Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (xi)

After coming home from the hospital, returning to the campus, going to sleep, and awakening and realizing that people were, spontaneously, not going to return to class until Kirk was replaced, I was still somewhat dazed. Everybody seemed to be talking Revolution. Everybody around seemed to be a New Left activist. I, personally, didn’t need to do much activist work anymore. Many new recruits were now involved with SDS. Students wanted to strike. New student leaders had emerged as mass leaders and mass orators during the student revolt who seemed better able to move a crowd than I could.

I started to read Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence and spent the next few weeks writing a brief history of Columbia SDS activity at Columbia between 1967 and 1968, which attempted to analyze why we had been so successful in confronting the Establishment. Other Columbia SDS people who were newly energized by the events of late April and early May seemed to think I was retreating from New Left politics, because I wasn’t as visibly active as before the revolt, and because I was spending time writing down my thoughts on the revolt.

Yet, personally, I felt like a rock singer who had helped produce a hit record before he was 20. I also felt that people at Columbia should never let the Administration reopen the corporate university again, now that it had used its cops so brutally against its own students.

As to the next step for the New Left at Columbia, now that we had created another Berkeley Student Revolt on the East Coast, I was confused—as were most of the other Columbia SDS steering committee people. We now had the numbers to mount an effective strike. But the U.S. Establishment still had the clubs and the guns of the cops. Thousands of students had been politicized and radicalized. But once you’ve created another Berkeley, what are you supposed to do for an encore, in order to build more quickly a New Left white revolutionary movement?

Why did the use of 1,000 NYC cops to bust up the occupation by about 950 students and maybe 50 non-students at Columbia have such a radicalizing effect at both Columbia and on other campuses?

First of all, the brutality of the police invasion shocked a predominantly upper-middle-class, white academic U.S. setting that had never experienced that kind of indiscriminate police repression before. To get into the buildings occupied by white anti-war students and some non-students, the helmeted TPF had to pass through crowds of curious, sympathetic white liberal youth who might not have been committed enough to sit inside the buildings, but did not wish to see other students of their generation beaten, or feel themselves being pushed around by the burly cops. Some of these sympathetic white liberal students were peacefully sitting in front of the entrances to the buildings we were occupying, acting to both shield us from police brutality and to demonstrate their commitment to a non-violent resolution of the campus confrontation.

Many more sympathetic liberal white students, having never seen so many cops in action before on a college campus, felt the need to observe the cops closely and start chanting in protest, once the cops started to brutally do their thing. And when the cops started shoving some of the sympathetic liberal student onlookers, some of the white liberal students shoved back a little which, in turn, stimulated more police brutality.

In clearing out Hamilton Hall, the cops shrewdly avoided using the kind of brutality that might have provoked a Black mass rebellion in Harlem or an angry march from Harlem to Columbia. Fearing, perhaps, that any militant Black student resistance to white cops inside Hamilton Hall prior to their arrest might provide the cops with a pretext for seriously brutalizing or even killing SAS-led students in Hamilton, the African-American student leadership chose to accept a dignified arrest without further non-violent resistance, on tactical grounds. Hence, there was no need for police brutality against the Black students to insure that Hamilton Hall would be quickly cleared.

With regard to the white anti-war students, who did not have the kind of off-campus militant community backing that the African-American students had, there was no apparent tactical need for the cops to restrain themselves. If they had to wade through sympathetic white liberal students with clubs to clear out the buildings, so be it. If they had to beat some students inside to overcome any white student slowness about obeying their commands to stop “trespassing,” so be it.

By sending around 150 predominantly white upper-middle-class students to the hospitals with head wounds, arresting over 600 other white students and shoving or clubbing, indiscriminately, bystanders who hadn’t been politically radical before the bust, the cops blundered. You can’t inflict that kind of mass police brutality on an Ivy League campus in the U.S. and not expect large numbers of the politically impressionable youth hanging out there to respond by being radicalized for many months afterwards.

But when 1,000 cops are sent onto a campus to put down a political protest, it seems likely that—even if the cops don’t intend to be especially brutal—you’re always going to end up with some kind of bloodbath, of cops beating on students and some students fighting back. That kind of police invasion can never be done without some kind of brutality.

Once the cops were used by the Columbia Administration, the Establishment’s argument that the New Left relied on force, not reason, to achieve its political goals was no longer credible to the bulk of upper-middle-class white youths who hung out around Columbia and who were already radicalized somewhat by the failure to quickly end the war in Viet Nam and the draft.

