Tag: New Haven

So where are we?  Well, a few weeks ago, things were sort of looking up, but last week they seem to get into the well-known hand basket.

For instance, the Maryland House passed a bill disallowing many, but not all, forms of discrimination against people based on gender identity or expression.  It wasn’t unanimously applauded by the trans community since there were no protections in public accommodations, but there it was.

But only a week or so earlier, the Maryland House had tabled the marriage equality bill that had already passed the Senate, to someone in the Senate decided that the House need to be taught a lesson, so sent the gender identity/expression protection bill to the Senate Rules committee, expecting it to languish and die there.  After all, who do those House members think they are?  We’ll show them!  We’ll kick this transpeople right where it hurts.

Wasn’t that just very cool?

Me, I don’t have much memory of Nixon’s April 30, 1970 speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia. It could have been because nothing the bastard did would have surprised me by that point, but more likely it’s just that I was already on my way to New Haven to see about Bobby.

That would be Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was facing trial in the case of some Connecticut Panthers accused of murdering a member they thought was a police informant. A national call had gone out for a May Day demonstration to defend Bobby, and thousands of young radicals from around the country and especially the Northeast were en route. We had a couple of dozen from NYU’s Uptown campus with us.

Lemme step back here to set a little context. NYU today is a bigtime, self-promoting academic powerhouse whose relentless pursuit of lower Manhattan real estate for expansion has earned them the hatred of all clear-thinking New Yorkers. Back then, NYU was a bit cheesier, with a campus in Greenwich Village and a satellite one in the Bronx. (The Uptown campus was abandoned by the racist NYU administration later in the 1970s when it found the West Bronx was becoming, let’s say, too colorful, and is now the home of Bronx Community College).

We had a pretty good SDS chapter at NYU Uptown and saw no reason to change anything just because the national organization had imploded the previous summer. (In fact, at one point we decided the chapter head, Lon E. Thud, must be National Secretary of SDS-nobody else was doing it, after all). NYU had given me a “compulsory leave of absence for academic reasons” at the end of the previous school year, a tactical mistake on their part. I was still a registered student and, as such, could not be excluded from the campus.