Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968

Chapter 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968 (iii)

By September 1968, the Columbia Strike Committee’s sublet of the W.114th St. fraternity house for its Liberation School had expired and the headquarters of Columbia SDS and the Columbia Strike Committee was moved into an apartment a few more blocks south of the campus. It was there that I met with Mark and Lew prior to the day when we were planning to confront the Columbia Administration over its refusal to allow Mark to register.

As part of his effort to divide Columbia SDS’s mass base by developing a split between our newly-radicalized left-liberal supporters and our radical hard-core supporters, Columbia President Cordier agreed to drop charges against most of the arrested students and not take any disciplinary action against those arrested students who agreed to visit the dean’s office and acknowledge the legitimacy of the University’s disciplinary authority. And it turned out that--despite the summer events in Chicago increasing the sense of white student political alienation in relation to the Democratic and Republican parties—a summer away from Columbia and traveling in Europe or being at home with parents had caused many newly politicized student rebels of Spring 1968 to become more politically cautious by Fall 1968. As memories of the spring term busts at Columbia had receded somewhat and a summer of isolation from other enraged students had also helped defuse memories of the spring, a sizeable number of white participants in the revolt were inclined to accept the partial amnesty that Columbia was offering most Columbia and Barnard students.

In addition, the African-American students had quickly chosen to visit the deans and meekly return to class during the fall term, because they did not feel that the white New Left’s goal of continuing to keep Columbia shut down was either practical or relevant to their collective concerns. This fact encouraged many white left-liberal participants in the spring revolt to feel morally justified in also passively returning to class in Fall 1968 at Columbia.

True, we still had maybe 400 to 500 white activist students and non-students in early September around Columbia who appeared willing to keep the fight going in confrontation with the Columbia Administration, until Mark was let back in and until more of our radical New Left goals were achieved. But as long as the Columbia Administration did not call in the cops to invade the campus a third time, it began to appear unlikely that our mass support was going to expand rapidly enough in September to be able to prevent Columbia from returning to business as usual, despite the events of the previous spring.

In the early weeks of September, our afternoon and evening rallies and demonstrations were still well-attended and we were able to disrupt an Administration-sponsored meeting of Freshmen in Low Library. When Hayden spoke on campus, fresh from the war on the streets of Chicago, in early September, there was also a large crowd in attendance and the mass spirit was high. An international conference that included student rebel leaders from France, West Germany and Italy which Lew had organized also attracted a good crowd and kept mass spirit high (despite the fact that deep ideological divisions were revealed at this conference between the student leaders of each country). It started to again appear possible that we would be able to shut down registration at Columbia and prevent classes at Columbia from beginning--until everybody who was not being allowed back into Columbia because of their political activity in the spring—including Mark—was allowed to register.

But in mid-September, when the afternoon to disrupt registration came, we did not have enough militant anti-Columbia demonstrators in our march of 300 students who were willing to use physical force to push aside a few African-American security guards that Columbia had shrewdly hired—to keep us from sitting-in at the old on-campus gymnasium where Columbia had shrewdly decided to have its fall term registration. Although a picture of Mark and Gus unsuccessfully trying to push past Columbia security guards appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine the following week, to symbolize a new wave of campus protest that was beginning again around the U.S., our failure to occupy en masse the site of Columbia’s fall registration meant that fall classes at Columbia were going to resume. We had naively expected the spontaneous, unorganized mass militancy of our supporters to be sufficient to enable us to get past the registration area security guards some way, in the same way that spontaneous, unorganized mass militancy had carried us into the Columbia buildings during the spring revolt.

Another reason why Columbia SDS people couldn’t prevent the Columbia Administration from reopening the University in Fall 1968 was that both the Labor Committee and PL each flooded the Columbia scene with at least 10 of their dogmatic members. The Labor Committee and PL sectarians were able to drag the chapter into lengthy sectarian debates and faction fights that demoralized and turned off many returning veterans of the spring revolt, as well as new members. Instead of being able to spend SDS mass meeting time figuring out ways to more effectively mobilize Barnard and Columbia students to confront the trustees, much of the mass meeting time had to be spent with Columbia New Left activists exposing the inadequacies of the politically sectarian proposals of the Labor Committee people—who were acting as external cadre for Lyndon LaRouche/”Lynn Marcus”’s cult group, within Columbia’s SDS chapter.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968

Chapter 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968 (ii)

Except for Lew, Mark and me, by Fall 1968 most of the people who had been active during the first year of Columbia SDS’s existence had either moved on to other arenas of activism or retreated from Columbia SDS politically. Ted, Teddy, Josh, Harvey and Peter Schneider had all enrolled in a NYC Board of Education teacher-training program during Summer 1968. Their plan was to protect their draft deferments by teaching in the public schools during the 1968-69 academic year while, at the same time, attempt to organize teachers into a “Teachers for a Democratic Society” (TDS) New Left post-graduate Movement group, around anti-imperialist politics.

