Some of my black students told me that they regretted Ken’s refusal to associate with them, that he did not want to be their “adviser,” and that they looked upon his decision to spend all his time with the white students and the organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as one result of Yale’s power “to change a brother.” They also looked with criticism at his exclusive association with other whites; but yet they knew, so they assured me, that Ken’s image was assured, for with his brilliance and brains, they were willing to admit that “the brother is heavy.”
And suddenly, events overtook his best planned and cultivated image. The Black Panthers were coming. To Yale. To occupy it. And take over its administration, perhaps only symbolically, recruit all the black students and some of the black faculty to their theology of Black Power, to disrupt the university, and to provide a sympathetic environment for the trial of Bobby Seale for murder, in a New Haven court. The SDS was the Panthers’ vanguard. Jerry Rubin preceded them with a rousing speech in the park. Rumours of impending riots, the disruption to regular classes, the head of Black Studies in a quandary, uncertain, uninformed on university policy and strategy by the president of the university, unable therefore to advise his black faculty members. And underlying all this confusion, the safety of the black women students was on everybody’s minds, just in case things got out of hand, as they were getting out of hand in many American cities, and especially in the black communities. And the directive authored by Kingman Brewster, meaningless in a meaningless confusion, with nobody knowing what was the best thing to do, to save Yale. For it was felt that Yale was about to be burned down. Certainly disrupted to the degree that its normal operation and administration were seriously threatened. The presence of the SDS and the threatened presence of the Black Panthers on the Yale campus in this week of May 6, 1970, had us all reeling, like fish thrown to the surface of a lake, to catch breath.
Everybody was talking about liberation. But liberation from what? The war in Vietnam? President Richard Nixon’s oppressive administration, during which civil rights were trampled, and wire-tapping strangled free expression of political views? The spreading of racism and the increase of police violence against black people in the inner cities of America?
There arose in the midst of this chaos mixed with national uncertainty about the means of controlling it, incapable of solving it, for no one seemed to have a solution, they sprung up, all over the Yale campus, and on other Ivy League campuses in America, semi-formal “institutions” called “the teach-ins” — impromptu lectures given by the more radical black professors. At Yale, they were also known as “Liberation Schools.” I have a copy of a broadsheet that came off the presses at this time, like the spreading of contagious diseases, like mosquitoes and flies in the summer cottage time, at the lake. It is dated Wednesday, May 8th. The year is 1970, the year Yale, in a fit of fear and guilt, was convinced that the Black Panther Party was going to “occupy” the university, close it down to ordinary classes, and turn it into indocrination camps teaching black cultural nationalism.
This is what was advertised for the afternoon and evening of May 6th, in one of the Liberation Schools set up by the black student body and the black faculty:
Liberation School
Wednesday May 6
Black Literature and the Process of Liberation
Houston Baker and Austin Clarke
2PM Branford
Liberation and What We Can Do
Ken Mills, Roy Bryce-Laporte
2PM, Morse
Yale and the Community
to organize and coordinate action workshops
Ken Mills
Margaret Leslie, from United Newhallville
Branford Dining Hall
8PM, Wednesday 6th
The enthusiasm and the excitement that surrounded these Liberation Schools stated very clearly the underlying concern that swept through the entire campus; and this concern was the physical safety of the black women students, and what to do with them, how to protect them in case “armageddon” fell like bullets from police guns, or fell like slashes of billy clubs in the hands of the police. It was the first time that the meaning of the term “armed camp” had a nervous connotation, as I walked from my apartment on Park Street, through the quadrangle of Pierson College, out on to York Street, through Branford, and out to the Old Campus. In the park nearby, the SDS had already set up their soapboxes like pulpits to deliver the lesson to Yale. The night before this morning that broke clear and hot, Jerry Rubin had laid down the political platform of the SDS. But the whole country already knew what that political theology was: we had heard it many times before, from Columbia, to Harvard, and to Princeton. The Black Panthers were no way in sight. But their presence was heavy and real and scary as an omen. The New Haven Police and the Connecticut National Guard were already lined up along the streets, tense, unsmiling, muscle-bound, and with their hands wrapped round their brown billy clubs held in front of their bodies as if they were protecting their testicles. I felt that this armed guard expected, and perhaps relished, the possibility of having to use them in a few hours, when things got out of hand. I felt that they wanted things to get out of hand.
