"Playing in the Doll's House of Revolution": White Students and Activists Involved in the Black Power Movement

By his own admission, Gary Howard was not exactly a likely supporter of the Black Power movement that took American inner-city ghettos – and many college campuses – by storm in the late 1960s. An upper-middle-class white student from Seattle who began attending Yale in 1964, Howard arrived in New Haven with “the Bible in one hand and a copy of Barry Goldwater’s platform in the other ” 1 – hardly the image of revolutionary fervor associated with black power and ‘60s-era student activism. However, the same religious impulses that seemingly separated him from the increasingly violent Black Power movement in the late ‘60s initially drew him into the inner-city communities where Black Power started, as he began community service work in a New Haven community known as “the Hill”. The Hill was an impoverished, largely African-American ghetto ripe with simmering anger towards white establishments and general frustration with and distaste for the incremental approach to civil rights with which they associated “do-gooder ” whites such as Howard. After living amid the desperation and chaos of The Hill for three years, and attending a Black Identity and Leadership summer camp where Howard was confronted with his legacy of white privilege that he had previously ignored, Howard came to identify strongly with the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers in particular, “see[ing] the water of White dominance as a highly 1 Gary Howard, “White Man Dancing: A Story of Personal Transformation. ” In Christine Clark and James