After the March 7 vote of the Yale Corporation to leave Yale’s admissions quotas in place, Women and Men for a Better Yale disbanded.1 Yale activist groups in those years were often short-lived, forming around one event or another—such as the March on Washington or a political campaign—and then dissolving right afterward. New groups emerged and then folded within a matter of weeks. The Graduate Women’s Alliance and the Yale Law Women, however, had not succumbed to this pattern and were both meeting regularly to discuss the discrimination they saw against women at Yale and what they might do to stop it. Halfway through the second semester, no similar group yet existed for undergraduate women, but one week after the Corporation vote, Kit McClure and Betty Spahn decided to change that. “Meeting for Yale Women,” read their fliers.2 “Vanderbilt Lounge. Monday evening. 7:30.” Betty got out her staple gun, and by the end of the day, the notices were posted all over campus.
It was unusual at Yale for a freshman and a sophomore woman to be friends, particularly when, like Kit and Betty, they were in different residential colleges and had not gone to the same high school or even grown up in the same part of the country. But Betty and Kit had one thing in common: their dismay at how women were treated at Yale. Before the alumni lunch protest, Kit had assumed that Kingman Brewster would be an ally of Yale’s women students, but now she knew otherwise. If change was going to happen, Kit decided, undergraduate women had to organize and push for it themselves. Some of the New Haven feminists whom Kit had met at the Free Women Conference urged her to start a women’s group for Yale undergraduates. “We’ll walk you through it,” they promised, but they couldn’t do it for her.3
Betty had not gone to the Free Women Conference, and she was not involved with New Haven Women’s Liberation like Kit was. But Betty was tired of going unheard at the men’s political meetings she went to and she missed being with other women. It was exhausting being with just men all the time. She and Kit met through the left-wing circles at Yale that both frequented, and the two began talking about the problems they saw. Betty liked Kit’s style. Kit was “just tough as nails,” said Betty, “and outspoken,” and Betty loved this idea of starting a women’s group.4 And so she pulled out her staple gun. Neither Betty nor Kit was certain that anyone else would show up to their meeting, but “What did they have to lose?” asked Betty.5 If no one else came, Betty and Kit would be no worse off than they already were.
On Monday night at 7:30 p.m., Betty and Kit met in the lounge in Vanderbilt Hall. Other women soon joined them: a freshman who had been missing the company of other girls, another who had collected signatures for the petition on sex-blind admissions, and Judy Berkan, the junior who was as fed up as Betty with the way she was treated in Yale’s white radical groups. Judy had attended the Free Women Conference in February. It gave her “this incredible lift,” Judy said. “It was the first time since I had been at Yale that I had really spoken to girls.”6 Maybe this group of women in Vanderbilt Hall could provide the same feeling.
By the time the meeting began, nearly twenty students had gathered in the Vanderbilt lounge. They sat together on the sofas and armchairs; some took a seat on the carpet. Almost none of them had met before. Betty and Kit began by having each girl introduce herself and say why she had come to the meeting. Freshman Marie Rudden was there because she was tired of dealing on her own with the challenge of being a Yale woman. “There was such a feeling of being curiosities, of feeling like you weren’t really part of the college,” she explained. “It seemed like it would be really helpful to be able to talk about that.”7 Others voiced similar reasons.
The girls in the Vanderbilt lounge included freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. They came from a range of Yale colleges: Berkeley, Calhoun, Morse, Pierson, Silliman, and Trumbull. Having twenty women in a room together, crossing so many of the divisions that had separated them so far, was remarkable, yet the twenty in the room that night were just a tiny slice of Yale’s 575 women students. From the freshman class, Kit McClure was present but not Lawrie Mifflin; of the sophomores, Betty Spahn came but not Connie Royster or Shirley Daniels.
No black women had come to the meeting.8 None would for another three years. All of the students in the Vanderbilt lounge were white save for Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt, whose mother was Chinese and father was white. The group’s whiteness was predictable, at least at 1970s Yale. Statistically, a gathering this size would have included 1.5 black women if it had reflected Yale’s racial makeup, but even so, “I’m not sure we had anything to offer black women,” said Betty.9 Shirley Daniels and her friend Vera Wells were committed to pressing the concerns of women too, but this activism took place on their own terms, not as part of a group that white women had founded.
After the introductions were over, the students began talking about what to do next. Few of them knew much about the women’s liberation movement. Kit may have joined a women’s group when she was in high school, but the word feminism was new to Betty, as it was to almost all of the others. There was one freshman at the meeting, though, a dark-haired girl from Manhattan, who was in touch with a radical feminist group in New York, the Redstockings. She had learned from them a process that she thought the Yale women should try. It was called “consciousness-raising.”10
New Haven Women’s Liberation had been holding consciousness-raising sessions for a few months by then, and the women’s group that Kit attended in high school had used consciousness-raising too. Women sat together in groups of a dozen or so and shared stories of experiences like being in high school, and “the importance of having boobs, and what it was like to be smart, and . . . whether you could major in math or science.”11 From their individual stories, patterns emerged as women realized that what they had thought was a personal problem was in fact something that other women had experienced too. The title of UC Berkeley’s feminist newsletter summed it up: It Ain’t Me, Babe.12 Being in a consciousness-raising group changed how women saw the world. One day, a woman in the New Haven group looked at the front page of the newspaper and realized that it did not contain a single woman’s name. “I had been reading the newspaper all my life,” she said, “and I had never noticed that.”13
The women students in the Vanderbilt lounge agreed to try consciousness-raising and to meet the following week. “We need a name,” said one student.14 Another suggested “The Sisterhood.” Everyone in the room was enthusiastic. And so it was decided. The Yale Sisterhood had begun.
* * *
Ever since January, Yale’s limit on the number of women undergraduates had been under fire—from the Yale Daily News, from Wasserman’s Student Advisory Council, from the Free Women Conference, from Women and Men for a Better Yale, and from the 1,900 Yale students who had signed the petition calling for an end to Yale’s gender quotas. Yet throughout this rising debate, one significant group had remained silent: the faculty. Didn’t Yale’s admissions quotas concern them too? Apparently not, at least if the views expressed in a 1962 faculty report still held true. If Yale admitted women students, the report had declared, “there should be no reduction in the number of men,” a position that preceded Kingman Brewster’s first public statement on this topic by six years.15
Whether the faculty had changed its stance since then, no one knew, since the dean had never placed the question on the faculty meeting agenda again, and no Yale professor had spoken out against the practice individually. On March 26, that status quo changed when Assistant Professor Keith Thomson sent a letter to Brewster that put at least one faculty member on record as opposing Yale’s policy.
Thomson was one of the ten faculty members on Yale’s Admissions Committee, the group that decided which students got into Yale and which did not.16 In 1969, the committee had stayed focused on male applicants while Elga Wasserman and Sam Chauncey had handled the admission of women, but in 1970, women applicants for the class of 1974 were brought into the regular admissions process, with the same two-reader system and final rankings as men: one for the strongest applicants, two for those who were reasonably strong, three for applicants who were shakier, and four for the weakest group. The admissions office staff did this initial ranking, while the final decisions were made by the full Admissions Committee: fifteen staff members, ten faculty members, four deans, and Elga Wasserman. Only five of the committee’s thirty members were women: Wasserman, Assistant Dean Elisabeth Thomas, instructor Paula Johnson, and two junior members of the admissions office staff, whose senior members were all men.
The admissions process began in the fall, with recruitment and interviews and the processing of applications, but March was the month when decisions were made. The work of the Admissions Committee kicked off with a February 27 meeting with Brewster, who liked to instruct the committee members in person at a special gathering in Woodbridge Hall. They had each already received a copy of his 1967 “hunchy judgment” letter to the admissions office staff, and Brewster reiterated the central point he had made in the letter: the Admissions Committee’s job was to admit the candidates who seemed most likely to be leaders.17
On Tuesday, March 2, the work began in earnest. The committee convened that morning in the second-floor conference room of the admissions office on Prospect Street, a room they would soon grow weary of. The schedule was grueling: 9:15 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Monday through Friday, with two-hour breaks for lunch and dinner, and then another seven hours on Saturday and three more on Sunday afternoons. Admissions Dean Inky Clark hoped to have the work completed by early April. If a faculty member had a class or an administrator had a meeting, they just missed that particular session. Decisions were made by a majority vote of those present.
By March 26, the committee had been at this schedule for more than three grueling weeks: Admit. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Admit. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. For the women applicants, the “rejects” came twice as frequently, an outcome forced by the gender quota. After three weeks of witnessing the impact of Yale’s policy on women’s chances of admission, Assistant Professor Keith Thomson sent a letter to Brewster.
“Dear President Brewster,” he began, “I am not naturally a petition signer or a writer of hectoring letters, but this is a matter that has affected me considerably in the last few days.”18 The problem, Thomson explained, was that Yale’s admissions policy was causing the committee to reject 400 women candidates “who have every qualification for acceptance” and to wait-list another 250 with “qualifications that many of our male candidates would envy.” Thomson proposed a modest solution: free up one hundred slots in the class of 1974 that were now reserved for men and make them available to women. Otherwise, the Admissions Committee would be forced to “reject exceptionally well-qualified women in large numbers and at the same time accept some 10 percent of men who are . . . relatively less impressive.”
