Harlem vs. Columbia University: 40 Years Ago

What We Can Learn from Harlem's Encounter with Columbia University
Forty Years Ago

http://hnn.us/articles/95270.html

By Stefan Bradley
7-20-09

The story is all too common: large institution wants to expand;
local residents oppose large institution; large institution expands
anyway. There are countless instances, from sprawling Super Walmarts
providing cheap shopping in rural areas to institutions of higher
education gobbling up city blocks to provide a service for the larger
society.

That currently seems to be the case with Columbia University in the
City of New York as it expands into the Manhattanville section of
Harlem. There was a time, however, when a seemingly powerless Harlem
prevented the powerful Ivy League university (and alma mater of the
current president of the United States) from achieving its expansion goals.

When time and space collide, the result is history. As Columbia
University met with the tumultuous 1960s, it found itself next to an
increasingly militant black community in Harlem that had grown to
resent the elite Ivy League institution. Taking advantage of the
urban renewal movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Columbia
attempted to keep the neighborhoods that surround it in check by
purchasing land and buildings. While expanding, Columbia eliminated
housing for poor, black, and Puerto Rican people. Although these
residents were rankled, many felt as though they could not resist the
desires of the second largest land holder in the city. That was, at
least, until time and space caught up with Columbia.

Harlem activists intensified their campaign against Columbia in the
mid-1960s when the university attempted to build a gymnasium in a
park that separated the predominantly white institution from
Harlem. In the almost scripted fashion of the Civil Rights movement,
community members first launched their opposition to the gym by
appealing to university and city officials. Columbia officials
explained that the new facility would benefit both the university and
the community, with 85 percent of the floor space dedicated to the
university and 15 percent to the potential community patrons.

In the late 1960s, time met space when Black Power came to
Harlem. Black Power activists did not advise appealing to
institutional white power, but rather demanding and, if necessary,
taking control of issues that affected black people. The few black
students on Columbia's campus took up the campaign against the gym as
part of their desire to advance the black freedom struggle. At the
same time radical white students saw the gym, along with the school's
ties to war research, as an issue that could help to jolt the
majority white student body from its apathy with regard to university
policy issues. In this rare case, local residents, in alliance with
black politicians (including Charles Rangel, Shirley Chisholm, Basil
Paterson, and Percy Sutton), activists (like Bayard Rustin, Stokely
Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown) and students from Columbia provided a
new model for history.

With the riots that occurred in Harlem after the April 4, 1968
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. looming in the minds of
university and city officials, the Columbia administration eventually
suspended construction of the gym. That was not, however, before
students staged a weeklong demonstration that ended with 1,000 city
police officers brutally removing the youthful demonstrators from the
campus buildings they had seized. Riding the tide of the victory
over the gym, in 1969 Columbia's black student activists continued
the movement by demanding a black studies institute. They, like
other black students in the Ivy League, brought the philosophies and
methodologies of Black Power to campus.

It took the efforts of an assortment of groups to prevent the
university from taking even more space and control from Harlem. It
also took the influence of several social movements­antiwar,
youth/student power, Civil Rights, Black Power­to shape the opinions
of those involved. Columbia, whose leaders often dictated economic,
social, and political policy in the nation and the world, could not
defeat the will of the people in the 1960s. The gymnasium in the
park would have been a symbol of the racism and powerlessness that so
many Harlem residents and black people throughout the nation had
faced. While those residents knew that they could not keep Columbia
from expanding in the future, they could at least lay claim to a
small victory over what they viewed was an overbearing institution.

There is much to be learned from Columbia's historic relationship
with Harlem. For instance, institutional expansion in itself is not
necessarily detrimental to a community, but expansion without the
consultation of those who are to be impacted is a sure sign of future
difficulties. For as much good as Columbia has done and will
continue to do for the world, it can do as much damage to the
neighborhoods into which it expands. When considering the history of
Columbia University in the City of New York and Harlem, one finds
that no institution is impregnable. Although rare, the people can
muster the power to change their situations by using time and space
to their advantage.
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Mr. Bradley is assistant professor of history and African American
Studies at St. Louis University. He is the author of the new book
Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late
1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

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