1968 New York Student Strike (51 images)
Black Power
Student activism hit a new high point in 1968, when dozens of campus protests broke out at colleges and universities across the country and internationally. Events evolved at a quick pace that year. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in January, an estimated 500 students at New York University demonstrated against Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. Dow was the manufacturer of napalm, a chemical agent used by U.S. military in Vietnam to burn plant life and human beings during the war. Students at NYU and elsewhere opposed the links between the university and what came to be known as the “military-industrial complex.” That same month, Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, entered the Democratic presidential nomination process as an anti-war candidate, shocking Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign by earning 40% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.
Shortly thereafter, Robert Kennedy entered the race and Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he was dropping out of the race. In Early-April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, spurring dozens of urban rebellions in cities nationwide, including Harlem. At NYU, administrators suspended class for two days to hold a series of student-faculty seminars on race relations and formed a new committee to create a policy focused on African American students and other students of color.
From April 22-27, student activists in SDS and the NYU Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV) organize and lead a week-long “International Student-Faculty Strike to Bring Our Troops Home, End the Draft and Racial Oppression,” consisting of a series of campus anti-war protests and discussions, a class boycott on Friday, April 26, and then a march down 5th Avenue the following day. That same day, members of SDS and the Student Afro Society at Columbia University seize several campus buildings in what will ultimately become a significant international incident.
In May, student activists in Paris trigger a nationwide strike there. In June, Robert Kennedy is gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic primary in California. In August, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the “Prague Spring” protest movement. A few days later, Chicago police attacked New Left protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In mid-September, a new controversy erupted at NYU surrounding the appointment of John Hatchett to head up the Martin Luther King Afro-American Student Center on campus. Hatchett had been a civil rights activist during the early-1960s, most significantly participating in sit-ins, marches and other demonstrations in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1963, he moved to New York City to attend graduate school at NYU and Columbia University. He also taught in the New York public school system, where he continued to advocate for the interests of local black communities. On October 11, three months after Hatchett assumed his position as head of the AASC, administrators fired him amid claims that an article he wrote, “The Phenomenon of the Anti-Black Jews and the Black Anglo-Saxon: A Study in Educational Perfidy,” was anti-semitic and anti-white. In a speech, he had also referred to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon and the president of the United Teachers Federation, Albert Shanker, as “racist bastards.” NYU President, James Hester, told reporters that the primary cause of Hatchett’s firing was that he had “proved to be increasingly ineffective in performing his duties because of the incompatibility of many of his actions and public statements with the requirements of his position in the university.” The firing was applauded by many local Jewish, Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, but sharply criticized by campus militants. The American Jewish Congress stated at the time that they hoped the university would replace Hatchett with “someone who is more likely to guide black students into harmonious relationships with their fellow students and the communities in which they will live.”
In response to the firing, NYU student activists mounted a series of demonstrations, including a general strike that lasted for about ten days before fizzling. Student radicals also occupied two buildings on the NYU Bronx campus. The university ultimately offered a compromise, allowing Hatchett to remain an adviser to African American student groups on campus. In November, the AASC became independent of the university, run by a board made up of African American students and faculty.
The images in this set were taken by Roz Payne during the NYU protests of
Hatchett’s firing. Interestingly, a number of the signs also reference the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” movement that was powerful at the time in New York public schools. Activists saw both as examples of the need for greater autonomy for black and brown people within local educational institutions.
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville district had been reorganized as an experiment in local control of public schools, with a community-controlled school board instituted in the primarily African American neighborhoods. Rhody McCoy was appointed superintendent of the new board. McCoy, who was popular in the black community, was a controversial figure because he was a follower and friend of Malcom X. Some claimed he was heavily influenced by Harold Cruse’s seminal book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and believed Jews were too involved and powerful within the black freedom movement. McCoy also appointed Herman Ferguson as the principle of one of the schools in the district. According to an article he wrote in The Guardian, Ferguson advocated that schools offer "instructions in gun weaponry, gun handling, and gun safety" as important survival skills for children of color in a racist society. Ultimately, the appointment was withdrawn.