Although Thomson was anguished at the task he’d been given, Yale was not alone in its bias against women applicants.19 A 1970 American Council on Education study found that male high school students in the top fifth of their class had a 92 percent chance of being accepted by a selective U.S. college, while the odds dropped to 62 percent for the top-ranked high school girls. A similar gap occurred at every level. Even among the weakest male candidates, those in the bottom three-fifths of their class, 36 percent of those who applied to selective colleges were accepted, compared with 4 percent of the women. With many of these colleges, one had to wade through statistics to see the pattern of discrimination. Yale put its policy right out there: the class of 1974 would have 230 women and 1,025 men, with the twenty-five-student bonus ensuring the eventual graduation of 1,000 male leaders.20
The day after Thomson sent his letter to Brewster, English instructor Paula Johnson, another Admissions Committee member, wrote Brewster too. She began by emphasizing her “gratitude and commitment to Yale,” as if dissent called that into question, and then reiterated Thomson’s point about the injustices caused by the limit on the numbers of women.21 Yale’s policy, she wrote, “results in a crueler double standard than the simple exclusion of women ever did.” Like Keith Thomson’s letter the previous day, Paula Johnson’s was an act of courage. Neither Johnson nor Thomson was protected by tenure, and when it came time for Yale to decide whether they would remain on the faculty, such a public challenge might not be overlooked.
A week later, Brewster received a third letter on the problem, this one from Elga Wasserman. “You have received two very thoughtful letters from Keith Thomsen and Paula Johnson which pinpoint the serious problems encountered in the selection of the women,” she wrote.22 And then, banging home the point, she added, “The problem would obviously be less if we could increase the number of women admitted.” Wasserman still did not challenge Brewster publicly on this issue. She confined her concerns to her letter. But Brewster certainly now knew how she felt.
* * *
At the start of April, the Yale Daily News published a front-page story on the academic outcomes of the first semester of coeducation.23 Despite all the challenges the women students had faced, they had outperformed their male classmates.
“Of course we’re smarter,” one sophomore teased her boyfriend when the article came out.24 “Why do you think we’re here?” Women sophomores and juniors received Honors, Yale’s highest grade, in 31 percent of their classes, compared with 23 percent of the men.25 Freshmen women got 22 percent Honors, on par with freshmen men, but outflanked men 49 percent to 41 percent in High Pass, the second-highest mark. If academics had been the bar that Yale women needed to leap, they did so with room to spare. But at Yale, the emphasis on “character” over intellect did not end at admissions, and doing well academically was not an accomplishment most students wanted their classmates to know about. As author Mary McCarthy observed, the “wrong sort of seriousness in study” was considered “barbaric” at Yale.26 Student leaders were known by their achievements outside the classroom, not within it.
So where did that leave the Yale women? Yale may not have valued their academic success, but had they faltered, it would have been noted. And for many Yale women, their coursework was not just a test to prove that women deserved to be students at Yale but a source of personal joy.
“We were all very much involved in our study. Just cared about it, worked on it,” said a woman junior from Maine.27 “I loved studying,” said freshman Patty Mintz of Massachusetts. “I’d go up to the stacks, or I’d find a little desk and a comfy chair and just read.”28 Patty’s classmate, Los Angeles premed student Carol Storey, found the same spark in the lab. “Science . . . was an area of intense curiosity and interest for me.”29
But while academics mattered to Yale women, they did not matter all that much to Yale. As economics professor Ed Lindblom explained, “The official tradition here at Yale is that we are not producing intellectuals, we are producing leaders.”30 The worth of Yale women was thus measured not by the academics at which they excelled but by the extracurricular activities from which they were largely excluded. President George W. Bush, Yale class of 1968 and a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brother, captured this indifference to academic achievement in his remarks to graduates at a Yale commencement many years later: “To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students I say, you too can be president of the United States.”31
Kit McClure had no presidential ambitions, which was a good thing since her grades at Yale were much better than George W. Bush’s. She was earning Honors in American Social History, receiving High Passes in Revolutionary Thought and Communism, and acing American Jazz. But by the second semester, what occupied the center of Kit’s days even more than her coursework was “music, music, music.”32 Kit was teaching herself the saxophone and earning money as the trombone player in a professional brass quintet. And the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band was thriving. “We had so much fun,” said freshman Kate Field, who played guitar in the band that spring.33 Kate lived in the same Vanderbilt entryway that Kit did, and the two had gotten to know each other through the Sisterhood. Kate had never told Kit about the incident with the poetry professor who had tried to seduce her. For that matter, she hardly told anyone. But Kate went to the Sisterhood meetings, and now she was in the Women’s Liberation Rock Band.34
There were six women in the band that spring: the three women who had first come up to Kit at the Free Women Conference in February and three freshmen from Yale: Kit McClure, Kate Field, and Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt. The band members’ skills as musicians varied widely. A few of them “barely knew how to play their instruments,” while Kit and French horn–player Virginia Blaisdell were both accomplished musicians.35 Anna also had formal musical training, but she played the cello, not your typical rock band instrument. “Well, close enough,” said Kit when Anna showed her the cello. “I can teach you to play the bass.”36
The band had a rehearsal space in a loft on Chapel Street, a few blocks down past Wooster Square, and Blaisdell would ferry their instruments back and forth in her bright-yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Kit and the other women spent hours in that loft, practicing covers and writing feminist lyrics to Rolling Stones songs. Sometimes other women musicians would be in town, and they would all get together for jam sessions. The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band was not nearly good enough yet to perform in public, but with enough practice, Kit knew they would get there. On Monday evenings, however, practice was off. The Yale Sisterhood met then, and all three of the band’s freshmen were members.
By April, about a dozen women students were regularly attending the Sisterhood meetings in the Vanderbilt lounge. Consciousness-raising formed the heart of the evening. The students shared stories about their experiences at Yale. They talked about what happened sometimes when they spoke up in class and had their comments ignored by their professors and male classmates. Ten minutes later, the women would watch as a different student, a man, made the exact point and the class reacted with a gush of admiration, as if Benjamin Franklin had wandered in and offered an insight. It had happened to Betty Spahn more than once. “I thought I just wasn’t articulate enough, and Judy Berkan, who’s very articulate, thought she wasn’t articulate enough, and Dahlia Rudavsky thought she wasn’t articulate enough,” said Betty. “It turned out it wasn’t us, was it? It was them.”37
The incessant attention the women received from the men came up also. It never felt “normal to be a woman student” at Yale, said freshman Marie Rudden.38 “It was hard to have it just like normal.” Over time, some of the women shared stories about dates with Yale men who had forced them into sex that they hadn’t agreed to or wanted. Many struggled afterward with guilt and shame, as if somehow they were at fault. The stories shocked Betty Spahn. “I had no idea this was going on. None. No idea. And the other women, to whom it happened, had no idea it was so widespread.”39
At the Yale Sex Counseling Service, Lorna Sarrel had begun to hear stories as well. “Sexual assault and rape were not front and center of our awareness or awareness on the campus,” she said. “It really was still hush-hush, like pretending it never happens.”40 Sometimes in her discussions with students, however, Sarrel would hear, “Oh, I didn’t have a very good experience the first time.” As they spoke further, “it would turn out that it was a sexual assault. The women did not want to recognize that themselves . . . In some instances, the word rape may have applied, and to see yourself as victimized in that way is not easy. So there was a lot of denial. And of course at the professional level there was also a kind of denial.”
Women students who found a safe place like the Sisterhood or the Sarrels’ office to talk about what happened to them were more fortunate than those who did not, but nothing stopped the male students who assaulted Yale women from continuing. There was not yet even the language to name the experience. The term date rape would not be invented for seventeen years.41
At their meetings, the Sisterhood members paid close attention not just to what each girl said but to the way in which the group held conversations. “Things like everyone getting a turn to speak, things like no one interrupting anyone else, things like no one attacking anyone else”—the Sisterhood paid attention to that, explained one of its members.42 Each woman picked up a handful of poker chips at the start of the meeting, and every time she spoke, she tossed in a chip. When she ran out, she couldn’t talk any more at that session. That way, the Sisterhood made sure that everyone’s voice would be heard.
Like much of what the Sisterhood did, the choice about how conversations were held did not fit the mold of what some students thought of as protest. There were no angry speakers shaking their fists in the Vanderbilt lounge, no marchers carrying banners. Yet the Sisterhood challenged Yale’s culture too, just as surely as more standard strategies. Yale was a place where male students spent hours in “bull sessions” that gave center stage to those with quickness and wit, yet the Sisterhood rejected that model of competitive talking.43 Women students at Yale were expected to be constantly on call as “mother, lover, sister, confidante” to men, yet at the Sisterhood meetings, no men were present.44 At Yale, women did not go out on the weekends unless they had a date, but women in the Sisterhood did. “They would get up the nerve to go to the theater together. In other words, they didn’t wait for a date. They would go in groups with women,” explained one shocked freshman woman.45
The Sisterhood was not for everyone. Some students “kind of stumbled in thinking that we were going to sit around and discuss fashion and their boyfriends,” said Betty.46 Those women rarely returned. But for others, the Monday night Sisterhood meetings became the anchor that made the rest of the week possible. “I just really liked being with the other women,” said Betty. The Sisterhood “was my safe haven. It was my place to go. And I think a lot of us felt that way.” Over that first spring, the Sisterhood did not speak out publicly about any of the issues then roiling Yale. The group really was just getting started. Yet even without the Sisterhood’s voice, the volume of the conversation about the status of women at Yale grew louder. Some days, it seemed as if that was the only thing anyone was talking about.
On April 6, stacks of Yale Break, Yale’s new feminist newspaper, appeared in Yale dining halls, offices, and libraries. There were three thousand free copies for the taking. The publication was written by women students, secretaries, and faculty wives. “Divided We Fall,” read its headline.47 That same day, the Yale Daily News ran Yale’s admissions discrimination as its lead story, and a fourth Admissions Committee member voiced his dismay. If Yale had selected the class of 1974 without regard to gender, Associate Professor John Ostrom told the paper, three hundred acceptance letters that were just mailed to men would have been sent instead to women.48
The Yale Alumni Magazine jumped into the fray and devoted its entire April issue to coeducation. For the first time, the voices of women students filled the magazine’s pages. “We desperately need more girls,” said freshman Sarah Pillsbury, the daughter of a prominent alumnus.49 A second alumnus’s daughter made the same point. Her father was a Connecticut state senator.
