April 30, 1968
With billy clubs swinging, bloodying heads, a phalanx of riot police stomped their way through the crowd of faculty supporters standing outside Fayerweather Hall. No one was given a chance to walk away.
The police then proceeded to smash in the main doors of the Hall where students had been camped out for a week -- and to systematically drag students down the stone stairs to the lawns out front.
Nobody was violently resisting.
Many of the students were resisting passively, simply by going limp. This infuriated the police, who weren't buying these Gandhi-like tactics of Ivy League coeds. They beat everybody, young and old, male or female, with lead truncheons until they agreed to stand up. 150 students were injured and treated in nearby hospitals.
When the police reached the corner classroom -- filled with graduate students of which I was one -- they broke down the large antique doors and, with a crazed look in their eyes, struck wildly at us as we huddled together. It was a military operation clear and simple, and they were out to "shock and awe" the middle class demonstrators.
I was in the back of a group of fifty students and scurried out a window, along a narrow ledge, to get away from the flailing truncheons. Suddenly, looking down, I realized I was about forty feet above the cement of Amsterdam Ave's sidewalk. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea? A red-faced, fat cop, angry that I was just out of his reach, leaned out the window after me, striking at my legs and whacking me with a long pole, as if to deliberately knock me off the ledge.
Twelve feet from the window, along the ledge, was a terrace that overlooked the avenue. I didn't look down and, with my back against the building wall, cautiously edged my way to the terrace, worried that more cops might be waiting for me when I got there.
They weren't. I hopped down, relieved that I wasn't splayed on the sidewalk forty feet below. And just in time to witness and photograph the police riot that enveloped the campus that night.
Days earlier I had been a member of an angry group of students that had stormed the president's office at Low Library, after the black protesters told us to leave the first building that had been occupied -- Hamilton Hall. They thought that the white student rebels were too unfocused.
Once ensconced in the comfortable couches of the president's office at Low, we helped ourselves to his private stash of Madeira and exquisite cigars. I photographed a longhaired David Shapiro (a well known poet who has since taught at Columbia) sitting at Kirk's desk smoking one of these cigars and sipping Madeira. (The picture was widely circulated in newspapers and magazines around the world.) Despite our fun, we were careful about Grayson Kirk's possessions and his fine antiques and art. We were, after all, children of the elite.
Later when the cops cleared the building, they smashed everything. The New York Times published pictures of the office destruction and blamed it on the student "animals". The "Paper Of Record" also failed to report that the cops beat up two of their own reporters, John Kifner and Michael Kaufman, the night of the bust.
How had things come to this? Why were we there?
Some participants have not been able to articulate their motives. It is easy to mock the long-haired rebels who practiced free love, smoked marijuana and wore Che Guevara t-shirts. To many on the hard left, the protesters were frivolous and mindless. To many on the right, we were traitors and degenerates.
But we had genuine grievances.
- Martin Luther King, the embodiment of the Civil Rights movement, had been assassinated a few weeks earlier. The movement had been dragging on since the early 1960s and not much had seemed to change. Columbia was planning to build a gym in a Harlem Park with a separate "Jim Crow" entrance for the black people of the community.
--The unwinnable Vietnam War was raging full tilt and would eventually kill 50,000 American boys, despite the fact that the majority of Americans were against it.
-- The draft was looming over all the male students. If we didn't stay in school, we might end up in the mud paddies of South East Asia. Middle Class kids like us stayed in school and mostly black and poor kids went to war. We knew as much. The stakes were high.
And we made our point.
After the demonstrators were routed, a student and faculty strike shut down the campus for the rest of the semester. The Gym was never built, the University stopped doing research to benefit the Vietnam War effort, and the 700 arrested students got amnesty and were not expelled.
The Columbia demonstrations were not an isolated incident.
College students across America were organized and militant, having learned their lessons from the Civil Rights movement. There were sit-ins, mass demonstrations, thousands of arrests, and a real anti-war passion flowered on every campus.
Senator Gene McCarthy had mobilized an anti-war "army" of young people and intellectuals to challenge a sitting president. When he came close to upsetting the all-powerful Lyndon Baines Johnson -- as a write-in the New Hampshire primary -- the president bowed out of the race, because polls predicted a loss to McCarthy in the upcoming Wisconsin primary.
Johnson didn't want to face the bitterness and anger that was hounding him everywhere he went:
"Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?"
