Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968

Chapter 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968 (iii)

In Fall 1968, the New York SDS Regional Office was flooded with requests for SDS speakers. So Karen asked me to go out to an Ethical Culture Society meeting in Nassau County one night to sit on a panel that was discussing “Student Rebellion.” Most of the people in the crowd were in their late 40s and early 50s, but I felt they responded positively to my spontaneous talk and seemed more disturbed by my casual dress than by my revolutionary political rhetoric. A Newsday columnist also wrote a fairly sympathetic column about me the next day.

Yet by mid-December 1968, SDS at Richmond College and the Black Panther Party on Staten Island still were not mass-based. After I had spoken with Mark in November about the difficulties I was having in getting the mass of students at Richmond College interested in becoming New Left activists, Mark had suggested: “Why not arrange for me to come down and make a speech and show the Newsreel film? I should be able to draw a crowd down there.”

The Newsreel film that Mark referred to was a 45-minute film about the Columbia Revolt that had been produced by a recently-formed small group of radical filmmakers in Manhattan.

Our SDS chapter set up a meeting for the film to be shown and for Mark to speak at Richmond College. Around 100 people watched the movie and listened to Mark speak. Yet most of the audience appeared to be more curious about seeing Mark in person than eager to become active in the New Left. After the meeting, Mark met with Neal, a good-natured Richmond College African-American student group leader named Earl and about 10 white SDS student supporters in the basement-student lounge of the college. An FBI student informant also attended the meeting, according to my de-classified FBI file.

But, although our discussion with Mark was lively, we could all not agree on how to best interest the mass of students at Richmond College in New Left politics. And after Mark’s visit to the school, it was still hard to persuade even sympathetic students that political organizing or collective action could actually accomplish anything that related to maximizing the freedom they enjoyed in their own lives. The students who most identified with SDS at Richmond College were also still really just anti-war and left-liberal in their politics, not anti-imperialist and revolutionary communist or Marxist-Leninist like their more affluent counterparts within Columbia SDS had been. If there had been no Viet Nam War draft in 1968, there would have been absolutely no interest at all in SDS or the New Left at Richmond College. Students at Richmond College, unlike students at Columbia and Barnard, did not appear to have been socialized to believe that they could make any impact on U.S. history in a positive way.

Despite our inability to really attract a mass New Left base quickly at Richmond College, Richmond College President Schueler was still paranoid about our small group. After being telephoned during his dinner by a paranoid school security guard about an evening meeting of some high school students that Neal and I had decided to hold at Richmond College, Schueler suddenly appeared at the school’s student government office, his breath smelling of alcohol, and begged me to cancel the meeting and not “cause trouble.” After I shrugged my shoulders and assured him that we were only planning to hold a small meeting and not to secretly attempt to take over his office that night, Schueler went back to his home, feeling somewhat embarrassed that he had behaved so paranoically.

Christmas 1968 approached and I spent some of the vacation back in Queens with my parents for five days, writing a paper on “The Logic of Genocide,” in which I attempted to explain the economic motives for the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazi German government. The continued mass murder of Vietnamese civilians in the 1960s appeared to be motivated by economic motives and I felt similar motives probably provided the logic for the genocidal crimes committed by the Nazis less than 30 years before.

January 1969 began and it now appeared that, despite the events at Columbia of Spring 1968, the New Left Movement around New York City was once again stagnating. Away from Columbia, there had been very little mass motion of students around New York City at colleges where most students still lived with their parents and commuted. Outside of New York City, student demonstrations still only occurred mostly at the elite universities or large state universities only. Mark drew big crowds whenever he spoke at state university campuses around the U.S. and more students were involved in SDS outside New York City than ever before. But within New York City, SDS was still not very mass-based at campuses other than at Columbia. One promising development, though, had been an increase in political activism among anti-war college-bound, elite intellectual NYC high school students in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, who managed to form some kind of high school union around this time, with some SDS Regional Office assistance.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968

Chapter 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968 (ii)

In Fall 1968, the Albert Shanker-led United Federation of Teachers [UFT] struck in order to try to sabotage any Board of Education plans to concede control of NYC public schools in the Black community to African-American community control boards. New Left SDS people supported the demand of African-American activists for community control of their neighborhood schools, seeing it as a just demand for Black self-determination, and defined the UFT strike as a reactionary, racist action. PL and Labor Committee members within SDS chapters, however, supported the UFT strike and argued that it represented a justified struggle of labor against Ford Foundation and white corporate establishment-sponsored “bourgeois black nationalism.”

PL and Labor Committee people within SDS chapters also opposed New Left SDS people on the issue of fighting for open admissions to places like Columbia and CUNY for African-American, Puerto Rican and white working-class people. New Left SDS people argued that it was democratic to demand that open admissions be established in the “bourgeois university.” PL and Labor Committee people, however, charged that it was reactionary to fight for open admissions to the “bourgeois university” because, once admitted, the African-American, Puerto Rican and white working-class students would “become bourgeoisfied.” Within Columbia SDS, the ideological division between the white New Left response to the UFT strike and the open admissions demand and the PL/Labor Committee response led to more demoralizing faction-fighting throughout the fall. But off-campus, Teachers for a Democratic Society [TDS] members, led by Ted, taught in African-American-controlled “freedom schools” during the UFT strike.