The New York Times picked up the story and got a quote from Admissions Dean Inky Clark. The Admissions Committee “was frustrated over turning away many highly qualified women,” Clark said. “Only one of every 14 women applicants . . . could be accepted, compared with one out of 7.5 men.”50 The Times article went beyond Yale admissions and chronicled women’s activism as well. “A general campaign for women’s rights has been mounted,” the paper reported.51 The law school women’s sit-in at Mory’s, the alumni lunch protest, the Free Women Conference, and the student petition—it was all in the New York Times article. Yale dining halls buzzed with talk of coeducation and the actions by women at Yale.
“At long last,” observed one male junior, “women were beginning to be viewed as a factor to be reckoned with.”52 The momentum that had been building since January seemed on the verge of bringing change for Yale women. But then a high-profile trial being held two blocks from Yale’s campus and the massive protest that accompanied it diverted Yale’s attention.53 It could not have been otherwise. Both matters were urgent. But once again, the needs of Yale women were forgotten.
* * *
The trial that began in New Haven that spring centered on the 1969 murder of a member of the Black Panther Party named Alex Rackley. The case had drawn national attention because of the prominence of the defendants: nine Black Panther Party members, five men and four women, including national chairman Bobby Seale and New Haven Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins. Many on the left suspected that Seale and Huggins were being framed as a part of the larger government campaign to destroy the Black Panthers, and Panther supporters had planned a protest rally on the New Haven Green, right across College Street from Yale’s campus, for the weekend of May 1.54 But up until April 14, Yale had not paid much attention to either the upcoming protest rally or the trial itself.55
That morning, the presiding judge in the case shocked onlookers when he sentenced two Black Panthers who were merely talking in the courtroom visitors’ section to six months in jail for contempt of court. News of the incident spread quickly through campus, where the severity of the judge’s penalty for such a minor infraction raised fears that a larger miscarriage of justice might occur, with Seale, Huggins, and the other Panthers being convicted for a murder they did not commit. That worry in turn tapped into the deep well of concern that most Yale students felt about racial injustice and that had led many to volunteer in the black communities that surrounded Yale.
Yale students, both women and men, served as tutors in New Haven public schools. They founded a day care center for the children of Yale’s predominantly black dining hall workers. They worked in a local nonprofit that was creating low-income housing. They woke up early to work in a free breakfast program for schoolchildren that was run by the Black Panthers, who had a network of community help programs in New Haven. “There was a particular spirit in the air,” said Yale freshman Darial Sneed. “It seemed like the whole youth mentality was that we’re going to do better than our parents, we’re going to make this a better world.”56
Students at Yale had also watched as their peers on other Ivy League campuses—Columbia, Penn, and Harvard—staged strikes and sit-ins in an effort to halt university expansion that was harming black neighborhoods.57 And so on April 14, when news spread of the judge’s harsh penalty at the Black Panther trial, Yale students were ready to listen. Many believed that Yale had a responsibility to ensure that the Black Panther defendants were treated fairly, and within days, the trial and what students should do about it was all that anyone at Yale was talking about.
A series of mass meetings pulled increasing numbers of students into the conversation: 400 in Harkness Hall on April 15; 1,500 in Battell Chapel on April 19; and 4,500 in Ingalls Ice Rink, the largest venue at Yale, on April 21.58 From these meetings emerged the idea that a student strike could pressure Brewster and the Yale Corporation to demand a fair trial for the Panthers and, equally important, increase Yale’s efforts to end the ravages of racial discrimination in the two black communities that it bordered. By April 22, the strike was on, and three quarters of Yale students stopped attending classes. The May 1 protest in support of the Panthers—“May Day,” as the students called it—would show the nation that Yale students would not stand idly by as injustice took place on their doorstep.59
Yet another concern had surfaced by then, one that would dominate Yale as much as the goal of racial justice. On April 15, a four-hour riot at Harvard had left 241 people hospitalized and caused $100,000 in property damage after a crowd of angry protesters from Boston converged on the university.60 “When Harvard was trashed . . . we understood for the first time that something dangerous could happen [at Yale],” said Associate Dean John Wilkinson.61 Abbie Hoffman, cofounder of the radical-left Yippies and the ringleader of the Harvard riot, stoked fears of violence still further when he proclaimed on a New York radio station that the Harvard riot was just the prelude to even greater mayhem at Yale, which some saw as a symbol of “the establishment” that was behind the Vietnam War and the nation’s racial and class injustice. The May Day protest at Yale, said Hoffman, would be “the biggest riot in history.”62
Up until then, campuses such as Columbia and Harvard had reacted to major protests by calling in armed police to restore order, a response that had failed to prevent violence and, some thought, only made matters worse.63 Yale faced a challenge greater than any campus to date. Thirty thousand protesters,64 a group seven times the size of Yale’s undergraduate student body, were expected to flood into New Haven for the May Day rally, with many intent on doing Yale harm.65 After consulting with experts, Kingman Brewster decided on a new approach to mass protest.66 Yale would welcome the May Day protesters in, providing free meals and a place to spend the night, and the university would thus become an ally rather than a foe of those who sought justice. No one was sure, however, whether Brewster’s unorthodox strategy would prove to be a stroke of genius or the cause of unprecedented damage and injury.
