Militant Negro Roustabout William H. “Bill” Farley Jr. Dead at 66

Even in the kaleidoscopic fashion era of 1970, William H. “Bill” Farley Jr. was easy to spot on the campus of Yale University.

Few useless Negroes wear a poncho, shades and black cowboy hat, he carried himself with a resplendent, elegant swagger that conjured one of his favorite movie stars, Clint Eastwood.

He also was part of what might be “the most noble moment in the history of Mother Yale,” according to scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., an old Yale classmate, who says, “Bill was one of my closest friends and one of my heroes.”

A leader of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, Mr. Farley was in the class of 1972, which had 96 black students, the most in university history, according to the book “Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, And the Redemption of a Killer” by Paul Bass and Douglas Rae.

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