It was still early on this May morning, and I was walking through the park and the quadrangle of the Old Campus, like a soldier counting bodies and arms of the dead, although the dead in the Battle for Yale had not yet been started; but start it would; and in the haze, perhaps imagined in the new lexicon of warfare and battle, or perhaps more correctly, the humidity which someone told me can rise like a thin white cloud, in this unclear morning, I imagined the sound of guns and the smell of tear gas. And with this anticipation, I placed my white handkerchief to my nostrils, and imagined I was being attacked by the soldiers holding their sticks in the same tough way a man holds his prick standing like a conqueror over a white porcelain urinal. But nothing was happening. Just the accumulation of police and troopers, waiting for an order, or waiting to act out of fear, in case the order came too late for their impatience. No black students were in sight. No black woman students. They had been hidden from view, taken into safety. I walked back the same route almost, and came not immediately, but taking my time, in this inspection of event and result not yet happened, and when I got close to Calhoun College, I started to smell the smell of tear gas. Something had happened. My white handkerchief was no longer white. It was black. Not from the tear gas, but from the haze of humidity and New Haven dust. The streets were quiet now. Only the brute-force image of New Haven Police and State Troopers. And they were lined along Park Street, across from Pierson College, guarding the empty streets, in case the invisible Black Panthers should fall out of the sky. I walked beside them, for the road was narrow, close; and I could smell their perspiration, and their hate; and saw the way the police gripped their guns, their tools, caressing them in the way described by the French playwright, Jean Genet, who knew something about thighs and limbs.
No one had commissioned me to make a tally of things, to report like a scout in war, jot down and take notes of mortalities and injuries. It was the boredom of the morning, the boredom of the event, the boredom of the May Day weekend, now without the gaiety of unprofessionally stilled beer, and red hot cinders of steaks large as a brick; and hot dogs like boys’ penises; and hamburgers burnt to sweet blackness; and for those whose constitutions could afford its sting and strength, bourbon and whiskey, and the playing of Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, James Brown, Otis Redding, and some Miles Davis and John Coltrane sneaking through amongst the heavy beat of rhythm and blues. And not a note, not a whisper, not a chord of calypso. I am in America.
This was a time of craziness: and the proclaiming of crazy ideologies and romanticism. This craziness was caused by one fact: the barbarians were at the gate.
John Hersey, the master of Pierson, had recently written a book, Algiers Motel, and he wanted to set up a foundation to receive the royalties from the book after the second year. The royalties from
sales in the first year were to go to the Detroit families. But the barbarians were at the gate. He wanted then to give the royalties to the Black Panthers. But there was a condition. The royalties were not to go to the Panthers’ political program. I did not see how he could exclude one from the other.
Houston Baker, now head of Black Studies at Duke University, startled us with, “The Black Panthers are the new Denmark Vesey,” because, to him, they see visions and had white support.
Doug Miranda, who was a member of the Black Panther Party, regarded white radicals as “the crazies.” He was certain that the Panthers could not have got the New Haven black community or the Black Students at Yale (BSAY) to bring about the confrontation with the university, as some had been enticing them to do, so, according to Doug Miranda, he allowed the “crazies” to do it for them. “Maximize chaos” was the tactic. At any rate, he felt that the Panthers are not hung up on the white radicals, “the crazies.”
A large number of white faculty, old and young, were beginning to chastise President Brewster, because they felt that they had been abandoned by him. They were not supporting him in the statement he made about the trial of black revolutionaries. Part of this statement was the institution of a “voluntary” or an “involuntary” tax on the university faculty: one percent of basic salary, or one percent of salary over $12,000. This money would be taken annually to create a foundation. This money will be given as Yale’s contribution to the black community.
And talking about salaries, which in my time at Yale was smaller than at most universities, came one of the most intriguing incidents that seemed to have been the colour and the character of the Black Studies Programs in America. The shortage of qualified black professors. We were like surgeons, constantly on call. And during most weekends none of us were in Yale, but travelling out into the provinces, so to speak, to other universities and colleges who wanted to hear our views on everything that was black. “Black Aesthetics” became a watchword, to cloud or to bury intelligent argument, and point of view. You had to know something about this “black aesthetics” key, otherwise you could not unlock the vault of “heavy bread.” You didn’t really have your shit together. The times were good. Money was being made. Money the middle name of Americans. And the places where this money was most easily found, and mined and offered to any black professor at Yale, the leaders in the Black Studies Programs, where “black aesthetics” was best taught, was the State University of New York system of universities, SUNY.
You drove from Yale on Friday mornings, to Williams College, to Clark University, to Connecticut College, to Wellesley, to the various SUNYs, to Duke, to Princeton, all over America — wherever a plane alighted; and if there was no airport, you were picked up and driven to your lecture. And you came back with your pockets full and heavy.
I was in a classroom at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, teaching Afro-American Literature, Richard Wright’s Native Son; and it was four o’clock in the afternoon and I had to get up to Boston on the train from Waltham, and hire a car, and be driven by one of my students to Williams College to give a lecture on Malcolm X and the Black Muslims in America, and have a discussion with Betty Friedan, who confessed that the women’s liberation movement gathered its technique and political tactic from the blacks in the civil rights movement. This had never been expressed publicly before. And the irony is that the women’s liberation movement did not lift a sincere finger to assist black women who were suffering, and still do suffer, a more heinous persecution of inequality, inequalities in all aspects of their lives.
