Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968 (iv)

Sokolow, Brian and I had found a rent-controlled apartment on W.106th St. and Amsterdam Ave. in May and--after being forced to pay our new Midtown Manhattan landlord a $600 bribe in order to get him to agree to give us a lease—we moved there in June. Brian immediately sublet his room for the summer to a Columbia student from Great Neck who was anti-war and had been arrested during the first bust, but who was no longer interested in political activism. Brian then went up to his parents’ home in Hartford, Connecticut, where he had lined up a summer job. A few days after Sokolow and I moved into the 106th St. apartment, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California, and I ended up watching the funeral on TV with Sokolow in the Upper East Side high-rise apartment of his parents.

Because I was working during June, I did not go to the June 1968 SDS National Convention which, surprisingly, elected Bernardine as SDS Inter-organizational Secretary, after she declared that she was a “revolutionary communist” in her politics. But much of my summer spare-time was spent hanging around the Columbia Strike Committee’s “Liberation School.”

The Liberation School was located between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. in a Columbia fraternity house on W.114th St. The Columbia Strike Committee had sublet the frat house for the summer. Initially, many people attended Liberation School classes in the afternoon and in the evening. But by the middle of July, only a small number of people were hanging out around there, or attending classes there, on a regular basis.

Much of the work in running the Liberation School was done by Josie and Dionne, although JJ and Lew also could be seen hanging out there often during Summer 1968. Josie remained very energetic and militant and spirited during Summer 1968, dropped out of Barnard, cut herself off from the Duke family and its fortune, spoke to the press often, became a full-time Movement activist and, for awhile, seemed to become emotionally close to Lew.

Dionne had worked at Citizenship Council prior to the Columbia Revolt, but after the revolt she also dropped out of Barnard and became a full-time SDS Movement activist. She was from Westchester, had long blonde hair and wore both mini-skirts and blue jeans. A few runaways and a few FBI informants also seemed to hang out around the Liberation School during Summer 1968.

An older guy in his early 30s, who was dressed in a suit and tie and was named Bruce, first appeared around the Movement at this time. He attended a class on Columbia’s housing polices and started to participate in SDS strategic debate at the Liberation School. Bruce helped start the Columbia Tenants Union around this time and, as the head of the Columbia Tenants Union he became a thorn in Columbia University’s side for many years, before he was found murdered over 20 years later.

Among the favorite books discussed at the Liberation School during Summer 1968 was Carl Oglesby’s Containment and Change paperback, which described the history of U.S. imperialism in the world in a concise, clear way that didn’t rely on vulgar Marxist jargon.

During mid-June, I ended up being chosen as the spokesperson for the 70 or so suspended students. We held a press conference in which we vowed to register at Columbia in the fall, and I was interviewed for a local TV news show. In mid-June 1968, it still seemed possible that Columbia could be forced to rescind all of its suspensions. But—just in case Columbia didn’t take me back—I visited an experimental college of CUNY in Staten Island—Richmond College—and applied for admission there, in order to protect my 2-S status and continue to avoid the Viet Nam war draft.

To attend Richmond College in those days only cost $120 per year in tuition, as compared to Columbia’s tuition of $1,900 per year. So it seemed like purchasing my draft deferment at Richmond College was a better bargain than purchasing it at Columbia. Richmond College’s young faculty, led by a Columbia College graduate named Professor Nachman, had been sympathetic towards our student revolt and had passed a resolution which urged Richmond College to admit any students that Columbia had suspended for political reasons.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968 (iii)

The cops entered Hamilton Hall, wearing helmets, in the early morning hours of May 22, 1968, put handcuffs on Mark and, in a non-brutal way, escorted us all through tunnels out of Hamilton Hall, into waiting police vans and down to the 100 Centre St. Tombs jail. Before being arraigned, we spent most of the morning hours in crowded, uncomfortable jail cells. As we were led into the City cells, I heard one official of the liberal Lindsay Administration self-righteously say to some arrested student: “You students are the ones responsible for the right-wing backlash!”

The student smirked and replied: “Bull-shit!”

