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PETER BROOKS
prove that they were listening and that they were committed to hav–
ing Blacks at Yale to the point that they would understand what
kind of a position the Blacks had been put in as a result of pressures
from the Panthers and from their place within the elitist institution.
Their demands were militant but not irresponsible; they were moving
in that they showed a commitment to the institution as well as to
blackness, a heroic effort to balance militancy and the preservation
of Yale. I sat down on Tuesday and wrote out some sentences about
where I thought we were. The statement was for my classes, but
also
for myself: an attempt to explain to myself why I felt there had been
a raising to a new level in the dialectic. "The issue is no longer spe–
cifically and exclusively the trial of the New Haven Panthers," I
wrote, "and the commitment to justice in that trial that we all must
affirm and seek to realize. A new symbolism has been introduced:
that of the national repression of the Black Panther Party; that of
Yale's relation to the Black community bordering on it; that of
racism in our nation and our lives.
It
is useless to protest that this
new symbolism is not necessarily linked to a criminal trial going on
in New Haven. It is linked to it at the deepest level of reality....
The innocence or guilt of the defendants [in that trial] has nothing
to do with the real trial, which is of ourselves, as individuals and
as an institution."
I had come to believe that the strike was necessary, but also
that it had to be put to good use.
That night was the Ingalls Rink meeting. The phenomenology
of the meeting was special and curious for Yale. Its model was the
mass meetings on ROTC and university governance that had been
held in the rink a year previously. The fact of the rink, Saarinen's
great arching space, was itself part of the phenomenology: as the
largest structure at Yale, it meant extraordinary numbers, urgency,
the inadequacy of the usual forms. The meetings in the spring of
1969 had been laboriously democratic, with microphones placed on
the floor, student and faculty speeches from all quarters, a parlia–
mentarian on hand and carefully counted votes. I
think
we all ex–
pected the same thing at Ingalls this time. We thought we were being
assembled to vote on the strike proposition. Your first Perception that
things were different was the layout: behind the speakers' platform,
in the bleachers, all the Blacks had taken their seats together, so that
