http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_hilton_o_080527_columbia_student_reb.htm
by Hilton Obenzinger
May 27, 2008
Meditations in a Time of Delusions and Lies 28
Paul Spike was going to participate in "Voices of 1968," a reading
featuring poets, novelists and other writers as part of a conference
commemorating the 1968 student occupation and strike at Columbia, and
he wanted me to take a look at the piece he had just written. I sat
with Paul just before the reading on the ledge in front of Columbia
University's famous Alma Mater statue on the steps of Low Library,
our backs against the pedestal.
Alma Mater sits with a book on her lap and her arms outstretched to
both sides, the mother of wisdom offering herself to all of her
children. Anti-war students had pulled a black hood over her head and
connected mock electrodes to her hands a couple of days before. The
iconic statue had turned into yet another icon, the hooded
crucifixion image of Abu Ghraib.
Paul writes novels and non-fiction – he's also a journalist, the
first Yank to edit Punch. For this event, he wrote of the murder in
1967 of his father, the Protestant minister who led the civil rights
work of the National Council of Churches, marching with Martin Luther
King in Selma and elsewhere. The murder remains unsolved. Paul has
long suspected that the murder was a political assassination – but
his grief was only an entry point to his main purpose: to offer an
apology to Columbia's black students of 1968.
Why an apology?
Forty years before, Columbia had wanted to build a gym in Morningside
Park, and the community and students (and the parks commissioner and
the mayor) objected to the landgrab by a private entity of a public
park. And to make it even uglier, the magnanimous university allowed
for the Harlem community to use a small part of the gym, except that
the students (almost all white) would enter from the front door and,
as the park sloped down hill toward Harlem, the black community would
enter the facilities from the back door. This smacked of Jim Crow
– in fact, we called it Gym Crow – and it was emblematic of the way
the university lorded over Harlem. At the same time, the university
persisted in conducting counter-insurgency research to support the
Vietnam war, despite avowals by President Grayson Kirk and others
that Columbia had cut all ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses
(IDA), the consortium of universities conducting the research.
Tensions had been building for a long time. But in a swirl of events,
starting with a rally at noon, April 23, 1968, students spontaneously
rushed to Morningside Park to tear down the fence around the
construction site, and then ended up occupying Hamilton Hall, the
main undergraduate classroom building, with Dean Henry Coleman in his
office. (A day or so later, the black students asked the dean if he
was hungry, and suggested that he go get lunch across the campus,
never saying he was released, so as to avoid any impression that he
had been held hostage in the first place.) In the middle of that
first night the black students in the Students Afro-American Society
asked the white students, led by Students for a Democratic Society,
to leave: the black students would hold Hamilton Hall on their own,
and they invited the white students to take over their own building.
And they did, with great enthusiasm. In the end, four more buildings
were occupied, including the president's office in Low Library –
which is where I spent that week.
Once we were ensconced in Low, we tried to keep the office suite as
clean as possible, considering that it held about 125 people, and we
set up cramped living quarters. We also dug out the files on the IDA
that proved the university's complicity and spirited away copies to
expose the truth in the underground press.
The faculty tried to intervene and negotiate, and it soon became
obvious, no matter what kind of maneuvers by President Grayson Kirk,
that the gym and the defense contracts would be dead. In the end, one
demand remained the thorniest: amnesty. We felt that we would not
accept punishment for doing the right thing, and that if the
university wanted to punish us that they should just go ahead and do
it, but that we didn't have to agree to accept it in exchange for . .
. being right.
According to former Deputy Mayor Sid Davidoff, the city urged the
university to grant amnesty. That would isolate Mark Rudd and his
band of radicals, Davidoff had explained his strategy, and he warned
that the police were frustrated and itching for blood, "chewing on
their nightsticks" in buses for days. Once they were unleashed, he
had explained to the university administration, they could not be
controlled. Meanwhile, Yale President Kingman Brewster and others
called Kirk, telling him to stand firm, that if Columbia gave in to
amnesty, other universities would collapse in the face of student
rage – another version of the domino theory.
Kirk finally did send in the cops. The black students, advised by
lawyers, told the police that they would not resist but that they
would not leave Hamilton Hall without being arrested, and they
allowed themselves to be cuffed and taken away with no violence.
Their approach prevented black students from being brutalized, a
spectacle that could have ignited Harlem, and their charges were
limited to criminal trespass and no more.
The white students in the other buildings offered passive
non-violent resistance of various forms – and as a consequence they
were severely beaten. Over 700 were arrested that night, and over a
hundred injured, as the cops charged through faculty and students
outside the buildings and bloodied many of those inside.
Events spiraled after the bust into a strike involving the entire
university, including faculty, and to other occupations,
demonstrations, police riots, and negotiations, going on through the
next academic year and beyond. The gym was history, the war research
was canceled, and Columbia went through a process of rebuilding
itself and, with other universities, reforming higher education to
include more democratic governance involving students and faculty,
innovations such as black and ethnic studies and women's studies, and
a deeper sense of accountability. The discourse of "diversity" and
"multiculturalism" arose from the revolts of Columbia, as well as
other schools, to the dismay of the right-wing to this day.
So, forty years later, we came together on the campus from April 24th
to 27th with current students, faculty and community members to
commemorate the revolt. The "wrinkled radicals," as the student
newspaper called us, reconnected and exulted, sensed our mortality
and mourned, perhaps all to be expected at any kind of reunion. We
wanted, as Gus Reichbach, now a judge in New York, underscored, to
show today's students that it's possible to live lives committed to
social justice – and still have fun. But we also wanted to discover
the deeper significance of the strike and its legacy. With the
country embroiled again in yet another immoral war and Columbia once
again expanding into Harlem, the similarities and differences were
crying out to be explored.
The day before the conference, the New York Times published a
personal reflection on the strike by critically acclaimed novelist
Paul Auster, "The Accidental Rebel." He had been part of the
occupation of the Math building, and he too would read at "Voices of
1968." Auster constructed the little essay around the idea that 1968
was "the year of craziness, the year of fire, blood and death . . .
and I was as crazy as everyone else." He went on to observe that
"Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had
been dealt," which was the threat of being drafted into a war that "I
despised to the depths of my being." He reflected on the gym, the
landgrab, the backdoor apartheid quality, but for him the war was at
the center of his own revolt. He didn't recant, had no regrets, and
"was proud to have done my bit for the cause," even though he felt
that not much had been accomplished, considering that the war
continued to drag on for too many more years. And then, noting that
he would not say "the word 'Iraq'" (and by not saying it, did just
that, in great Jonathan Swift tradition), he ended his piece with
humorous defiance that "I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."
Auster's "craziness" managed to surface periodically through the
conference panels on Vietnam and Iraq, on the ethics of protest,
race, the legacy of the student movement, the emergence of the
women's movement, and more. Longtime activist Tom Hayden, also a
veteran of Math, objected to the essay, regarding Auster as
trivializing the protest as insane, an aberration, and not a
political eruption. The next day, philosopher Akeel Bilgrami regarded
Auster's craziness differently, describing it as part of Erich
Fromm's observation that, in an insane society, one must become
"crazy" to become sane, one must disrupt the bland, grim normality of
the lunatics in charge. In fact, Erich Fromm spoke at the
counter-commencement held by protesting students in 1968, so Bilgrami
may have certainly captured one aspect of the spirit of the age. At
the same time, Ray Brown, one of the leaders of the black students in
Hamilton Hall, also objected to considering what the African American
students had done as "crazy." As the conference would reveal, the
black students felt they had to act with utmost sanity to undermine
racist expectations. All of this was quite a bit of play for a little
personal reflection – but it was, after all, the only voice in the
New York Times for what we had done, so a lot more hung on a short
essay than anyone might otherwise note, and the controversy was intense.
Indeed, we met with almost the same intensity as we did 40 years ago
– minus the cops. But much of what took place was unusual, and a bit
surprising. In our self-reflection, "crazy" was able to take on all
sorts of meanings.
Most electrifying was a multimedia re-creation or tableau called
"What Happened" that presented a narrative of events, starting on
April 23, 1968, with participants describing their experiences at
each juncture. Eventually, this narrative-testimony will be brought
together as an audio and textual document, hopefully with additional
accounts by those students who supported the university
administration, and others, such as the police and surviving
professors. But even with the dozens of those who took part in the
strike testifying at this event, we learned much of what really took place.
For example, the women's movement was just beginning, and Columbia
would be one of the last major protests where male monopoly of
leadership and traditional gender roles went unchallenged. It was
impossible to revise those dynamics entirely today – Columbia was
all-male then, and we could not change that fact – but we were able
to highlight the role women played and the rumblings of imminent
eruption. For instance, a key juncture in the rebellion was when the
demonstrators on April 23rd found themselves locked out of Low
Library, the main administration building, and were frustrated in
their attempts to confront the university administration. At that
point, accounts note that anonymous cries went out, "To the gym! To
the gym!" whereby the crowd headed to Morningside Park to tear down
the cyclone fence at the construction site. At "What Happened," we
learned that those shouts were not anonymous: Bonnie Offner Willdorf
and Ellen Goldberg announced that they had been the ones to re-direct
the demonstration: "It was two women who called out 'To the gym! To
the gym!'" Two women acting "crazy," violating the decorum expected
of Barnard students, and they led the auditorium once again in cries
of "To the gym! To they gym!"
But it was race relations that was the most volatile, then and now,
and the revelations were the most startling – which is what drove
Paul Spike to write his essay in response. In 1968, as I outlined
earlier, there were two main groups of students driving the protest,
black students led by the Students Afro-American Society, and the
rest of the students, overwhelmingly white, led by Students for a
Democratic Society. During the upheaval, there were two distinct
perceptions of strategy and tactics; and afterward, there were two
different streams of experience and memory. After the bust, we went
our separate ways, politically and socially; and now the conference
finally allowed these two streams to converge: black and white came
together, and we came to understand each other far better than ever before.
All the students who occupied the campus buildings had agreed on the
racist dimensions of the gym. The Morningside Park structure was
regarded as an attempt to grab land from Harlem with the added horror
of what was in effect a segregationist plan for its use. For the
black protestors, Vietnam was critical but the gym was the
particular, immediate focus: they were black students at an elite
institution that was doing harm to the black community, which meant
they had a special responsibility to stop the gym. Columbia had only
just begun to allow in more than a handful black students, but they
were far fewer than the white students. Nevertheless, the black
students were far more united on fighting segregation, despite their
politics ranging from pan-nationalist to leftist to conservative, and
they had to act together with far more deliberation than the unruly
mass of students who first occupied Hamilton Hall. For years, many
of the white students were perplexed, even somewhat hurt: Why were we
asked to leave? At "What Happened," Ray Brown and other black student
leaders explained the care and discipline the situation demanded,
their experiences in the civil rights movement, their knowledge that
they were representing the race, which meant they did not want any
allegations of misconduct or damage to the property to divert
attention from the political demands, no "crazy" behavior, and they
were repulsed by the chaos of hundreds of undisciplined white
students. He explained how all of this made it necessary for the
black students to invite the white students to take their own
building – particularly since the black students faced the danger of
beatings or even death far more than the white students, and that
danger required their utmost cohesion.
We also learned that guns had indeed been brought into Hamilton Hall,
as had been rumored for 40 years, but, more importantly, that the
leadership had asked for them to be removed the next day. Behind this
there was another telling revelation: When the leaders of the black
students in Hamilton Hall met with Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael,
Percy Sutton, Basil Paterson, and other Harlem leaders, they were
told that Harlem was exhausted from recent rebellions and would not
rise up to defend college students, even black ones. Consequently,
the leaders of Hamilton Hall decided upon a magnificent bluff: to
make the fear of Harlem's rage part of the protest, even though they
knew there was no real basis for it. And it was that fear of Harlem
that kept Columbia's administration from sending in the cops that
first day; it was their fear of black rage that provided the leverage
for all of the students to make their demands.
Despite the central role of the black students and their relationship
with Harlem, the media had portrayed the strike, from the start, with
SDS and Mark Rudd solely at the center of the rebellion, rendering
SAS and the black students in Hamilton Hall almost invisible. Most of
us saw the distortions of the media at the time, but the swirl of
events and the gulf between black and white made it difficult to
counter this image, along with other nonsense about the white
students being mindless barbarians seeking, in the words of
Columbia's president, "inchoate nihilism." But for years, the black
protestors were resentful that they had never been given due credit,
that their role had been erased, and that the white students were
complicit. Ray Brown noted in an interview how much it would fly in
the face of white supremacy for an elite university and the media to
admit that black students had actually led the action which brought
the Ivy League school to a halt. (Even today, when Tom Brokaw decided
to make a documentary about 1968, he only sought out Mark Rudd for an
interview, not Ray Brown, Cicero Wilson, Bill Sales, or any of the
other black leaders.) So, at the conference everyone re-affirmed the
decisive, leading role of SAS and the black students, without
negating SDS's role. At a panel the next day Mark Rudd acknowledged
the pain the distortion had caused, and he discussed how he had spent
years "un-becoming" the media construction of "Mark Rudd."
But there was more. During "What Happened," the black veterans of
Hamilton Hall began to share stories of the ugly personal abuse they
had suffered at Columbia and Barnard. Robert Friedman, one of the
conference organizers, described some of the accounts in an essay he
wrote for the student newspaper The Columbia Spectator for which he
had been the editor in 1968: "Zack Husser, a black football player at
the time, talked about his anger at coach Buff Donelli's 'stacking'
system, which involved putting most of the black athletes at the same
position, regardless of where they had played in high school,
resulting in all but one of them sitting on the bench. Al Dempsey,
now a judge in Atlanta, talked about how his experience at Columbia –
including being stopped by security guards every time he entered the
campus – was more painful than growing up in the South. Indeed, he
said, more painful than anything in his life other than watching his
wife die of cancer."
Campus guards, mostly black and Puerto Rican themselves, had no
guidance on how to respond to the presence of more than a handful of
black students, and they constantly checked IDs. Leon Denmark
recounted how he told one security guard who had harassed him that he
was going to watch to see if he would also check the IDs of all the
white students passing through the gates. Black students were
rebuffed by professors when trying to attend their classes, and many
of the white students were crudely racist. There were no black
professors, no black administrators, and the higher echelons of the
administration ignored the concerns of the black students, and when
they turned to the leading intellectual lights in the faculty, such
as Jacques Barzun, they were treated with disdain. In fact, as Ray
Brown explained in an interview, only the younger administrators gave
them any heed. Ironically, Dean Coleman, who had been held "hostage,"
was actually well-liked by the black students because he would at
least meet with them. After black students banded together to form a
fraternity as a safe haven to maintain their dignity, they were
derided by The Jester, the undergraduate humor magazine with a photo
of Africans dressed in finery with the caption: "Black Brothers: Six
members of the all-Negro pledge class of the prospective Columbia
chapter of Doo Be Doo Be Doo."
The white participants in the conference were stunned by the
revelations. (I don't remember even seeing the copy of The Jester
with the offending photo at the time: I didn't think much of the
magazine to begin with.) In 1968, and 40 years since, the white
students, many of whom had been active in the civil rights movement,
had not fully understood the bitter personal pain our classmates had
endured, and the shock was electric. How could we have missed such
blatant discrimination?
And so, I sat with Paul Spike beneath Alma Mater to review his essay.
I suggested a word here or there, pointing out where he might have
been over-generalizing, small changes, but with the essay's basic
apology remaining as he intended. That night, at "Voice of 1968,"
marvelous writers who had been involved in the protests read from
their works, including Thulani Davis, Mary Gordon, Bob Holman, James
Simon Kunen, Sharon Olds, Jonah Raskin, Kathy Seals, David Shapiro,
Meredith Sue Willis. Paul Auster opened the event, commenting on the
"crazy" controversy, explaining how the Times enforced all sorts of
restrictions (e.g., can't say "cops," must say "police officers"),
then read an excerpt on failure and fear during his time at Columbia.
