The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Cornell had ‘3 hours to live’ back in 1969
Through no plan of my own I was present at two of the most frightening events in the history of American education: the Cornell crisis in 1969 and the Kent State massacre in 1970. Cornell made Black lives matter. Kent State sadly made white lives matter more.
At Cornell, the president, James Perkins, negotiated with members of African American Students who had occupied Willard Straight Hall and then armed themselves with rifles to protest the burning of a cross on the lawn of a Black dormitory and racism in general at Cornell.
Perkins persuaded the students to end their occupation of the building in exchange for allowing them to carry their rifles as they exited Willard Straight Hall ending their takeover of the building with an administrator in the lead.
A photo of the armed students holding their rifles as they exited appeared on the front page of The New York Times worldwide the next day in April 1969.
The university suspended classes for a week-long teachin on racism as part of the negotiated deal. I attended all of the sessions at Cornell traveling from my South Hill perch at neighboring Ithaca College.
Whether Cornell’s president intended it or not, his peaceful resolution of the dispute demonstrated that “Black lives mattered” at Cornell, 50 years before George Floyd’s murder in 2020 enlarged that movement and slogan.
Cornell was loudly divided on the issue with faculty flip-flops, reversing votes for and against support of the presidential negotiations: Had the president caved in to violence or prevented it? Some faculty would resign in protest.
Today President Perkins, a white administrator, might be praised for valuing Black lives over institutional politics. Instead, he resigned the presidency at the end of the year. Cancel culture existed 50 years ago.
I went off to graduate school at Kent State University in Ohio that September 1969 and within 10 months, unlike Cornell, bloodshed was not prevented in a student demonstration. Bloodshed was the outcome of the demonstration, literally triggered by 21 Ohio National Guardsmen who fired 61 bullets into a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding nine, paralyzing one for life, May 4, 1970. It was the fourth day of demonstrations at Kent after President Richard Nixon widened the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia.
Imagine if Cornell had sent in dozens of uniformed law enforcement agents as Ohio did at Kent State. The bloodbath which eventuated at Kent in 1970 is what Cornell’s President Perkins avoided in 1969.
One of the students who occupied Willard Straight Hall, Tom Jones, came to that conclusion about Perkins’ peacemaker role 36 years later in 1995 when he, by then a successful executive, endowed a prize in Perkins’s name at Cornell.
After graduation Jones became head of the nonprofit workers’ retirement fund TIAA/CREF and a Cornell trustee. In 1995, he endowed the P erkins Prize for Interracial Understanding in honor of former President James Perkins.
Some transformation. Tom Jones had been the Black student who declared “Cornell had 3 hours to live” when he and other Black students took over Willard Straight Hall in 1969.
Unlike Cornell’s racially charged crisis the year before, the Kent State killings on May 4, 1970 touched a raw nerve in America, spawning the anthem for a generation: Neil Young’s “Ohio” written within a week of the shootings with the haunting lyrics “Four dead in Ohio.”
Eleven days after the Kent State shootings two Black students were killed and 12 wounded by a barrage of police bullets at Jackson State College in Jackson Mississippi:
“0n May 15 1970, the police opened fire shortly after midnight on students (and passersby) in a May 14 protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Twelve students were wounded and two (21-year-old law student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and 17tear-old high school student James Earl Green ) were killed.” Both were Black.
No contrast could have been clearer. The white children killed at Kent State on May 4, 1970 instantly became martyrs even in the anthem whose words were intoned a kind of musical sainthood chant over and over “Four dead in Ohio. Four Dead in Ohio. Four Dead in Ohio.
The Black children killed at Jackson State 11 days later achieved no such status. They soon disappeared from the public’s eyes and ears.
Another college administrator took it upon himself to right that cultural blindness which befell the Jackson State victims.
Dr. J. Gregory Payne, chair of the Emerson College Communication Studies Department, has long honored both Jackson State and Kent State in combined memorial services, academic discussions, and artistic creations.
In a memorial for the 25th anniversary of both shootings in May, 1995, which I attended with Dean Kahler, the student paralyzed in the Kent State shootings, Dr. Payne and his Emerson students held a four- day event, honoring the victims of Jackson State and Kent State.
Dr. Payne shared leadership of that memorial with a Black academic from Harvard Law School, Charles Ogletree, who led discussions on the Jackson State shootings.
In addition to lectures, panel discussions and performances, Payne’s students also organized a memorial candlelight vigil on the Boston Common for the victims of Jackson State and Kent State.
Recall the tiny mustard seed please: Cornell’s President Perkins in 1969 decided that even rifle-toting members of the African American Students group occupying Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall were Black lives that mattered. Emerson College’s Communications Chair Greg Payne, with his decades-long tradition of memorializing the Kent State shootings in tandem with the Jackson State shootings, made it clear that Black lives matter as well as white.
These two educational leaders, Perkins and Payne, planted in our national soil the mustard seeds of racial equality decades before the formal Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 sprouted into a huge trees with international branches.
Seeds matter, black or white.