The the 1960s are defined as a time of change in the United States as well as here in Connecticut.

They were also a time of long standing and evolving contradictions between prosperity and inequality, innocence and disillusionment, courage and fear.

Over the next hour, we'll explore our decade of change the 1960s and Connecticut.

Someone you can depend on, someone you can rely on.

No matter what you say you want to be ready to play my dream dance Now.

I know you'll get to like you.

After the Second World War, with this economy firing on all cylinders.

America was growing into its new role as a world superpower.

And the country is now fat and sassy and, you know, ready to move into the future and the future gets defined as, you know, a house in the suburbs on a quarter lot with a lawn.

So you have the suburbs equals success.

And after the war, all the bombers were turned into washing machines, sort of figuratively.

Home sweet home became everyone's desire because it was safe.

It was welcome.

But it also was a symbol of what was America, the scrubbed clean little Norman Rockwell kids, a peace fulfillment.

You had an enemy which was a well focused enemy that you could understand was an enemy, and that was Russia.

And you knew that the United States had to do better than Russia in armaments and in space.

And you were very secure if you had those armaments.

Americans elected a young, charismatic leader to guide the country into the future.

In Waterbury on November six, 1960, just two days before the election.

Tens of thousands of people lined the streets, waiting until 3 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the Democratic candidate for president, John F Kennedy.

This was a president that the country had come to know through a new medium television.

It's a function of the president is to set before the by the end of the sixties.

Virtually every home had a black and white television.

I'd never had a TV in my home before.

And it was just to me, astonishing.

The Patty Duke Show, Gilligan's Island.

So you had Gidget and then Gidget.

Sally Field transformed from Gidget into The Flying Nun.

Julia Child.

Oh, she was marvelous.

The Lone Ranger.

Roy Rogers, Guy King.

Those shows were on Saturday morning.

It's time for the Ranger M.D.

Show.

My name is Ranger Andy, and I've traveled all around and I am writing you a song about the things I found I'll sing on and come on and play.

Connecticut Children Long to Be On The Ranger Andy Show.

I want you to turn around and tell me who you are, who's white.

And I know you're from West Hartford.

Douglas.

What?

Your troop number.

You're a pack number, then one.

Each week.

Ranger Andy played his banjo and entertained children in the WTC studio in between cartoons.

Anybody here with a birthday to day to area?

Linda, how old are you?

All right, good for you.

And congratulations on my well, I have a birthday you don't have.

You got to be fired if you don't have a birthday.

I had a long time.

Oh, I see.

Well, anyway, happy birthday to you.

And don't eat too many hotdogs or hamburgers or whatever, but I hope that you'll enjoy it with your family and your friends and sing with me.

The longest song.

The song that never.

I grew up with Captain Kangaroo.

My brother believes that through the anarchy of the Sixties really comes from Captain Kangaroo and at certain random times during Captain Kangaroo, ping pong balls would suddenly fall from the sky.

And so it was like just chaos.

Suddenly in the middle of this regular show that would just be chaos.

And he says, the kids just grew up thinking, okay, man, this is like, you know, the bomb could go off at any minute.

Ping pong balls could fall from the sky and let's get high.

Oh.

Jingle bells, jingle bells.

Jingle bell rung.

Jingle bells, jingle bells.

And while children were learning about the bomb in unexpected ways, Dancing.

their parents were eager to relive favorite childhood memories.

Can't wait.

Particularly remember Christmas time, Maggie Fox and the display that they had on top of their marquee and as being a kid and experience all this and then becoming a photographer for a newspaper.

I went back to that place every Christmas trying to find that same excitement.

Constitution Plaza great, great Christmas adventure.

When the lights went out, it was amazing.

It really was nuts.

The jingle bells jingle bell.

That's the jingle bell, Rah.

I have one photograph.

It's of three kids on a toboggan.

And they went off this very high jump type of thing that they built in Goodwin Park, and the expression on their face was marvelous.

In the springtime, neighborhoods came alive.

Something still burning, and your park was a meeting place.

It was a place where you used to buy a sandwich off the sandwich wagon in front of the Harvard boat and take the sandwich and go to Bushnell Park and eat it.

And I would meet the friendliest squirrels you ever wanted to meet.

Everywhere in the city of Harvard.

You'll see who had straw sale.

