The Columbia Student Protests of 1968: What you may not know
When many individuals think of the Columbia Student protests they think of a monolithic protest mounted in opposition to the Vietnam War by the students of the college. The truth is, however, that the Columbia protests were multifaceted, drawing from a variety of viewpoints and motivations that didn’t always agree.
One of the main causes of the protest was sparked by the land-hungry private university, technically located in Harlem, continuing to gentrify the neighborhood and swallow up land previously owned by low-income Harlem families who had been in the area for generations. This reached a boiling point when Columbia announced its plans for a gym that stretched from a part of Morningside Park, which was a city-owned public part, down into the poorer streets of Harlem. The predominantly-white students would have had access to the entirety of the facility through a main entrance, whereas the predominantly-black Harlem residents would have been gifted access only to the basement area through a secondary back entrance. Students from the Columbia Student Afro-Society (SAS) branded this effort as “Gym Crow”.
Another root of the protest reached back to March 1967, when an activist for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) group at Columbia named Bob Feldman was looking through records at the school’s International Law Library. As he searched through the documents, he discovered that the university had a board seat on the Institution for Defense Analyses (IDA), a think-tank focused on weapons research that had ties to the US Department of Defense. Anti-war students protested the hidden way that their college payments were being used to aid the war overseas and campaigned for Columbia to sever ties with the IDA, culminating in a March 1968 peaceful protest in which six of the protesters were placed on probation.
This, however, wasn’t the main protest that people are still talking about 50 years later. That would happen on April 23rd 1968 when, building on the intense energy and anger generated by the MLK assassination, the SAS and the SDS tried to occupy Low Library (the main administrative building) to no avail. They then marched to the Gym construction site, where one arrest was made, before making their way to Hamilton Hall, fully occupying it.
At this point, however, the protests began to split. The SAS students, fully aware of how the media liked to paint any black protesters as violent and disorderly, were very careful to remain peaceful. The SDS students, however, only grew more rowdy and destructive, and were eventually asked to vacate the hall by the SAS. Through much arguing and debate, the SDS students finally left Hamilton Hall to occupy other campus buildings, eventually also making it inside Low Library.
These protests lasted almost a week, with more and more demonstrators flooding the campus as time went on, and almost all official university activity was forced to stop. Eventually police swarmed the campus, making over 700 arrests and resulting in well over 100 injuries to protesters and police officers alike.
The SAS were extremely well organized, and peacefully marched out of Hamilton Hall while complying with police orders. Black lawyers from the surrounding community were waiting outside to offer to represent any protesters who needed it, and development of the Gym was canned.
The SDS were far less organized and focused, but still succeeded in their overall goal. Although at least 30 students were suspended, the University did sever its ties with the IDA, and classes were cancelled for the rest of the week, with special allowances put in place that let all students achieve passing grades for the semester.
Works Cited:
Bronstein, Scott. “30 SEIZED IN COLUMBIA EVICTION PROTEST.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Feb. 1987, www.nytimes.com/1987/02/24/nyregion/30-seized-in-columbia-eviction-protest.html.
Bell, Daniel. “Columbia and the New Left.” In Cronfrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities, ed. Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Berman, Paul. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. New York: Norton, 1996.
Kifner, John. “Columbia’s Radicals of 1968 Hold a Bittersweet Reunion.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28columbia.html?scp=1&sq=columbia%2B1968&st=nyt.
Bradley, Stefan M. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. Ballantine, 2004.