Ntozake Shange, who had recently suffered a stroke, also
participated. At the outset of the reading, she slowly made her way
to the front of the auditorium with the help of a walker and an
entourage of friends in order to read just one poem. Her eyes filled
with tears, her voice cracked, and then she left with as much poise
and dignity as she had come. It was that important to her, to mark
her presence as part of the occupation and strike, and she had
struggled to be there.
Soon Paul Spike mounted the stage to read his essay, first describing
the murder of his father and reading a eulogy from Martin Luther King
and a message from Stokley Charmichael, and then moving on to the
revelations at the conference:
"Despite having grown up inside the civil rights movement, and my own
painful legacy as a result of what happened to my father, when I
heard, as we did last night, that a black man's experience at
Columbia was far worse than his life in the segregated South, this
was a shocking revelation for me. I had never understood the personal
pain that was being felt by black students here on campus. Of course
I was very conscious of what was happening throughout the country
during the Movement years, but I now understand that I was, at best,
indifferent and, at worst, complicit in the persecution they
suffered on this campus.
"Of course, what we did in the buildings and in our protests was an
effort based on our sincere political beliefs about racism and the
war. But, on a personal level, I was a Good German."
Paul ended by asking "all of the black students at Columbia in 1968
to try to forgive the adolescent self-absorption and intellectual
mindlessness, even the privileged racism, which failed to grasp the
reality of their suffering, which failed to reach out to them." The
response was thunderous, and Paul Spike's little essay became a key
juncture in a conference already filled with astonishing moments.
But why had so many of the white students occupying the buildings
been so blind to the personal abuse the black students had faced? And
if it were self-absorption or personal racism, how did that come
about among such a large group of people who believed they were
acting militantly to oppose racial inequity? It's hard to imagine now
how deeply racism had cut through our lives 40 years ago.
For my class, the class of 1969, only about a dozen black students
had been admitted, and I knew only one or two. Only with the classes
of 1970 and 1971 had the numbers climbed, although even then the
amount was still small, and the alienation still great. James
"Plunky" Branch, one of the students in Hamilton Hall and now a jazz
musician, recalled that, when he arrived as a freshman at Columbia in
1965, "I had to learn how to see White people with my physical eyes,
having come from a Richmond, Virginia, where there was an avoidance
of looking at white people, and where, by the time I left to go to
New York for college I knew but one European (my high school Russian
teacher)."
Jim Crow was not yet history, despite whatever gains had been made.
Only a couple of months earlier three black students had been
murdered by state troopers in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when they
protested a segregated bowling alley, although the press barely
mentioned the killings. And only weeks before the events of April 23,
1968, Martin Luther King had been murdered.
How much had white and black been able to look at each other with our
physical, much less spiritual, eyes at that time? How comfortable
could a black student feel describing the abuse he faced? How
confident could a black football player feel that one of the white
players would understand how he was denied his chance to play? Tommie
Smith and John Carlos had not yet raised their fists at the Olympics
in Mexico. So much had yet to come: the Third World Strikes at SF
State and Berkeley, the Open Admissions struggle at CCNY, Alcatraz,
Wounded Knee, the Chicano Moratorium, the Asian American movement,
the Young Lords, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and
much more. After all the gains in the fight against segregation and
for civil rights by April 1968, America was just on the verge of even
greater changes, as incomplete as they may yet be. In 1968 we could
hardly dream that an African American would make a serious run for
president in 2008.
We were blessed at this conference with the good fortune to come
together to fight for our history. We would not cede our stories to
others less interested in the truth of our experience. We would make
sure that our perspective would be lodged in any historical account.
And, in a way, the conference itself became a small historical
moment: we were able to re-visit the past and take what we did then
one step further today. Something new was being worked out, another
beginning, a way to reaffirm and extend the vision against war and
racism that had propelled the rebellion – and our lives – 40 years before.
--
Hilton Obenzinger is the author of "American Palestine: Melville,
Twain and the Holy Land Mania," among many other books of criticism,
poetry and fiction, and the recipient of the American Book Award. He
is a long-time Jewish American advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Hilton Obenzinger teaches writing and American literature at Stanford
University.
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