At the morning court arraignment, people arrested in Hamilton Hall were charged solely with “criminal trespassing,” with the exception of Mark. Mark had not been beaten, but he was now being charged with crimes like “inciting to riot” and “criminal solicitation,” in addition to his “criminal trespassing” charge. If ever convicted of these crimes, he faced a few years in jail. Some activists who had attempted to mobilize students outside Hamilton Hall to resist a second police invasion of Columbia’s campus were being charged with crimes such as “conspiracy to commit murder.”

What had happened was that while we were being non-brutally escorted from Hamilton Hall in the early morning hours of May 22nd, hundreds of Columbia and Barnard students on campus, in imitation of the students in Paris, had begun to spontaneously construct barricades by the 116th St. entrances to the campus, to try to prevent a second police invasion and occupation of their campus. Columbia President Kirk and Mayor Lindsay, however, ordered their cops to clear the campus and a police riot, even more brutal than the police riot of April 30th, occurred.

Hundreds of Columbia students were beaten, shoved or chased into dormitories by cops. SDS people who were seen speaking through bullhorns were singled out by plainclothes cops for special battering with blackjacks. Robby and Ron were sent to the hospital with quite serious head wounds. African-American student leaders like Ray were roughed up brutally. Columbia and Barnard students fought back more militantly than they had on April 30th but, since the students were unarmed, disorganized and possessed no clubs, the cops were able to seize the campus within a few hours. A few bricks had been thrown at some cops, but nearly all the people who ended up in the hospital were again unarmed students.

Around this same time, Mark, Lew, Bill and Ray appeared on David Susskind’s TV talk-show. On the talk-show, Susskind was very hostile towards the student leaders and appeared to act as an apologist for both the Columbia Administration and the NYC Police Department. What Susskind didn’t reveal on his show was that during the previous year he had signed a lucrative contract with the NYC Police Department which gave him free access to NYPD files for use by the scriptwriters of his NYPD television series on ABC—in exchange for New York City Police Department veto power over all the shows produced by Susskind for his cop-adventure series.

Following the May 22nd bust, more students were radicalized and many Columbia College seniors walked out of Columbia’s official commencement ceremony (which was being held in St. John’s the Divine Church for security reasons) in early June to attend the Columbia Strike Committee-sponsored “counter-commencement.” This “counter-commencement” was held in front of Low Library and was addressed by both Eric Fromm (the author of The Sane Society) and Dave.

“We don’t want to fill the corporate slots we’re supposed to fill. And the reason why we were treated seriously by the Columbia Administration this spring is that, for the first time, we took ourselves seriously,” Dave said.

The Spring 1968 term had ended at Columbia and, although I was now suspended, I did not think that Columbia would be able to open up again in Fall 1968 if we were able to mobilize and organize our mass New Left white base of students effectively prior to September.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968 (ii)

In order to finance a June move from Furnald Hall to an off-campus apartment on W.106th St., I had to start working 9-to-5 again in mid-May. Despite the mood of Revolution throughout the world, landlords in New York City were still able to force their tenants to pay rent for their housing. I landed a job on W.125th St. as a clerk in Columbia’s Alumni Office, but was fired within a week—after I began talking with the most disgruntled African-American worker at the place about the need for unionizing Columbia clerical workers.

I soon found another job, however, by being in the Columbia Citizenship Council office one afternoon. Citizenship Council was using work-study money to finance a research pamphlet, which would describe Columbia’s relationship to the West Harlem/Morningside Heights community in which it was located, and it needed to hire an additional researcher/writer. Because I had discovered Columbia’s connection to IDA, Cit Council head Ziff quickly hired me as one of his pamphlet’s researchers, when he noticed me in the Cit Council office.

The job only paid $90 per week. But it enabled me to spend my days during June, July and August of 1968 interviewing both Columbia administrators responsible for its real estate policies and community tenant leaders like McKay and Hickerson. It also enabled me to do library research for money, under the supervision of a left-liberal Columbia student from Scarsdale named Rauch. Although I was able to document in concrete ways the number of tenants evicted and housing units destroyed during the 1950s and 1960s as a result of Columbia’s neighborhood gentrification and institutional expansion policies, Rauch—not me—had control of the overall writing of the pamphlet. So the final draft of the pamphlet was not radical in either its content or its conclusions. But working as a researcher-writer in Summer 1968 felt less oppressive than working all day at the Mental Health Clinic in Queens General Hospital had seemed, the previous summer.