All the old liberal ideological myths about how the U.S. operated politically no longer seemed to explain how political decisions were actually made, once Kirk and Truman called in the cops. Columbia SDS people had been arguing for a few years that Columbia was run in an undemocratic fashion to serve corporate and government interests, not student interests, and Columbia’s use of police seemed to validate the argument for many people. Neither Columbia nor the United States, as a whole, seemed to be run in a genuinely democratic fashion.

A second reason why the bust at Columbia had such a radicalizing effect was because it took place in the context of a big media fishbowl event. Everybody around the country heard about the event or watched some of the event on TV or read about the event in newspapers or magazines.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (x)

By Friday, Mathematics Hall had been liberated by non-student leftists and Columbia SDS people and it quickly gained the reputation for having the most militant of the white demonstrators who were inside the buildings. JJ ended up basing himself inside Mathematics Hall, as did the Motherfuckers, who quickly had moved from Low Library to Mathematics Hall, after Mathematics Hall was liberated.

Hayden, one of the early founders of National SDS, ended up holding Mathematics Hall occupiers together during the days before the police bust. After hearing news of the student occupation of Hamilton, Hayden had appeared on campus. But he didn’t really start to play any major white radical leadership role until he was able to join other SDS people in occupying Mathematics Hall.

Like most other Columbia SDS people, I felt that Hayden’s presence in Mathematics Hall further legitimized the revolt and further certified the event as being as politically and historically significant as the 1964 Berkeley Student Revolt. I didn’t personally bump into Hayden before the bust in Spring 1968 because most of his time was spent in Mathematics Hall, except for when he spoke at a spring anti-war rally in NYC that took place on the weekend before Kirk called the cops.

Abbie Hoffman was also inside Mathematics Hall during the Columbia Revolt. But Abbie was not as prominent in SDS and Movement circles as Hayden at this time, and I can’t recall Abbie being asked to speak to a crowd during the Columbia uprising. In late April 1968, Abbie was still known only in relationship to being good at guerrilla theater, throwing money at the New York Stock Exchange, telling funny jokes at the pre-Pentagon March news conference and using humor and WBAI airwaves to get hippies to Central Park be-ins and to an anti-war yip-in at Grand Central Station, which the NYC cops brutally broke up. In late April 1968, most SDS people still didn’t realize how popular Abbie was going to get as a political leader or how massive his freak constituency would become once he was given more mass media access. We also didn’t realize how fantastic an orator and rabble-rouser he was. Although Mark was over 10 years younger than Abbie, Mark was still a more effective mass agitator than Abbie was at this time.

Each of the occupied buildings had their own political character. Black nationalist revolutionary Hamilton, led by Bill and Ray. Hippie revolutionary, white radical Mathematics, led by Hayden. White radical sectarian/white left-liberal/white New Left radical undergraduate Low Library, led by Tony and Robby. White left-liberal, politically-wavering Fayerweather Hall, led by Columbia graduate students. And white left-liberal Avery Hall, led by architecture students. Within Ferris Booth Hall’s Citizenship Council offices, the various white student-occupied buildings were coordinated by Lew, Mark, Juan and others, who would go from occupied building-to-occupied building, encouraging the mass of white left students to hold firm.

I can recall Mark and Lew each taking a turn on separate occasions arguing persuasively to the Fayerweather Hall student demonstrators that it was the Columbia Administration’s intransigence, not Columbia SDS-led Strike Coordinating Committee irrationality, that prevented a negotiated end to the revolt. Mark looked exhausted and somewhat overwhelmed, as he spoke with people in Fayerweather. But he still projected the charismatic, moralistic, Savio-like earnestness and emotion that enabled him to inspire most anti-war students who listened to him.

Yet despite Mark’s charisma and the intellectually concise, logical way Lew later explained to Fayerweather people why it remained necessary to hold firm, some anti-Mark grumbling began to develop in Fayerweather, a day or two before the big police bust. At a key point in one of the debates, a Columbia Law School student with a thick Brooklyn accent, who had never appeared in left activist circles before April 23rd, stood in front of the room and defended Mark’s leadership of the Movement at Columbia. His name was Gus.

“If it weren’t for Mark, none of us would be here,” Gus began. Then he delivered an impassioned defense of Columbia SDS’s role in the revolt, using an overdramatic rhetorical style that struck me as being somewhat archaic, too theatrical and “square,” in comparison to the usual New Left Movement activist style of oratory. Yet despite Gus’s rhetorical style and thick Brooklyn accent, his speech was extremely intelligent and effective with the predominantly graduate school audience. And his jovial, extroverted personality quickly made him a popular Movement figure for awhile.

