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subject in his press conference; and when the weekend arrived, the
Panthers put on a stunning display of leadership and responsibility.
They would be helped by the marshals, and by the restraint of the
police; even the Guard, though a sinister and provocative presence,
behaved well. But how long could we ask the Panthers to behave
more responsibly than those who were out to suppress them? The
arrest of the Baltimore Panthers came on the eve of May Day.
Thursday evening, April 30, at Bill Coffin's watching Nixon's
deviously sincere gray face, hearing that America must not be a piti–
ful helpless giant, you got a feeling of numbness. You could hardly
register the horror of the Cambodian invasion. From within the closed
sphere of anxiety that had gradually enveloped us, this seemed, gro–
tesquely, just one more uncontrollable force launched against New
Haven on May Day, a kind of explicit provocation to force the
Movement into armed showdown.
MAY DAY
The college masters had organized a faculty "presence" in most
of the colleges, to lend a stabilizing effect. Some had moved into
the guest suites for the weekend; some, like myself, were just hanging
around in the courtyard. The soup kitchen had been set up, to serve
Familia, brown rice, salad and something like Kool-Aid, but slightly
worse. Someone had found a cache of Civil Defense "survival crack–
ers" in huge tins, stored in the basement for the day of thermonu–
clear war, and brought them up. They were inedible. It was sunny
and warm and very pleasant in the courtyard as we waited, with
somewhat self-conscious calm, for four o'clock and the start of the
rally. Outside, all the downtown shops were boarded up with bright
new sheets of plywood, a raw and expensive tribute to panic which
the students were as rapidly as possible covering with posters and
stenciled slogans.
If
you walked ablock from the college, you sud–
denly came into the midst of the Guard, slouched in their jeeps, with
rifle barrels sticking in every direction. They did look obscene. Some–
one could tell them to put their guns on the floor, I thought. There
was a long line of them in front of the Grove Street Cemetery. The
neo-Egyptian gate above them was inscribed: THE DEAD SHALL
BE RAISED.
I wandered forth onto the Green. Most of the speeches that first
