It's Been a Long Time Coming

“The struggle is eternal. Someone else picks up and carries on.”—Ella Baker

I’m a sucker for Eyes on the Prize. I’ve watched that series on the civil rights and black power movements many times over, and I still get teary-eyed when the opening credits roll and the spiritual begins anew. There is a fierce beauty and power in the struggle that is both monumentally inspiring and terribly challenging. I’ve spent most of my academic energies at Columbia learning about grassroots political movements, so I understand what Robin Kelley wrote in his book Freedom Dreams—“I spent more than half my life writing about people who tried to change the world, largely because I, too, wanted to change the world.” I’ve tried, with many others, to change Columbia, and as I graduate I’m attempting to find a way to reflect upon my experiences here that will be fulfilling and useful.

Kelley also wrote that “Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.” Kelley’s words ring true for me. While there have been concrete victories for changes in Multicultural Affairs, the Core Curriculum, and ethnic studies, the fundamental problems of this University remain. While those efforts and successes were worthy, I feel that there are also great lessons to be learned in reflecting on the way that students went about achieving them, and the kinds of communities they built.

I leave Columbia much less certain about anything than when I came here, thinking a lot about the value of humility and democracy in social justice work. One of the most important moments in my intellectual and activist development is when I learned about Ella Baker in Kelley’s class. This can of course prevent you from listening to other perspectives and doing necessary self-critique, but it can also be internally disempowering for a group. Baker was very critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for not doing enough to promote local leadership and for having a centralized movement power structure. Groups like Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge and coalitions like Stop Hate on Columbia’s Campus helped to reinforce for me that everyone’s participation is important, and that the work we do is out of dedication to each other, not self-righteousness and self-promotion.

One of the dangers of looking back so lovingly on past movements or at my time at Columbia is that I may isolate the efforts into particular outbursts or spectacles of energy, when in fact these movements were developed with enduring care and patience by many people over long periods of time. I was amazed when I found out that Rosa Parks was not simply tired, but was a trained and committed community activist. In working together with other students over the course of a semester to develop a report on ethnic studies, I saw firsthand the value in education and preparation that doesn’t come in moments of protest, but in unglamorous, quotidian effort. I never took over a building at Columbia, which some may see as the height of either activist success or absurdity, but that doesn’t bother me. My favorite “protest” moments are not the large rallies and the nervous-looking administrators and security guards, but the calmer moments, like during the spring of 2006 when SHOCC had everyone sit in circles and simply talk to and listen to each other, during the hunger strike when I dialogued with people I had never met before in the tents in front of Butler, or every Monday night, when ROOTEd hosted discussions on power and privilege.

A couple of summers ago, I pored over 50 years of Spectator issues to help build an archive on student activism for the Intercultural Resource Center. At first it was very frustrating to see that despite major victories, for decades students kept protesting and fighting about the same things, including expansion, ethnic studies, multicultural affairs, hate crimes, war, labor abuse, etc. But there is also something wonderful in this constant struggle. For no matter what struggles or setbacks students may face, they keep coming, they keep organizing, and they stay committed. The fact that new students take up these causes shows that these issues—and the Columbia University and world that these students have been trying to build—are bigger than any one person, group, or era. I can leave Columbia proud because I look at the classes below and I believe in them, just as older classes believed in my generation.

Christien Tompkins is a Columbia College senior majoring in African-American studies.
Freedom Dreams runs alternate Thursdays.
Opinion@columbiaspectator.com.