Indeed, we met with almost the same intensity as we did 40 years ago – minus the cops. But much of what took place was unusual, and a bit surprising. In our self-reflection, “crazy” was able to take on all sorts of meanings.
Most electrifying was a multimedia re-creation or tableau called “What Happened” that presented a narrative of events, starting on April 23, 1968, with participants describing their experiences at each juncture. Eventually, this narrative-testimony will be brought together as an audio and textual document, hopefully with additional accounts by those students who supported the university administration, and others, such as the police and surviving professors. But even with the dozens of those who took part in the strike testifying at this event, we learned much of what really took place.
For example, the women’s movement was just beginning, and Columbia would be one of the last major protests where male monopoly of leadership and traditional gender roles went unchallenged. It was impossible to revise those dynamics entirely today – Columbia was all-male then, and we could not change that fact – but we were able to highlight the role women played and the rumblings of imminent eruption. For instance, a key juncture in the rebellion was when the demonstrators on April 23rd found themselves locked out of Low Library, the main administration building, and were frustrated in their attempts to confront the university administration. At that point, accounts note that anonymous cries went out, “To the gym! To the gym!” whereby the crowd headed to Morningside Park to tear down the cyclone fence at the construction site. At “What Happened,” we learned that those shouts were not anonymous: Bonnie Offner Willdorf and Ellen Goldberg announced that they had been the ones to re-direct the demonstration: “It was two women who called out ‘To the gym! To the gym!’” Two women acting “crazy,” violating the decorum expected of Barnard students, and they led the auditorium once again in cries of “To the gym! To they gym!”
But it was race relations that was the most volatile, then and now, and the revelations were the most startling – which is what drove Paul Spike to write his essay in response. In 1968, as I outlined earlier, there were two main groups of students driving the protest, black students led by the Students Afro-American Society, and the rest of the students, overwhelmingly white, led by Students for a Democratic Society. During the upheaval, there were two distinct perceptions of strategy and tactics; and afterward, there were two different streams of experience and memory. After the bust, we went our separate ways, politically and socially; and now the conference finally allowed these two streams to converge: black and white came together, and we came to understand each other far better than ever before.
All the students who occupied the campus buildings had agreed on the racist dimensions of the gym. The Morningside Park structure was regarded as an attempt to grab land from Harlem with the added horror of what was in effect a segregationist plan for its use. For the black protestors, Vietnam was critical but the gym was the particular, immediate focus: they were black students at an elite institution that was doing harm to the black community, which meant they had a special responsibility to stop the gym. Columbia had only just begun to allow in more than a handful black students, but they were far fewer than the white students. Nevertheless, the black students were far more united on fighting segregation, despite their politics ranging from pan-nationalist to leftist to conservative, and they had to act together with far more deliberation than the unruly mass of students who first occupied Hamilton Hall. For years, many of the white students were perplexed, even somewhat hurt: Why were we asked to leave? At “What Happened,” Ray Brown and other black student leaders explained the care and discipline the situation demanded, their experiences in the civil rights movement, their knowledge that they were representing the race, which meant they did not want any allegations of misconduct or damage to the property to divert attention from the political demands, no “crazy” behavior, and they were repulsed by the chaos of hundreds of undisciplined white students. He explained how all of this made it necessary for the black students to invite the white students to take their own building – particularly since the black students faced the danger of beatings or even death far more than the white students, and that danger required their utmost cohesion.
We also learned that guns had indeed been brought into Hamilton Hall, as had been rumored for 40 years, but, more importantly, that the leadership had asked for them to be removed the next day. Behind this there was another telling revelation: When the leaders of the black students in Hamilton Hall met with Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Percy Sutton, Basil Paterson, and other Harlem leaders, they were told that Harlem was exhausted from recent rebellions and would not rise up to defend college students, even black ones. Consequently, the leaders of Hamilton Hall decided upon a magnificent bluff: to make the fear of Harlem’s rage part of the protest, even though they knew there was no real basis for it. And it was that fear of Harlem that kept Columbia’s administration from sending in the cops that first day; it was their fear of black rage that provided the leverage for all of the students to make their demands.
Despite the central role of the black students and their relationship with Harlem, the media had portrayed the strike, from the start, with SDS and Mark Rudd solely at the center of the rebellion, rendering SAS and the black students in Hamilton Hall almost invisible. Most of us saw the distortions of the media at the time, but the swirl of events and the gulf between black and white made it difficult to counter this image, along with other nonsense about the white students being mindless barbarians seeking, in the words of Columbia's president, "inchoate nihilism." But for years, the black protestors were resentful that they had never been given due credit, that their role had been erased, and that the white students were complicit. Ray Brown noted in an interview how much it would fly in the face of white supremacy for an elite university and the media to admit that black students had actually led the action which brought the Ivy League school to a halt. (Even today, when Tom Brokaw decided to make a documentary about 1968, he only sought out Mark Rudd for an interview, not Ray Brown, Cicero Wilson, Bill Sales, or any of the other black leaders.) So, at the conference everyone re-affirmed the decisive, leading role of SAS and the black students, without negating SDS’s role. At a panel the next day Mark Rudd acknowledged the pain the distortion had caused, and he discussed how he had spent years “un-becoming” the media construction of “Mark Rudd.”
