PARTISAN
REVIEW
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dinary and moving speech. He called the crowd every name in the
Panther repertory. He told the motherfuckers to get in off the street
and onto the campus, to get their heads together and to get off their
ego
trips.
Because, he said, they weren't ready for the revolution
yet. They needed to learn discipline, they had to follow the lead of
their revolutionary avant-garde. "Because, you see,
if
niggers can
have disCipline, then so can you," he said. You need to come and
rap together, you need your workshops, you need to study and to
learn. Yale was open, they should come in and use it. The speech
ended in praise of the university as the base for the revolutionary
transformation of society. In this speech everything that the crisis
was about was beautifully articulated: a nineteen-year-old Black stand–
ing
in
Yale's Old Campus across from the statues of Abraham Pier–
son and Nathan Hale, explaining that the revolution needed the
uni–
versity and that the university was in the revolution. What, I thought,
can you say about a system that has put someone so smart, so warm,
such a clear leader of men, into the streets rather than into the class–
rooms in the buildings surrounding him.
If
we can't take the chal–
lenge he embodies, and bring
it -
and him - into the classrooms,
we
will
fail and will deserve to fail.
I walked on to Saybrook College, where in the narrow courtyard
everyone was sitting in deep calm. Allen Ginsberg was behind a raised
balustrade, chanting poems. Someone came and gave him a message,
and he announced quietly that there was gas on the Green, drifting
up over the young green trees. He was a saintlike figure, and the
crowd felt it. He went moments later to the Old Campus and sat
crosslegged on the bandstand to sing melodic oms as the gas drifted
in, penetrated everywhere. Students held wet towels on his eyes,
the water rolled down his face and the oms went on.
The next day, we all were looser. We had got through the first
round. We milled around on the Old Campus, where a group of
students was preparing to go "Rap with the Guard." I went for a
while into Dwight Hall Chapel, where a packed house was voting to
go back to their universities and shut them down in protest over
Panther repression and the Cambodian invasion. In Branford Col–
lege, there had been a group of YAWF militants who were protest–
ing that they hadn't come to New Haven for a rock festival, but to
free Bobby; and that they wanted some action. The Monitoring Com–
mittee called Panther headquarters, and a group of Panthers came
