By Mike Ely

May 4, 2010 -- Kasama Project -- May 4, 1970. Forty years have passed. It is history now in the eyes of the world. But for me, and many others, it is raw and alive. It always will be.

I won’t tell the well-known details – if you don’t know them, look them up. But I will tell you what it felt like, and looked like to a teenage boy who wanted desperately to see the liberation of the Vietnamese and Black people in America.

May Day for Bobby Seale — New Haven, 1970

On May 1 1970, I was in New Haven, Connecticut. Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party was facing a murder trial in New Haven. They had first bound and gagged him in the courtroom of the Chicago 8, then shipped him to Connecticut to lock him up for life. We were determined to free him.

Students came from all over the US east coast to turn the city upside down. On my campus, we had worked day and night to explain the attack on the Black Panther Party – and to mobilise busloads to go New Haven.

Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party.

There was a heavy, heavy air over the whole event – we did not know it yet, but US President Richard Nixon was about to unleash an invasion of Cambodia, and he was determined NOT to allow student radicals and Black militants to obstruct his plans. Everywhere in the country there was a stiffening of the power structure. We didn’t know it then, but Nixon and his minions were on the phone demanding that governors, mayors, police chiefs and college administrators prepare to suppress resistance.

What we did know was that all kinds of ominous moves were being made. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, airlifted 4000 army paratroops and marines from east coast bases to the New Haven area. And, the press was announcing that a military train had been looted and that thousands of military rifles were missing. It was a lie, it was disinformation – but it was clearly intended to create mass hysteria, and it was clearly designed to justify Nixon’s own preparations for violence.

Within the city, the police focused heavily on tracking and demoralising the Black Panther Party. A book, written by the police chief, later explained how he had developed a set of teams to deploy parallel to the Black Panther’s own teams. Whenever the BPP went out into the Black community, to agitate for Bobby Seale and to mobilise for the May Day march, a plainclothes police team would be there, disguised as ordinary passersby. And they were trained to heckle and denounce the Panthers – to give them the (false) impression that they were isolated, and that the mood among Black people had turned sharply against them. It was the kind of Cointelpro [counter-intelligence program] tactics that were being deployed generally at those times – to divide and confuse the growing revolutionary forces.

The Panthers had inspired us to be revolutionaries. The attack on their leadership had brought us into the streets. We looked to them for leadership. And yet, things were about to become more complicated than I expected.

The Black Panthers generally were skittish about gathering Black people in large militant crowds. They tended to believe that they would be exposing the community to mass murder. And while they often supported the mobilisation of supporters (“mother country radicals”), there was a reluctance among Panthers to bring out the Black community into the streets – even in their own defence.

And, to the surprise of many of us, the Black Panther Party pulled out of the plans to bring out New Haven’s Black community for May Day for Bobby at the last moment. Part of this was their reaction to the unmistakable signs that this system (at a high level) was preparing bloody acts. Part of it was, I believe, confusion that police disinformation caused among their own members. And part of it was their own ambivalence: the Panthers (as a movement) did not have clear grasp of the need to mobilise and rely on the people. The Panthers were very much in the crosshairs — literally. And sections of them, especially on the east coast were already thinking about retreating to a strategy of “moving in twos and threes”.

Black Panthers in New Haven.

We didn’t know about the Panther decision until very late in the game. And it did not (could not) deter tens of thousands already making their way to New Haven.

Fighting spirit

My plans had been to hook up with some of my close high school friends who were coming with a radical contingent from Antioch College. And I remember vividly how intense it was to see them come marching through the milling crowds on the Yale college campus: they marched though the crowed in disciplined ranks, wearing motorcycle helmets, and carrying red flags on heavy wooden clubs. They cleared a space on the green lawns and started practicing karate – moving in lines, moving in groups. We were preparing for street fighting.

My close friend David Sullivan took me aside to show me his special pack. He was always eager for a fight, and he loved gear. He pulled out a special combat first-aid kit, and pointing out that he had bought a dozen gunshot dressings – heavy cotton padding and gauze.

I remember thinking: We all understand the stakes now… the pigs may come at us this time with guns, and we have come prepared to fight, and even to die. David planned to stuff cotton into massive wounds if need be, as we carried off our injured and kept fighting.

It had come to this. We were determined to free Bobby Seale. We were determined to confront and defy anything Nixon threw against us.

Liberal foes become reluctant allies

In the complex swirl of events, there were all kinds of forces gravitating toward the radicals. On a campus like Yale, the administration of Kingman Brewster were basically the kind of liberals who we had viewed as enemies on campus (and who had been persecuting our SDS -- Students for a Democratic Society -- takeovers). But things were shifting massively. Brewster was confronted by plans for a student strike at Yale. At a campus rally, a Panther leader had declared: “The Panther and the Bulldog gonna move together!” The faculty had endorsed that rally – and had called for suspending classes. No student was going to be penalised for abandoning schoolwork.