Gus was apparently the red diaper son of a hard-core leftist Brooklyn working-class guy. Unlike the affluent red diaper baby, Ted, Gus initially chose, within the Ivy League world, to be more into careerism than radical politics. Columbia SDS’s Spring 1968 activity, however, had somehow inspired Gus to apparently carry on his father’s work and to start putting his body on the line. Being a Columbia Law School student in 1968 now seemed much less chic than being a New Left activist in 1968, for the trendy Gus.

Outside the various occupied buildings, those anti-war students who weren’t yet ready to sit inside the liberated buildings put on green armbands and vowed to remain in front of the buildings, alongside various sympathetic Columbia professors, should Kirk and Truman decide to call in police.

In the early morning hours of Friday, April 26th, Truman and Kirk did decide to call in police. When Truman announced the cops were being called-in at a meeting with the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee in Philosophy Hall lounge, a few professors shouted “Shame!”

But after the first police to go into action clubbed Professor of French Literature Greeman, who—along with the Episcopal Campus Ministry’s Rev. Starr—turned out to be the most committed New Left professor at Columbia in 1968, Truman and Kirk were pressured into cancelling the request for police to empty the buildings, in order to once again try to negotiate some kind of settlement.

Before Professor Greeman, who was standing in front of Low Library next to Rev. Starr, was brutalized by the cops, everybody inside the buildings was all tense. It looked like the revolt was going to be crushed. But once Professor Greeman was clubbed, it became obvious that any use of NYC cops by Kirk and Truman would produce a bloody scene at Columbia. So SDS people began to feel that the Columbia Administration might concede the 6 demands, including the amnesty demand. And not call cops on campus again.

If all this sounds confusing, it was all confusing. People remained in the buildings. On April 27th, anti-war protesters from the NYC anti-war rally downtown marched up to Columbia to cheer us on. During the revolt, SNCC leaders like H. Rap Brown (n/k/a Jamil Al-Amin and currently imprisoned in a Georgia jail) and Stokely Carmichael (a/k/a/ Kwame Ture) also held a press conference in front of occupied Hamilton Hall. In addition, many other left celebrities, such as Norman Mailer and Dwight MacDonald, visited the liberated campus.

Much of what happened immediately prior to the first police bust in the early hours of Tuesday, April 30, 1968, is now a blur.

The big issue was “amnesty.” The Columbia trustees did not want to give us amnesty. We were not going to leave those buildings without amnesty, because we felt we were morally justified in occupying Columbia’s buildings in support of our just demands and we did not accept the right of the U.S. Establishment to punish us. We felt that the Columbia University Administration represented an undemocratic, illegitimate authority that served the special corporate interests of a minority—not the majority interests of students and oppressed and exploited humanity.

Inside the buildings between the clubbing of Professor Greeman and the April 30th early morning invasion of 1,000 cops to clear the buildings, life became more repetitive. Life became a mixture of endless debates, waiting in line to go to liberated co-ed bathrooms or to receive some food to eat—which, because of our inherited and internalized male chauvinism, was usually prepared by Barnard women—and trying to find time to sleep. I began to feel there was little more to debate and it became more boring to just wait around inside the buildings.

Politically, though, the longer we held Columbia’s buildings, the more politicized and radicalized students inside the buildings tended to become. So if the Columbia Administration had decided not to call in the cops--yet also not to give in to our demands and, instead, just wait us out-- Columbia SDS people would have been willing and able to keep Columbia shut down until June.

But such was not to be the case. The Columbia Administration asked the “liberal” mayor of New York City—John Lindsay—to order his cops to clear us out of the buildings. And, overnight, a mass base for the New Left Revolution was created on the Upper West Side, and the Columbia New Left replaced the Berkeley Left as the student movement’s vanguard. SDS was put on the map, historically and mass media-wise, and, for a few years, "SDS" became a household word in the United States.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (ix)

There was a march of a few hundred Harlem supporters across Campus Walk to support the students inside Hamilton Hall. At first it looked like force would be used by right-wing students to keep the African-American demonstrators off-campus, but the right-wing jocks decided to retreat. “The gym goes up—Columbia goes down!” was one of the main chants. Another chant was “Beep! Beep! Bang! Bang! Ungawa! Black Power!”

