426
PETER BROOKS
that silence was the worst stance. We learned that President Brewster
would make a statement on Sunday afternoon, and we sent repre–
sentatives to him, urging that it be a strong one. At one meeting, on
Saturday morning, in the midst of a fairly heated discussion, one of
the Black faculty members suggested that everything would be trans–
formed if the Black students called for a strike. The notion seemed
to me absurd. I couldn't see what a strike would accomplish for them,
and I couldn't see any sense in its symbolism. But it was increasingly
clear that the Black students were the key element in the situation.
I had long realized that the only real possibility for disruption at
Yale - where the white radicals were weak, divided or coopted by
the general progressivism of the institution - would come
if
the in–
ternal Blacks ever linked their situation to that of the New Haven
Blacks, who had a number of grievances against
Y~le.
New Haven,
thirty percent Black, mostly Black
in
large areas contiguous to Yale,
with a high level of Black consciousness and leadership, was, like the
marble courthouse where the Panthers would stand trial, an irreduc–
ible fact of our situation.
Kenneth Mills was going off to talk with the Black students,
who were disciplined, statesmanlike, but under tremendous pressures.
A word about Mills: without him, events never would have been pat–
terned as they were. Not that he had a "scenario" to start with; he
improvised brilliantly as he went on. Born in Trinidad, educated at
Oxford, a student of Marxism and Third World revolutions, someone
who could gain the trust of the Panthers yet also hold the respect
of
his
white colleagues, it was he who would make all the con–
nections and articulate them in the days to come.
Monday evening, April 20, 9
P.M.
There was a meeting of the
Student Senate (the latest in a series of attempts to set up a viable
representative student body) to judge what should be done. Doug
Miranda had called for a strike the day before, arguing that the
"Panther and the Bulldog gotta get together." A mass meeting
in
Ingalls Hockey Rink was scheduled for the following day.
The Senate meeting was open. There were about
sixty
senators
and perhaps a hundred other students and a handful of faculty pres–
ent. The senators were taking their task seriously. They
in
no way
resembled the student government types of my day; they weren't
square. The chairman seemed admirably versed in procedural mat-
