A little-known act of rebellion against the state — involving Black Panthers, a judge, and a sketch artist — emerged this week in the filtered light of Beinecke Library. Read on to learn, and see, more.
The subversion is on display on the second floor of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at 121 Wall Street, in an exhibit called The Black Panthers Trial: Courtroom Sketches by Robert Templeton. The exhibit opened Wednesday and runs through March 2.
The exhibit features a display case full of sketches Templeton made for CBS News in 1971 when he observed the murder and conspiracy trial of two people labeled subversives by the U.S. government, national Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins. The state sought the death penalty for the pair in connection with the 1969 torture and murder in New Haven of falsely accused spy Alex Rackley. The trial attracted national attention and protests.
The subversive nature of the new Yale exhibit has nothing to do with the Panthers, FBI tactics, or SDSers and other militants who gathered on the New Haven Green at the time vowing to burn down the town.
Instead, the act of subversion was Templeton’s drawings themselves. He defied the judge by drawing them, on the sly. There were strict rules at the trial: No photographs. And no drawings.
The order came from Judge Harold Mulvey. Mulvey proved the most interesting, perhaps even redeeming, character in the trial drama. He started out despising the Panthers, their supporters, and civil-rights leaders. He ended up setting Seale and Huggins free in the wake of a lack of solid evidence against them. Mulvey proved that, contrary to doubts expressed by Yale’s then-president, Kingman Brewster, a black revolutionary could indeed receive a fair trial in America.
Yet this exhibit shows how even an exceptionally fair-minded jurist could succumb to petty, unreasonable rules in the courtroom that call into question the openness of the legal system, like the one prohibiting illustrations.
A 1972 Waterbury Republican article included in the Beinecke display describes how Mulvey met personally with Templeton after deputy sheriffs escorted the surreptitious artist out of Courtroom B for the second time.
“The judge reminded him that he was accredited as a reporter and not as a working artist. ‘‘He said to me,’ recalled the artist, ‘‘“You can’t look up and down.’” The judge was trying to impress on Templeton that he had to work as a reporter, looking at his pad, while listening.”
The apocalyptic days surrounding the trial seem like a century, not just 36, years past. However, the arbitrariness of the court system continues. The public, including reporters, still can’t bring cameras into the state and federal courthouses in downtown New Haven. Nor cell phones.
Some of the restrictions have to do with post‑9/11 security. But some, like the camera restrictions, well predated 2001. Rather than establishing a sense of order, they shut the public out. They make the proceedings of Justice, so important to have on the widest possible display, less visible to the wider world.
Yet Robert Templeton managed to capture all the key players, and the feeling of the courtroom, in sketches that were flashed to the nation. That qualifies him as a hero for the public interest.
And it qualifies the Beinecke display as a worthy contribution to the unearthing of history. Templeton’s sketches fill a multi-part display case a good eight feet high. Yet the exhibit shrinks in magnitude against the backdrop of Beinecke’s marble walls, which rise at least five times as high. In context, it makes for an inspiring scene. Because unlike the marble walls in the Elm Street courthouse where the Panther trial took place, Beinecke’s marble walls let the sunlight in.
