Stories
The Black Panthers
in New Haven
The American
Independent Movement
Union-Organizing at Yale
* * *
After a year in Italy, Nina and I returned to New Haven and involved ourselves deeply in the New Left which was at its height in those years. In New Haven, our organization was the American Independent Movement which grew out of the earlier Cook for Congress Campaigns.
These were revolutionary times, and the peace and civil rights movements of the New Left were buoyed by a feeling of solidarity with revolutionary movements around the world, including the Black Panther Party in the US and New Haven. My role in AIM was that of a journalist at Modern Times, one of the many alternative New Left newspapers in the US at that time. This put me at a center of information flow about what was happening.
From time to time in 1968 and again in 1972-3, I kept a diary in a beautiful leather-bound notebook from Italy.
Nina and I got involved in community organizing in the "ethnic" neighborhood of New Haven where we went to live, Fair Haven.
AIM came to the support of workers at the largest employer in New Haven, Yale University and its hospital. Nina and several others supported a small group of workers in the Yale School of Public Health who had started an independent organizing effort called the Yale Non-Faculty Action Committee, and expanded the effort to all the university's white-collar workers. Other comrades from AIM supported a union drive of hospital workers. I covered these stories for Modern Times.
Continuing to develop a professional career in brain research, I worked for a couple of years as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale under the grants of David Egger whom I had worked with in Flynn's lab. At the suggestion of David and Ted Coons, who headed up Miller's Industries in the Yale Psychology Department, I shifted from working with cats to working with rats, which opened many more possibilities for the study of aggressive behavior. Before moving on to Wesleyan in 1970, I had already published one breakthrough study on the brain mechanisms of aggression in rats in the prestigious journal, Nature.
As the War in Vietnam came to an end, so did the protest movement. The New Left had failed to develop a solid political base and began to fall apart. It disintegrated in thousands of personal disputes such as the one that split Modern Times, often expressed in anti-communist sectarianism. Those of us involved in the New Left learned valuable lessons from its failure, but many of these lessons were not used for many years to come. I wrote of these lessons in my 1985 book, the American Peace Movements, which described how peace movements in the United States up until now have been protest movements, which disintegrate once the cause they are protesting against no longer exists. A new kind of social movement is needed that is more than protest, but is the creating of something new and lasting.
A montage from an issue of Modern Times, illustrating the ferment that engaged millions of people
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Stages
1986-1992
Seville and Peoples Peace Appeal
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme