The Week in Brief

Beinecke, SML honor Amistad captives

Beinecke featured artwork by New Haven resident William H. Townsend. The pencil sketches were drawn in 1839 while the Amistad captives awaited trial in a local jail.

Christa Sammons, a Beinecke curator, explained that the sketches were placed on display in response to the recent popularity of Steven Spielberg's film. "The sketches are a first-hand look at those people who were part of this town....They are very vivid images of great historical significance," Sammons said. The exhibit will remain on display until Sat., Jan. 31.

In addition to Townsend's drawings, there was a slide presentation called "Amistad: The True Story Behind the Movie" in Sterling on Mon., Jan. 19. An open discussion entitled "Reflecting on the Legacy of Cinque and Martin Luther King, Jr." followed the slide show.

--Sangeetha Ramaswamy

Black activist reflects on adversity at Yale

LIZ OLINER/YH Activist Eugene Rivers

Rivers spoke following a well-attended screening of the 1974 documentary Black at Yale, which was written and directed by Warrington Hudlin, ES '74. The film explores the contradictions and alienation that Hudlin and other black Yalies faced, as well as the gap between the urban black poor and the black middle class.

In a fiery question-and-answer period, Rivers said current black leftist thought is irrelevant to the real problems of race. "The intellectual elect won the university and lost the country," he said. "The fluent black intelligentsia has failed in a post-Civil War context to create a real social and intellectual framework. There are just no new ideas."

Now a Protestant minister, Rivers declared that "because the intellectuals are brain-dead," the black church is probably the only progressive black institution. "Only a language of faith has the psycho-cultural capacity to transform a people so clearly damaged and yet obsolete for slavery," he said.

--Molly Ball

M.I.T. Enterprise Forum to boost city business

The company held its first Yale meeting on Wed., Jan. 21, at the School of Medicine. The presentation featured a speech by Edward B. Roberts, MIT's highly acclaimed professor of management of technology.

--Melissa DePetris

Panelists criticize city for pollution record

The panel criticized New Haven's Harbor Station as one of Connecticut's "Filthy Five" fossil fuel-burning power plants. State law permits these older plants to emit two to three times the normal limit of pollutants, a loophole environmentalists want to abolish. "This is something that should have happened over 20 years ago," panelist Bernadette del Chiaro of the Toxics Action Center said.

An elderly resident complained about pollution from the New Haven plant near his house. "I don't get any sleep because I just can't breathe. I got soot in my hair that I can't wash out," he said.

--Drew Swan

Yale psychiatrist is key witness in murder case

The defendant had already confessed to killing Leshea Pouncey, whose two-year-old daughter was in the same room when Person stabbed her to death. Merikangas was called to testify regarding Person's motive for the murder.

Person was a "natural-born killer," according to Merikangas' analysis. "We had proof that he had brain damage," the psychiatrist said, proposing lead poisoning or a bicycle accident as possible causes for Person's brain injuries. "That made him unable to control his violent impulses."

This is not the first time that Merikangas has taken the stand for his psychiatric analysis. Last year, he was the sole defense witness in a case in which the defendant killed his best friend. In that case, Merikangas proposed that the defendant suffered extreme emotional disturbances that caused him to lose control.

--Joshua Marks

Back to News...