Although the New York Regional SDS office attempted to mobilize masses of anti-war youth in an Election Day 1968 “vote in the streets, vote with your feet” demo in Manhattan, less than 1,500 people showed up at Union Square to march to Rockefeller Center. The intention of the New York Regional SDS Office demo organizers had been to march to Rockefeller Center and attempt to create an Election Day evening street scene analogous to what had been created during the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago. But the New York City cops outnumbered us and they surrounded us at Union Square before we could “take the streets” as a group, and block traffic. Consequently, by the time various small portions of our demonstration reached Rockefeller Center we were too dispersed to either effectively block traffic or attract TV cameras. And there was no need for the cops to even brutalize us on Election Day evening in order to keep the streets clear. Columbia SDS actions around Election Day at Columbia were also unsuccessful in attracting the kinds of crowds that Columbia SDS had attracted during the height of the spring revolt.

In early November, the UFT strike was finally settled in a way that was unfavorable for the African-American community, and all the white middle-class teachers went back to work. High school students, however, were ordered by the Board of Education to remain in school 45 minutes longer in order to “make up for the school time they had missed” as a result of the teachers’ strike; and thus insure that New York City school bureaucrats would be able to still receive the maximum amount of state government funding. Spontaneously, students at McKee High School and Curtis High School—which were both located a few blocks from Richmond College—walked out and refused to stay for the extra 45 minutes.

An African-American peace activist from Bedford-Stuyvesant who now lived and worked on Staten Island, named Neal, was asked by some of the white and Asian-American high school students (who he knew from his work as a Job Corps youth counselor) to help organize a student strike on Staten Island in early December. One of the Richmond College underground newspaper editors (who had been arrested for “disorderly conduct” while observing the high school student walk-out) arranged for me to meet Neal. We immediately hit it off. Neal had decided to start forming a Black Panther Party [BPP] chapter on Staten Island and we agreed that Richmond College SDS and the Staten Island Black Panther Party should work together in helping to organize the December 1968 high school student strike on Staten Island.

Neal was around 26 years-old and considered himself both a writer and an African-American revolutionary. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and had spent most of his stint in the Army fighting on one of its boxing teams, in the middle-weight division. Neal was soft-spoken and gentle in personal conversation and seemed very aware politically. When he spoke before a crowd about the question of Black Liberation and Revolution, Neal spoke as charismatically as Bill or Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture. He was a fiery orator who could rap as well or better than most African-American ministers. His theatrical skill as an orator seemed to rival Mark’s skill.

After getting out of the Army, Neal began working against the war in Viet Nam with Staten Island Peace Coalition people. Following his decision to form a Black Panther Party chapter on Staten Island, Neal set up a storefront on Jersey Street and began to sell Panther newspapers within Staten Island’s small Black community. Most of the people who lived on Staten Island were white working-class people of Italian-American or Irish-American background in the 1960s, but Neal managed to gain some support off-campus for the BPP from the white intellectual peace activists with whom he had worked.

Prior to the scheduled December high school student strike, Neal and I met with a committee of about 6 high school students in the home of a white pacifist woman artist-activist in her early 40s, whom Neal had met as a result of his Staten Island Peace Coalition work. From the SDS Regional Office, I was able to get some organizing help from Karen and Dionne in attempting to attract Staten Island high school students to the New Left. Along with Nick, Karen and Dionne hoped to stimulate the formation of high school chapters of SDS around the City. Dionne and Karen joined Neal and me on a few occasions in meeting with dissident high school student leaders on Staten Island.

As a result of working with Karen and Dionne on this organizing project, I got to know both of them better. We would all take the subway down from the Upper West Side to the ferry terminal, then get on the ferry, and finally take a 20-minute bus ride together from the Staten Island ferry terminal to the private house in which our meetings were held. Then, after the meeting, we would all make the long trip back to the Upper West Side. So there was plenty of time to talk with Karen and Dionne about politics and SDS.

Karen was taking some self-defense lessons at this time and she demonstrated a few of her karate moves, while we waited for the uptown Broadway local on the W.96th St. subway station platform. She seemed to be ahead of most other Movement women in questioning traditional definitions of gender roles. Karen also appeared to be totally committed to the Movement and very hardworking. During the summer, she had become friendly with Gus for a brief time, but now she seemed to be unattached. Our conversations, however, generally never moved beyond questions of Movement work or politics. After we both traveled down to Staten Island early in the morning to speak to the December 1968 student strike rally before about 300 high school students, we didn’t see much of each other anymore.

