...
...Move steadily...
...The students are waiting outside, he says, afraid and confused...
...She says she "wishes the Panthers would go away and leave us all in peace...
...She told me, and when I asked her why she was here, she said, "I heard this was going to be the biggest riot of the year—so I came...
...President Brewster issues a directive reinstating regular academic expectations for faculty and students...
...In the course of his harangue, Hilliard urges "killing pigs...
...We are given coffee and donuts and wait several minutes...
...Local motorcycle gang members...
...Michael Lerner suggests?only half ironically—that we also congratulate the white demonstration organizers "for having created the conditions under which a riot was virtually inevitable and then having done everything possible to prevent it from happening," and that we congratulate the National Guard "for having positioned themselves in the most awkward, visible and provocative manner possible, and then having behaved with great restraint when provocation followed...
...A tumultous mass meeting of more than 4.000 students and faculty is held in Ingalls Hockey Rink...
...And it was just like lemmings, just lemmings, and it disgusted me totally...
...When Hilliard finishes his speech, Kenneth Mills, assistant professor of Philosophy at Yale and a member of the black faculty group, who has been chairing the meeting, announces that the young man has a right to speak, though he was not scheduled to do so...
...Friday, 9:00 P. M. Tear gas has been used on the lower Green in New Haven to disperse the yawf-led demonstrators...
...Two days later we are informed by them that there will be no black high-school students at the May Day rally...
...There is a general agreement that they will talk about the issues raised by the strike, not the reading...
...most people have left or gone to bed...
...that the Yale faculty, the administration and the student body acted with singular openness and intelligence...
...You think you could be stupid marshals...
...The Weekend's Tally...
...Women from the Women's Liberation groups in Boston and New York, booted and in Levis like the men...
...They're really nuts, you know...
...When one moves from facts to evaluation, the disagreement is still greater...
...He reappears, with no sign of any injury...
...The young man, still confused and disoriented, walks slowly across the platform and stands before the microphones...
...Those fuckers, those yawfs [Youth Against War and Fascism, a New York-Boston radical group]: They carry their banners around at night...
...And what was happening, was people watching for something to happen...
...It is estimated that 15,000 visitors can sleep in the university on lawns and courtyards...
...The Guardsmen then shoulder arms and march down the street, to the applause of the gathered crowd...
...Sunday, 2-4 A. M. I go to bed at 2:00 a.m...
...There was a need for marshals, so I was out in the street trying to marshal the crowds...
...Black and white hucksters are selling radical newspapers of every conceivable ideology...
...When Schmoke finishes, the faculty rises and applauds until he has left the auditorium...
...Marshals appear everywhere, saying, "Don't run...
...6. The preexistence of a strong sense of community, trust and communication at Yale, upon which the weekend was ultimately built...
...The rock band stops...
...Friday, 4:00 P. M. The rally has begun...
...As I leave the rink, three students take me aside to say, "I sometimes feel like that guy myself...
...Yet given the Rashomon Effect, it seems most honest and informative to present here a series of vignettes: bits of raw data that together recreate some of the events as I saw them or as they were seen by people I know well and trust...
...I was working as a marshal, so I was very tired, and I said, 'Let's go out and see what's happening at all the colleges.' There were some dances and rock bands and things like that...
...He says nothing for at least five full minutes...
...On Thursday afternoon, the first stragglers begin to arrive in New Haven...
...It can only make it less likely...
...May Day + 3. Monday...
...A Student-Faculty Monitoring Committee has been formed to help assure a nonviolent demonstration on the coming weekend...
...Mills then steps to the podium and pleads passionately for a strike in support of the Panthers on trial in New Haven...
...I couldn't even believe it...
...Afterward, a professor of history rushes up and says, "It was a truly psycho-historical moment...
...At 10:30 p.m., a National Guard unit is stationed in one corner of the Green adjacent to the campus...
...An sds rally before the main one has dispersed quietly, thanks in part to the efforts of the Yale marshals...
...But Adele Richardson, secretary to one of the officials of the university, who worked in the office all weekend, who spent the previous night there "just in case I am needed," refuses to go...
...Suddenly, 10-15 tear gas canisters are fired by local police and the Guard into the crowd and across the entire two-block length of the Old Campus fronting the Green...
...He turns and walks away...
...The banners were dispersed all throughout the crowd...
...Several people attempt to gain their microphone...
...There is much talk, shouting, fist-waving, applause, chanting, laughter...
...Five hundred dollars bail was originally demanded, but this was reduced to $10 after the weapon was studied...
...God, that's really stupid...
...Yale marshals...
...Thursday, 4 P. M., April 23...
...He sits with us for a few minutes and says almost nothing, surveying the scene...
...Now we're faced with the fact that it's just going to happen, and there's nothing more we can do about it...
Vol. 53 • June 1970 • No. 13