There was something about that lecture at Williams that reminded me of Canada. The name of the auditorium was the name of a Canadian beer, or rather the name of the owner of Molson Beer. I remember another humorous thing about that lecture, which was pointed out to me by my friend, Jonathan Aaron, who was an assistant professor, like me, at Yale in 1968. Jonathan said that he held his breath, in fear that my opening sentence was so long that I had forgotten the subject, and therefore could not find the finite verb to close the thought I was making about Malcolm X’s importance in the civil rights movement, and in the liberation of black people in America. Long sentences, not only written but spoken, seems to be my calling card, seems to have started at that lectern that night in Williamstown. And this does not mean that I do marvel at the length of opening sentences in my fiction, and sometimes, at the omission of the finite verb.
But this story is about my friend, Ken. Ken’s reputation mounted after the Liberation Schools he organized during that historic May Day Weekend at Yale. People began to notice. He was being invited all over the Eastern seaboard to dispense his radical wisdom in philosophy. One of the SUNYs snapped him up. This was not unusual amongst black professors. At conferences, he gave paper after paper, like another West Indian who had come over from England where he taught in a second-rate university, for an interview at Yale; and who was instructed, as a visitor, to take the Connecticut Limousine from LaGuardia Airport to Berkeley College, at the corner of Elm and High Streets; and who arrived a little late, in a yellow taxi, a trip that cost more than one hundred dollars; and that was not apologized for as an extravagance, but as a cultural misunderstanding. “A limousine in England is the same as a taxicab. Or a hansom.”
In Ken’s case, there was not this misunderstanding. But those of us who were spying on him, discovered that he owned a very rare, and expensive English car, which he never drove on campus, but which had been hidden away in a garage some distance from the cluster of the twelve Yale colleges. One man who knew of this car was Doug Miranda, who borrowed it almost every weekend, who kept Ken’s secret, who had to be given the courtesy, since he and Ken were radicals, and the bond of being “brothers” could not be broken.
Ken would sneak out from Branford College and drive down to his SUNY to attend conferences, and give guest lectures, and hobnob with the New York “brothers,” all of whom made almost twice the salary that Yale paid Ken. Ken was not tenured. No black professor in Yale’s Black Studies Program was tenured, and this was another contention during the lectures in the Liberation Schools.
A position at the SUNY was offered. And Ken accepted. The money was too good not to. He must have heard about the West Indian who mistook a taxicab for an airport limousine, and who held three full-time teaching jobs at the same time, who lived on planes, who changed his clothes in the washrooms of planes, who drew three hearty salaries, and drove a white Cadillac and smoked Cuban cigars, to settle his nerves and soothe his anxiety, to help him to remember which city or town, which campus and university he was in, at that moment of restless insomnia.
The money was too good. Ken was appointed associate professor, with tenure. And things went well. He drove back up in his roaring English foreign roofless roadster, his long Afro blowing in the breeze, to take his seminars in Branford College. And then, one Friday, at a conference on some aspect of Marxist sociology, or the sociology of Marxism — was it the Marxism of sociology? — at which the chairman of sociology at Yale was a speaker, looking at his program, he saw the name, the title, the position of one of his own faculty members in Yale Department of Sociology …
This dialogue between the SUNY chairman of sociology, and the Yale chairman of sociology, has been repeated many times by many black professors:
“Is this Ken Mills?”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
“We think very highly of him!”
“So do we. He’s on our faculty!”
“Ken Mills?”
“The same Ken Mills!”
“The same Ken Mills?”
We do not know anything of the conversation between the chairman of Yale sociology, and Ken. We do not know what passed between the SUNY chairman and Ken. We do know however, what words were exchanged back at Yale, between the chairman and Ken.
“You have to make a choice.”
“I choose Yale.”
Ken had been shortlisted for a prestigi
ous fellowship. Ken was shortsighted about the philosophical aspect of loyalty to Yale. Ken sacrificed a very large salary, plus tenure at his SUNY, for the prestige of Yale.
He was awarded the prestigious fellowship. For one year.
He was fired when he returned to Yale.
He died, unfortunately, too young, soon after this declaration.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Norman Mailer comes roaring into the Calhoun College lounge, to be made a Fellow of the College, fresh and burly from his success in a thoughtful article written for thousands of dollars and for thousands of Americans to read, including the rebellious young black students at Yale, and published in Look magazine, on his favourite subject, civil rights in America, and the black problem. No other matter on the minds of Americans was as worthy of such intellectual attention as “the black problem.”
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