Before the demonstrators from Harlem arrived, there were rumors on campus among white students, Columbia administrators and Columbia professors that the Harlem demonstrators might try to burn Columbia down. But, as it turned out, the march was quite peaceful, even though the mass spirit was militant.

There were all-white male meetings of Columbia professors inside Philosophy Hall lounge, in which these politically naïve professors unsuccessfully tried to develop a proposal for a negotiated settlement. Mark later accurately described the Columbia professors’ attempts to resolve the campus crisis as “bull-shit,” causing many morally arrogant Columbia profs like Professor Silver to become very offended. But I felt that Mark was right. All the verbal talk of the politically naïve, anti-communist, white racist Columbia professors during the student revolt seemed to amount to little more than bull-shit. The issue was whether the Columbia trustees were going to concede the 6 democratic demands of the New Left Movement and the community or whether they were going to use brute force to try to drive us from the buildings we had liberated, and which we felt now belonged to the people of New York City and Columbia and Barnard students—not to the white corporate Establishment.

Columbia faculty members never understood this simple fact. All they were concerned about was trying to figure out some kind of meaningless verbal formulation that would persuade their students to withdraw from the buildings, return to academic business as usual, and stop putting their bodies on the line to fight the Establishment. They didn’t seem to realize that in 1968 there was a war going on in Viet Nam that made it immoral for students to do anything other than shut down Columbia until the IDA ties were cut and all the other demands were won. The faculty jokers didn’t realize that Columbia was not sacred to anyone whose salary check did not arrive from Columbia. They didn’t realize that most people in New York City in 1968 who knew anything about Columbia’s institutional policies had come to hate Columbia.

I dropped by a few times, myself, to observe some Ad Hoc faculty meetings in Philosophy Hall but quickly realized that they were irrelevant to what we were trying to accomplish inside the occupied buildings.

By the third night of the revolt, I was basing myself inside Fayerweather Hall, because you could go in and out of there without difficulty, and I was too restless to want to just stay in one place during the revolt.

It was in Fayerweather Hall that I met Louise. She was a graduate student in Columbia’s English Department with long brown hair, who had attended Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate. Like most of the other graduate students (who spent much of their time inside Fayerweather Hall debating whether or not Columbia SDS’s primarily undergraduate leadership was too uncompromising in not being willing to accept anything less than winning all 6 demands), Louise had not been involved in campus New Left politics prior to the occupation of Hamilton. Like most of the other Fayerweather Hall graduate school rebels, Louise had been too busy working on her PhD to be involved with Columbia SDS people before April 1968.

But unlike most of the other women Columbia graduate students who had become politicized, Louise seemed willing to get romantically involved with younger undergraduate Columbia College men. After one lengthy debate inside one of Fayerweather Hall’s largest classrooms, in which much time was spent having to argue against a red-haired woman graduate student named Rusty (who had gotten her BA from the University of Chicago) and her anti-SDS, left-liberal, right-opportunist politics, Louise touched me in a friendly, comradely way.

But I was hesitant about responding to her willingness to make the first move socially in relationship to a younger man. In 1968, there were still social taboos around the New Left, with regard to women being the initiator of love relationships and younger men becoming involved with older women like Louise. Instead of being praised for being straightforward and emotionally open with Movement men who were younger than her, women like Louise ended up being foolishly put down by some Movement men or rejected by others. Yet when I think of Fayerweather Hall during the Columbia Student Revolt, mixed in with my memories of the endless debates, the sleeping on hard floors, the smoking of joints, the sharing of food, the bumping into a whole set of new friends, the dancing, the sense of community and comradeship in a combat-type situation, the ‘new age” wedding of Andrea and Richard in the middle of a generational war and the generalized love vibrations, I think of Louise.

By the third day of the revolt, the right-wing Columbia students, wearing their suits and ties, had organized themselves into a misnamed “Majority Coalition.” Encouraged by the more politically right-wing administrators like Dean Coleman, the non-intellectual, status-seeking, materialistic, pro-war “Majority Coalition” students started to stand around the buildings that had been liberated by the white anti-war students. Their intention was to try to prevent food from getting into the occupied buildings. A few of the Majority Coalition-types, impatient with the Columbia Administration’s failure to call in cops to clear out the buildings quickly so that classes could resume immediately, attempted to re-take Fayerweather Hall once, but they were too outnumbered to be effective.