As May Day approached, the threat of violence pervaded the campus. The New York Times ran front-page stories for days about the anticipated destruction. Storeowners on the streets surrounding Yale locked their doors and boarded up windows. Yale and New Haven prepared for May Day “like it was an approaching hurricane,” said a member of Yale’s football team,67 and adding to the anxiety were the hordes of reporters and camera crews, more than six hundred in all, who began flooding into New Haven so as to have front-row seats for the violence predicted.68
In the midst of this rising tension, Kingman Brewster uttered a statement that could have cost him his job. Hundreds of Yale faculty members had convened in Sprague Hall to discuss the Panther trial and student strike, and in the midst of the meeting, Brewster offered his opinion, “I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”69 Two days later, the quote was on the front page of the New York Times, and conservatives nationwide were outraged that Yale’s president would question the fairness of America’s justice system. The following week, U.S. vice president Spiro T. Agnew stated that Yale’s trustees should replace Brewster with “a more mature and responsible” president.70 Students admired Brewster for his statement and saw it as brave,71 but while the Corporation stood by him, Brewster had permanently damaged his image with Yale’s more conservative alumni.72
Meanwhile, parents who learned about the upcoming protest grew increasingly concerned, and some asked their sons and daughters to come home. Many students worried about safety as well, and dining hall conversations turned to a new question: Are you going, or are you staying? Carol Storey decided to leave and start her summer job early. “There was word spreading that it might not be such a good idea to be around over May Day,” said Carol, and with the strike ongoing, there were no longer any classes to attend.73 Another freshman girl left after several heartfelt conversations with her parents. “You could stay, and everything could be fine,” her mother told her, “but if something happens and you want to leave, you might not be able to do so.”74 Yet another left Yale because her roommate planned to let some of the demonstrators come sleep on their floor. “I felt personally threatened by that possibility, people that I didn’t know,” she said.75 As the eve of May Day approached, only two-thirds of Yale students remained.
* * *
Connie Royster did not leave. New Haven was Connie’s city; she was not going to abandon it when violence threatened. Lawrie Mifflin did not leave either. For Lawrie, the May Day protest was a time to stand and be counted among those who opposed the Vietnam War and the injustice of racism. “Our generation was going to be different,” said Lawrie. “We weren’t going to stand for this.”76 Kit McClure wasn’t going anywhere either. She had been spending more and more time with the feminists in New Haven Women’s Liberation, who had been protesting the treatment of the imprisoned Black Panther women as far back as November.77 Shirley Daniels and Betty Spahn were staying for May Day too. Both were focused on the goal of keeping the weekend nonviolent, although each took a different path to that end.
Shirley was worried about the safety of black New Haven high school students. A few of the Boston Black Panthers had come down to New Haven and were riling up the high school kids and encouraging them to walk out of school and cause trouble. If police overreacted, the reasoning went, the headlines that followed might force action to remedy long-standing discrimination. Shirley tutored students at Hillhouse High School, and she was there when the Panthers showed up. She tried to talk the students into returning to class, but not many listened. “The kids didn’t know what they were getting into,” said Shirley, but the BSAY did. The BSAY had been concerned about the New Haven police since well before the “Stop the Cops” rally in November.78 The last thing black teenagers should be doing was provoking police into a confrontation.
The issue erupted when a Boston Black Panther attended one of the BSAY meetings. Shirley knew the man from her involvement with the Simmons College black student group before she came to Yale, and she did not like how he operated. “You can’t be doing this to the kids,” she told him. “Someone’s going to get hurt!”79
Shirley got so angry that other BSAY members escorted her from the room, but they too worried about the younger students, and a few days later, the BSAY came out publicly against any action that would harm New Haven’s black community. If the Panthers sought to stir up black teenagers, the BSAY would not support them.
Betty Spahn was concerned about the possibility of violence too but was more focused on the dangerous mix of thousands of protesters, some bent on violence, and the four hundred young and inexperienced National Guard troops whom Connecticut’s governor had ordered to New Haven for the weekend.80 Betty and a large group of Sisterhood members volunteered to be trained in how to de-escalate conflict and serve as peace marshals over the May Day weekend. During the demonstrations, the marshals would station themselves among the crowds on the New Haven Green. If tensions arose, the marshals would step in quickly to calm things, with small groups of women going in first, since women were seen as less likely than men to inflame any conflict. They should try to soothe the angry protester, Betty and the Sisterhood members were coached: “Kiss him on the cheek if he’ll let you. Be very feminine.”81 It helped Betty to know that other Sisterhood members would be with her on May Day. That made the peace marshal role less scary.