(Can't imagine crowds today chanting that every time the president appears.)
Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for president on March 16th. McCarthy's supporters called Kennedy ruthless and calculating for letting McCarthy take the major political risks. Banners appeared with slogans like "Bobby Kennedy: Hawk, Dove or Chicken?"
McCarthy was the Change candidate and promised to get us out of the war and transform the way politics was practiced. Bobby Kennedy represented the establishment's candidate to many students; to others, he represented the candidate that could win.
Following Johnson's exit, Vice President Humphrey entered the race and managed to avoid the primaries -- (or was) too late to enter them -- instead concentrating on winning over unelected delegates. Surely enough, after RFK was assassinated, Humphrey beat George McGovern, who took RFK's place after he was killed, for the nomination in August without a single primary under his belt.
1968 was a heady time.
All over the world, students were angry and challenging authority.
It was the time of the Prague Spring and, later that summer in Czechoslovakia, there were more demonstrations against Russian troops. There were also demonstrations in Poland (against Soviet domination), France (against the Algerian war), and Mexico (against a feudal ruling class), to name a few.
But the real legacy of the '68 turmoil was the idea that young people and students had the obligation to challenge authority, to question assumptions... and could succeed.
We drew strength from Robert F. Kennedy's words when he told us, "Let us not have tired answers."
This spirit of questioning and change from the Civil Rights movement and the sixties taught every succeeding generation of students and young people that they must speak truth to power. That it is their civic duty.
The women's movement, the environmental movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the current anti Iraq War movement have all built on this legacy of questioning what is.
This attitude was a radical departure from the complacency of those students who grew up during World War II and the Fifties, when challenging authority was out of the question.
That spring, we didn't entirely change the world, but at least we tried. I am proud that we did.
Follow Blake Fleetwood on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Blakefleet
After several tear gas attacks and the usual warning about anybody left in the building will be charged with plenty of felonies, there were only two of us left, me and an African American girl who had experience in the Detroit riots and had thought ahead enough to bring chains and padlocks and we had been going around locking the doors from the inside, but we finally bailed too.
It was May 4, 1970, and only a couple of hundred miles away, at one of our sister schools in the Mid America Conference, Kent State, the National Guard opened fire on demonstrators that day and 13 kids were shot with high powered rifles and four of them died.
He crumpled like a sack of potatoes, and his gang of thugs dropped my friend and turned to come after me. I turned and ran, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and I was able to run through. The crowd closed behind me and I got away, but I was pretty scared that I had seriously injured or done worse to that cop. I’m really a non violent guy, and in the heat of the moment had just reacted to the situation without thinking, and I certainly did not intend to whack a cop with a big piece of asphalt in the head. The rocks had been bouncing off the pigs with no effect until my “lucky” shot.
So I was at Western Michigan in 1970 and we didn’t organize a takeover until right after Nixon invaded Cambodia. Organize was the wrong word.
I got pretty scared that day. We had 8,000 students on strike and massed in front of the student union. Some friends and I commandeered all the city buses that came up the “Ave” and we used wire cutters to cut the brake lines so the big street through campus got blocked with immobilized buses.
The cops came up to clear the Ave. like storm troopers, 120 of them marching in formation in full riot gear, and started to wade into the crowd, spraying tear gas and beating anyone they could get their hands on.
I earned my red badge of courage two years later, in front of a Marine recruiting station on Fordham Rd and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, up the hill from Fordham University where we'd just heard of the Kent State killings.
Determined not to incite violence, considering the murders in Ohio, we marched from campus and were met by a phalanx of police "defending" the recruiters. In fact, fear reduced our number considerably--to about 60, although hundreds had just attended our meeting prior to the demonstration.
We chanted, poorly perhaps, and those among us who traditionally took to song...well, I'll be the first to admit we were pretty hopelessly tone deaf.
Without provocation, I'll state this on my deathbed, the police charged into us, swinging clubs, gleeful not to be outnumbered considering the thousands massing nationwide in similar protests.
A girl nearby was about to be clubbed and I grasped the cop's sleeve to deflect the blow. My plan was to dash in the opposite direction.
"Opposite" a relative term in most circumstances, especially in the middle of a police riot, I ran into the fellow's buddies, was flung against a bus in Fordham Rd, three cops clubbing me on the head.
Good thing the bus braced me. I'd covered my face with my hands but saw through my fingers a friend writhing on the ground, repeatedly kicked in the nuts by boys in blue.
