The Best Citizens of New Haven

BLACK POLITICS/WHITE POWER, CIVIL RIGHTS, BLACK POWER, AND THE BLACK PANTHERS IN NEW HAVEN By Yohuru Williams. Brandywine Press, 2000.

THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER VISITED NEW HAVEN tend to assume that as a college town, well stocked with coffeehouses, bookstores, and upscale boutiques, it might offer a refuge from the third world conditions which are a conspicuous feature of most large cities in Connecticut. Connecticut, after all, is the state notorious for having the richest county, Fairfield and within it, the city with the lowest per capita income, Bridgeport. Bastions of white suburban privilege surround pockets of black urban desperation which might reasonably be described without too much exaggeration as bantustans.

Still, the illusion persists that a humane, liberal sprit flourishes in New Haven, albeit one combined with an invigorating post-industrial grit. That New Haven is not North Hampton, Ann Arbor or La Jolla is a fact that needs to be impressed on visitors to the city. Yale students, in particular, do not encounter "the other New Haven" in Yale's glossy publicity materials, or in their carefully monitored visits to the campus. For this reason, they must be hastily educated upon their arrival here that much of the city harbors considerable ill-will towards the University and, by extension, towards them, its charges.

Among the many startling revelations of a new book by Yohuru Williams, a professor of Political Science at Delaware State University, is that misconceptions pitting the public face of the university town against its day-to-day reality are nothing new. Indeed they go back nearly two centuries. For example, in 1831, Williams writes:

A white Congregationalist minister and pastor of a black church, Simeon Jocelyn, proposed the creation of a college for blacks in New Haven. Describing the citizens as "friendly, pious, generous, and humane," Jocelyn and his supporters assumed that cosmopolitan New Haven, home to Yale College, would embrace the humanitarian gesture. Instead, his proposition was greeted with public outrage. . . The controversy led to numerous assaults on white abolitionists, black people and their property. Tensions came to a head in September of 1831 after "the best citizens in New Haven, led by the mayor and a number of Yale professors staged a riot before the homes of the supporters of the college."

Since 1831, the tactics of the "best citizens of New Haven" would become more sophisticated but the essential goal remained: to politically neutralize an increasingly non-white working class providing a low-wage labor force for New Haven's affluent households, the university and what are now only a few remaining industries.

Most of Williams' book is concerned with the divide and conquer strategies implemented by successive Democratic administrations following the Second World War. An influx of immigration from the South drawn by the defense industries had by the fifties begun to significantly alter the racial composition of the city from predominantly ethnic white to majority non-white. The calls for racial and economic justice were now backed by numbers which had the potential, if mobilized, to achieve real as opposed to the largely cosmetic gains which the African-American community had resigned itself to for most of its history.

Richard Lee, Mayor of New Haven from 1954 through 1969 would emerge as the most effective practitioner of policies designed to insure that these calls would be muted when they could not be ignored altogether. Williams shows in detail how the Great Society icon Lee selectively distributed public and private grants to grassroots organizations beholden to him. Control of these purse-strings combined subtly but no less powerfully with Lee's proffering to black leadership access to the local business elites and connections to national political figures. The two-pronged strategy would consolidate Lee's control of the black community to the extent that no organized opposition to his policies would emerge until the end of his tenure, well after the peak of the civil rights movement.

THE LEADERSHIP OF THE NAACP WOULD PROVE TO BE particularly vulnerable to Lee's blandishments. The NAACP branch president, John Barber, for example, can only be described as the mayor's "vassal" since this is precisely the word Barber uses to describe himself. His letters to Lee, which Williams, in a scholarly tour de force, has discovered housed in Yale's Beinecke library make for embarrassing readings in their abject expressions of fealty of to the Mayor. Due to Barber's deliberate sabotage, the NAACP would repeatedly fail to act in favor of school desegregation and would boycott protests at the mayor's office demanding community representation on the school board and improved housing. These failures would result in the NAACP's near total loss of influence in the African American community, eclipsed first by the more radical CORE, and eventually by a series of grassroots community movements. The most notable of these, the Hill Parents Association, would be initially formed to address dilapidated conditions in one community school, but would branch out to become a powerful force for community organizing around a range of issues including police brutality, rent gouging and inadequate welfare payments.

By the time of the emergence of the HPA, the glove of co-optation would be removed to reveal the fist of repression. Lee and his police force would be innovators in the use of illegal electronic surveillance for which the city would later be forced to pay stiff civil penalties. HPA parents doing nothing more radical than attempting to secure for their children safe buildings and new textbooks would find their phones tapped and infiltrators placed within their midst. The New Haven police force would also work in close contact with the FBI, transmitting to Washington files on the lead activists in the organization. Based on this information, the FBI would wage a smear campaign against the association and would attempt to prosecute the leadership of the HPA on trumped- up charges.

When the New Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed in 1970, relatively late in the Panther's short life-span, it would be in position to take advantage of and build on the activist foundations which the HPA and other organizations in New Haven had laid down. However, it would be the BPP's holistic approach of a political and educational message reinforced and reinforcing neighborhood community service which would gain the trust and admiration of the community. The BPP's serve the people initiatives in New Haven included the children's breakfast program, based on a highly successful national BPP program, political education programs, and the People's Free Health Care Clinic. The latter would function effectively for many years after its founding in 1971. Less tangible, but equally important was the confidence, sense of purpose and critical political awareness the Panthers inculcated among its followers and to the community at large. Williams provides many examples of a community mobilized and ready to take action in its defense of its own interests against what the BPP accurately characterized as a "racist power structure." One of the more inspiring involves a BPP-led delegation of welfare mothers to Hartford to confront the state welfare commissioner with a series of clearly articulated grievances backed up by impressive statistical documentation. Not surprisingly, according to a Panther report cited by Williams, "rather than having to face the mothers, their children, and have to deal with their needs (the commissioner) had his flunkies report that he had received a hay fever attack."