The peace marshal initiative was massive, with hundreds of undergraduates, graduate students, and New Haven residents volunteering to serve. Sisterhood member Kate Field was in charge of coordinating the effort as part of her role on the Student Strike Steering Committee, where she was the only woman member. Kate was just a freshman, but she was dynamic and knew how to organize, said Yale minister Phil Zaeder, who worked out of the same building where the Strike Steering Committee was headquartered. Kate was a “very accomplished, formidable, wonderful person,” said Zaeder, and Betty Spahn was also impressed by Kate’s unyielding insistence on nonviolence.82 Betty attended some of the Strike Steering Committee meetings, and when Boston Black Panthers advocated the use of weapons, Betty and Kate stood up to them. “No guns,” said the Sisterhood women. Betty was proud of how they stuck together on that issue. “The women, we hung together. We hung firm on that,” said Betty.83
Meanwhile, Connie Royster joined a different effort to prevent violence. The Strike Steering Committee had quickly focused on entertainment as part of their strategy—bored protesters got into mischief. The committee lined up bands for the May Day rally, and Connie joined black theater students from Yale Drama School to present an original performance, “Black Celebration,” on the main stage of the university theater.84 The show would donate its proceeds to the John Huggins Free Health Clinic on Dixwell Avenue, which was run by the New Haven Black Panthers. While many Americans connected the Panthers with violence and some party members fit right into that stereotype, the Black Panther Party as a whole had set aside its earlier militancy in 1968 and begun establishing programs to help urban black communities.85 The John Huggins Health Clinic, to which “Black Celebration” would contribute its earnings, was one such effort.86
Connie’s connection to May Day ran deeper than her role in “Black Celebration.” What few Yale students besides Betty Spahn knew was that Black Panther John Huggins, for whom the health clinic was named, had been Connie’s cousin. Like Connie, John Huggins had grown up in New Haven. After graduating from Hillhouse High School, he’d joined the navy and fought in the Vietnam War. When he returned to the U.S., he’d made his way to Los Angeles, where he had led the local Black Panther chapter until January 1969, when he was killed by members of a rival organization.
Connie’s family was devastated by John Huggins’s death. He was the son of Connie’s great uncle, one of the family patriarchs, and John and his wife, Ericka, another Black Panther, had a three-month-old daughter. After the funeral, Ericka moved to New Haven with the baby to be closer to John’s family, and she soon became a leader in the local Black Panther Party. When the police arrested local Black Panthers for Alex Rackley’s murder, Ericka Huggins was sent to the state women’s prison in Niantic and separated from her daughter. The baby’s grandmother, Connie’s aunt, took care of the child, and Connie’s father helped drive the baby and grandmother the hour to Niantic for regular visits so that Ericka Huggins could spend time with her baby.
Connie’s decision to stay in New Haven over May Day did not stem from her family ties to John and Ericka Huggins. She would have been there regardless. Doing her part to prevent violence that weekend “was the right thing to do,” said Connie.87 Yet the May Day events wove through Connie’s life very differently than they did for other Yale students. Her family was close. They still felt the pain from what had happened to John Huggins and his young family. Not many at Yale, however, knew that a fellow student was connected so deeply to May Day.
* * *
As May Day drew near, a sense of impending crisis filled the entire state of Connecticut. Governor John Dempsey deployed the National Guard and then, fearing it could not contain the violence on its own, sent a telegram to U.S. attorney general John Mitchell asking for backup from federal troops. On April 30, two thousand army paratroopers and two thousand marines were flown up from North Carolina and stationed at air bases near New Haven.88 That same night, President Nixon increased tension still further when he announced that the United States had invaded Cambodia, sparking outrage across a nation that had thought the war was nearing its end. The following morning, May 1, chartered buses filled with demonstrators began arriving in New Haven for the protest. The tinder for a conflagration at Yale was set.
Thirty thousand protesters poured into New Haven that day. Guardsmen with guns and tear gas masks lined up shoulder-to-shoulder along the streets, while National Guard tanks stood at the ready on York Street right next to Yale’s Saybrook and Davenport Colleges.89 Yale stuck with Brewster’s plan, however, and opened its doors to the protesters.90 Hundreds of Yale students, both women and men, volunteered for the work details required to carry out the strategy. Some pulled on clear plastic gloves and served up rations of brown rice and salad by the handful. Others cared for protesters’ children at a day care center set up in Davenport College or volunteered as peace marshals and medics, while still other students worked shifts on their college’s security patrol.
