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.

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.

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

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

After the first bust, I had no desire to ever become a Columbia student again. Like many other Columbia SDS people, I felt now that being a full-time New Left activist was the most meaningful and politically productive direction to move work-wise. At the same time, though, I still felt personally lonely on a romantic level.

A political vacuum existed at Columbia after the bust. We now had the numbers to shut down Columbia until the end of May and prevent classes from starting up again. But they had the clubs and guns to keep us from re-occupying the campus.

There was a rally on Amsterdam Ave. on the afternoon following the early morning bust, when the hundreds of people who had been driven away in police vans to 100 Centre St. had filtered back to the Upper West Side, after being arraigned for “criminal trespassing.” In an angry mood, over a thousand people—including many anti-war people from around the City who had not previously been active on Columbia’s campus—came to demonstrate their support of us.

On the Law School Library bridge over Amsterdam Ave., from where the speakers were addressing the crowd, somebody, without warning, suddenly asked me to speak to the crowd. Not used to speaking before such a large group, all I could quickly think of saying was “They came at us like wild animals inside the buildings. But we will continue to fight for the six demands.” Then I quickly passed the bullhorn to somebody else.

I was still uneasy about speaking spontaneously before such a large crowd and still uncertain of what the next appropriate political move in this totally new post-bust campus situation should be. In this new situation, new leaders seemed to speak with more passion and speak more effectively. So I continued to retreat somewhat from visible New Left leadership at Columbia, for awhile.

After the April 30th bust, many students at Columbia who had been going to school all their lives were at a lost about what to do, now that most classes were not in session. During May, the alliance between white radical student activists and revolutionary Black nationalist student activists, on a day-to-day level, pretty much fell apart. The white students who had been in the occupied buildings met a few times on the lawns outside the buildings they had previously occupied to debate the best ways to continue the strike and to keep the spirit of resistance going. People from outside the Columbia left scene were invited to speak at strike committee-sponsored alternative classes. For a few weeks, PL people and JJ pushed for a heavy presence on the picket lines. But most of the politically radicalized people did not appear willing to picket academic buildings since, even in the absence of much picketing, no classes were being held because of the post-bust strike’s mass support.

In order to make the strike more mass-based, SDS people like Mark made certain ideological concessions to the “moderate” students—who were more anti-Kirk than pro-6 demands—at a big post-bust meeting of students in Wollman Auditorium. At the time, Mark’s concessions seemed like a wise way to move. During the summer, however, some of these less radical strike committee students ended up splitting off from the Columbia Strike Committee, accepting Ford Foundation money and (according to de-classified documents) even apparently acting as FBI informants, at the same time they formed the “Students For A Restructured University.”

Columbia’s campus remained crawling with undercover plainclothes cops, who would shove into students occasionally at the various spontaneous rallies that developed on campus. The plainclothes cops usually were heavier, taller and older-looking than students and they usually looked like cops--even without their uniforms on. They usually carried blackjacks or small clubs in their pockets, as well as guns, and were noticed by most students. Few had long-hair in those days.

Tony suddenly had great prestige in Columbia SDS circles, despite his PL background and left-sectarian record of the previous 2 years, because he had helped hold the Low Library student rebels together and had won the respect of newly-politicized hippie-type undergraduates, for awhile.

As a result of Tony’s influence, Labor Committee head “Lynn Marcus” and his cult members were invited to speak to Strike Committee-sponsored workshops on the South Lawn of the campus. “Lynn Marcus” was apparently a former SWP member of the 1950s who apparently worked for some Wall Street firm in the 1960s. In Spring 1968, he projected himself as a Marxist revolutionary socialist in the Rosa Luxemburg tradition. He pushed the line that the student strike at Columbia should quickly be expanded into a mass strike in New York City. When the French Student Revolt of May 1968 began to spread rapidly and attract the support of young French industrial workers, after the students battled with French cops in Paris’s Latin Quarter a few days after the Columbia bust, “Marcus”’s proposed political strategy did not seem unrealistic.

Most of “Marcus”’s followers were ex-PL people (like Tony) who had followed Tony out of PL and had apparently been meeting with “Marcus” for at least 6 months before the April 1968 Columbia Revolt. “Marcus”’s SDS Labor Committee—like PL—saw the New Left SDS as a mass-based umbrella, within which they could operate as an external cadre and from which they could recruit new organizers to hand out leaflets to a U.S. industrial working class which, they argued, was ripe for revolution. No one realized in May 1968 that “Lynn Marcus”’s real name was Lyndon LaRouche and that his “socialism” was apparently just a mask for his lust for individual dictatorial political power.

In May 1968, Dave remained a prominent SDS and Columbia Strike Committee spokesperson, along with Mark, Juan, Lew, Robby, Stu, Ted and Josie. Josie had been radicalized more, as a result of her participation in the Low Library occupation and being roughed up by the cops. But Teddy seemed to retreat into the background politically (along with the Schneiders), now that he wasn’t the Columbia SDS chairman anymore. And Teddy was now no longer very prominent on campus.

But I was still surprised one day to notice Dave and Nancy walking across Campus Walk, as if they were now lovers. Between October 1966 and April 1968, Nancy and Teddy had seemed inseparable and had seemed to be living out one of the great romances of the decade. And Nancy had seemed to be pushing for a marriage to Teddy for a long time. Consequently, it was quite a surprise for me to observe that Nancy was now apparently in love with Dave—not Teddy. And Teddy, all of a sudden, looked emotionally lost, as he walked around campus during May and June 1968, without Nancy by his side. But Nancy’s romantic involvement with Dave did not last too long.

Another relationship that seemed to start falling apart after the April revolt was Mark’s friendship with Sue. Large numbers of trendy and New Leftist women, and newly politicized Barnard women, seemed to start throwing themselves at Mark, once he became a media object and a celebrity. At the same time, a sweet Japanese-American woman from California, named Jean (who had hung around on the outskirts of Columbia New Left circles for a few years prior to the revolt), seemed to replace Sue as Mark’s most steady female companion and lover. Jean seemed more bohemian in dress and lifestyle than Sue, but I felt sad that Mark and Sue seemed to have drifted apart.

As a result of the student revolt, the police bust and the U.S. mass media publicity, the status of Columbia SDS hard-core activist men appeared to rise greatly among large numbers of newly-radicalized or trendy Barnard women. For a few months after the police bust, SDS political strategy meetings were attended by newly-involved Barnard women, who now appeared much more eager to become romantically involved with New Left men than they had been before April 1968. My dorm roommate, Stu, for instance, became romantically involved in a brief love affair with one of the trendy Barnard women, during the month following the police bust. Unattached Barnard women who had walked by the Columbia SDS table without noticing me a few months before, but who had helped occupy the buildings during the revolt, suddenly became interested in flirting with me and dating me. In the eyes of some trendy Barnard women, Columbia SDS men were now the “Big Men On Campus” and “success-objects.”

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.