Because the more visible the Majority Coalition became on campus during the revolt, the more Barnard and Columbia students polarized in support of the New Left in reaction to a visible right-wing presence, I did not feel particularly disturbed by the Majority Coalition-types. When they outnumbered leftists in a dark alley, they were dangerous, because they could not defend their political views verbally, yet were willing to physically attack left-wing students who were politically sharper in debate. But around Columbia, there was never any danger that the more intellectually-oriented Columbia SDS’s mass base would ever be smaller than the “Majority Coalition”’s mass base. The political demographics of the Columbia and Barnard student body were always in our favor, even though the Establishment media tried to give more media publicity to the right-wing students, as the revolt continued.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (viii)

Throughout the week of turmoil, WKCR radio broadcast news of the revolt constantly—on-campus and off-campus. The Establishment’s mass media also had correctly focused-in on Mark as the revolt’s white radical spark plug and he was doing a great job speaking in front of the TV cameras. But on the second or third day of the revolt, Mark temporarily resigned as Columbia SDS chairman.

The reason why Mark resigned was because of what happened at an emergency Columbia SDS steering committee meeting in Ferris Booth Hall. Ted, Peter Schneider, Dave and other old Praxis-Axis people—while excited by the depth of politicization on campus—were against Columbia SDS people occupying as many more campus buildings, in support of the Black students, as they could. Instead, Ted, Schneider, Dave, Nick and other Praxis-Axis people proposed that Columbia SDS—in the middle of the developing revolt—start knocking on dormitory doors, do dorm canvassing, hand-out informational leaflets and hold more dorm lobby meetings to explain the New Left politics behind the student strike that Columbia SDS was calling.

Mark, however, argued that Columbia SDS people seizing more buildings would do more to both win the demands of the revolt and encourage Columbia and Barnard students to strike, than any more dorm canvassing would do. Mark argued that, given the occupation of Hamilton and Low and the constant threat of a police bust, now was not the time for “business-as-usual” radical educational work. And that it was totally ridiculous not to focus on engaging in more militant action, since “militant action, not dorm canvassing, is what has gotten us so far during the past few weeks.”

Mark, as usual, turned out to be correct. But the Praxis-Axis people had argued that more building seizures by Columbia SDS would decrease support for a student strike and leave no New Left cadre outside of buildings to do the necessary radical educational work to both pull-off a successful strike and create more revolutionary consciousness among our mass base. And their arguments had sounded more plausible than Mark’s at this time. So, by about a 70 to 3 vote, Mark’s proposal to take more buildings was voted down. Only JJ and one other Columbia SDS person voted with Mark. I, myself, mistakenly fell for the Praxis-Axis argument that it wasn’t necessary for Columbia SDS to hold more than one building in order to maximize its political impact and bargaining power. After the vote went against him, Mark said with disgust: “I resign as chairman of this fuckin’ organization.” Then he stalked out.

Ted, Dave, Nick and the rest of us all shrugged. Then people went ahead with the process of planning for the writing, printing and distribution of more strike leaflets, and the planning of a mass meeting of strikers and an intensified dorm canvassing drive. I can recall feeling quite confused. The Praxis Axis seemed to make more sense at this time. But there also seemed some validity in Mark’s argument. And it seemed foolish for him to resign the Columbia SDS chairmanship, just because a vote went against him once, since he had been doing such a great job.

As it turned out, however, events moved so rapidly that Mark quickly agreed to reassume his Columbia SDS chairmanship post and continue being the white spokesperson for the media. The mass of Columbia SDS people and supportive students turned out to be much more interested in seizing more buildings, than in doing more dorm canvassing.

Although Columbia’s graduate students were generally more politically and personally conservative—and less personally desperate and angry—than its undergraduates, the effect of the mass media publicity was to cause the left-liberal “trendy” graduate students to occupy Fayerweather Hall. Around the same time, white left-liberal School of Architecture students occupied Avery Hall. The revolt seemed to be expanding.

With so many buildings occupied, there was no longer any need for the African-American students to hold Dean Coleman hostage as a bargaining chip, and he was allowed to just leave his office in Hamilton Hall. Everybody in Columbia SDS steering committee circles—even Praxis Axis people—realized that, finally, the mass of New Left students on campus had moved beyond the need for more dorm canvassing. We had collectively not been audacious enough during the first two days of the revolt and had, initially, underestimated the speed of campus radicalization produced by the firm stand of the Black students in Hamilton Hall and the subsequent mass media publicity generated by that stand and by our willingness to open up a second front in Low Library. Plans were made by SDS people to “liberate” another building, Mathematics Hall.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (vii)

Meetings were being held all around the campus. Non-student leftists from Manhattan and around the country were getting eager to jump into the scene and join the fight against the Columbia Administration.

