50 years later, former students recall protests
NEW YORK — Fifty years ago Monday, Columbia University students angry about racism and the Vietnam War began a rebellion that fed a sense the country was in turmoil.
Starting at noon on April 23, 1968, student militants occupied Hamilton Hall, a main classroom building, and took a dean hostage for 24 hours. They stormed into the office of the university’s president, ransacked files and smoked his cigars.
Over the next few days, hundreds of students would seize a total of five campus buildings. The occupation attracted global attention. Black militant leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown visited the protesters. China’s Chairman Mao Zedong sent a telegram.
Then, early on April 30, a thousand police officers swept in and cleared out the rebels.
“In the club swinging, fist fighting, pushing and kneeing that marked the violent subjugation,” the Associated Press reported at the time. One hundred students and 15 police officers were injured. Police made 700 arrests.
The protests were part of a year of global tumult that included Vietnam’s Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and mass demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
As Columbia prepares to observe the anniversary, some people who lived through the occupations see parallels with today’s young activists, such as survivors of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
“When Parkland happened and I saw particularly the young women speaking angrily and passionately about what had happened and what had to change, I just heard my own voice,” said Nancy Biberman, who was a student at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia.
Two grievances sparked the protests: Columbia’s ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a weapons research outfit, and a university plan to build a gym in a city park that would have separate doors for Columbia students and for the surrounding African American community.
Karla Spurlock-Evans was a freshman.
“Being in that building, sensing the power of what can come when people who have a common goal that is righteous come together with goodwill and good intentions and love showed me that real change can be accomplished,” said Spurlock-Evans, now dean of multicultural affairs at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
But support for the occupiers wasn’t universal. Vaud Massarsky was a leader of a student group opposed to the protests called the Majority Coalition.
“The press has ignored the great apathetic mass that was there to get a degree,” said Massarsky, now a management consultant and author of detective stories.