Eldridge Cleaver at New York University
(2 images)
Black Power
Photos of Black Panther Party Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver at New York University.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
New York University Black Panther Party Demonstration
(2 images)
Black Power
Images from a Black Panther Party Demonstration at New York University.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
New York Anti-War Demonstration, December 1967
(12 images)
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In 1967, anti-war activists shifted tactics from “protest to resistance” to the War in Vietnam, seeking more militant means on the home front to challenge U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. In October of that year, anti-war activists organized the first “Stop the Draft Week,” an effort to engage in civil disobedience at draft induction centers. Most famously, in Oakland, hundreds of activists marched on the Oakland Army Induction Center in an effort to shut it down. Police responded with widespread violence. In December, anti-war organizations organized a second “Stop the Draft Week.” In New York, Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsburg led more than 1,000 demonstrators to the Whitehall induction center in New York.
A December 6, 1967, New York Times article by Homer Bigart, titled, “264 Seized Here in Draft Protest,” offered an account of the protest:
The police arrested 264 persons, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and the poet Allen Ginsberg, during a demonstration yesterday between 5 A.M. and 6 A.M. by more than 2,500 antidraft, antiwar protesters at the armed forces induction center at 39 Whitehall Street.
The mass arrests, anticipated by both the demonstrators and the police, brought the only turbulent moments in a generally orderly demonstration.
But the police were alerted for a livelier protest today when a coalition of more that 40 antiwar groups plans to surround the induction center with 5,000 demonstrators who have been instructed to paralyze traffic in the area.
The Police Department issued an order marshaling all available manpower in the 28,000-man force on either an active or a standby basis, effective through Friday. About 4,000 men were expected to be on duty at the induction station today.
The center opens at 5:30 A.M., Mondays through Fridays, and that is why the demonstrators are obliged to be up long before dawn.
Yesterday's siege failed to disrupt either the induction center or the neighboring tip of the financial district.
The ranks of demonstrators thinned out before the morning rush hour. Leaders said they had no intention of trying to force a halt in the induction process; they merely wanted a "symbolic" protest. But today, they said, would be different.
Starting at 5:30 A.M., according to instructions issued by the Stop the Draft Week Committee, demonstrators will not only block streets in the area but will try to intercept inductees and persuade them to join the protest.
The police massed more than 2,500 men yesterday and defended the induction center, a faded nine-story red brick building of 1886 construction, with barricades so formidable that Dr. Spock had to plead for an opening so that he could sit on the entrance steps and be arrested.
Among those arrested were Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, and his wife Maire, daughter of the former deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Sean MacEntee. The O'Briens were among a group staging a sit-in at Broad and Pearl Streets, one block from the induction center.
Mrs. O'Brien told newsmen that mounted policemen drove their horses into the sitting group and her husband was assaulted by policemen who followed on foot.
"They [the police] kicked Conor around quite a bit," she said.
Dr. O'Brien, who headed the United Nations mission to Katanga during the 1961 Congo crisis, insisted on medical attention, according to Mrs. O'Brien. She said the police took them both to Bellevue Hospital, where it was found that Dr. O'Brien had suffered bruises. He was discharged yesterday afternoon.
Assembling in early morning darkness, the demonstrators arrived in Peter Minuit Plaza armed with notebooks and cameras so, they explained, they could record instances of police brutality.
But the police, operating under a set of "instructions and principles" issued by Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelik, behaved in a manner that drew praise later in the day from Mayor Lindsay.
Mayor Lindsay told a City Hall news conference that he had received a full report on the demonstration and believed it was "handled very well by the police."
The Garelik instructions warned the police to respect the rights of the dissenters so long as the demonstrators did not impede the rights and the free movement of others.
All of the 264 persons arrested - there were 171 men and 93 women - were paroled when arraigned in Criminal Court on charges of disorderly conduct. Hearings have been set from Jan. 10 to Jan. 24.