Hundreds of previously apolitical and politically apathetic Columbia and Barnard students, as a result of the mass media attention and the disruption of classes, were now willing to come to Columbia SDS mass meetings and forget about their academic work or their personal-relationship problems for awhile.

Columbia SDS people rejoined “Tony and his 20 disciples” in Low on the night of April 24th. I spent one night inside Low Library, after running in-and-out of other buildings and around campus, helping to do all the political tasks that large numbers of people were sharing.

Inside Low Library, much of people’s energy went to arranging for food to be brought in-and-out, discussing political strategy in endless meetings and just sitting, talking and napping. There was a lot of time just spent waiting, but you also became personally closer to the people you sat-in with and new friendships were formed easily.

One of the top administrators at Columbia—a guy named Fraenkel—spoke with Mark, Lew and a few other Columbia SDS people in the rotunda of Low Library and tried to scare us into surrendering. After Mark raised some objections to his negotiating proposal, Fraenkel said in an angry tone: “Look, Mr. Rudd! You’re through at this University! There’s no way you’re ever going to be let back into Columbia! So why are you trying to prevent the other students from being reasonable?”

Lew and Mark both snickered and started to smirk after Fraenkel’s outburst. And Fraenkel left Low Library a few moments later.

By the night of April 24, 1968, some “Motherfucker” anarchist people from the Lower East Side were among the people sitting in Kirk’s office and they were helping to harden the spirit of resistance there. They also had good concrete suggestions as to how Kirk’s office could best be barricaded.

Seeing the non-student Lower East Side hippie “Motherfuckers” (who were mostly in their mid-to-late 20s) mingling with the slightly younger Columbia and Barnard students, made me feel more certain that the Columbia Administration would have more difficulty getting the anti-racist whites to leave Low by a few verbal promises. The white non-students had joined us inside Low Library because they wanted to strike a blow against a U.S. ruling-class corporate establishment that they hated vehemently. Unlike the more privileged white Columbia and white Barnard students (many of whom had never had to work 9-to-5 in corporate offices for more than a summer), the white hip non-student radicals from the Lower East Side felt that off-campus America was a death culture and that work-life after college in the plastic 9-to-5 world represented slavery and psychological death for white leftists. Hence, they were ready to trash Low Library if Columbia SDS people had chosen to give them our tacit approval. But this we did not do.

Between the night of April 24th and the police invasion of April 30th, what happened exactly remains a blur in my mind, for the most part, with the exception of a few significant events and scenes.

I can recall contributing to an endless tactical debate on the evening of April 24th in Kirk’s office, by saying the following: “Our collective power is that as long as we stay here, the only way Kirk can get us out is by creating an embarrassing scene of police dragging us out. Just like the cops had to drag students out of Sproul Hall in Berkeley in 1964. We have to stay here and show Kirk that if he doesn’t give into our demands, there’s going to be an embarrassing scene at Columbia.”

After the first day of the revolt, the Black student leaders in Hamilton acted autonomously and there developed an uncertainty among some Columbia SDS people about whether they would end their occupation once gym construction was stopped and amnesty was granted to all Black students, but before Columbia’s IDA ties were severed. As it turned out, although the Columbia Administration quickly agreed to stop construction of the Jim Crow gym, it was never willing (or legally able) to offer amnesty to just the African-American students alone. So there was never any incentive for the African-American students in Hamilton Hall to drop the anti-IDA demand and make a separate peace.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (vi)

As the early morning hours passed, news that the cops were arriving on campus reached us inside Kirk’s office and people had to decide whether to stay seated in the office and submit to arrest, or whether to leave Low Library before the cops came. Most of the white students in Low Library on the morning of April 24th felt like I did: Why get arrested in Low Library, when we could be more productive in organizing students on campus to support the Black take-over of Hamilton Hall if we were out of jail? About 20 students, however, led by PL and Columbia SDS Labor Committee leader Tony, chose not to flee when news came of the cops’ arrival on campus. When the NYC cops started knocking on the door to Kirk’s office, Mark, myself and everybody else—except the 20 students that Tony had won over—began to exit through the open windows of Kirk’s office. From the ledge outside his windows, most of us jumped down or lowered ourselves to the grass, and headed back to our dorm rooms or off-campus apartments to get some sleep.

