May Day at Yale, 1970: Recollections: The Trial of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers

By Henry "Sam" Chauncey, John T. Hill, Thomas Strong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This book comes from first hand experiences, both in word and in pictures. It offers a partial record of a community and an institution coming together to accommodate an event while deflecting its potential violence. The history of the New Haven Green bridges over four centuries. It has served as a place for worship, for grazing cattle, staging revolutions, witness to hangings, and various campaigns.

On the day before and on May Day of 1970, Yale University and New Haven prepared to host an agitated congregation of young civil rights activists with a diverse list of causes, but focused mainly on freeing Bobby Seale, the Black Panther leader. This book gives a glimpse of that diversity; diverse in cause, attitude, and dress. Marked changes in mood evolved over the approximate 32 hours. Yale and New Haven could be proud of avoiding real violence and blood shed.

Like an archeological record, it exhibits not only the New Haven Green on that one day, but marks a broader shift in direction for a county at large. For those who were there, it seems painfully near. For later generations, it is likely a remote abstraction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prospecta Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632260222

Henry "Sam" Chauncey

Henry Chauncey, Jr., known as “Sam”, was born in 1935. He graduated from Yale College in 1957. He worked in various administrative capacities at Yale from 1957 to 1982. He then was founding CEO of Science Park Development Corporation in New Haven; subsequently President and CEO of Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford, Connecticut and finally Lecturer and Head of the Health Management Program in the Yale School of Public Health. He is retired and resides in New Haven.

Book preview