In the spring of 1970, thousands of protesters descended on New Haven, Connecticut, to demonstrate against the trial of members of the Black Panther Party, including Ericka Huggins and co-founder Bobby Seale, for the kidnapping and murder of suspected FBI informant Alex Rackley. Led by radical luminaries including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Jean Genet, the demonstrators converged on the New Haven Green to vent their anger and shut Yale down. Forever endearing himself to a generation of activist students, Yale President Kingman Brewster famously noted, “I’m appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” Hoping to avoid the crises that had engulfed other universities, Brewster welcomed and fed the demonstrators in an attempt to lower the temperature on campus. Brewster commissioned a small group of Yale students to document the demonstrations, and Yale’s handling of them, which resulted in this short film. The film is credited collectively to May First Media, which included filmmakers Josh Morton and Nick Doob, and who were advised by Yale faculty member and filmmaker Michael Roemer. The events of May 1970 in New Haven were filmed for at least three other projects, including Bright College Years, made by Peter Rosen in 1970 and preserved in 2024 by the Yale Film Archive, as well as unfinished films by Paul Williams (with cinematographer John Avilsden) and Kartemquin Films.

Of the many defining moments that capture the seismic change of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the Summer of 1963 is among the most influential, representing one of the largest human rights rallies ever recorded in the US, drawing over 200,000 participants. The Bus, by lifelong activist and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (1922-2015), gives agency to the anonymous faces at the March, capturing in intimate detail the story of one small group of individuals that travelled across the country to stand in the shadow of the Washington Monument and demand equality and human rights for African-Americans.
Self-funded, produced and photographed by Wexler with a skeleton crew that included filmmakers Nell Cox and Mike Butler, this vérité documentary begins in San Francisco as an integrated group of 37 people, young and old, embark on a three-day cross-country road trip organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. Employing a raw, unobtrusive shooting style, Wexler and his 16mm Auricon sync-sound camera are never acknowledged (or seemingly noticed) by his subjects, as charged conversations and small but extraordinary moments of candour are gleaned on the journey: an elderly gentleman calmly details how a white mob tried to kill him the last time he was in DC, decades earlier; a white bus driver, a self-avowed ally of the cause, worries that the scope of protest may cause white Americans great anxiety; a young African-American man passionately calls out his fellow riders when they show apprehension at an unfamiliar stop, fearing confrontation by angry whites. The collective result of such scenes is a film of major consequence, a record of the everyday faces and voices behind a watershed moment in U.S. history. For film historians, The Bus also serves as a key example of Wexler’s early development as a singular, world-renowned film artist.

Mark Quigley and John H. Mitchell