Looking back 50 years after the Black Panther trial

For decades, Yale’s archival material on the New Haven Black Panther trials of 1970-71 has remained popular with student researchers. Students often base their theses and research projects on this monumental and tumultuous time in New Haven history.

Part of this scholarly impulse, no doubt, is driven by a desire to be reflective about how the university has historically addressed racism and to uncover the power of student activism. Yet part of the appeal of studying this moment in history is also likely rooted in the glossy promises of getting to read and write about murder, revolution and cultural upheaval.

As the 50th anniversary of the New Haven Black Panther trials approaches, many will reacquaint themselves with the story of what happened in New Haven five decades ago. In May 1969, nine Panthers were indicted on charges related to the murder of alleged police informant Alex Rackley. The unjust circumstances surrounding their case and trial — including a “press trial” condemning the Panthers, unlawful raids on Panther property, deplorable conditions of detention, and racially biased jury selections — propelled hundreds of members of the New Haven community and Yale student body into protest. Yale’s “May Day” protests brought in over 15,000 protestors from across the country.

While it is vital to commemorate the history of May Day, it is also important to prevent the murder trial from becoming the central referent in our memory of the New Haven Black Panthers.

The Panthers — both now and then — are largely associated with separatism and violence, to the exclusion of their ultimate humanitarian mission.

The Panthers used inflammatory rhetoric often simply to shock people into social action. For example, Doug Miranda, captain of the New Haven Panthers, explained to black Yale students: “We’re trying to get a strike going here, man! Now you can’t just tell them [white students], ‘Strike!’ You’ve got to give them something more extreme, and then you let them fall back on a strike.”

The heart of the Panthers’ agenda was not ultimately a vengeful, myopic objective to “get whitey,” but the broader goal of social and racial equity. This mission was largely pursued at the grassroots level; as scholars like Thomas Sugrue, Yohuru Williams, and Paul Alkebulan have recounted in recent years, much of the “off-camera” work of the organization was rooted in community organizing initiatives.

The mission of the New Haven Panthers, as they wrote in The Black Panther newspaper, was to “meet the needs of the people, serve them, love them with heart and soul and never at any point divorce ourselves from the interests of the masses.” They organized classes on political education, a free clothing program and a free breakfast program. They offered their support to The Welfare Moms of New Haven. They circulated flyers on the city’s discriminatory housing policies, working with neighborhood groups on lead-abatement initiatives. They founded a legal aid program and a free health clinic. They worked to combat rent hikes, forced housing relocations, and racialized policing in the poorest areas of New Haven.

As Yohuru Williams has pointed out in his book, Black Politics/ White Power, contrary to popular belief, such programs were not race specific. Nor was the intellectual project of the Panthers as a whole. The Panther agenda was imbricated in broader national and international liberation struggles across lines of race, gender, and class. As the New Haven Nine wrote in The Black Panther, “Not only is America rampant with racism, but capitalism is the disease that causes racism. All of America is affected by it… [a] point that we want made clear is that the electric chair makes no distinction between white and black, student or worker, when the switch is pulled.”

Along these lines, a women’s liberation group wrote in a flyer circulated in New Haven, “Sisters, free yourselves. Support the demands. End the trial.” The women understood their own freedom as contingent on justice for the Panthers, just as the Panthers understood racial justice as tethered to the liberty of all marginalized groups. This mutual sense of recognition and solidarity was the ideological fulcrum of the Black Panthers organization — not an idealized kind of black separatism.

While the memory of the New Haven Black Panthers largely centers on the murder of Alex Rackley, as the 50th anniversary of May Day arrives, one must not let this shroud their foundational commitments to grassroots activism and the broader liberation struggle.