Over several months, tensions simmered between the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville board and a number of white teachers and staff who the board claimed were trying to sabotage the experiment in local control. In response the school board attempted to fire 83 teachers and staff, almost all of whom were Jewish. The teacher’s union balked at the move, which violated terms of their labor agreement with the district. Albert Shanker, the head of the teacher’s union called the board action, "a kind of vigilante activity." In response, teachers went out on strike. When they attempted to return to the school on May 15, a group of parents and community members who supported the board attempted to block them. Local police broke the blockade, allowing the teachers to return, though the board closed the schools. On May 22-23, teachers again protested by staying home, promoting the board to fire 350 more teachers.
At the start of the new school year in August and September, a city-wide teachers' strikes shut down the New York City public schools for 36 days. The strike caused divisions among civil rights leaders and union members. Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph supported the striking teachers, causing sharp criticism from many black parents, teachers and a new generation of racial justice activists. While large percentages of teachers participated in the strike, black and brown teachers, as well as white teachers who taught primarily black and brown students, tended to support the strike in much lower numbers.
The strike ended in mid-November with the state seizing control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district and reinstating the fired teachers. Some argued that militant black teachers were “purged.” Undoubtedly, the conflict heightened tensions between the African American and Jewish communities.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Columbia Revolt
New Left
"In May 1968, the students of Columbia University went on strike after the administrators repeatedly ignored their demand for open discussion of the university's involvement in racist policies, exploitation of the surrounding community of Harlem. This is the story of our first major student revolt, told from inside the liberated buildings." (Roz Payne Archives) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BUcYLuGiL_s" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Kit • Parker Films - YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
RAT Subterranean News, February 6-23, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. In early 1970, women’s liberation activists took over RAT and turned it into a women-only periodical to challenge sexism within the New Left. This issue is the first after the take-over of RAT and covers a wide range of topics, including Afeni Shakur and the Panther 21; letters to the editor; women’s take-over of RAT; feminist critique of the New Left; the ambush of New York police in Harlem; the emergence of strong women leadership in the Weather Underground; Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria; sabotage; theft and activism; Boston students protesting a lecture by S.I. Hayakawa; Berkeley women take-over of karate class; a Gay Liberation Front protest at a San Francisco radio station; gas masks; women challenging doctors on abortion; sex and sexism; “Are Men Really the Enemy?” exam; John Sinclair release from prison; Palestinian women and armed struggle in Jordan; obscenity trial against Che; women in China; a Stockton, California, housewives strike; poetry; film review of “Prologue…”
R.A.T. Publications, Inc
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
February 6-23, 1970
underground press
Siege at Columbia (7 images)
New Left
The “Siege at Columbia,” as some called it, refers to the 1968 take-over of two buildings at Columbia University by white and black student radicals. It was a part of the broader global student revolt of that year.
In early March of 1967, Columbia SDS activist, Bob Feldman, uncovered documents that linked the university to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, sparking a year of anti-war protests on campus. Around the same time, opposition grew to a plan by Columbia to construct the Morningside Park gymnasium. Some were critical of the university’s appropriation of public park land in Harlem to build the new facility, while others labelled a proposal to create a separate “back-door” entrance for local community members, most of whom were African American and Puerto Rican, “Gym Crow,” claiming it was segregationist and discriminatory. Columbia, a major land-owner in the area, had a decades-long history of displacing local black and brown residents and applying stricter scrutiny to community members who used their facilities.
On March 27, 1968, student anti-war activists staged a peaceful demonstration inside Low Library. In response, university administration placed six activists on probation for violating a Columbia ban on indoor protests. Tensions grew between university administrators and student activists. On April 12, Columbia University president, Grayson Kirk, stated, “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.” On April 22, Columbia SDS leader, Mark Rudd, replied, “Dear Grayson, . . . You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: 'Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.'"
On April 23, members of SDS and Columbia’s Student Afro Society (SAS) led a second attempt to protest inside Low Library, but were prevented by university police. Following the campus confrontation, activists marched to the gymnasium construction site and attempted to block work there, resulting in scuffles with local police and some arrests. SDS and SAS members then returned to campus, where they occupied Hamilton Hall, which housed classrooms, as well as administrative offices. Activists detained Dean Henry Coleman (and released him 24 hours later) and issued six demands:
1) Disciplinary actions against the six originally charged must be lifted and no reprisals taken against anyone in this demonstration.
2) Construction of the Columbia gym on Harlem land must stop NOW.
3) The University must use its good offices to see that all charges against persons arrested at the gym site be dropped.
4) All relations with IDA must be severed, including President Kirk’s and Trustee William Burden’s membership on the Executive Board.
5) President Kirk’s edict on indoor demonstrations must be dropped.
6) All judicial decisions should be made in an open hearing with due process judged by a bipartite committee of students and faculty.
Soon after the occupation began, though, racial friction among the activists emerged. Black student activists requested that white radicals separate themselves from African American demonstrators. Black militants wanted to maintain a single focus on the construction of the new gymnasium, whereas white student activists also wanted to protest the broader issue of the university’s links to the war effort. In addition, members of SAS opposed the destruction of property, whereas SDS members did not. African American militants were concerned that destruction of property would play into long-standing racial stereotypes about black people. Ultimately, the two groups came to an agreement with white activists retreating from Hamilton Hall and occupying, instead, the President’s office in Low Library, along with three other buildings on campus. The siege at Columbia attracted significant national and even international attention, as well as the participation of community members, students from other campuses, and other activists, like SDS founder, Tom Hayden. On Friday, April 26, Black Power leaders, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown arrived on campus.
The stand-off between occupying student activists and the administration continued for a week, with wrangling over terms of a possible resolution. An Ad Hoc faculty committee desperately tried to broker a deal, but student activists, administrators and local politicians consistently rejected their efforts. Despite a majority of students and local community seeming to support the occupying students, a groups of student athletes and conservative students formed what they called the “Majority Coalition” and formed a cordon around the occupied buildings in an effort to block food and water from entering the buildings to “starve out” the activists. In response, supportive faculty created a buffer between the Majority Coalition and the buildings.
On Tuesday, April 30, an estimated 1,000 police entered campus to clear the occupied buildings. Fearful of a race riot in Harlem just a few weeks after civil disorder had hit the community in the wake of Dr. King’s murder, a contingent of African American law enforcement dealt gingerly with SAS activists. As SAS leader, Raymond Brown recalled, “They must have had half the black senior officers in New York on-site at Hamilton Hall, led by Assistant Chief Inspector Waithe. I think there was a great determination that they were not going to kick any black students in their butts.” Barnard SAS member, Karla Spurlock-Evans said, “The police came into Hamilton Hall and handled us very gently—not at all characteristic of police officers in general. They loaded us onto buses and took us downtown to the Tombs.” By contrast, police stormed the buildings controlled by white radicals with clubs swinging indiscriminately. According to Columbia faculty member, Michael Rosenthal, “They started beating the shit out of people. No one was resisting. I was standing next to the 64-year-old English professor Fred Dupee when he was punched in the face.” Future New York governor, Goerge Pataki, who was a Columbia law student at the time and member of the “Majority Coalition,” remembered, “From around the back of Low library comes this wave of T.P.F. guys just clubbing everybody in sight. I guess their orders were to clear the campus, which was incredibly stupid and counterproductive because many of the people outside the buildings were the anti-radicals—the pro-cop people. The radicals were all inside the buildings.” Nancy Biberman, a Barnard SDS member, stated, “I saw the university rabbi being beaten by police, and I saw random students who were beaten for just being outside on campus. These cops had been sitting on the perimeter of campus all week, pent up, waiting and waiting. As soon as they were allowed on campus, there was a mêlée. It was called a police riot, and I believe it. It was terrifying.” Police officer, Gary Beamer, agreed, saying, “The police were forced to stand outside the campus for several days and watch crimes being