Despite all that had happened in April 1968, the Columbia Administration still insisted on disciplining members of the IDA 6 during May 1968. Consequently, when the suspension of members of the IDA 6 on May 21, 1968 was announced, New Left white students marched from a sundial rally in the afternoon into Hamilton Hall again. This time, however, Columbia’s African-American student leaders did not choose to join SDS people in organizing an occupation of Hamilton Hall.

Believing that their biggest mistake during April had been not calling in police quickly enough after Hamilton Hall had been first occupied and before other buildings had been seized by students, Columbia President Kirk and Vice President Truman decided to clear out Hamilton Hall of New Left students as quickly as possible and with as little police brutality as possible. Within Hamilton Hall on the evening of May 21st, New Left students were quickly threatened with suspension by the Columbia Administration if they did not leave before police came in to arrest them. The atmosphere inside Hamilton Hall on the night of May 21st thus quickly became less frivolous than it had been prior to SDS people being asked to leave by SAS leaders on the night of April 23rd.

Despite the events of the previous month, many of the students who initially occupied Hamilton Hall were uneasy about staying to get arrested there, once it became clear that the Columbia Administration was going to take an uncompromising line, call cops again and suspend more students. This reluctance was reflected in the debate inside the building and Columbia SDS leaders like Mark and Ted were later accused of manipulating people to stay inside Hamilton Hall and ignoring certain votes that reflected the uneasiness some students had about prolonging the occupation.

Although over 200 people had originally marched into Hamilton Hall, by the time the cops were to arrive less than 150 people were willing to get arrested. Most of the people who had been arrested during the April 30th campus bust or the off-campus bust in front of the W.114th St. apartment building chose to avoid a second arrest, not only because of the threat of suspension, but also because a second arrest was likely to tie them up in much deeper court difficulties. Because I had only been beaten, not arrested, on April 30, 1968, I felt obligated to risk an arrest on May 21st, 1968. The threat of suspension did not worry me too much because I felt we were justified in occupying Hamilton Hall again and I felt the only value of retaining my student status at Columbia was that it was the most convenient way to protect my 2-S deferment from the draft.

Right before the cops came into Hamilton through underground tunnels, the 130 of us who had remained there sat peacefully and sang Freedom Songs. Both action-faction people and praxis-axis SDS people were sitting in with me, as well as more newly politicized students and non-students. I noticed both Ted and Mark there, and I was happy that even the threat of suspension and more arrests could not discourage us all from refusing to compromise with our class and generational enemies. The Columbia trustees still had the cops. But we still felt we had the just cause and the U.S. Establishment had no moral right to punish us for resisting its institutional policies.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter 17: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968 (i)

I first heard Bernardine speak in a room on the second or third floor of Ferris Booth Hall in May 1968. She was in her mid-20s and was dressed like a straight, middle-class radical lawyer. She wore a tight skirt, not jeans, and was representing the National Lawyers Guild. The Lawyers Guild had agreed to represent all the students who had been arrested following the April 30th police invasion, and Bernardine’s speech explained in a coherent way what was the current legal situation of arrested people, in the eyes of the Guild. Bernardine spoke in an efficient, unemotional way and she seemed to be more of a radical lawyer than a New Left political activist. She seemed smart. But she also seemed more middle-class fashion-oriented than bohemian or hippie-oriented in lifestyle.

Bernardine had grown up in the Chicago area, studied at the University of Chicago and worked with Martin Luther King during his 1966 open housing campaign in Chicago and Cicero, Illinois. She had moved to New York City during the year before the Columbia Student Revolt in order to work as the National Lawyers Guild’s campus organizer. Although she had traveled to many U.S. campuses on behalf of the Lawyers Guild and spoken on topics such as draft resistance law, few people within Columbia SDS steering committee circles had heard of Bernardine prior to her May 1968 appearance in Ferris Booth Hall.

As May 1968 unfolded, the student revolt in Paris’s Latin Quarter, that attracted the support of French industrial workers and nearly brought down the French government, reinforced Columbia SDS’s notion that revolution in an advanced capitalist country like France or the United States was, indeed, possible.