Hey, Dan, I think every place you can think of, they were there.

Reminders of the Cold War were woven throughout everyday life.

During the sixties.

There were air raids, of course, and there were also Nike sites going up.

Nike sites, missiles stationed around major population centers were sprinkled throughout Connecticut.

So in the one of the images that I shot there was of this missile with a National Guard standing in front of it.

It was all arranged to educate people about Nike sites.

There was a comfort zone in Hartford during the sixties.

Whether you were in a bar or whether you were in a restaurant or wherever, There really was.

where I felt very comfortable, prosperity was guaranteed.

Being able to work in a field that you felt comfortable in and wanted to work in, that was prosperity.

If you wanted to do something, it was available to you.

Today that prosperity was not felt by everyone.

In the 1950s, large numbers of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans moved into the state just as Connecticut's economy was moving away from heavy industry.

They come at a time when the factories are beginning to decline, so they don't have as much opportunity to move their way up the ladder.

With the economic boom came a growing income gap.

African-Americans and Puerto Ricans struggled to support themselves, feed and educate their children.

This is the period of time when white flight is beginning.

The populations of Connecticut cities are shrinking.

Puerto Ricans are moving along with African-Americans into the inner city neighborhoods that are increasingly vacated by whites.

And a lot of times are getting housing that was built decades ago.

It's deteriorated.

The rents are often quite high.

And so the living conditions in general are not very good.

And obviously there was a fair amount of racism going on.

There was a picket in front of W.T.

Grant that was downtown Car Bell's Ranch House Restaurant, a Cadillac dealership on Albany Avenue.

Those are three of the biggest ones that I remember.

While the civil rights movement was challenging racism, women from Bridgeport to Granby were facing challenges of their own.

The Fifties was a dead period for women in this country.

17 had more silverware, advertising than any other magazine.

The readers were expected to grow up and get married and amass silver China linens, and I lived in a totally postwar suburb in Farmington, and many of our neighbors had only one car to a family, which meant that the wife was marooned at home all day.

You got a car, you may have a sewer, you got to school.

I was very happy to be married and all these new things, but I wasn't prepared for his being traditional, which meant that I could work if I wanted to.

But I also had to take care of the baby, do the shopping, cook somebody else.

Oh.

Feminist writer Kate Swift met Betty Friedan after she had written The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

And I do remember going to her apartment in the old Dakota Hotel on Central Park West.

She talked to us about the coming women's movement, and she said, you know, this is going to be the next civil rights movement and it's going to be huge and it's going to be overwhelming.

So it's going to change the future for women.

I said to myself, not likely, but she was right.

It did.

It did.

And what do you think of women's liberation?

Women are women and men are men.

And what do you mean by that?

Women should be in the kitchen cooking and in the living room, cleaning, and the men should be outside mowing the lawn.

Well, I like it to a certain extent where they get the salary that the men get.

But other than that, I don't I'm not interested in that.

I think that in a house with a husband, their kids, a woman is a woman you should exercise.

A lot of us don't act like men, but I think it makes them look more masculine and feminine.

What do you think of women's liberation?

I'm for anything to get me out of the house.

Women across the country begin to ask questions about their own lives.

Well, they certainly didn't have control over their own bodies in the early sixties.

All forms of birth control were illegal.

In Connecticut.

Women had no choice but to go out of state or obtain birth control illegally.

I guess you could say we were violating the law when we sent people to New York.

We were violating the 100 year old law here in Connecticut.

I felt very strongly that we should give people information and advice.

In 1961, a still, Griswold and Yale's Dr. Charles Buxton opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, which was immediately raided by police.

Connecticut attorney Katherine Rohrbach represented.

Griswold claimed that the 1879 law was unconstitutional.

The case reached a Supreme Court in 1965.

Winslow versus Connecticut was a huge deal.

It allowed for the first time contraceptives to be distributed to married women.

Only minor.

I know that my emotions the result of Griswold was cited in the decision of Roe versus Wade.

Eight years later, Katherine Rohrer back.

She didn't get to do the arguing before the Supreme Court, but she had done all the work and she was also a very committed feminist as well as a a lawyer for progressive causes.

While women were awakening to the inequality in their lives, their children became tweens.

Dan shows all the rage throughout Connecticut.

New Haven had one, Channel 30 had one, and I came in 58 to do one.