committed—assaults, destruction of property, and preventing students who wanted to get an education from going to class. It didn’t sit well with most of the police. So naturally, when the green light finally came for the police to go in and restore order, they were pretty eager to do it.” And Columbia student, Hilton Obenzinger, told reporters years later, “I remember vividly a cop with a frozen grin on his face going up to a girl, a Barnard student. He lifted up his very long utility flashlight and slammed it on her head. And it wasn’t just once—it was again, and again, and again. She fell down and he kept beating her.” Conflict between students and police continued into the next day. In the end, 132 students, 4 faculty members and 12 police officers were injured and roughly 700 arrested. An estimated 30 students were suspended. After another round of campus protests between May 17-22, police beat 51 and arrested 177 more students. Following the spring demonstrations, Columbia university did scrap the Morningside Park gymnasium and severed some of their ties to the military-industrial complex.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Uncle Sam needs YOU nigger
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster was issued by the Harlem Progressive Labor Club, the Harlem branch of the Progressive Labor Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization founded in 1962 out of a split within the Communist Party USA. Some described the organization as Maoist in the late-1960s. The PLP gained a foothold in the anti-Vietnam War movement through its Worker Student Alliance faction, which rivaled the Revolutionary Youth Movement within Students for a Democratic Society. The Harlem chapter initially emerged in response to police violence against African Americans in Harlem and later in opposition to the War in
Vietnam, emphasizing the racial dynamics of the war. This poster reads, "Uncle Sam needs YOU nigger/ Become a member of the world's highest paid black mercenary army!/ Fight for freedom... (in Viet Nam)/ Support White Power - travel to Viet Nam, you might get a medal!/ Receive valuable training in the skills of killing off other oppressed people!/ (Die Nigger Die - you can't die fast enough in the ghettos.)/ So run to your nearest recruiting chamber! (Keep the faith, baby)."
Harlem Progressive Labor Club
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
poster
Why We Strike
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
The “Siege at Columbia,” as some called it, refers to the 1968 take-over of two buildings at Columbia University by white and black student radicals. It was a part of the broader global student revolt of that year.
In early March of 1967, Columbia SDS activist, Bob Feldman, uncovered documents that linked the university to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, sparking a year of anti-war protests on campus. Around the same time, opposition grew to a plan by Columbia to construct the Morningside Park gymnasium. Some were critical of the university’s appropriation of public park land in Harlem to build the new facility, while others labelled a proposal to create a separate “back-door” entrance for local community members, most of whom were African American and Puerto Rican, “Gym Crow,” claiming it was segregationist and discriminatory. Columbia, a major land-owner in the area, had a decades-long history of displacing local black and brown residents and applying stricter scrutiny to community members who used their facilities.
On March 27, 1968, student anti-war activists staged a peaceful demonstration inside Low Library. In response, university administration placed six activists on probation for violating a Columbia ban on indoor protests. Tensions grew between university administrators and student activists. On April 12, Columbia University president, Grayson Kirk, stated, “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.” On April 22, Columbia SDS leader, Mark Rudd, replied, “Dear Grayson, . . . You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”
On April 23, members of SDS and Columbia’s Student Afro Society (SAS) led a second attempt to protest inside Low Library, but were prevented by university police. Following the campus confrontation, activists marched to the gymnasium construction site and attempted to block work there, resulting in scuffles with local police and some arrests. SDS and SAS members then returned to campus, where they occupied Hamilton Hall, which housed classroom, as well as administrative offices. Activists detained Dean Henry Coleman (and released him 24 hours later) and issued six demands:
1) Disciplinary actions against the six originally charged must be lifted and no reprisals taken against anyone in this demonstration.
2) Construction of the Columbia gym on Harlem land must stop NOW.
3) The University must use its good offices to see that all charges against persons arrested at the gym site be dropped.
4) All relations with IDA must be severed, including President Kirk’s and Trustee William Burden’s membership on the Executive Board.
5) President Kirk’s edict on indoor demonstrations must be dropped.
6) All judicial decisions should be made in an open hearing with due process judged by a bipartite committee of students and faculty.
