THE YALE ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE
TO MAY DAY

President Brewster (left) at press conference for national media on the day before May Day, photograph by Stephen West, 1970.

“STATEMENT OF
KINGMAN BREWSTER, JR.”

The Yale University administration, particularly Yale’s president at the time, Kingman Brewster, played a particularly significant role in the university’s response to the rally. Brewster, also the president of the university when African American Studies was established as an undergraduate major at Yale College, worked to make support available for the activists, although not always without resistance. In several statements made by Brewster around the time of the protests, his opinion remained clear: it was necessary to preserve justice within the legal system and to ensure that the Black Panthers were treated fairly, a concept that was certainly not guaranteed given the racist treatment of Black Panther activists at the time.

Yale students sign petition supporting Black Panthers. Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives / The African American Experience 1930-1980. Chapman University.

“STATEMENT OF
KINGMAN BREWSTER, JR.”

Brewster committed, in another statement featured here, to ensuring that the activists would be able to have a fair trial, promising university resources and support systems to ensure that this could be the case, but falling short of committing the university’s financial support to the New Haven Nine during their trial. Emphasizing as an individual his frustration with the nation’s racist treatment of Black activists, leading to the Black Panthers’ potential inability to have a fair trial, Brewster wrote in his April 23, 1970, statement that “I am appalled and ashamed that things should have to come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”