Sponsored by the dairy farmer, members of Connecticut Milk for Health.

It was a Brad Davis show.

They call it what I call it.

Everybody called it the Milk Show.

Everybody had to go over.

This was part of the deal to have a glass of milk with me at the milk dispenser from Bobby Vinton to the Jackson five.

The milk show was a regular stop for famous musicians passing through Connecticut.

Every Saturday.

I had what I called the local spotlight, and I'd have local bands.

The sole choppers were one of the best local bands.

My sister played bass, which was unusual, and my brother played guitar and needed to play sax and to have the opportunity to to participate on TV.

I just thought it was great.

You were like the local star for a moment.

I heard this record for the first time.

I want to thank all of you for inviting us here.

I was supposed to last 13 weeks and the show lasted 11 years.

If you go through 40 years of the school dances, there were on Tuesdays in the gymnasium.

But most of the time you dance with a door knob.

We were swinging them or doing the mashed potatoes, and I learned how to swing from a door knob with just one piece that my hair, the great teens craved the fashion.

They saw it on squeaky clean dance shows.

Hey, no.

Oh, no.

Not the old halo.

You know how my dad and single mom need to go out?

I had a Chesterfield coat.

Everybody wanted a chastity moko, and this was like a war coat with a suede collar nylon like I was in the sixties.

Everybody wore fedoras.

Two women happened to cardigans, sweaters.

I remember a type of shoes called snap checks.

The bond shirts with the stars and the collar had that oh, page boy, page boy.

You know, the flip straight face would have flip flop through this guy like a clean leather key was the beginning, really, of the teenager, Judy.

And so as a teenager, you're you're dating for the first time.

You're driving for the first time, you're working for the first time.

You're spending more time away from your family and you're doing all these things in the context of the sixties time snapshot.

I y y you would try to if it happened to me, it's not part of in life way.

I wanna love my way.

La la la la la.

Way with you is Gene Pitney, a Rockville native, was one of a small group of early 1960s acts who continued to enjoy hits well into the decade.

And here was a kid, the Rockville Rocket to the Sky, and he he became a huge star.

And boy, I'm on a radio or TV from the record store or the high school whether it was on gym, music defined the sixties while music changed with the with society and what was happening in the world.

We kind of went through this period of innocence and reflected in the music of The Boy Meets Girl, all the teen idols that were out, the boys, the bandstand or what have you.

And then our president was assassinated.

Things kind of changed a little bit and they got a little bit more introspective.

I'm just rhythm to myself, attending the folk singer Judy Collins became famous on the UConn campus at the start of the decade.

So we were listening to a lot of folk at the beginning, listening to Connecticut's own Judy Collins is a big influence on me.

Another, you know, girl with big Eyes singing suicidal songs in 1964 that came a sea change.

The Beatles struck a chord in teenage brains across America.

And once American kids saw the Beatles, everyone thought that they could just go out and start their own band playing in the car with me as my friend Rich Ventura.

I punched the button on ABC and I hear on that I dundela it's I want to hold your hand and I'm listening going, Who's that Rich Negro?

I don't know.

Let's listen to them.

And the song starts playing.

And I was like, I got literally got goosebumps.

Tom Violante brought a guitar that afternoon and immediately formed a band that became the Shea de la Connecticut garage.

Rock was born from October.

The SAGs recorded the tried nasal studios under dentist turned manager Doc Cavalier, and then they started banging out all sorts of records that were huge hits.

If you talk to someone who was a teenager in 1965, 66, the Shanks were as big as the Beatles in Connecticut.

We played one year at the Woolsey Hall, a concert with Lesley Gore and Chubby Checker On our way out of the Woolsey Hall and a side exit, we were mobbed.

I lost part of my hair.

I lost an arm on my jacket.

My drummer's jacket, shirt and necklace were ripped off.

And Carl, who's blind, I had to lead him to the car.

He lost his jacket and we finally got in the car and drove away.

Otherwise, I think we would have been standing there in our underwear.

It was this whole English influence thing.

We all wanted to look like the models that we saw from England.

Wow.

So it was the beginning of the creation of the girl as object of desire as opposed to the woman.

And part of that came from the the sort of trimming down and the emphasis on, you know, the eyes and the face as opposed to the voluptuous body of the woman and the clothes I think followed suit.

