‘Wild’ Battle of Columbia, 50 yrs. later
IT WAS a year that upended the world, with peaceful protests and violent attacks, and students in a corner of Manhattan played no small role.
Sandwiched between the murders of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the Columbia University protests of 1968 were an important part of a worldwide movement rooted in hope and united in outrage.
On April 23, 1968, Columbia University students began a nonviolent campus takeover that lasted nearly a week, and ended with the bloody removal of students from five occupied buildings.
Students and community supporters called for the university to cut its ties to research for the war in Vietnam, and to end construction of a Morningside Park gym project that failed to promise reasonable access to nearby Harlem residents.
“We had tried every way possible to convince them to change their policies,” said protester Tom Hurwitz. “They wouldn’t do it. So finally we made a really dramatic movement, which was to begin to occupy buildings on campus.”
Negotiations between student protest leaders and university administrators soon reached a stalemate.
On April 30, at 2 a.m., police came in and started clearing the buildings.
“There were people who were sitting in front of the buildings who were trying to stop the police,” Hurwitz recalled, as if it all happened a few hours ago.
“They were pacifist groups sitting in front of the building. They were beaten mercilessly.”
As quickly as it had begun, the occupation was over, but the protests and the movement never went away.
Over time, the university abandoned the gym project and built a facility on campus. The school severed ties with some companies with connections to the war machine.
And Columbia launched a university senate that included new input from faculty and students.
“It was a wild, amazing ride,” said protester Jamal Joseph. “Even then, you knew that you were part of something bigger than yourself.”