Michael and his community activist allies secretly planned to take over an apartment building on W. 114th St. that Columbia was in the process of emptying in order to use the apartment building space for Columbia’s School of Social Work. A rally was held in mid-May, our mass base of students marched off campus from the sundial to the site of the community’s occupation of Columbia’s apartment building and a number of students who hadn’t been arrested or clubbed during the April 30th campus bust sat down in front of the W. 114th St. building. Columbia called in City cops to reclaim its apartment building and arrest those Columbia and Barnard students or community activists who were either sitting in the street or occupying the apartment building. The cops made over a hundred arrests but were not brutal when they arrested people this time.

Mark was among the students arrested outside the W. 114th St. apartment building. At the time of the April 30th campus bust, Columbia SDS people felt that there was no need for Mark, himself, to get arrested inside one of the liberated buildings, because he could best serve the cause by continuing to speak to the U.S. mass media after the mass arrests were made. Following the April 30th police invasion, however, the Establishment’s media tried to make political hay out of the fact that, despite his militant leadership, Mark had “not even been willing to get arrested with his followers” on April 30th. To disprove this Establishment propaganda ploy, Mark felt it was necessary to submit to arrest when the mid-May seizure of a Columbia apartment building occurred.

As the cops made their arrests on W. 114th St. and pushed onlookers back towards the campus while the off-campus arrests were made, I felt that, despite our sense that revolution was possible, given what was happening in France, we really were going to get nowhere—unless we could figure out a way to overcome the Columbia Administration’s ability to keep calling in police.

Among the community activists arrested with Michael in the W. 114th St. building was an old CP activist of the 1930s named Hickerson, who appeared to be in his late 60s or early 70s. Hickerson had fought against Columbia’s real estate policies for many years and during 1968 was a popular speaker at Columbia SDS rallies because he combined a militant verbal attack on Columbia’s gentrification and expansion policies with a strong opposition to the “crimes of monopoly capitalism,” whose interests Columbia served.

Columbia SDS people (who now worked under the banner of the Columbia Strike Committee) continued to produce a lot of political literature during May 1968, in order to consolidate the New Left’s mass base; and debate continued as to what the next political goal was to be. We rejected the notion that our goal was to simply establish student power at Columbia or student control of Columbia at this time. We argued that until the whole society was changed by revolution, it was utopian to expect that Columbia could become an oasis of democracy within an imperialist society. We also argued that Columbia should serve the interests of community residents and humanity, not just the interests of students.

Influenced by the establishment of “Critical Universities” by student radicals in France and West Germany, Columbia Strike Committee people made plans to establish a “Liberation School” with “liberated classes” during the summer. In this “Liberation School” students would be offered tuition-free courses by Movement people on subjects that were relevant to the cause of Revolution. By attending our Liberation School, students would learn what education at Columbia should really be like and would come to realize why the “bourgeois education” that Columbia provided before the April 1968 revolt was nothing more than pro-capitalist indoctrination.

During May 1968, classes were cancelled by Columbia because of the student strike’s success and students were marked on a pass-fail basis for the courses they were enrolled in prior to April 23, 1968. Yet, given the magnitude of the revolt’s impact, the marks and classes of the pre-April 23rd era at Columbia seemed irrelevant to most Columbia and Barnard students.

Within the New Left, JJ’s political prestige rose dramatically as a result of the Columbia revolt because the revolt proved that--despite JJ’s pre-revolt inability to convince anyone else that immediate campus disruption, not educational forums, was the quickest way to radicalize students--JJ had been strategically correct all along.

Wearing a headband and looking like a hippie for the first time, at a meeting of the Mathematics Hall “commune” (students within each building had begun to identify themselves collectively as “communes” in the days prior to the April 30th bust) in May 1968, a former ideologue of the Praxis-Axis, Evansohn, smiled sheepishly at me one afternoon and said: “You know, JJ was right all along.”

As a result of the Columbia revolt, people now took JJ seriously as a New Left political thinker and strategist and, when he rambled on in his usual way in political debate, he now seemed to make sense and people now paid attention to him. Mark, in particular, began to follow JJ’s political and strategic lead; and he was able to then articulate JJ’s politics in a more persuasive way than JJ, because Mark’s oratorical skills were greater than JJ’s, and he possessed more charisma than JJ.

Phil Ochs visited Columbia again after the April 30th bust and gave a free concert one evening inside Wollman Auditorium, as a tribute to participants in Columbia’s student revolt. His biggest cheers came after he sang “I’m Gonna Say It Now.” The Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg also showed up at Columbia, following the revolt.