You had those mini dresses which looked good on a boyish figure, fabrics they used for velvet and even a pulse through fabrics.

I can remember the principal calling me into his office and saying, You know, that hair is not acceptable.

I think he was saying when all I had was be sort of Beatle bangs, I would say Julius Caesar or something.

Wow.

Okay.

Three, two, one, zero.

All right.

We have while Connecticut teenagers were striving for the perfect mop, top Connecticut engineers were striving for the perfect space helmet.

Another eight level, 30 seconds.

I was working on a B 70 airplane air conditioning it when one Friday afternoon appellant came down and said, How would I like to work on putting a man on the moon?

In 1962, Tom Carolla and 35 others made up the entire space department at Hamilton Standard, based in Windsor Locks.

People thought that I was crazy.

I was actually an intelligent human being who was actually working on putting a man on the moon when Apollo Money really hit.

I mean, $26 billion into the Apollo program.

All of a sudden we were 2000 people just like that, people at the height of the space race, Tom's Department grew to 1600 with engineers moving into the state from all over the country.

Hamilton worked to develop spacesuits and backpacks for astronauts.

We didn't have any many places to go to where we could read how to build a spacesuit.

And so the neat thing about the program was that we were constantly learning things, and I couldn't wait to get into the plant to start the work that we were doing that was so much fun to do with people that you really enjoyed and you knew that your work had a purpose.

And one small step for man Part II, at least for me.

Every time one of those things came home, you were just so wow.

And then you couldn't wait to get out to the front of the building.

One where the lobby, the main lobby is because in a way, an astronaut or two were going to be there giving a speech, thanking the people and all that.

The space race was not the only Cold War game in town.

The National Highway Act was passed under President Eisenhower.

The idea was under the auspices of defense to be able to move both both commerce and and troops in case of emergency.

And when they were brand new, they were remarkable.

They were the, as promised, the speedways of the future, I-95 was very disruptive.

It went right through the heart of so many coastal cities, you see, which was very unfortunate.

But people were in a hurry to accommodate the automobile.

These are USA in your Chevrolet.

America is asking you to come drive and there are cheap cars and cheap gas and everybody wants to see the USA in their Chevrolet or a road along a levee.

What then begins to happen is a sprawl of development.

The farms and forests get knocked down and subdivisions and strip malls are built mile after mile after mile and pretty.

So the landscape changes.

There was a slow awakening led by individual groups about the need to pay attention to over development so we wouldn't lose too many species.

So the effects of the building of highways like I-84 and that's specific to Waterbury, I-90 one and I-95, which hit a lot of other communities.

New Haven, Hartford, etc., is to decimate a lot of the working class, affordable housing.

Not only were these minted highways redefining urban neighborhoods, they were connecting the dots of the Cold War.

What are your thoughts right now as you get ready to board the bus?

I don't really know what to think or what to expect.

They're not very explicit.

When you when you're in the enlisting station, it's going to be one hell of a long ride down there.

What did your buddies say when they learned that you had lost it because you did Really?

Oh, okay.

We'll see you later.

You know, what are your thoughts right now?

It's just that I miss my mother, my father.

It's my family.

That's all.

You wish somebody else could be in your shoes right now.

No one.

It.

While the threat of mutual annihilation spurred the building of American infrastructure and a furious race to the moon, there was another part of the Cold War.

Gentlemen, you're about to be enlisted into the armed forces of the United States.

Raise your right arms and repeat after me.

When President Kennedy Space program was announced, there were 16,000 soldiers in Vietnam, the war became increasingly contentious as it was escalated by Johnson and then Nixon.

Greater and greater numbers of Connecticut residents joined in protest as young soldiers returned home.

It brings back your faith memories.

Why is something you never forget?

Because your kid coming home was a great joy.

We had talked about it, fantasized about it, told lies about it.

I came from combat right back to the States.

I remember being downtown with my grandmother and a truck backfired.

I hit the ground.

It's downtown Hartford.

I had look for a safe enclave at the American Legion or the VFW, and that was just wasn't available to us.

You know, you ran into other camps that you want to serve.

You know, we was in different branches, and so we would hang out at night in the park and set up in smoke weed and just talk to each other because no one understood it.

You blend in, but yet you have a lot of other stuff in your head that you don't forget and can't forget.