Surprisingly, the cops who entered Kirk’s office were not ordered to arrest the remaining 20 students who continued sitting there. All the cops did was remove a valuable painting from Kirk’s office. In retrospect, Tony and the students who remained in Low on the morning of April 24th, despite the arrival of the cops, had made the correct move in calling Kirk’s bluff of a quick police bust. Were it not for their refusal to leave on the morning of April 24th from Kirk’s office, Columbia SDS people would not have been able to re-join them en masse in Kirk’s office by the evening of April 24th, when it became evident that no separate bust of the white radicals was going to quickly take place.

After leaving Low Library and heading back to my Furnald Hall dorm room, I collapsed on my bed for a few hours. When I awoke and bought a copy of the New York Times and read through Spectator, I realized that Columbia SDS had finally made a political impact historically and that Mark, like Savio, was going to be a New Left mass media object and celebrity. I hurried over to Hamilton Hall to see how the Black student occupation was going.

A hard rain was falling on the campus. Campus life was obviously disrupted by the student revolt and there seemed to be much confusion. Large numbers of disgruntled right-wing students were gathered in the courtyard in front of Hamilton Hall, angry over their inability to attend class. Desks and chairs and wastepaper baskets were shoved against the front doors of Hamilton Hall from the inside, to form a barricade. The African-American students controlled who could and could not enter the building. Columbia SDS people took turns throughout the day standing in front of Hamilton Hall in the rain with a bullhorn, acting as a kind of white shield for the Black students inside Hamilton, although the African-American students really didn’t need white radicals as a shield as long as they maintained their community contacts. The Harlem community—not the white New Left—was the real external shield of the Black students in Hamilton.

On the 2nd floor of Hamilton, one or two male African-American students coolly looked down and out over the crowds outside the building from an outside balcony, but did not attempt to speak to the half-supportive, half-hostile crowd. In front of the building, Sokolow spoke at length through the bullhorn for the first time, trying to develop more white support for the revolt. His speech was clever. Like Stu, he blossomed as an orator during the revolt, although he never became as skillful or entertaining as Mark.

“As far as the IDA research goes. It’s not dirty because it’s secret. But it’s secret because it’s dirty. And it’s dirty because it helps the Pentagon murder millions of Vietnamese,” Sokolow said.

Sokolow was a very short, mustached guy who wore wire-framed glasses. The son of an Upper East Side corporate lawyer who did legal work for his law firm's CBS client (and who was a Robert Kennedy liberal-type Democrat), Sokolow had gone to prep school in Manhattan and tended to dress more often in a sport jacket and shirt and tie than in jeans (although Sokolow, in later years, no longer recalled himself wearing a sport jacket on campus as frequently as did I). But he was very intellectual. A sophomore in April 1968, he was an English major who had become quite radicalized during his first two years at Columbia. Although his father was wealthy and Sokolow sometimes took cabs instead of the subway to get around Manhattan, he worked part-time in the Butler Library as a sophomore, making sure that all books that left the Burgess-Carpenter library had been checked out

During the 1967-68 academic year, I had become friendly with Sokolow because he was very enthusiastic about his commitment to New Left radicalism, very intellectual and extremely hard-working. He became a hard-core Columbia SDS activist who chose to spend his time doing Movement work (no matter how menial) on campus rather than spend it pumping out term papers or being into academic careerism. Sometimes, his enthusiasm hurt his organizing because, when talking with liberals, he would hammer away verbally at them in such a heavy way over an intellectual point of contention that, while winning the argument, he turned them off to the New Left by his vibes and his intellectually domineering approach. I thought Sokolow’s best quality was the moral outrage he felt at the System and at Columbia.

During the day of rain after Hamilton was first seized, Columbia SDS also handed out leaflets around campus explaining why the Columbia revolt was justified and calling for a mass meeting in Wollman Auditorium. Columbia’s campus was now completely politicized and polarized, and Establishment mass media cameras were everywhere.