It is unfortunate that the BPP in New Haven is now less well known for its highly effective community service, educational and local political programs than for the dramatic circumstances of its demise. While the causes of the collapse will probably never be fully understood, contributing factors include a volatile mixture of personal jealousy, internal disorganization many of which were provoked or exacerbated by the FBI's counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) personally presided over by J. Edgar Hoover. After castigating the New Haven office for failing to submit "concrete recommendations," Hoover requested bi-weekly reports detailing agents efforts to "disrupt the BPP" specifically requesting agents to "make allegations" in the form of "anonymous mailings" accusing the BPP leadership of acts of "violence, lack of morals, and drug addiction."

The intensive campaign of dirty tricks, sabotage, and violence directed against the BPP would culminate in the cause celebre of the Alex Rackley murder trial of 1971 in which four Panthers, including BPP president Bobby Seale, would be charged with the murder of a presumed police informant. By this point, the fact, if not the extent, of police infiltration and provocations against the BPP would become publicly known and deplored in most quarters. Indeed, even Yale President Kingman Brewster would express doubt as to whether the leadership of the party could receive a fair trial and would endorse the now legendary Mayday protests by opening the doors of Yale to the demonstrators. Williams, in the light of new evidence provided by his research, demonstrates that the extent of the repression goes beyond not only what liberals at the times were willing to grant but even beyond the most paranoid fantasies of contemporary observers.

Taking his cue from an off-hand remark of the Dallas police department in 1992 to the effect that "there were eight people who belonged to the Black Panther Party and two of those worked for us and told us what was happening every day," Williams' reconstruction of the events of the Rackley murder makes clear who was pulling the strings. Rackley was tortured and murdered by two Panthers, Warren Kimbro and Lonnie MacLucas, acting on the immediate orders of George Sams, described by Williams as "a clinically diagnosed moron with a reputation for violence." According to Williams, both Kimbro, now a respected community leader in New Haven, and Sams were probably police informants, and both would consequently receive extremely light sentences for their crimes. After serving four years during which he would graduate from Eastern Connecticut State University, Kimbro would receive immediate admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. MacLucas, on the other hand would, according to Williams, "find unforgiving the system that had embraced Kimbro" and became "the fall guy" for an operation in which he was the only participant not under the control of the authorities. Despite his having neither given nor implemented the order to kill Rackley, MacLucas would serve a significantly longer prison sentence than the others and would receive little help on his release. Finally, Williams reveals that the undoubtedly grisly details of the operation, which took place in the basement of Kimbro's house, would be monitored electronically by the New Haven Police who listened in and took no action while Rackley was tortured.

THE ULTIMATE LESSONS OF WILLIAMS' HISTORY for a new generation of activists now having its own encounter with state sponsored repression are various and urgent, if somewhat problematic. Among these is the frequently unrecognized fact that the facade of a seemingly innocuous practice of democracy in the United States underwritten by the constitutional protections outlined in the Bill of Rights will be quickly dropped should a real challenge to objective authority emerge. What will replace state protections are forms of state sanctioned violence bearing a striking resemblance to those practiced in third world dictatorships. It should be also recognized that rather than constituting a mere comical annoyance as they are commonly portrayed, if Williams' version of events is correct, police and FBI infiltration were probably as decisive in the demise in the BPP. Furthermore, Williams' collection of data, while narrowly focused on the BPP in New Haven, is so compelling that it forces us to consider whether other instances of COINTELPRO infiltration were (and possibly at this moment are) equally decisive.

Another lesson derives from the sequence of betrayals of the rank and file by organizational leadership. While John Barber emerges as the most flamboyantly craven in his willingness to sell out, he is only the first in a series of Black leaders in New Haven to have made the interests of their community a hostage to their personal ambitions and failings. Williams' text offers repeated instances of leadership which would fail to take to heart the probably cynically intended, but indisputably correct advice of Lee aide Richard Dowdy. Black leadership, Dowdy would remark in 1962, "cannot afford the luxury of involving their personal lives in ways that do damage to the causes they claim to advance." CORE President's Blyden Jackson's shooting by his wife in a domestic dispute and his filing of a false police report of the incident would, Williams shows, do serious damage to the CORE organization. HPA president Fred Harris' politically motivated prosecution for narcotics possession which would serve as a wedge for police infiltration resulted from his being caught with the goods, as would, slightly later, the prosecution of Huey Newton for cocaine possession. Finally, Eldridge Cleaver's later cavortings with Watergate felon Charles Colson and his advocacy of the codpiece as a fashion statement would conclude the tragedy of Panther leadership with an element of farce.

Williams' text can in no way be read as an indictment of all leadership from this period. Bobby Seale, in particular, emerges as disciplined, responsible, serious, and cagey, exactly the qualities which were required from those in an executive positions of any organization issuing a serious challenge to the ruling bipartisan plutocracy, then and now. However the real inspiration of Williams's remarkable book comes from the legions of sometimes named, but usually anonymous individuals who for a brief time were able to organize a real challenge to the distinctly illiberal agenda of the "best citizens of New Haven."

Contents of No. 31

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