And as more baby boomers and returning soldiers participated and protests became more intense, their music followed suit.

In 1966, you had the The Ballad of the Green Beret.

Very, very eclectic.

And then all of a sudden, toward the late sixties, you had this more and more angst.

People were yelling and screaming on on records for the first time.

It was reflective of what was going on in in the American psyche.

The Vietnam War kind of hardened us, made us a little tougher than we might have liked to be and made us more aware of what I guess what reality really is.

Not only did music play a key role in the growing anti-war movement, it also served as a soundtrack for the new sexual revolution.

It Ain't Me Looking for the Boys were quoting Bob Dylan all over the place so that everybody was it.

Me, babe, breathe in my ear, which just drove people crazy.

And parents, especially when there were no dirty lyrics in it.

But it was a lot of suggestive lyrics and just the lyric Breathe in my ear was enough.

We were told that a deejay in the South had broken the record and sent it back to the publishing company saying it was filthy and he wouldn't play it.

These were times when getting music was sort of like getting it.

It was like getting an illegal substance.

I mean, it was not just something you could download.

It was not.

It was something that was passed hand to hand by the hip, you know, and you had to really know what was going on.

You had to know somebody who had it.

Now, when they were first starting off in New Haven, before they became the shags, they had a brother and sister, Karen, and Richard, that would come out and enjoy their music.

Of course, they moved to California.

They became the biggest duo in popular music in the seventies simply by using their last name, The Carpenters.

We've only just begun to.

When you think of Connecticut being small in particularly that New Haven area, but it really has contributed a lot to the history of of rock and roll as a work.

You know, it would be true.

One showdown between a young rock rebel and the establishment took place in 1969.

Jim Morrison's arrest at a Doors concert made national news, and he was backstage.

MORRISON This is before the concert, getting a little too aggressive with a underage young lady from the audience.

And a New Haven police officer threatened him a couple of times and then went ahead and maced him.

And Morrison went out on stage and I remember him saying on stage, Jim Morrison said, Tell him to shut the lights off and I'll just start singing.

They shut it off and then they flicked the lights back on.

And and he was actually the first artist ever arrested on stage while performing.

And then we we never got our money back.

When you straight there was again the generation gap where the police I don't know what the police do today at concerts they understand now they're probably rockin too, you know.

Then they were like they didn't like, you know, like statues and like, it was so odd.

While the music of The Doors and others became increasingly important to the counterculture, it was an accidental hit that took a local band to the top of the charts.

In 1969, three guys from Bridgeport under the name Steam created a filler song for the B-side of a new single they were releasing back then.

You had an A-side and a B-side, so they said, Do whatever you want, Just put something on there to have a B-side.

So these guys, for lack of anything else, went back and found a song that the three of them had written eight years prior.

But to dissuade disc jockeys from playing the B-side, they put some obnoxious drum tracks behind it and they put in this long Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah thing about And the matter of a few short weeks kiss him goodbye became a number that.

one hit across the country, and it if you put the radio on and it was am radio back then, if you put the radio on you would hear Frank Sinatra and his daughter at number one with something stupid.

You would hear the Archies and then you'd hear Jimi Hendrix.

It was very eclectic.

I mean, a cross-section of what was going on in America was really reflected in Top 40 music back then.

And then all that I tried and I tried for Baby to Go that I can only give you a me.

Early in the decade as wife, families left cities in search of white suburban utopia.

The government sought to engage African-Americans and Latinos through war on poverty programs while simultaneously revamping urban neighborhoods, failing to meet after Kennedy's assassination.

Johnson In his State of the Union address in 1964, he announced a war on poverty, which was sort of a much bigger vision, I think, than Kennedy had been talking about at the time.

If that assassination hadn't happened, I don't know if Lyndon Johnson would have been at the forefront of the civil rights movement.

The federal government funded community action agencies in cities across the country to deal with issues of employment, education, health care and housing.

We opened field offices throughout the city in each of the designated areas, and they were manned by people who lived in the community and they selected what they felt was the most important issue.

But our particular area for people in that community to know where to put pressure continuously to see that that housing is built according to environment events, that was the reason.

So on mean, it was really exciting and it really presented an opportunity for many of us to get administrative experience.

The programs are funded in 1964 and by 1967.

They're already being cut back.