The Staten Island high school strike rally was only half-successful. Although the turn-out was respectable, a majority of the white high school students were too racist to accept Neal’s African-American leadership and too right-wing to continue working with SDS people. At the same time, they were too disorganized and politically inexperienced to create any alternative white leadership of their own for their high school student strike. So the strike lasted only 1 day on Staten Island in December 1968.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968

Chapter 19: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968 (i)

By the end of September 1968, Mark, Nick, Dionne and Josie were working, not at Columbia, but in SDS’s Prince Street regional office downtown, as full-time Movement organizers. I was starting to spend more time trying to get something radical going at Richmond College and classes at Columbia had resumed again. Lew, Juan, Stu and Robby continued to hold Columbia SDS’s hard-core together and hoped that they could use guerrilla theater and other educational tactics to build for both a campus protest action around the time of the November 1968 election and another seizure of buildings at Columbia in Spring 1969. Despite the September 1968 white New Left setback at Columbia, its Columbia SDS hard-core still remained the politically strongest chapter in the United States, even without Mark, Ted, Dave, Teddy, the Schneiders, Harvey, Josh, John, Nick, Josie, Dianne, Linda, JJ and me hanging around there much anymore.

Until early January 1969, I commuted from W.106th St. to Richmond College, which was located in Staten Island, only a few blocks walk from the ferry terminal. Brian had moved back into the apartment with Sokolow and me. And until he started to spend most nights at the apartment of his woman friend, later in the fall, we often would use his water pipe to smoke grass together in our apartment living room.

Brian remained an easygoing guy and we would mostly converse about politics and speculate about what future life in the U.S. would be like after the Revolution. Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album was our favorite album to get stoned to at this time. Usually, however, we wouldn’t be turning on together until after 10 p.m., because during most Fall 1968 evenings there was generally some kind of political event or meeting up at Columbia. And when there wasn’t an evening political event, both Brian and I preferred to do the minimal amount of academic work we did elsewhere than in our apartment.

On Staten Island, classes were smaller at Richmond College than at Columbia and I was able to take every class on a pass-fail basis because the school was experimental. To begin training myself for teaching in the public schools, I took an ed course on adolescent psychology which ended up being a waste, except for the fact that I met a few other radicals and hippies as a result of taking the course. Frankie and Hugh were both from Brooklyn and both working-class in background; and both were instrumental in forming a Richmond College SDS chapter by late October. Another non-conformist I met in this class, Angela, had transferred from Temple University to Richmond College; and I became friendly with her and her roommate, Jane, for a few weeks.

Another course I took was taught by a follower of Herbert Marcuse, named Professor Nachman. Nachman had worked in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign earlier in the year. He was an entertaining lecturer who had graduated from Columbia before becoming a professor at Richmond College and he advocated the establishment of a leisure-oriented, sexually-oriented democratic society. Unlike full-time Movement activists, however, Nachman seemed too white middle-class and too academic in his life-style to be willing to either organize or actually fight for a revolutionary society. He was an academic radical who was more comfortable lecturing in class and donating money to bail out activists when they were arrested than in living on a subsistence level, organizing demonstrations and putting his body on the line for the Revolution. In addition, he had a traditional wife and a kid to support.

The most relevant course I took in Fall 1968 was an African-American history and culture course taught by a 32-year-old African-American communist named Professor Hicks. Professor Hicks had worked with LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka in the early 1960s to defend Robert Williams and Williams’ stance of advocating the right of armed self-defense against racists in Monroe, North Carolina. Professor Hicks had a beard and spoke in a hip way. He introduced me to the writings of DuBois, William Patterson, E. Franklin Frazier, Herbert Aptheker, Harold Cruse and Richard Wright. He was a fantastic lecturer, even though there were only 10 people enrolled in his class and, except for me, all of them were non-radical whites. I became intellectually and personally close to Professor Hicks for awhile because we seemed to share the same values and most of the same politics, and because we had drawn similar conclusions about the nature of U.S. society.

The revolt at Columbia had not influenced the predominantly white working-class students at community colleges like Richmond College very much. The students who were anti-war were more into pot, rock music, sexuality and being hippie than being into radical New Left politics. There was a broad sympathy for the Columbia student rebels and much interest in inviting me into off-campus pads to smoke hashish and grass with other anti-war students. But few of the anti-war students I turned on with were interested in doing anything more than attending radical events or meetings on campus sometimes and going on semi-annual anti-war marches. Few anti-war students at Richmond College could be persuaded that it was practical to become New Left activists or New Left Movement organizers, whereas at Columbia large numbers of anti-war students had felt that becoming a New Left activist or organizer was a viable life-option.

Still, by late October 1968, about 10 of us had formed a Richmond College SDS chapter. But we had to call off our plans for some kind of an anti-war protest event at Richmond College around the presidential election, because we felt too isolated. An underground newspaper was formed by two hippie-anarchist types, named Hart and Russ, who were sympathetic to SDS and the New Left. When their first issue was circulated on campus, it was condemned as being “obscene” by an open letter of Richmond College President Herbert Schueler. So I began to then contribute a column on New Left politics and culture for Hart and Russ’s underground newspaper.