Instead of seriously negotiating with the African-American students in Hamilton and immediately agreeing to the fairly moderate 6 demands, Kirk and Truman and the Columbia trustees refused to end the revolt quickly, by negotiation. As a result of this delay, more and more students began to polarize on campus in support of the New Left, more Harlem residents began to polarize in opposition to Columbia and more mass media attention began to focus on Columbia’s anti-democratic institutional policies.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter 16: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968 (v)

There was some concern among some of the white students inside Hamilton Hall about a possible “threat to Dean Coleman’s life” if the Black students were left alone inside Hamilton Hall. This concern stemmed from a combination of white racist paranoia and rumor-mongering. During the evening of April 23rd, some non-student Harlem young men had joined the Black students in Hamilton and rumors were being spread that Black non-students—not Student Afro-American Society people—now controlled the demonstration. Another rumor being circulated was that Black non-students had brought guns into the building in preparation for self-defense in response to a police bust. Despite these rumors, I saw no indication that there were ever any guns brought inside Hamilton or that Student Afro-American Society people ever relinquished control of their sit-in/occupation.

After Mark’s surprise announcement, all the white students quickly ran to whichever part of the building they had dumped their sleeping bags, blankets or guitars at and gathered en masse down in the lobby. Many white students were tense and emotionally freaked-out. A few white students were crying, but the more politically and emotionally mature African-American students looked cool and determined, as Columbia SDS people led our demoralized band of 300 to 400 white anti-racist students out of Hamilton Hall and up to Low Library, in the early dawn hours.

About a third of the white left demonstrators immediately returned to their dormitory rooms or off-campus apartments to get some sleep, after being told to leave Hamilton Hall. The rest of us quietly walked across Low Plaza and towards the right entrance of Low Library, in order to occupy Low Library. When the first SDS people got to the glass door and tried to enter, they found the door was locked. Frustrated, some of the SDS people then picked up a wooden bench and—using it as a battering ram—slammed it into the glass door, in order to get inside Low Library. After the glass broke, I heard some gasping among the white students behind me on the plaza. About one-third of the white students who had been expecting to occupy Low Library with SDS turned around, and went back to their dormitory rooms and off-campus apartments, as soon as they heard the glass break.

I shook my head with disgust and thought to myself: “They’re only into fighting institutional racism when property doesn’t get damaged. Typical white liberals.” Then I went into Low Library and waited in the rotunda, until about 100 of us were all gathered together, and Mark began to speak to us:

“The reason why we had to leave Hamilton is that the Black students felt that we weren’t solid enough. They’ve chosen to make their stand in Hamilton Hall. And they’re ready to die.

“I’m not ready to die yet. But I think we can continue to support the Black students by holding this building.

“For many of us, our academic careers at Columbia are over. But before the police are called in, we have to decide what we’re going to do.”

There was some concern expressed about the possible fate of Dean Coleman. And even Robby, who would later become very hard-line politically, felt that Dean Coleman might get killed if cops were sent into Hamilton. After a few minutes of discussion, a consensus emerged that sitting down in the rotunda was tactically stupid, because the space around us was so large that when the cops came to arrest us they would be able to clear us out in no time, by just forming a circle around us. We therefore decided to take over Columbia President Kirk’s office. His door was closed and locked, but somebody figured out a way to get in. Then the 100 of us went inside the office.

It was the first time any of us had been inside the office of an Ivy League university president and it felt good to be there. I immediately began to pull open the drawers and files of Columbia President, IDA Director and Mobil Oil Director Kirk to see if I could discover some more dirt on Columbia to reveal to the people of New York City. I was curious. And I felt that people in New York City had a democratic right to go through the office files of Columbia’s President.

Surprisingly, as soon as I began to gleefully go through Columbia President Kirk’s office files, the white students around me started to look frightened.

“What are you doing?”

“Leave those files alone. We’re here to make a political statement, not to vandalize his office!”

There were just a few of the comments that greeted me when I started to do some more research inside Kirk’s office. I couldn’t believe my ears at first.

“We have a right to know what’s in these files,” I argued.

“It’s Kirk’s private property. We have a right to sit-in here, but we don’t have the right to go through his private files,” another white anti-racist student replied.

I was flabbergasted. Were these, indeed, the same students who, under Black student leadership, were willing to hold Dean Coleman hostage for many hours?

Since no other students in the portion of Kirk’s office where the files were kept were willing to join me in going through Kirk’s files, and I was getting bad vibes from the other students, I stopped going through Kirk’s files. Within a few days, however,--as white anti-racist resistance to the Columbia Administration hardened and people began to lose their bourgeois hang-ups about Columbia’s “property rights”—other students completed the search of Kirk’s files. Copies of some choice documents found their way into the Rat underground newspaper. The photocopied documents from Kirk’s files would reveal additional dirt on Columbia University expansion activity, its IDA ties and intra-Establishment conspiring.