Last weekend, several hundred participants in the 1968 student protests at Columbia occupied buildings on campus—this time legally—to reflect on the meaning of those events. This time the students had the benefit of 40 years of hindsight. This time, too, black students (now doctors and judges and teachers) and white students (now also doctors and judges and teachers) were together again under the same roof.
That might not seem like such a big deal at a moment when a black man (and a Columbia graduate) stands on the doorstep of the White House, but at one commemoration session Friday night at the Columbia Law School, something historic took place.
These two groups had long gone their separate ways: first that night in April 1968, when white students were asked to leave Hamilton Hall and take over their own building, and then for the next 40 years. Resentments festered. Black students felt their story had never been told. White students felt they never got a good explanation for why they had been sent packing.
The room at the Law School was crammed with about 400 alumni, current students, and observers. But I wish more of the Columbia community had been there to witness what unfolded during a three-and-a-half-hour living-history pageant in which three dozen participants told bits and pieces of the larger story of the Columbia uprising.
Zack Husser, a black football player at the time, talked about his anger at coach Buff Donelli’s “stacking” system, which involved putting most of the black athletes at the same position, regardless of where they had played in high school, resulting in all but one of them sitting on the bench. Al Dempsey, now a judge in Atlanta, talked about how his experience at Columbia—including being stopped by security guards every time he entered the campus—was more painful than growing up in the South. Indeed, he said, more painful than anything in his life other than watching his wife die of cancer.
Most of the whites in the audience, although they were classmates of Dempsey's and others with similar experiences, had never heard this bitterness. They didn’t know what drew many blacks into Hamilton Hall. Now, 40 years later, the stories were being shared—without acrimony, in front of all.
We learned from Juan Gonzalez, now a columnist at the New York Daily News, that there were indeed guns inside Hamilton Hall that first night. But the more important story, we also learned, was that the black student leadership ordered them out by morning. We also learned that the Student Afro-American Society thought the white students were hopelessly undisciplined and politically splintered into what Ray Brown, now a criminal defense attorney, described as 72 varieties of Marxism. Michelle Patrick, who wore a yellow cable-knit sweater to the revolution and later cut it into squares to protect against an anticipated tear-gas attack, talked about how she spent hours cleaning up after the white students left to make sure the building was presentable if the cops came.
By evening’s end, no one wanted to leave the cramped Law School classroom. There was a reaching out across the years and a realization of how central the experience of black students had been to the Columbia 1968 story, even though the protests are almost always described as the acts of a band of white radicals led by former Columbia student Mark Rudd.
The next night, at a literary event featuring readings by many of the writers who were at Columbia in 1968 and who took part in or supported the protests—Paul Auster, Mary Gordon, Thulani Davis, David Shapiro, Hilton Obenzinger, Ntozake Shange, Meredith Sue Willis, Sharon Olds—author Paul Spike offered an apology to his long-ago classmates for being what he called “a good German” and asked for forgiveness.
Forgiveness was a theme throughout the weekend. And it is past time for the University not only to forgive but also to embrace those who took a stand 40 years ago—a stand against Columbia’s ties to a military think tank that did research for the Vietnam War effort and a stand against the University’s land grab in Morningside Park. University President Lee Bollinger took a step in this direction when, on Thursday night, he welcomed the graying protesters back to campus. What he didn’t say—but what I believe to be the case—is that Columbia is a much healthier institution today as a result of what happened that year.
Yes, those were traumatic times. But social change, as Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian professor of philosophy, pointed out in a talk at a panel on the ethics of protest, only comes about as the result of disruption.
Political protest has a long history at Columbia, dating back to the days when Alexander Hamilton agitated against the Tory masters of King’s College. Nearly 200 years later, his heirs went into a building named in his honor, put their careers on the line, and said “enough.”
Columbia today is a far more diverse community, as those of us who walked around the campus over the weekend couldn’t help but notice. There’s a University Senate where none had existed before. The curriculum is more inclusive, and instead of an unsightly construction pit in Morningside Park, there’s now a beautifully landscaped lawn and pond. On Sunday, the Friends of Morningside Park planted a weeping cherry tree above the pond to mark the spot where the gym wasn’t built. It is a fitting memorial, which will last for generations, to the spirit of 1968.
The author is a member of the Columbia College class of 1969. He was the editor in chief on the 92nd Managing Board and one of the organizers of the Columbia 1968 commemoration.