Black Student Power in the Late 1960s

`Harlem vs. Columbia University:
Black Student Power in the Late 1960s'--
Review of Stefan Bradley's new book

http://bfeldman68.blogspot.com/2009/09/harlem-vs-columbia-university-black.html

September 16, 2009
bu Bob Feldman

HARLEM VS. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Black Student Power in the Late 1960s
By Stefan M. Bradley
Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press (2009)

In the epilogue of his great new book on the historic 1968 student
revolt at Columbia University , Harlem vs. Columbia University,
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html
which "attempts to draw out some of the important factors that
contributed to the 1968-69 uprisings," St. Louis University Professor
of History and African American Studies Stefan Bradley notes that
"although many of the participants have since passed on, the issues
at Columbia seem to linger." This was borne out at a 2008
commemoration event held on Columbia's campus to mark the 40th
anniversary of the student revolt. A Harlem Tenants Council activist
denounced the Columbia Administration's current 17-acre campus
expansion project in the neighborhood north of West 125th St. and
passed out a flyer in which the Coalition to Preserve Community group
of community residents vowed to stand against Columbia 's " West
Harlem eviction plan."

Professor Bradley also observes that over 40 years after the student
revolt, some of the black students who participated in the
non-violent student occupation of Hamilton Hall in April 1968,
"bristle at the image of the Columbia demonstration that media
sources often invoke" and "are dismayed at the representation of the
rebellion as one where raucous white youth defied their parents and
authority by taking over buildings…"

A key reason why the white students at Columbia and Barnard who were
active in its Students for a Democratic Society [SDS) chapter were
able to mobilize large numbers of white students to help shut down
Columbia a few weeks after Martin Luther King's assassination was
because a political alliance developed between Columbia SDS and the
black students who were most active in the Student Afro-American
Society [SAS] campus group. So a book like Professor Bradley's book,
which focuses more on the role that the black students who occupied
Hamilton Hall played in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt than on the
role of Mark Rudd and the white student demonstrators, is long overdue.

By examining the 1968 confrontation between the Harlem community (and
its student supporters at Columbia) and Columbia's board of trustees,
Bradley attempts to: (1) explain how it was possible for Columbia to
take land and power from black people before 1968; (2) determine the
effects of the confrontation method that the 1968-69 student
protesters used; (3) explain why the black and white student
protesters separated after Columbia's Hamilton Hall was jointly
seized by them; and (4) explain why Columbia eventually capitulated
to some of the demands of the student demonstrators. The first part
of Harlem vs. Columbia University explores Columbia's historic
relationship to Harlem's people and land, while the second part of
the book examines the historic role students played in attempting to
change Columbia's institutional policies.

The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University includes an
interesting history of the Harlem and Morningside Heights
neighborhoods surrounding Columbia's campus and explains why
community resident opposition to Columbia developed. Bradley recalls
that "there was only one full-time black faculty member at Columbia
by the mid-1960s;" and, during the 1960s, 9,600 tenants,
"approximately 85 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican," were
pushed out of the Morningside Heights and West Harlem apartment
buildings or Single-Room Occupancy [SRO] residential hotels which
Columbia University purchased and demolished or converted for its own
institutional use.

Bradley next focuses more specifically on Columbia's plan to
construct a gymnasium for its students in Harlem's Morningside Park
and the history of community protests against this project. We learn,
for example, that in a January 29, 1966 editorial, Harlem's
African-American newspaper, the Amsterdam News warned:

" If Mayor Lindsay permits Columbia University to grab two acres of
land out of Morningside Park for a gymnasium it will be a slap in the
face to every black man, woman and child in Harlem…Columbia
University, one of the richest institutions in the nation, only
admits a handful of Negro scholars each year and its policies in
dealing with Negroes in Harlem have been described as downright
bigoted…Why then should the parents of Harlem give up their parkland
to Columbia? What has Columbia done to merit such favoritism?"