Because the Columbia Administration withheld Ted’s diploma from him, he became ineligible to teach in the City public schools. But through a friend of his family, he was able to protect his draft deferment by landing a job in a private school for the emotionally disturbed. In the evenings and on weekends, however, he worked as a Movement regional organizer for TDS during the 1968-69 academic year, as did Teddy.

Within Columbia SDS leadership circles in early September 1968, Lew and Mark were still the most influential people. But there was some negative feeling developing towards Mark among other Columbia SDS activists who were somewhat jealous of his newly-acquired mass media celebrity. These activists felt that Mark had become too “egomaniacal” as a result of all the mass media publicity.

During the summer, a number of position papers had been written which recommended various possible September 1968 fall strategies. Sokolow and I had felt that, in addition to working to completely win amnesty and our other Spring 1968 demands, Columbia SDS should also demand that Columbia’s Graduate School of Business be shut down, because it trained managers for U.S. imperialism and for the efficient exploitation of the U.S. working-class. We showed our position paper to Lew, but he and Robby were wedded to a strategy of using exemplary action only to completely win the Spring 1968 demands and to shut down Columbia’s NROTC unit.

I was for mobilizing people to eliminate Columbia’s NROTC program as well. But, unlike Lew, I felt that without equally targeting Columbia’s School of Business we were failing to adequately generate sufficient anti-capitalist, pro-working-class consciousness. There was little Columbia SDS leadership inclination, however, to attempt to shut down Columbia’s Business School. But a consensus was reached by people like Lew, Robby, Stu, Mark, Sokolow, Josie, Juan, Dionne, myself and other New Left SDS people to focus on both winning the 6 demands and eliminating NROTC on campus in the fall.

Our Fall 1968 strategy of exemplary action was developed as a result of collectively analyzing both the French student revolt of May and the lessons of our own revolt of April and May. The fundamental idea was that New Left students at Columbia could most effectively win the support of both the mass of students on other campuses and the mass of U.S. working-class people, not by leafleting outside factories or on other campuses (as advocated by Lynn “Marcus” and Tony’s Labor Committee), but by engaging in disruptive exemplary action at Columbia which would, by its example, inspire students and workers elsewhere to occupy those institutions which most affected their lives.

Between early May and September, the trustees of Columbia University attempted to defuse the situation at Columbia by appointing a commission headed by a Harvard professor named Archibald Cox, by setting up a new campus disciplinary process according to rules drawn up by a Columbia Law School professor named Sovern and by appointing a former UN official named Cordier (who had previously headed Columbia’s School of International Affairs) to replace Grayson Kirk as Columbia University President. In the course of doing a background check on Cordier, I discovered that he had played a key role in creating the conditions that enabled the CIA to eliminate Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in the early 1960s.

As my last Columbia SDS research project before enrolling at the low-tuition Richmond College, I put together a research paper on Cordier’s connection to the Mobutu overthrow and assassination of Lumumba, which described how Cordier used UN funds to pay anti-Lumumba soldiers and authorized UN forces to prevent Lumumba from speaking on the radio and rallying his supporters. As a sourcebook, I used Kwame Nkrumah’s book, Challenge of the Congo. Dionne liked the pamphlet and arranged to mimeograph a few hundred copies to pass around campus as a first step towards revealing whose special interests Columbia’s new president served.

In preparation for the New Left’s recruiting drive during Freshman Week, Mark put together an updated pamphlet, entitled Why We Strike, which used material I had written in the spring and summer describing Columbia SDS’s pre-revolt attempts to change Columbia’s institutional policies using the so-called legitimate channels and documenting which apartment buildings and SRO buildings Columbia had emptied, converted or knocked down during the 1950s and early 1960s. Around this time I was also invited by Klare to join a NACLA research project on the mass media. On the day of the June 1968 “counter-commencement,” NACLA people had sold a magazine-like pamphlet, titled Who Rules Columbia?, which contained dirt on Columbia that even Columbia SDS had not previously known about.

