When this Ivy League school planned a segregated gymnasium, students held the dean hostage
Students and Harlem residents came together to say no to racism, gentrification, and the Vietnam war
The year 1968 was a time of youth uprisings. In May, students revolted in Paris; in August, they squared off with police in Chicago and Prague. But before any of these, there was the Columbia occupation, where students of Columbia University and residents of Harlem banded together to battle a segregated gymnasium plan they called “Gym Crow.” They occupied campus buildings for a week. More than 700 people were arrested, hundreds were beaten by police, and several dozen were hospitalized. They took the dean hostage until their demands were met.
And it worked — the gym was never built in Morningside Park. But while the Columbia occupation was successful in many respects, it also showed the deep fractures in social movements of that era, which would eventually lead to their dissolution. At the time, it seemed to many that 1968 was only the beginning of a new revolutionary era. But when we look back decades later, we see that the last years of the sixties were actually the climax of the New Left.
The tensions at Columbia had been brewing for a while. The student mood all across the nation was increasingly anti-war, and in 1967 a Columbia student discovered that the university was working closely with the Institute for Defense Analyses on projects that furthered the Vietnam War effort. Students began to write articles and even folk songs about this discovery: “You stand in class / You spout your facts / A noble scientist / But then at night / You join the fight.” Anti-war protests on campus began to escalate, and to indict not just the government but the university administration itself.
At the same time, as the civil rights movement flourished and the student movement developed an increasingly anti-racist outlook, the university’s gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood started to become a major concern for students and residents alike. Columbia University was a major landowner in Morningside Heights and Harlem, and after World War II it frequently evicted working-class and poor black and Puerto Rican residents in order to build student housing and university buildings. It also managed non-student residential properties and acted as a landlord for its poorer neighbors. Residents felt pushed around by the Ivy League university, which was out of reach for their own children.
In the late sixties, American cities were tinderboxes of racial tension. In 1965, Los Angeles had been convulsed by the Watts riots. During “the long, hot summer” of 1967, 83 people died in a total of 75 race riots across the nation. Meanwhile, the student movement, which had begun at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, was growing more militant as the war escalated. Because Columbia was both a rapidly radicalizing university and situated in a largely black neighborhood in New York City, it was located at the intersection of these two trends. As one student editor wrote shortly after the riots:
Columbia has little cohesion as a community, for there is little to differentiate it from New York City. There are few trees, and the buildings are cramped onto a six-square-block campus. Columbia is diffused into New York. And in the process something happens that transforms it from the Ivy League school that its alumni and administrators imagine it to be to the urban university that it is in reality. As Columbia flows into the streets of New York, so the society of the streets flows into Columbia. Medieval attempts to keep reflective thought separated from reality only prove futile. New York is life. Its dirt, congestion, motion and art force people to respond; its physical environment has generated a mental climate of liberality and social consciousness, which has permeated the urban campus.
Columbia’s impact on the surrounding community had been on activists’ radar for years, but it came to a head when — just weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — the university quietly broke ground on a gymnasium it planned to build in Morningside Park. Though located on public land, the gym would be primarily for student athletes. There would be a separate entrance to a smaller facility in the basement, open to residents of the neighborhood, but four-fifths of the gym would be open to Columbia students alone. It was this segregated design that led to the moniker “Gym Crow.” The plan was offensive to residents on principle: the university already owned so much of the surrounding neighborhood, and now it was cutting a deal with the city to build a mostly private facility on land that by rights belonged to the public.
Two student groups were responsible for planning the demonstrations: the black Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) and the mostly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SAS had since 1965, oriented its efforts mostly toward the black community in the area. Stefan Bradley explains:
Starting in the late 1960s, emissaries from SAS had been attending local meetings to find out the issues that affected the neighboring black community. While at these local gatherings, the members of SAS learned of the gym controversy and decided to take on the community’s protest as their own. SAS saw the proposed gym in the park as a symbol of racism and as a struggle for control over land in the adjacent neighborhoods.
SDS, meanwhile, was attracted to the gym issue largely because it wanted to awaken the white student body from political slumber. The group had been outraged by the revelations regarding the Vietnam War, and even though the Columbia anti-war protests were gaining steam, SDS felt that students needed more power and more energy to make real demands on the university. Institutional investment in military research was unthinkable to knowledgeable peace activists but, as it turned out, not very easy for ordinary students to sink their teeth into. SDS thus felt it needed an issue that hit closer to home, one that would be immediately impactful and help radicalize students who weren’t yet hip to the anti-war movement. SDS chapter leader Mark Rudd said:
Any particular issue we raise probably can’t change things all that much, but changing people’s understanding of society, getting them to understand the forces at work to create the war in Vietnam, to create racism: this is the primary goal of radicals.
When SDS heard from SAS about the gym, the groups quickly established common purpose and linked up. On April 12, the first demonstration occurred. Though not particularly large, at least compared with what came later, it prompted the university president, Grayson Kirk, to react angrily. He said:
Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.
The student groups pressed on. For the next week, SAS organized mostly black Harlem residents and SDS organized mostly white students in preparation for another demonstration. On April 19, a leaflet circulated around campus that read:
The big steal is on. Last week, without notice, Columbia moved its bulldozers and chainsaws into Morningside Park … Join the community groups protesting the land grab. Rally on campus and demonstrate at the construction site. Get Columbia out of the park.