Thirty-one years before, W.E.B. DuBois had also written in his
classic 1935 book Black Reconstruction In America that "the Columbia
school of historians and social investigators have issued between
1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the
Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according
to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South;
second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro…"

By digging up flyers of various 1960s community groups and articles
that appeared in various neighborhood newspapers and the local
African-American press, Bradley indicates that between April 1966 and
March 1968 there were at least four community rallies against
Columbia's gym construction project and at least 25 arrests of
anti-gym protesters before April 1968. As Bradley observes:

"After realizing that they would receive access to only 15 percent
of the proposed structure that Columbia University would control, and
be forced to use a different entrance, many black residents in the
community saw that things were once more separate, but hardly
equal…Instead of fighting against Jim Crow, the community now fought
against Gym Crow…"

In the second part of his book, Bradley relates the growth of the New
Left and Black Power movements on U.S. university campuses during the
1960s and describes the initially integrated protest effort of the
black and white student demonstrators at Columbia on April 23, 1968,
on campus and at the Morningside Park gym construction site as well
as inside Hamilton Hall during the first few hours. He goes on to
show how the black student protesters in Hamilton Hall won some
concessions from the Columbia Administration by aligning themselves
with off-campus Black Liberation Movement groups and the Harlem
community. Bradley also provides a good description of what happened
inside Hamilton Hall, after the white student demonstrators were told
to leave Hamilton Hall and explains the political and strategic
rationale of SAS leaders for their decision to separate themselves
from their white student allies.

Bradley goes on to indicate the supportive role of SDS and its
objective of increasing white student support for the Black
Liberation Movement at Columbia and includes a description of what
happened when a thousand New York City police were called in by the
Columbia Administration on April 30, 1968, to arrest student protesters.

Bradley breaks some new ground in late 1960s Columbia historiography
by showing how, "at Columbia, the strategies and goals of Black
Student Power continued into the spring of 1969 as the black student
group, with the support of SDS, called for changes in admission
policies" and observes that in the 1960s Columbia's black students
"were regularly stopped by the security guards…to have their
identifications checked while most white students were not stopped."
Bradley is among the first historians to write a detailed historical
summary about black student activism on Columbia's campus during the
1968-69 academic year. He also provides a concise summary of black
student protests at Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and
Cornell (that received less mass media publicity than did the 1968
Columbia student protests) which reveals to readers that Columbia
University was "not the only Ivy League university to be impacted by
Black Power" in the late 1960s. Yet as late as 1984 there were still
only three tenured black professors at Columbia and the university
did not recognize a black studies program until 1987.

One very useful feature of the book is a collection of rare
photographs of some of the black participants in the 1968 Columbia
uprising and the excavated gymnasium construction site in Morningside
Park that weren't included in most previously-published books about
the student revolt. But there are also a few omissions or
inaccuracies in the book. For example, it inaccurately states that
Mark Rudd "decided not to return to school" in the Fall of 1968,
when--as Rudd notes in his recent autobiography, Underground-- he was
actually expelled from Columbia. In addition, although Bradley notes
that "SAS and SDS participated in student-supported on-campus
demonstrations throughout the month of May", readers of the book
would not learn that on May 21, 1968, the Columbia Administration
called police onto its campus a second time, the police rioted again
and, a leader of SAS, Ray Brown, was clubbed to the ground and then
kicked systematically by a crowd of cops.

Despite these few omissions or inaccuracies, Harlem vs. Columbia
University does a much better job than previously published books
about the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt of-- from a deeper anti-racist
perspective-- highlighting the relationship of the late 1960s Black
Power Movement, the history of the Harlem community, the Black
radical left and left nationalist intelligentsia and the role of
Black students and Harlem community activists to what happened at
Columbia in 1968 and 1969 and the current position of
African-Americans in the Ivy League academic world. So if you're
interested in the history of 1960s movements, Harlem and Columbia
University or if you're a 21st-century opponent of institutional
racism at Columbia University and at other Ivy League universities,
Harlem vs. Columbia University should be considered required reading.

.