And why they cut back is because people took this seriously.

And I'm president of the Cork Middle School Citizens Association.

Any type of resolving the we get to design the programs.

We get to sort of critique the the the approaches that that are not working.

And they actually did in many cases cause problems at city hall.

As long as my kids are in the school, I'm going to be here every time you have a meeting where it concerns my and I'm very concerned with my child.

which received more federal money than almost any other city in America, New Haven, was unable to reconcile the desires of the new community action agencies staffed by young women and men of color and older institutions.

time, the so-called Redevelopment Authority of New Haven At that had more employees than the entire city government.

So the money that was coming in from the federal government almost outdid the local budget.

You know, there was wasn't a mobilization that was centered around these community action programs that city halls across the country were not real happy about because the funds came directly to the community.

New Haven's funding was in jeopardy.

One congressional report today we're going to be talking with three of our congressmen.

Senator Dodd will be with us today.

Know lawmakers struggle to allocate limited resources.

I think many of these programs are good, they're worthwhile.

But it's a question of just how much can we afford while this war is going on.

There's a youth growing up that's increasingly discontent with the world of its parents.

There Are youth who are inspired by the model of the Black Panthers.

So there's definitely more anger, more militants, more protests.

Towards the end of the decade, protests against substandard education, housing, job opportunities, training opportunities.

And so the idea, again, was try to build some type of a nucleus here that could address the problems of housing, education, police brutality that really were complicating matters for people of color at that time.

We've had some skirmishes in Connecticut, some demonstrations, but they're all lumped in as riots because they all seem to have the same seeds of foundation.

And the big problem seems to be boiled down to two things housing and jobs.

They're big, ripe.

One minute it was like quiet.

I mean, you know, like people just walking down the street and the word got through the over the television that assassinated Martin Luther King and you went, boom.

Well, first of all, you had people going mad, running and breaking into stores, taking stuff out, looting, although both black and white people participated in the riots.

Police tended to surround African-American and Latino neighborhoods such as the north end of Hartford, concentrating the damage.

There were cops lined up at Bishop's Corner to protect Sean Taylor, I guess, you know, to protect the West Hartford from Albany Avenue creeping out.

And during the riots, they had all these police we could not go past.

We were surrounded.

And at that time, you know, both our police and our fire were not diversified.

supervisors coming to me and says, oh, there's there's the rioting in the street.

I remember my And well, as she was explaining it, I kept saying to myself, she kept saying, they and she's looking at me and they I am they a lot of the stores, vendors in part of our neighborhoods were destroyed and never reopened.

There's something happening here.

But what it is ain't exactly clear.

There's a man with a gun over there telling me I got to beware.

I think it's time we stop.

Children.

What's that sound?

Everybody, look at what's going on.

Because of that, the riots.

There were a lot more shops that closed and merchants that moved out.

Segal's Arms Bakery.

Jameson's Drugstore.

Is.

Epstein brothers for covering.

They all took hits in their minds.

I was riding through the North end with a friend of mine who was black.

We belong to a church organization together.

And he said, you know, get your head down out of the window, Barbara.

So I did.

And I said, I don't understand.

King was all about peace, so why is everybody fighting?

You know, Dr. And he said, What I don't understand, Barbara, is why you don't understand.

I mean, it was just an opacity in my viewpoint that would take years And that was it.

to erase.

Connecticut's unusual in the sense that the violence here ends very quickly.

Unlike Wilmington, Delaware, with the National Guard will patrol the streets for a year after their riot.

Connecticut things subside fairly quickly, and that's largely due to the civil rights structures that were in place.

And organizations like the Panthers that were already active in the community and trying to, you know, further people along and look for other ways, tangible ways to be constructive in dealing with King's assassination rather than destructive.

What happened was the rise of community organizations and people have been very active.

People beginning to run for political office.

So there was this, you know, turnover they could find to be controversial within the community.

The Oakland based Black Panther Party became increasingly influential in Connecticut after MLK assassination.

black leather jackets and berets, this new group spread a message of black pride Armed and dressed in that appealed to young Northern African-Americans.

And they're different in that they're approaching some issues that affect the African-American community in northern western communities that weren't necessarily issues in the Deep South.

So they're looking at issues, for example, of police brutality, which is very different in the north, in the west than it is in the south.

They're also looking at issues of welfare and also city services.

