Columbia Student Rebellion 1968 - 40 Years Later

For my class, the class of 1969, only about a dozen black students had been admitted, and I knew only one or two. Only with the classes of 1970 and 1971 had the numbers climbed, although even then the amount was still small, and the alienation still great. James “Plunky” Branch, one of the students in Hamilton Hall and now a jazz musician, recalled that, when he arrived as a freshman at Columbia in 1965, “I had to learn how to see White people with my physical eyes, having come from a Richmond, Virginia, where there was an avoidance of looking at white people, and where, by the time I left to go to New York for college I knew but one European (my high school Russian teacher).”

Jim Crow was not yet history, despite whatever gains had been made. Only a couple of months earlier three black students had been murdered by state troopers in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when they protested a segregated bowling alley, although the press barely mentioned the killings. And only weeks before the events of April 23, 1968, Martin Luther King had been murdered.  

How much had white and black been able to look at each other with our physical, much less spiritual, eyes at that time? How comfortable could a black student feel describing the abuse he faced? How confident could a black football player feel that one of the white players would understand how he was denied his chance to play? Tommie Smith and John Carlos had not yet raised their fists at the Olympics in Mexico. So much had yet to come: the Third World Strikes at SF State and Berkeley, the Open Admissions struggle at CCNY, Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, the Chicano Moratorium, the Asian American movement, the Young Lords, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and much more. After all the gains in the fight against segregation and for civil rights by April 1968, America was just on the verge of even greater changes, as incomplete as they may yet be. In 1968 we could hardly dream that an African American would make a serious run for president in 2008.  

We were blessed at this conference with the good fortune to come together to fight for our history. We would not cede our stories to others less interested in the truth of our experience. We would make sure that our perspective would be lodged in any historical account. And, in a way, the conference itself became a small historical moment: we were able to re-visit the past and take what we did then one step further today. Something new was being worked out, another beginning, a way to reaffirm and extend the vision against war and racism that had propelled the rebellion – and our lives – 40 years before.  

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