In an unusual step, those arrested were not booked at a police station but were taken directly in police vans to the Criminal Court Building at 100 Centre Street. There, close to the courtroom, the police had set up a booking desk. Equipment for fingerprinting and photographing any who might be charged with a felony was also at hand.
In addition to disorderly conduct, two of the prisoners were charged with resisting arrest. They were Tuli Kupferberg, 44 years old, of 301 East 10th Street, an editor of East Village Other, and Jonathan Miller, 20, of 120 West 106th Street.
Judge Walter H. Gladwin released all without bail but warned the defendants that if they were brought before him after participating in any other demonstrations this week "I shall have to set bail for you."
Hearings for Dr. Spock and Mr. Ginsberg will be held Jan. 10.
Dr. Spock told reporters out of court that he had been "cheerfully straight-armed" by the police when he tried to climb over a triple row of wooden horses and reach the steps of the induction building.
Reporters who saw the incident recalled that the 64-year-old Dr. Spock after failing in an effort to crawl under the barricade, mounted the wooden horses but was gently pushed back into the mass of demonstrators by policemen on the other side.
Finally, a police official showed Dr. Spock an opening at the end of the barricade. Whereupon the child doctor and antiwar agitator led about a dozen demonstrators from the picket line in the middle of Whitehall Street to the building steps. There, surrounded by policemen, they were allowed to squat on the cold stones for a few symbolic moments before they were arrested.
As soon as the van had taken them off, a second, group, this one headed by Mr. Ginsberg, was allowed to repeat Dr. Spock's performance. Mr. Ginsberg, the bearded beatnik poet, was wearing an orange batik shawl, a huge flowered tie, a rosary and a Buddhist amulet.
There were cymbals on his fingers, of the sort affected by Egyptian belly dancers, and he made a cheerful tinkle as the police hustled him to a van.
Some of those who sat on the steps went limp as policemen approached and had to be carried to the wagons while the pickets cheered.
But there was no violence here. Many of the pickets seemed middle-aged or older, and were not inclined to be violently demonstrative. One of the demonstrators, Beatrix Turner, 68, an artist, even praised the police: "I think the police behaved well; I'm full of compliments for them."
Very few Negroes were seen among the pickets.
A younger, much more militant outpouring was predicted today. Tactics "inspired" by the antidraft demonstration in Oakland, Calif., last Oct. 16 will be used, according to the sponsors. At Oakland, missiles were thrown and vehicles set afire.
But spokesmen for four of the sponsoring groups insisted that the protest today would be "nonviolent," even though it would involve "active interference with the war machine."
Meanwhile, inside the induction center, the commanding officer, Lieut. Col. James McPoland, called yesterday's demonstration "a big zero." Induction operations were normal and he predicted that the center would continue to process about 250 men daily.
Youths carrying brown envelopes containing orders to report for induction made their way unmolested through picket and police lines during the height of the demonstration. They vanished through an elevator door that bore the slogan "The Security of World Peace Starts Here."
"Somebody's gonna fight," said Pedro Anton Baez, 19, as he neared the building. "If I have to go to Vietnam, I'll go."
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
December 5, 1967
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
Movement, March 1969
New Left
The Movement was an underground press newspaper based in San Francisco, California. This issue, the "Huey P. Newton Birthday Edition,” was published in March of 1969. In a 3 page spread there is an interview with Bobby Seale about the status of Huey Newton's case, police brutality incidents in the Los Angeles area and questions regarding the Community Survival Programs of the Black Panthers. Also in this issue are multiple articles highlighting the student movement at various universities around the country, including Berkeley, Columbia, Yale, New York University, and San Francisco State University; a statement and manifesto from the American Deserters Committee for American Deserters living in Montreal, Canada; as well as various statements that cover other movements including the American Indian Movement (AIM). This issue ends with a poem from Ho Chi Minh's prison diary.
The Movement Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
March 1969
underground press