99% of what the Black Panthers did in this country was good.

They were a wonderful, wonderful organization.

They helped feed children.

They helped feed the poor.

They did wonderful things for the areas where they were located.

The Black Panther Party was the original founders of the Breakfast School program because we knew kids were in our neighborhood, because we live there and we were around them.

And so we knew kids were going to school hungry.

The problem with the Panthers, and this is true in Hartford and in New Haven, is that their national reputation was one, an organization that advocated armed resistance.

In fact, they were seen as a reverse Ku Klux Klan.

And a lot of that had to do with the propaganda that was put in place by the FBI to combat the Panthers in their message nationally.

I think it was more of the tact in the community and making people move forward.

A lot of people were scared of us because we were.

Yes, we were.

But we didn't go out looking for trouble.

We didn't carry one trait on us neither.

In 1969, a low level panther named Alex Rackley was murdered in New Haven.

Well, the murder of Alex Rackley in many ways is indicative of the problems the Panthers were having nationally in 1969, all over the country.

And you had these violent encounters between Panthers and police.

And the Panthers find themselves trying to root out informants within their organization.

Panther George Sams, who may have been a police informant, ordered the interrogation of Alex Rackley, a low level panther accused of informing on party members in New York while New Haven Panthers tortured Rackley.

National Panther co-founder Bobby Seale was speaking at Yale in the early hours of May 21st, 1969.

Sams and two other Panthers drove Rackley into a desolate swamp and shot him.

The trial gained national attention when Bobby Seale was indicted, along with nearly a dozen other Panthers.

I mean, there was no disputing that someone had been killed in New Haven.

But the idea of, you know, arresting somebody halfway across the country because he was a leader of the Black Panther Party and dragging them to New Haven, Connecticut, and making them stand trial, I mean, that seemed totally abusive to me.

Ill prepared for May Day, the climax of the sixties in Connecticut, a May 1st protest on behalf of the Panthers on trial in New Haven with violent clashes at Harvard and Columbia fresh in the national memory.

Yale prepared for the influx of tens of thousands of protesters.

We learned that the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, the other major radical groups, decided that they would have a major rally, if you will, in support of the seven Panthers who were on trial.

I had to decide at that point that I was willing to not finish my courses because just about everybody who was involved in these activities ended up taking incompletes, which I did as well.

And the university let people take incompletes because there was just so much going on where we decided we would not lock it up, we would open it up and we wouldn't invite all the radicals to come and live on the campus.

We would feed them and shelter them, if you will.

The second meal will be brown rice, rice and vegetable salad, whole wheat bread, coffee punch until we would rally the college community to work to make this an open place and a and safe place.

All the storefronts were totally boarded up because all the store owners thought there was going to be violence.

And and I think that all the people who were participating in the rally were worried about being tear gassed and drowned.

I went to my old office.

I said, we're going to the green.

And he said, Oh, you dangerous.

No, don't do that, because there's going to be a riot.

There are National Guardsmen on the tops of buildings all around the green ready to to shoot.

And, you know, you'll be in the middle of a melee and of we didn't think that that was really going to happen.

It did walk out a lot into the crowds both day and night.

And there were two things.

It was a segment of the crowd for whom this was a party for the cause.

Secondly, there was a group of people who believe passionately in an ideology, which is this business of being against authority.

And they have requested that people stay off the green of the truck, go around, go, Oh, this is a birthday party.

Oh, my God, Get Despite incredible tension and the use of tear gas against protesters yells Open campus strategy was successful in averting bloodshed.

Four days later in Kent, Ohio, four students were killed by National Guard troops.

I think that, you know, confluence of all those events was, you know, really fairly unique.

You know, everything that was going on in New Haven and the bombing of Cambodia and Kent State, all happening at once is very hard not to get caught up in that and very hard not to think that, you know, the government was your enemy and na na na na na na na na na na na na.

Because of the real politicized nature of the prosecution, it ends up one of these cases where the Panthers are able to make the claims and the government is unable to the claims that this is really a political trial more than it is a murder trial.

In terms of practical results, there's no real justice for what's really.

May Day was radicalizing for many of Yale's first female undergraduates who had arrived on campus.

The previous fall.

When I came to Yale, I had already been involved in some civil rights work about racial issues and racial equality.

