May Day, 1970

On May twenty-first, nineteen sixty-nine, a nineteen-year-old man named Alex Rackley was killed in New Haven. He was a member of the Black Panther Party, and other Panther members had accused him of being an FBI informant. His body was found in a swamp near Middlefield, Connecticut. Two men were convicted in connection with the killing. A third man, George Sams, had ordered it and testified against others in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Bobby Seale, the national chairman of the Black Panther Party, had visited New Haven during the period of the murder. Prosecutors charged him with ordering the killing. The case drew enormous national attention. By the spring of nineteen seventy, it had become a focal point for the anti-war left, the civil rights movement, and a broad coalition of people who believed that Black political defendants could not receive a fair trial in the United States.

On May Day, nineteen seventy, tens of thousands of people converged on New Haven. Yale University opened its residential colleges to protesters, providing housing and food. President Kingman Brewster issued a statement that became one of the most quoted by a university president in the twentieth century: he said he was personally appalled and ashamed, and that he was skeptical of the ability of a Black revolutionary to receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States. The statement was widely criticized by the Nixon administration, which considered it inflammatory. It was widely praised by others who considered it the plainest possible acknowledgment of how the justice system actually worked.

Jean Genet, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin spoke from the Green. There were no major incidents.

The charges against Seale and his co-defendant Ericka Huggins were dismissed on May twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-one, after the jury deadlocked twice and the judge determined that a fair trial could not be obtained.