Stories
The Black Panthers
in New Haven
The American
Independent Movement
Union-Organizing at Yale
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Back in 1966, editing the newsletter of the Cook for Congress Campaign in New Haven, which later became the American Independent Movement (AIM), I interviewed a young New Haven high school graduate who had joined the military and gone to Vietnam, only to find that he was fighting on the wrong side of the Vietnamese movement for national independence. His name was John Huggins. He was very eloquent, and he was Black.
John went out to the West Coast, where he joined the Black Panther Party along with many other Black Vietnam veterans who had come to feel they were fighting on the wrong side. And he married a California girl named Ericka. She shared his political commitment; she was also very eloquent; and she wrote good poetry.
Then John was murdered, gunned down while he gave a radical political speech in California. Commercial newspaper claimed that it was at the hands of a rival political group, but the information circulating in the movement was that it was set up by the FBI. Given the wholesale assassination of Black Panther Party members over the next few years, I tend to believe that the FBI was behind it. John never got to see his daughter who was born somewhat later to Ericka.
Ericka vowed to avenge John's death by coming back to his home town of New Haven and organizing a chapter of the Black Panther Party. I remember when she first arrived in New Haven and helped set up a community health clinic and free breakfast program in the Dixwell section of New Haven, a neighborhood of poor Blacks without decent services.
I had not yet joined the Communist Party, but I was friends with party members who helped out the Panthers, and I followed their growth with interest. I must have telephoned their headquarters at some point since I was on the wiretap list (see the story of Mayor Delieto and the Peace Commmission.
The Panther Party headquarters in New Haven became an armed camp with sandbags at the windows to stop potential bullet fusillades, as assassinations by government-aided police and provacateurs continued against Black Panther Party chapters across the country, including the machine-gun massacre of an entire chapter (a dozen people including children?) in Chicago.
Then, one day, there was a murder. A poor Black Panther Party member was executed, gangland-style, and his body dumped into Black Lake in Meriden. Apparently several Panthers took part in the murder, in the paranoid belief, having been convinced by a party member who may have been a government agent, that the victim was a spy. The government responded by arresting not only those who pulled the trigger but also the top leaders of the Panther Party, including Ericka Huggins, claiming that they had been part of a murder conspiracy.
In May of 1970 the case came to trial. A rally of support for the Panthers was called for the New Haven Green on May 1 which attracted thousands of people from outside the city, ostensibly in solidarity with the Panthers. The city was turned into an armed camp, and glass storefronts were boarded up in anticipation of warfare. The city was invaded by US Army troops with machine guns and armored cars (I passed armed posts on the Fair Haven Middle School on my way to the city center). Downtown, opposite the rally, one of my friends was stationed with his National Guard Unit, prepared to quell the expected "riot." On "our" side, in the crowd of 15,000 people, there were agent provocateurs from the government with knapsacks of rocks to be used to set off a riot and provoke gunfire in response. We had set up teams of monitors on the Green armed with walkie-talkies, pairing a smaller guy with a bigger guy. For example, I was paired with Vernon Moore who looked like a football linebacker. I remember Bill Morico and David Dickson also as some of the "big guys." I would go up to someone with a knapsack and ask to see the contents. When they refused, Vernon would tap them on the shoulder and they would look up to my tall, broad-shouldered partner, and he would simply take the knapsack, saying "I'll take that." We had dumpsters on the Green into which the rocks were then poured.
A week before the rally, Yale minister William Sloane Coffin had supported the rally. But as the days drew near, he had withdrawn his support, saying that he had "inside information" that there would be violence. This had heightened the expectations of violence, and I have always assumed that Coffin was working with the government authorities to accomplish this. This was typical for him; for example, he had done all he could, including the use of threats, a few years earlier to dissuade Martin Luther King from speaking out against the Vietnam War.
 Panther rally May Day 1970 on New Haven Green The image on the banner is Ericka Huggins |
The rally seemed to proceed peacefully, but someone (an agent provocateur?) dynamited the entrance to the Yale Hockey Rink, about a mile away, and when I was at our coffeehous, Bread and Roses, on State Street two blocks from the Green, I heard the fire engines going down Elm Street against the one-way traffic and I knew there was more violence. The headquarters of the liberal democratic political campaign of 1970 had been firebombed. The phone rang in our coffeehouse and I picked up. A voice on the other end simply said, "you're next." We quickly evacuated the coffeehouse, and called the police, but they said they couldn't help us. So all night we stood guard as cars with mud covering their license plates cruised past the coffeehouse in the darkness, apparently ready to throw a firebomb. We had several cars stationed on the street in front of Bread and Roses and when one of these cars approached, we would turn on our car lights, hit the horn and push ourselves down in the car in case they shot their rifles at us. This apparently dissuaded them, and as the dawn came, our coffeehouse was still intact.
Something like 30 or 40 Black Panthers were eventually assassinated by government provocateurs, while few if any White activists were killed. Even there, the government actions were racist.
Years later, at Wesleyan, John and Ericka's daughter was a student, and I passed the word through my students to tell her I would be pleased to talk to her about her father. Word came back "I had no father."
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme
1997-2001
UN Intl Year for Culture of Peace
2019-2024
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