For readers who don't recall what "police brutality" refers to.
" "Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?"
(Can't imagine crowds today chanting that every time the president appears.) "
Howzabout "Hey, Bushie! Off your tushie! You and the Saudis are way too cushy!"
Look at these two titles and decide fro yourself.
Fire in the Night The Weathermen tried to kill my family. by John M. Murtagh
40 Years Ago Today, The Police Tried to Kill Me At Columbia University by Blake Fleetwood
The first showed up in several blogs at about 10:00 AM and was in City Magazine dated 30 Apr 08. The second at 6:13 PM here. The first describes with regret the traumatic effect on the author's life after his house was firebombed by the Weathermen and maybe Bill Ayers himself. Detailing how the radical left brought violence to his home and fear to a child. All in the name of a "good" cause.
The second describes with glee how he enjoyed the fruits of someone else's labor. Smoking a fine cigar and drinking the man's wine. Blake, now that you are and adult and understand how how you have to work hard for the things your have and enjoy, have you ever thought of paying Grayson back for the things you stole? Or do you still feel you had a right to do those things because after all he was "The Man"? It strikes me your article is in response to Mr. Murtagh's writings. You are attempting to make it all right because some cops beat you up once. So Bill Ayers actions and Obama's association with him is justified.
I was concerned then with the 50,000 Americans who lost their lives in a useless unwinnable war.
(Not even counting the 500,000 Vietnamese) and those institutions that made the war possible.
I was concerned about the millions of blacks who couldn't vote, get a decent education, or a chance at a reasonable life. I was concerned about Columbia "Jim Crow" attitude toward the community.
I am proud that we were non-violent in the face of extreme provocation. I am proud that thousands risked being drafted, to protest an idiotic war.
I would like to see that now. Bush has destoryed our country, killed thousands of young americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqies. We need people willing to stage non violent sit-ins. We need people who are willng to be arrested to make the point that this war is sick, and is killing everything that has made America a decent and wonderful country.
We need every politician to be confronted daily with "Hey, Hey, how many kids did you kill today"
We need to wake up to the 40,000 needless medical deaths per year of Americans who don't get adequate health care.
Yes we were youthful, and tempted, but we risked so much to right serious wrongs and immoral behavior.
It could also be mentioned that the fancy office, booze and smokes were not so much earned purely through the Man's works, as bestowed by better fortunes than the many who died in Vietnam.
We that raised our voices and risked our necks so many years ago should be ashamed of ourselves.
We stopped an unjust war by our actions, Were are you now? How many tears, how much blood, or must your own personal treasure be at risk before you reach again for the fearlessness of your past?
Now is not the time to rest and reminisce of glory gone, all that was gained is gone.
This government and it's corporate masters are still cowards like before. They depend on the sleeping cowardice of the People to accomplish their goals.
Now as before they will fold and cower only to the absolute authority and will of the People demonstrated by their determined participation in actions that are clear and resolute.
ABOLISH this criminal government. The past is gone and meaningless if all that was gained is now lost by inaction of those same once noble Citizen Patriots!
As opposed to Hillary-bashing or whatever else it is you're usually here for.
You are the generation which should be out there, in the streets, doing something, ANYTHING, more useful than sitting, typing away angrily (oooh, the establishment's trembling in its boots) alongside someone older who is at least still committed, despite the forty years which have elapsed, to remind us what the Good Fight is.
I have a sister who graduated in 1968, and I am more than a decade younger than she is. What strikes me most about her peers nowadays is how they have changed dramatically from the liberal protesters of the 60's, to a group of pretty conservative people.
I live in Detroit, and all of the white people left the city after the riots. My parents chose to stay and when it was time for me to buy a house, I stayed as well. I believe that choice has made me much more conscious of the conditions of our day. I am much more liberal than my brothers and sisters. I am the only one following the election and paying attention to the war and this administration.
My question is, how could the passionate youth of the 60's turn out to be complacent and conservative today? I am not making this as a judgement or blanket statement, I just wonder what happened.
Just before leaving Buffalo, I was sent to cover the cop of the month in the Police Commissioners office. The cop was the detective with the baton and in front of the Commissioner I asked the cop to promise not to take my camera away this time. A red faced commissioner stammered apologizes.
Don't worry though. If they wanted to kill you you would be dead, say shot 50 times or so, not making a good living as an Ivy league grad..