I really wasn't thinking much about women's equality.

It wasn't on my mind.

But then coming to Yale and being thrust into this situation where, you know, you knew immediately or kind of a second class citizen and a lot of people treated you like, you know, you were just supposed to be pretty and not smart, turning to yourselves and saying, but gosh, I'm not just an animal.

We can gel, but not you know, it really you know, it made me start thinking.

And then The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan had been recently published and there started to be meetings at the close of the decade.

Germaine Greer and Kate Millet wrote groundbreaking works, plaid skirts, gave way to jeans and colleges across the northeast, became coed.

Come on.

And then sort of starting to read these books by these women with Kate Mallette and The Feminine Mystique.

And then I'm thinking, okay, wait a minute, you know, I have an education to get.

And that sort of gave me the appetite for it.

But really, from picking up those books that were funny and engaging and seductive in their writing about women's autonomy really changed the way I looked at life.

influential publications of the women's movement came out of New York.

One of the most Two of its first contributors lived in Connecticut.

We had a call from the magazine.

She said.

We're starting a new magazine.

It's called Mayors.

Have you heard that term?

And we said, yes, we had heard it.

We knew what it meant.

And she said, we want to use your article.

The next thing, we got a telephone call from Gloria Steinem saying.

You have to do it.

You can't not do it.

This is what the women's movement is all about.

Everybody has to do what they can do.

And we did it.

And with a new consciousness, female students began to use skills from the civil rights and anti-war movements to organize for themselves that are going to continue on and on.

You are trying to do you feel that women in general are in need of liberation?

Yeah, definitely.

I think we've been down too long.

Men have downtrodden us for a long time.

Why do you think that people to a man, because everybody was created equal.

I think that the idea that there even was something called the women's movement was a very deal.

As the long 1960s wore on.

It was not only women who challenged gender norms.

One day I saw it's the first time I seen a boy, a man, a male with a full head of hair like a girl.

And he was driving away from me.

I was in a car in a convertible.

I said, Boy, I got to get a look at this chick.

So I drove by and it was a man, but from the back you would never know it.

And that got me wondering.

And that was I think they were called hippies at that time.

And he was, Oh, you were a girl if your hair, long hair.

And the hair wasn't even that long.

Everything was just clean cut and a certain way.

So I guess it was Things are changing fast.

A hate shop opened up on the corner of Church and Trumbull, and they sent me down there to take a look at some just those kids are really nice.

I mean, they looked a little hi to me, but they were polite.

After returning from Haight-Ashbury, Rafael DeLauro opened a head shop in New Haven.

Yes, I went to art school and wanted to be an artist.

I didn't mean to start.

I had a child.

It just happened.

I was making a little pipes and stuff like that.

And before, you know, people are buying them.

And then we're selling beads and somebody was making garments.

I mean, maybe it looked like a hang out, but young people were attracted to this little metal thing happened and they were just when we went in, we were and they were, you know, like in the music we had and we used to play, you know, LPs, you know, on a little turntable.

Now, the energy flowed so easily between art, music, poetry.

When somebody flashed that to you, the the peace sign said it was magic.

And someone did that to me.

The first she was in a bus going by and I was in love.

You know, that feeling of connection, you wore what you felt long hair and music and you wanted it.

You know, we You didn't do it to harass other people, and you did it because that's what you wanted.

Who if you were a hippie, how long here everyone thought you smoked dope?

You know, you probably did.

But some people came hippies, but many people did not.

There are times when I feel really good about what happened in the sixties, and there are times when it's it's really upsetting to look back at everything that was going on.

I mean, it was so much going on.

It just propelled you to become more active, participate.

And I think that I grew up at a time where people felt like political change was possible.

They're fighting for freedom of speech.

Long hear civil rights, women's rights.

You can't say enough about the sixties.

Never get your heart that it's going to be over for me.

My grandma.

Maybe I'm not supposed to know many of those times, and if nobody ever known, that's the way I feel.

That's all working.

That's okay.

So the whole place now about a better place?

Yes, some.

Okay.

That smile on my face.

Don't teach myself how to understand.

Don't make myself a better man, Jamil.

Make my whole world better.

Let's go.

Keep that smile on my face.

Don't teach myself how to understand.

Go make myself a better star.

Oh, about on my wall.

Yeah, I'm better make.

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