Columbia’s Relationship to Harlem

Amid chants protesting Columbia’s approach to Manhattanville expansion, activists recall the infamous rally cries of 1968, as well as surface tensions over University and neighborhood identity.

Forty years ago, Columbia faced harsh criticism and accusations of racism when design plans for a gymnasium in Morningside Park featured two separate entrances—one for predominantly white University affiliates, and another for members of the largely black Harlem community. The proposed architecture with an upper entrance from campus and a lower entrance from West Harlem was originally based on the park’s sloped landscape. Students successfully joined forces with local activists to combat this construction, which they viewed as segregationist.

Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin has said that the past struggle is incomparable to current University-neighborhood relations surrounding expansion into Manhattanville. “I don’t think the analogy is appropriate at all,” he said.

Yet the residue of past conflict undeniably has had a real impact. At a November demonstration, a woman with graying hair held a poster that read, “1968, 2007—Same Struggle Same Fight.” Like many who marched along her side and who continue to raise their voices about Columbia’s ties to the local community, Suzanne Ross, BC ’59 and GSAS ’69, has had affiliations with both the University itself and the West Harlem area at large.

Inherent in the discussion about Columbia’s relationship with the neighborhood and the traces of 1968 is a question of its identity. Columbia’s full name marks its urban location—Columbia University in the City of New York. According to the University’s Web site for prospective students, the surrounding “college town, New York-style,” is located in Morningside Heights, with noted attractions such as the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the Farmers Market, weekend “kayaking on the Hudson,” and the Riverside Park Bird Sanctuary, among others.

But click on the “Neighbors” link, and the site speaks in different terms. “The cultural richness of Harlem, Washington Heights, and surrounding neighborhoods is an essential part of what makes Columbia a great place to work and study,” it reads, now using the word “Harlem.”

Barnard political theory professor Dennis Dalton, who arrived at the University in 1969, has had close personal relationships with Harlem residents since he first welcomed them into his class as auditors in 1992. His mantra is a quote by E.M. Forster, “Only connect,” which he applies to Columbia and the neighborhood. “That’s our mission,” he said. “We are now facing a massive disconnect between Columbia and Harlem, and that can be corrected.”

Dalton wishes that more of the student body took advantage of Harlem’s cultural offerings—particularly the famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street. Still, he believes that it would be oversimplification to consider University-neighborhood separation only as division along racial lines. “Class is every bit as important,” he said.

April 1968 seemed a cataclysmic context for this discourse about racial and class identity at Columbia. There was a stirring for civil rights across the country that had been building throughout the movement’s development, which was then coupled with widespread despair due to the sudden assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“What happened at Columbia was a very, very small speck on the landscape of larger events,” said former student activist Nancy Biberman, BC ’69, who is now working on this year’s 1968 commemorative events. “We all felt a sense of just powerlessness, absolute powerlessness. We were young, too young to do anything. ... There was a sense of ‘Oh, my gosh could it be? Could it be that we are making an impact?’ but then Dr. King was assassinated. So it was sort of like a roller coaster of emotion.”
It was at this moment that tensions between the University and locals living around Morningside Park came to a head.

“The truth of the matter was that it was more than a symbol. It was a Jim Crow project,” former graduate-student activist Bill Sales, SIPA ‘66, said. “The actual plans for two separate gymnasiums in one structure. No internal connections between the two and separate entrances. That’s not symbolism. That’s real Jim Crow. And remember we’re talking about 1968, and that’s not too far from the demise of Jim Crow. It’s more than symbolism. It was a real insult to the community.”

He added, “If you’re talking about Harlem people only protesting because of the civil-rights movement, that’s absolutely true, because it was the civil-rights and Black Power movements that gave black people the kind of power to stop the kinds of things that have been occurring in our community from the time we’ve been in the country.”
But Richard C. Yardwood, CC ’51, sees things from a different perspective. Yardwood, who turned 82 last week, was volunteering at the Columbia Community Athletic Field in Morningside Park during the 1968 controversy and has lived in and around Harlem all his life.

“When [Columbia’s leading 1968 activist] Mark Rudd and that group started to agitate about building the gymnasium and how it was going to be segregated—there was going to be a separate entrance for the community and all of that business—well that was just out and out misrepresentation,” Yardwood said. He added later, “Columbia does not have a good reputation or record in the neighborhood for being cognizant of the people who live there. However, the whole thing about the gymnasium—if you’re focusing on that—Columbia was totally in the right on that. Totally.”

Yardwood believes that the University has improved itself as a presence in the neighborhood since 1968, and that local activists today—such as the Coalition to Preserve Community, led by Tom DeMott, CC ’80—are too young to remember what really happened back then. “They’re totally ignorant, and they’re motivated in this ignorance and a persistence in the ignorance. They’re motivated by a bias against Columbia University and Columbia College,” he said.

At a recent CPC meeting at West Harlem’s St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Yardwood challenged DeMott’s characterization of the 1968 controversy. “The write-up was about this 40th anniversary of what had taken place—with the way the language was written—you know, gave the idea that it was an encroachment upon the community. And it wasn’t an encroachment in any way at all.”

But DeMott views the events of 1968 as pivotal in the self-affirmation of the Harlem community in the face of University expansion. To him, the success of the movement to halt the gym’s construction was essential to building the ties between student and neighborhood activists that have become so vigorous today.

On April 26, CPC will march to Columbia’s campus from St. Mary’s to commemorate 1968 and echo its message of resistance as that message applies to Manhattanville expansion. As protestors look back at the proposed Morningside Park project, DeMott said they will look ahead towards campus construction uptown and call upon Columbia to “cease the racist nature of its expansion.”

“The resemblance to today is striking,” DeMott said of Columbia’s past and present development, though he added, “The resistance, I would argue, to the expansion today is more deeply felt than in 1968.” The opposition movement surrounding the Manhattanville project has been active over four years, whereas the struggle over plans for the gym in Morningside Park was shorter-lived. Moreover, he believes that “the proposed expansion today will be infinitely more damaging in terms of its effects on the Harlem community than that gym.”

Whether or not an analogous relationship exists between the development controversy of 1968 and that of today—or to what extent it exists—there is undeniable influence. The tensions that surfaced between the University and the surrounding neighborhood 40 years ago are still felt in the dialogue about today’s relations, as each side struggles to assert its own identity as part of a shared community.

betsy.morais@columbiaspectator.com