PARTISAN REVIEW
429
what you saw, looking at the platfonn, was a solid phalanx subtend–
ing it. The platfonn was itself in the hands of the Blacks exclusively.
It was evidently to be a rally rather than a debate. Some of my
colleagues would later compare it to Nuremberg; that was nonsense,
but the theatrical effect was tremendous.
Just before the meeting, I learned that David Hilliard and
Emory Douglas had been freed that day, their sentences reduced to
"time served." They had been brought into court, where they apol–
ogized to the judge, and Bobby Seale said that he hoped for a fair
trial. How much was this the result of Yale pressure? There had been
maneuvers behind the scenes. The students read it, more simply, and
in the larger analysis perhaps not entirely inaccurately, as the result
of their massive demonstration of concern: the dismissal confinned
them both in their analysis of Yale's power to influence decisions
in the New Haven judiciary and in their sense of their own power.
The liberation of Hilliard and Douglas started the meeting on
a note of detente. We were moving forward. The whites who spoke
seemed uncomfortable; they were there on tolerance only. Bill Cof–
fin's proposal for bearing witness against the trial by submitting to
arrest in front of the courthouse - an arrest prearranged with Police
Chief Ahern - struck no fire: here was another form that no longer
seemed to have any validity in the situation, a fonn left over from
freedom marches and the heroic days of tlle antiwar movement, now
bypassed by history. It was after Coffin's speech that the chairman
intoned, "The platform is back in the hands of the people." Again
you asked yourself, whose revolution?
I don't think any of us knew that David Hilliard was coming to
the rally. He was introduced by Charles Garry, preceded up the ramp
into the rink by four bodyguards of a kind of outrageous theatri–
cality - they looked, I thought, like what Jean Genet would think
Panther bodyguards ought to look like - and the arrival had stun–
ning effect. He stood, elegant and dynamic, a twenty-six-year-old
Black revolutionary leader just freed from jail, to the wild ovation of
the students. What ensued - his mention that it was all right to
kill
pigs, followed by the students' boos, his loss of cool and vitupera–
tion of the "long-haired hippie Yale motherfuckers," his final retrac–
tion in exchange for the crowd's retracting its boos, then the strange
appearance of the white student who thrust himself forward to the
microphone and was grabbed and beaten by Hilliard's bodyguards:
