Violent Times

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966, as a sort of Third-World liberation movement for the black urban ghetto. They mixed Marxist politics and nationalist ideas in inexact quantities, but the Panther aesthetic was, from an early date, fixed: dark sunglasses, black berets, turtlenecks, leather jackets, unstintingly grim expressions, and big guns.

The Panthers’ combination of radical politics, impeccable style, and apparent authenticity—for 60s protest culture this was the coin of the realm—threw the large, mostly white student movement for a loop. Many white students were still stuck in the early ‘60s’ Civil Rights campaigns of the rural South, and their heroes were various leaders of the non-violence movement there. By the time the Panthers arrived on the scene in the late ‘60s, people like Tom Hayden, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the nucleus of the Northern student Left, were still wearing the bumpkin overalls they adopted while working with groups like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) down South.

All of these themes—race conflicts, the rise and fall of protest movements, and the task of sorting out who was radical enough—are explored in two new books about the era. In Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer, Paul Bass and Douglas Rae tell the story of a 1969 Black Panther murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut, and the New Left carnival it instigated there. They also delve into the history of New Haven, the “model city” of the book’s title, and its leaders’ attempts to prove the merits of urban renewal. Some of the same characters from the Bass/Rae book show up in Jeff Kisseloff’s Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s: An Oral History, where they’re allowed to tell their stories in their own voices.

Both books begin with rich subjects. In 1969, members of the New Haven Black Panthers tortured and killed Alex Rackley, a young party member suspected of being an FBI informant (he was not). Police quickly apprehended the triggerman, Warren Kimbro, a one-time New Haven social worker, along with his accomplices, but the government also indicted Bobby Seale on conspiracy charges, claiming he had given the orders to kill. This made the trial a big deal, and as it got underway the following year, activists from across the country joined politically agitated Yale students.

In the hands of a promising pair of authors, this all plays out in fine detail. Doug Rae is a long-time Yale political scientist whose last book, the excellent City: Urbanism and Its End, explored, in part, the failure of federal urban renewal efforts in the 60s in New Haven. Paul Bass, a Yale grad, has been an investigative journalist in New Haven for 25 years. In this book, however, the authors seem to pass up the opportunity to offer a big-picture perspective on the events they describe.

During the great urban renewal undertakings of the period, the city of New Haven received about three times more federal funding per capita than any other city in the country. Older neighborhoods were leveled, replaced by housing projects and highway connectors meant to bring people downtown. This was intended to create the slumless, economically vibrant model city that would usher in the new millennium.

These massive schemes were, in a way, everything that the radical Left despised about the American government in the ‘60s. They were an example, par excellence, of what Todd Gitlin (another ‘60s-era SDS president) calls “managerial liberalism”—an order-obsessed, elite-driven style of governance that sought to streamline and rationalize governmental decision-making by insulating it from the messy public realm. This brand of arrogant high-handedness was the bee in the radical Left’s bonnet.

Urban renewal’s impact was also more direct than all that. New Haven’s predominantly black neighborhoods—like Warren Kimbro’s Spruce Street—bore a disproportionate share of renewal’s destructive brunt. When riots broke in 1967, city officials expressed surprise that such a thing could happen there, given New Haven’s huge urban renewal expenditures; it was not worth considering whether the riots, in part, happened because of New Haven’s huge urban renewal expenditures, and the authors do not explore this idea in any depth.

Jeff Kisseloff’s book, Generation on Fire, begins well before the scenes set in Rae and Bass’s book, but touches on many of the same themes. It includes portraits of Civil Rights activists, protest artists, and riot-inciters, and Kisseloff points out that nonviolence, while deeply felt by Christian leaders of the early Civil Rights movement, was also tactically brilliant. Not just because it sharpened the contrast between the good guys and the bad guys for those watching TV up North; but also because it attracted the Tom Haydens of the world, northern white college students, guilty with privilege and looking to sacrifice themselves to a good cause.

Kisseloff’s book contains a moving portrait of Bernard Lafayette, the SNCC founder and Freedom Rider who organized lunch-counter sit-ins and voter registration drives in the early-60s Deep South. “Physically, nonviolence is no problem,” Lafayette says—you just don’t fight back. “The real question was how you feel on the inside about that person and yourself...You have to respond to their hatred with the greatest amount of love. How can you fight back with love when the perpetrator is practicing violence against you?… That’s the fight.”