Word: mayday
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Plans for a series of non-violent mass demonstrations of civil disobedience in Washington in late April and around Mayday will also be considered...
Last May, at the Panther Mayday demonstrations, everybody went to New Haven expecting the worst. Paratroop divisions were airlifted in from North Carolina, Yale organized a corps of medics incredibly well equipped. Papers that weekend printed sections on first aid and self defense...
...Mayday did not change the cast of characters at Yale, it did change their perspectives. For the first time, they found themselves confronted with the world and the problems of the city. It is easy to see them as sophisticated academics oozing charm to get themselves out of a light situation, but at the same time they seemed real, convinced of what they were doing. Not cynical academics, they were just the opposite: naive, innocent, unable to understand what was happening around them, why they were being attacked by Left and Right...
People at Yale are still trying to piece together exactly what happened on Mayday, and why it happened. One of them has written a book in an attempt to justify last spring to the world outside Yale, and perhaps also to explain it to the people at Yale. John Hersey's Letter to the Alumni will not be remembered as his greatest book, but it may become known as his most curious. In it, he has summed up the whole overwhelming feeling of innocence which led most of Yale to act as it did. This book will not please many...
...this tends to make everything that happened on Mayday and in the weeks before seem ludicrous. This is due in part to the way Hersey has presented the material, in a bowdlerized version suitable for distribution to rich conservative old Blues. And, in fact, it does look ludicrous in retrospect, to some extent. But, at the time, it was anything but absurd. There was a lack of hypocrisy, a feeling of commitment in the whole Yale community. It is easy to see now that they had not the slightest understanding of the problem in the black ghetto, and that they...