Soon after the occupation began, though, racial friction among the activists emerged. Black student activists requested that white radicals separate themselves from African American demonstrators. Black militants wanted to maintain a single focus on the construction of the new gymnasium, whereas white student activists also wanted to protest the broader issue of the university’s links to the war effort. In addition, members of SAS opposed the destruction of property, whereas SDS members did not. African American militants were concerned that destruction of property would play into long-standing racial stereotypes about black people. Ultimately, the two groups came to an agreement with white activists retreating from Hamilton Hall and occupying, instead, the President’s office in Low Library, along with three other buildings on campus. The siege at Columbia attracted significant national and even international attention, as well as the participation of community members, students from other campuses, and other activists, like SDS founder, Tom Hayden. On Friday, April 26, Black Power leaders, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown arrived on campus.
The stand-off between occupying student activists and the administration continued for a week, with wrangling over terms of a possible resolution. An Ad Hoc facultuy committee desperately tried to broker a deal, but student activists, administrators and local politicians consistently rejected their efforts. Despite a majority of students and local community seeming to support the occupying students, a groups of student athletes and conservative students formed what they called the “Majority Coalition” and formed a cordon around the occupied buildings in an effort to block food and water from entering the buildings to “starve out” the activists. In response, supportive faculty created a buffer between the Majority coalition and the buildings.
On Tuesday, April 30, an estimated 1,000 police entered campus to clear the occupied buildings. Fearful of a race riot in Harlem just a few weeks after civil disorder had hit the community in the wake of Dr. King’s murder, a contingent of African American law enforcement dealt gingerly with SAS activists. As SAS leader, Raymond Brown recalled, “They must have had half the black senior officers in New York on-site at Hamilton Hall, led by Assistant Chief Inspector Waithe. I think there was a great determination that they were not going to kick any black students in their butts.” Barnard SAS member, Karla Spurlock-Evans said, “The police came into Hamilton Hall and handled us very gently—not at all characteristic of police officers in general. They loaded us onto buses and took us downtown to the Tombs.” By contrast, police stormed the buildings controlled by white radicals with clubs swinging indiscriminately. According to Columbia faculty member, Michael Rosenthal, “They started beating the shit out of people. No one was resisting. I was standing next to the 64-year-old English professor Fred Dupee when he was punched in the face.” Future New York governor, Goerge Pataki, who was a Columbia law student at the time and member of the “Majority Coalition,” remembered, “From around the back of Low library comes this wave of T.P.F. guys just clubbing everybody in sight. I guess their orders were to clear the campus, which was incredibly stupid and counterproductive because many of the people outside the buildings were the anti-radicals—the pro-cop people. The radicals were all inside the buildings.” Nancy Biberman, a Barnard SDS member, stated, “I saw the university rabbi being beaten by police, and I saw random students who were beaten for just being outside on campus. These cops had been sitting on the perimeter of campus all week, pent up, waiting and waiting. As soon as they were allowed on campus, there was a mêlée. It was called a police riot, and I believe it. It was terrifying.” Police officer, Gary Beamer, agreed, saying, “The police were forced to stand outside the campus for several days and watch crimes being committed—assaults, destruction of property, and preventing students who wanted to get an education from going to class. It didn’t sit well with most of the police. So naturally, when the green light finally came for the police to go in and restore order, they were pretty eager to do it.” And Columbia student, Hilton Obenzinger, told reporters years later, “I remember vividly a cop with a frozen grin on his face going up to a girl, a Barnard student. He lifted up his very long utility flashlight and slammed it on her head. And it wasn’t just once—it was again, and again, and again. She fell down and he kept beating her.” Conflict between students and police continued into the next day. In the end, 132 students, 4 faculty members and 12 police officers were injured and roughly 700 arrested. An estimated 30 students were suspended. After another round of campus protests between May 17-22, police beat 51 and arrested 177 more students.. Following the spring demonstrations, Columbia university did scrap the Morningside Park gymnasium and severed some of their ties to the military-industrial complex.
This pamphlet, written by the Columbia Strike Committee, to “help explain and clarify the position of the striking students at Columbia.”
Columbia Strike Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
pamphlet