At noon on April 23, hundreds of students and community members came out to the rally. SAS leader Cicero Wilson announced, “This is Harlem Heights, not Morningside Heights.” SDS chapter leader Mark Rudd took the megaphone and pointed protesters in two directions: one contingent toward Morningside Park, the other toward Hamilton Hall.
At the park, students kicked down the chain-link fence and residents carried signs reading “To rebel is justified” and “Columbia is the enemy of all black people.” At Hamilton, students stormed the building and staged a sit-in, and they barricaded the dean in his office with furniture. Mark Rudd addressed the crowd inside Hamilton:
I want to ask people, are we disrupting the University’s function?
Yes!
Is the University disrupting people all over the world?
Yes!
Are we going to stay here until all of our demands are met?
Yes!
Hamilton Hall became the occupation’s headquarters, but other buildings were occupied as well. The SAS and SDS issued six demands, including an end to both gym construction and military research. The occupied buildings immediately transformed into micro-societies, communes whose rules were made up on the spot. Blake Slonecker writes that the communes “fostered a unique community sensibility defined in opposition to the traditional university and mainstream culture … At Columbia, the communes functioned as free spaces where disparate social networks eventually coalesced into a protest community of individuals who newly identified with collective activism.”
These temporary “liberated zones” emphasized participatory democracy and egalitarianism, as well as feminism. (A notice in one of the buildings read, “TO ALL WOMEN: You are in a liberated area. You are urged to reject the traditional role of housekeeper unless, of course, you feel this is the role that allows for creative expression. Speak up! Use your brains!”) But political and cultural differences weren’t so easy to overcome on the spot.
Less than 24 hours after the occupation began, SAS announced that it was taking over Hamilton Hall and that all white students were to leave immediately. SDS and the white students complied. For the duration of the occupation, the black students held Hamilton Hall while the white students held several other buildings, and demonstrations continued in the park, on campus, and in the city streets.
Columbia students were not all radicals. There soon emerged a group of counter-protesters calling itself the Majority Coalition, made up of clean-cut, conservative students who were mostly athletes. They first appeared on campus holding signs saying, “Stop SDS Nazism,” then blocked the flow of students in and out of buildings, then increasingly threatened demonstrators with violence. The situation on campus was becoming perilous, and the administration’s attempts at compromise were consistently rejected by the student occupiers, who found their concessions mostly symbolic and ultimately unacceptable.
On Friday, four days after the demonstrations began, two black power figures — H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael — came to campus to visit the black students at Hamilton Hall. The white students assembled outside to hear word from the Hamilton occupiers, with whom they’d had little contact. Brown and Carmichael emerged, climbed over the barricades, and read a statement to those gathered. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who was sympathetic to the students, took the occasion to speak, too, saying:
If one incident of force starts anywhere on this campus I have reason to believe that the police will be here and this University will be destroyed. If you believe that this University is, was or could be an institution for rational discourse, I urge you to keep calm.
Over the weekend, a temporary organization called the Ad Hoc Faculty Group drafted what it called the “Bitter Pill Resolutions” document, meant to bridge the divide between students and the administration and bring the crisis to an end. President Kirk scoffed at it. The occupiers rejected it. It was the last-ditch effort at compromise. The university called in the police. Journalist Robert McFadden recalls the scene:
They came on inexorably, a disciplined blue line of bobbing flashlights and many with nightsticks, then broke into a ragged charge. The students fell back, some tripping over low chain-link fences, and scattered like disturbed insects. There were screams, shouted obscenities and cries of “fascist pigs!”
Some protesters were trampled. Others were hit with flailing nightsticks by uniformed officers, or saps wielded by plainclothes men, some of them dressed like students in scruffy clothes, all with their badges hidden. Students were punched and kicked. Some were dragged down concrete steps outside Low Library.
On a lawn between Fayerweather and Avery Hall, another occupied building, two uniformed officers grabbed a young woman, spun her around, and hurled her into a tree. Nearby, two officers threw a youth to the ground and, when he tried to get up, pushed him down again; a plainclothes man rushed up and stomped the fallen man.
More than 700 people — students and residents, black and white — were arrested. Some were hurt so badly in the police stampede that they wound up in the emergency room. With that spectacular act of violence, the occupation was over.
Columbia did not build “Gym Crow” in Morningside Park, so by that measure the occupation was a success. But the New Left’s youthful optimism seemed to wane after the episode, replaced by something darker. In Chicago that summer, the scene repeated itself when police violently beat youth protesters in the streets; but there, violence also came from the youth activists, many of whom had felt the blow of nightsticks and held out little hope of a nonviolent end to domestic racism and the Vietnam War.
Mark Rudd lost his zeal for SDS-style organizing and joined the Weather Underground, a fugitive cell of left-wing radicals who bombed government buildings. The Black Power movement similarly went down a dark path as FBI infiltrators with COINTELPRO sowed mistrust and the movement turned inward and eventually collapsed. By the end of the sixties, the New Left was both fractured and jaded, and it manifested first in escalating violence — and then in eventual silence.
When we look back at the Columbia University standoff, it seems its brightest moments were its earliest ones: when black and white students first decided to band together to fight racism and war. The culmination of the Columbia occupation contained all the dynamics that led to the New Left’s dissolution. But by the same token, its beginnings are a microcosm of the movement’s radical promise.
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