I chose not to join NACLA’s mass media project after attending one meeting of the group in an Upper West Side apartment. Following the relatively sympathetic mass media coverage of the Chicago Democratic National Convention anti-war protests (perhaps because more journalists got beaten by cops there than at Columbia), I—perhaps mistakenly—felt that Movement people should focus on finding dirt on the police—and not on the mass media—at this time. I also felt that the NACLA people were still more into research in an intellectually elitist way than into activism, but that I was more of an activist than either a researcher or an intellectual elitist, myself.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968

Chapter 18: Summer In The Streets, 1968 (i)

July 1968 is pretty much of a blur in my memory. My de-classified FBI files indicate that I was under intensified FBI surveillance, along with at least 59 other Columbia SDS activists, around this time. And FBI people even went out to Queens to interview neighbors of my parents, in an attempt to find out more about me. It also was around this time that I attended my first Black Panther Party rally, which took place at W.116th St. and Amsterdam Ave. The Harlem branch of the Black Panthers, although infiltrated by police and FBI informants, was led by a guy who sounded like a solid African-American revolutionary and who appeared to be in his late 20s.

There were also a number of spirited, spontaneous marches in the street around this time. One night, a few hundred radicals marched in front of Manhattan District Attorney and Columbia Trustee Hogan’s apartment and, another night, we marched through Harlem, where crowds appeared quite sympathetic to us. There was also a demonstration outside the 100 Centre St. courthouse around this time.

During July 1968, I also read Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait and re-read Malcolm X’s Autobiography. Then, as a tribute to Martin Luther King, I wrote the song “He Walked Up The Hill,” which contained the following lyrics:

He walked up the hill
And he knew it was willed
That the white racists they would slay
All the good men who crossed their way
And what else is there left to say?
Look! The Black Prince of Peace now lays.

And all go and pray
Though they kill people everyday
Their soldiers kill ‘cross the sea
Their cops shoot up the city
Their managers steal our bread
Their teachers, they ruin our heads.

“Be non-violent!” they scream
For they fear what the Blacks will dream
Now that Moses is dead
Shot in the back of the head
“Love them” is what he said
Yet look how they treated him.

The hearts now are red
As they rise up from their beds
To say to the Man with hate:
“We’re sorry but it’s now too late
We want to control our fate
The Panther will kill your snake.”



As the August 1968 Democratic Party National Convention neared, there was increasing excitement among Columbia SDS activists. Both Ramparts magazine and the underground newspaper Rat started to hype-up the demonstrations that were being organized by people like Hayden, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. National SDS people in Chicago like Klonsky also started to get enthusiastic about the planned anti-war demonstrations in Chicago. SDS people hoped to win over disgruntled Eugene McCarthy supporters to the New Left Revolution during the week of demonstrations.

A few weeks before the Chicago Democratic National Convention demonstrations, rumors hit New York City that, since no permit was going to be issued, the Chicago police were going to mercilessly repress anybody who showed up. And that Hayden and Dellinger were receiving death threats. The effect of these rumors and the denial of demonstration permits by Chicago authorities was to discourage large numbers of anti-war people in New York from going out to Chicago into what appeared to be a police-state environment, on unfamiliar terrain.

Mark and JJ, however, were eager to go out to Chicago. I considered going out to Chicago myself but, mistakenly, decided to just concentrate on helping to finish the Columbia and the Community pamphlet I was helping to produce for Citizenship Council. Prior to the nationally-televised 1968 “Battle of Chicago,” I assumed that there were enough local Chicago and other Midwestern anti-war people there to mount an effective mass protest, without having to bus in people from the East. After the police rioted in Chicago, my sister—who had traveled there from Bloomington, Indiana to protest the Democratic Convention—vividly and excitedly described the scene in Chicago. I was surprised to hear that she had even spent some time with JJ, in the middle of all the tear gas.

In New York City, I watched some of the police brutality on TV with a few other people in Dionne’s apartment, because she was the only one around in the Upper West Side neighborhood that we knew who had a TV set. And, later in the night, some of us tried to get an emergency demonstration in solidarity with protesters in Chicago going. Because of her concern for Mark in Chicago, Sue took part in this small New York City demonstration in Midtown Manhattan that protested the Chicago police brutality. She ended up spending the night in an extra bedroom in my W. 106th St. apartment, since she was moving to England in a few days and no longer had the key to Mark’s apartment.

After the police riot in Chicago, the degree of white youth alienation from the U.S. Establishment’s political system appeared to increase. Columbia SDS people eagerly looked forward to a renewed period of confrontation with the Columbia Administration in September 1968.