The protest began on the afternoon of May 1, and students and outsiders packed the New Haven Green while Brewster and Sam Chauncey stationed themselves in a secret command post nearby.91 But the day was sunny, the bands at the rally were good, and the hundreds of daffodils that Yale had planted that fall to beautify the campus for the new women students were blooming. The long line of speakers at the rally tended to ramble rather than rouse the crowd to violence, the peace marshals prevented the most radical protestors from causing harm, and BSAY members walked the New Haven streets to keep the high school kids out of trouble.
By dinnertime, none of the chaos predicted had happened, and the protesters dispersed to Yale’s twelve residential colleges. But at nine thirty that night, word spread quickly that police had arrested several black men on the New Haven Green, a rumor that was untrue but nonetheless inflamed latent anger among some who had come to New Haven. A crowd one thousand strong returned to the Green, chanting, “Fuck Brewster! Fuck Yale! Get the Panthers out of Jail!”92 The mob threw rocks and a stink bomb, but New Haven’s police chief kept the young National Guard troops from letting their inexperience get the best of them. The police launched volley after volley of tear gas, and the New Haven Panthers, despite earlier calls for violence by some members, worked to calm angry protesters. As tear gas exploded around them, the Panthers circled the New Haven Green in their sound truck, urging the crowd to disperse. Violence would only bring harm to the neighboring black communities. Kate Field had sent the peace marshals back to the Green as soon as she got word of the trouble there, and even though she was hit in the head with a tear gas canister and knocked out, the marshals’ training proved effective. The protesters settled and returned to Yale’s residential colleges with no one seriously hurt and no significant damage.
The following day, the crowds were half the size of those on May 1.93 Once again, the scheduled rally went smoothly, but that night, as students were still leaving the Green, a group of two hundred white radicals began throwing rocks and bottles at police. Lawrie Mifflin was walking back with the crowds to her dorm room when the National Guard began firing tear gas. She could hear the ominous thump as each canister was launched in the air. Seconds later, clouds of caustic white smoke exploded on the sidewalk, and students’ eyes burned from the chemical fumes. When they tried to take a breath, it felt like swallowing fire. Why are they doing that? thought Lawrie. We’re not doing anything. We’re not being destructive.94
Like most students, Lawrie didn’t know the cause of the trouble. It was dark, and all was confusion. The tear gas billowed up Elm Street and down College, and Lawrie began to run with her friends to the Old Campus. Tear gas canisters exploded around them, and soon there was nowhere to escape. Kit McClure had retreated to Vanderbilt also, but tear gas was filling the hallways. “What do we do?” asked Kit’s roommate Dixie. “I can’t breathe.”95 Kit showed her how to put a wet washcloth over her face and duck down to stay beneath the chemical smoke. Kit had been through this before, when the SDS students at Cornell convinced her to go to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The tear gas didn’t burn any less the second time.
The gas spread to Yale’s residential colleges. “The entire campus was saturated,” said one Berkeley senior, who spent the next few hours dabbing his eyes with a wet towel.96 Betty Spahn was back in Berkeley by then too. The May Day events were done as far as she knew, and then all of a sudden, tear gas was coming in under the doorway. Betty couldn’t understand it. “Why are we getting tear gassed?”97 But once again, the crowd on the Green dispersed.
By Sunday, May 3, the thirty thousand demonstrators who had come to New Haven for the weekend had left. “Shock, like when wild rock suddenly ceases,” wrote sophomore Lydia Temoshok in her diary. “No one is here.”98 The weekend had passed without a single serious injury, and the marines and paratroopers went back to North Carolina having never set foot in New Haven. Despite all predictions otherwise, Yale and its students had succeeded in keeping the weekend peaceful. Those who had hoped to free the Black Panthers were disappointed, however. The trial continued, and Ericka Huggins remained in prison in Niantic while her daughter, who had turned one year old by then, was raised by others.
Another three weeks of the spring semester remained, but classes never really resumed. On May 4, four unarmed students at Ohio’s Kent State University were shot and killed on their campus by National Guard soldiers during an antiwar protest. Eleven days later, it happened again, when the Mississippi State Highway Patrol and local police fired into a student dorm at Jackson State University after a protest. Two students died. By then, 448 campuses across the nation were on strike, with student demands tied to democracy and the war: pull the United States out of Vietnam and Cambodia; end repression of political minorities; stop military research at U.S. universities.99 Now no one at Yale was going to classes. Students could take incompletes and finish their work over the summer. Exams that year were optional. “It was all a complete shambles,” said one Yale professor.100 Instead of coming to a clean close, the first year of coeducation simply disbanded.
Elga Wasserman thought May Day had been good for the women students.101 The crisis created an “us” at Yale that for the first time did not exclude women. Yet Sisterhood member Judy Berkan, who had volunteered as a peace marshal and had long been involved in antiwar activism, saw May Day differently. “May Day sucked the oxygen out of a lot of what we were doing,” said Judy.102 Compared with May Day and the Vietnam War, “there was a sense among male activists, and I think we bought into it ourselves, that our struggles as women were kind of trivial. And so it sucked the oxygen out.”