But there was more. During “What Happened,” the black veterans of Hamilton Hall began to share stories of the ugly personal abuse they had suffered at Columbia and Barnard. Robert Friedman, one of the conference organizers, described some of the accounts in an essay he wrote for the student newspaper The Columbia Spectator for which he had been the editor in 1968: “Zack Husser, a black football player at the time, talked about his anger at coach Buff Donelli’s ‘stacking’ system, which involved putting most of the black athletes at the same position, regardless of where they had played in high school, resulting in all but one of them sitting on the bench. Al Dempsey, now a judge in Atlanta, talked about how his experience at Columbia – including being stopped by security guards every time he entered the campus – was more painful than growing up in the South. Indeed, he said, more painful than anything in his life other than watching his wife die of cancer.”
Campus guards, mostly black and Puerto Rican themselves, had no guidance on how to respond to the presence of more than a handful of black students, and they constantly checked IDs. Leon Denmark recounted how he told one security guard who had harassed him that he was going to watch to see if he would also check the IDs of all the white students passing through the gates. Black students were rebuffed by professors when trying to attend their classes, and many of the white students were crudely racist. There were no black professors, no black administrators, and the higher echelons of the administration ignored the concerns of the black students, and when they turned to the leading intellectual lights in the faculty, such as Jacques Barzun, they were treated with disdain. In fact, as Ray Brown explained in an interview, only the younger administrators gave them any heed. Ironically, Dean Coleman, who had been held “hostage,” was actually well-liked by the black students because he would at least meet with them. After black students banded together to form a fraternity as a safe haven to maintain their dignity, they were derided by The Jester, the undergraduate humor magazine with a photo of Africans dressed in finery with the caption: “Black Brothers: Six members of the all-Negro pledge class of the prospective Columbia chapter of Doo Be Doo Be Doo.”
The white participants in the conference were stunned by the revelations. (I don’t remember even seeing the copy of The Jester with the offending photo at the time: I didn’t think much of the magazine to begin with.) In 1968, and 40 years since, the white students, many of whom had been active in the civil rights movement, had not fully understood the bitter personal pain our classmates had endured, and the shock was electric. How could we have missed such blatant discrimination?
And so, I sat with Paul Spike beneath Alma Mater to review his essay. I suggested a word here or there, pointing out where he might have been over-generalizing, small changes, but with the essay’s basic apology remaining as he intended. That night, at “Voice of 1968,” marvelous writers who had been involved in the protests read from their works, including Thulani Davis, Mary Gordon, Bob Holman, James Simon Kunen, Sharon Olds, Jonah Raskin, Kathy Seals, David Shapiro, Meredith Sue Willis. Paul Auster opened the event, commenting on the “crazy” controversy, explaining how the Times enforced all sorts of restrictions (e.g., can’t say “cops,” must say “police officers”), then read an excerpt on failure and fear during his time at Columbia. Ntozake Shange, who had recently suffered a stroke, also participated. At the outset of the reading, she slowly made her way to the front of the auditorium with the help of a walker and an entourage of friends in order to read just one poem. Her eyes filled with tears, her voice cracked, and then she left with as much poise and dignity as she had come. It was that important to her, to mark her presence as part of the occupation and strike, and she had struggled to be there.
Soon Paul Spike mounted the stage to read his essay, first describing the murder of his father and reading a eulogy from Martin Luther King and a message from Stokley Charmichael, and then moving on to the revelations at the conference:
"Despite having grown up inside the civil rights movement, and my own painful legacy as a result of what happened to my father, when I heard, as we did last night, that a black man’s experience at Columbia was far worse than his life in the segregated South, this was a shocking revelation for me. I had never understood the personal pain that was being felt by black students here on campus. Of course I was very conscious of what was happening throughout the country during the Movement years, but I now understand that I was, at best, indifferent and, at worst, complicit in the persecution they suffered on this campus.
"Of course, what we did in the buildings and in our protests was an effort based on our sincere political beliefs about racism and the war. But, on a personal level, I was a Good German."
Paul ended by asking “all of the black students at Columbia in 1968 to try to forgive the adolescent self-absorption and intellectual mindlessness, even the privileged racism, which failed to grasp the reality of their suffering, which failed to reach out to them.” The response was thunderous, and Paul Spike’s little essay became a key juncture in a conference already filled with astonishing moments.
But why had so many of the white students occupying the buildings been so blind to the personal abuse the black students had faced? And if it were self-absorption or personal racism, how did that come about among such a large group of people who believed they were acting militantly to oppose racial inequity? It’s hard to imagine now how deeply racism had cut through our lives 40 years ago.
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