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Later that month, Simms reported on a lecture by H. Rap Brown to a standing-room-only crowd in the grand ballroom of CCNY’s Finley Student Center, the outspoken chairman of SNCC. The Onyx Society, which had organized the event and partially paid for it with SGA funding, denied white people entrance. During his lecture, Brown insisted that “America is practicing a genocidal war against black people now. Thirty percent of the casualties in Vietnam are black; they got rid of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Muhammad Ali received the maximum sentence and the maximum fine.” Programs like SEEK “will not save you,” he said. “You saw that in Detroit— the honky beat the middle-class niggers with middle-class sticks. . . . In order to alleviate this condition we must move as a common force. . . . Power, as Chairman Mao says, comes from the barrel of a gun.”38 Brown, who would leave SNCC in 1968 to become the justice minister for the Black Panther Party, told his audience that the “Black Revolution will go on wantonly until you [educated] brothers and sisters give it some direction.” He wanted college-educated blacks to radically revise the history then being taught in American classrooms. He challenged the CCNY students to learn “the little facts” in history that most “educated people don’t know” and to get engaged in rewriting the history books and teaching history.39 There is evidence that the Black Power message spread quickly to college campuses throughout metropolitan New York and as far north as Ithaca. Shortly after his speech, black and Latino students did indeed rise up—first at Columbia, then at Lehman, CCNY, and Cornell—and they issued lists of demands intended to radically change their respective colleges.40
Student Takeover at Columbia, 1968 On April 23, 1968, just two and a half weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, two groups of student protesters shut down Columbia University. During the infamous six-day siege at Columbia, student activists barricaded themselves inside several university administration buildings. Members of the predominately white SDS wanted the university to formally end its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank dedicated to weapons research that had ties to the U.S. Department of Defense. Members of Columbia’s Black Power–inspired
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Student Afro-American Society (SAS) wanted to stop Columbia from building a new gymnasium in Morningside Park, the one natural barrier between the university and the surrounding black and brown working-class neighborhood.41 SAS’s outrage wasn’t unfounded. Elite urban universities have had a long history of physically expanding in the name of public and educational progress without giving much, if any, thought to the impact further development would have on the surrounding communities. Gentrification, dislocation of longtime residents, and destruction of important institutions and historic sites were some of the consequences of development by such institutions as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Yale University in New Haven, Harvard University in Cambridge, and historically black colleges such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the Atlanta University Center Consortium in Atlanta.42 Columbia’s plans to demolish valuable open space in Harlem appeared to the students to be another landgrab by a rich institution at the expense of a poor black and brown neighborhood. Harlem residents saw the white men who ran Columbia University as callous and arrogant people who threw their weight around for selfish ends and formed a number of organizations to resist the university’s attempt to expand the campus, thereby dislocating Harlem residents. The East Harlem Tenants Council tried to organize around the threat of gentrification. Arnie Segarra, a Puerto Rican, already a Harlem mainstay as a former star basketball player and now a manager of one of the top Latin nightclubs in Harlem, worked as an organizer for the council. Segarra knew people and had a gift for reaching out and bringing diverse groups together regardless of class or ethnicity. When the unrest in Harlem began in 1968, Mayor John Lindsay hired Segarra to serve as the community liaison between his office and East Harlem. As part of his job, Segarra built coalitions between the blacks and Latinos by reaching out to Charles Rangel, Percy Sutton, and City Clerk David Dinkins. Segarra and Dinkins formed a close personal relationship, and Segarra ultimately became a Dinkins aide and an organizer with Latinos for Dinkins. The SAS and other Columbia students worked closely with local Harlem organizations as student tutors and community organizers. Juan González—a Brooklyn native, Puerto Rican, and former Columbia student—volunteered at a student tutorial program in Harlem. Mark Naison joined CORE’s
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Columbia chapter and participated in tenant organizing in East Harlem; that group focused on uncovering housing discrimination and organizing tenant organizations, rent strikes, and working with local tenant organizations fighting against the displacement of low-income residents as part of the state’s urban-renewal program.43 In January 1968, González’s community group participated in a protest against the construction of a new Columbia University gym at the designated site “so I went, because it was our community group that was involved.”44 At the protest, an anonymous, young, militant African American minister made it very clear that Gonzáles, Naison, and another student CORE organizer from Columbia should follow him. Out of respect for the minister’s position (this almost sounds like they did this grudgingly), González and the two CORE members staged a sit-in in front of bulldozers. They were soon arrested along with other protesters and spent the day in the Tombs, the old and infamous New York City jail. In the meantime, SAS students had met with community organizers and were now convinced that Columbia’s landgrab was indeed a white supremacist attempt for local control over a black and brown community that they had to resist even if it meant harassment or expulsion. This type of militant stance was common for the era. A month before the takeover of Columbia, SAS members at Howard University participated in a building occupation there, which inspired SAS members at Columbia to take over Hamilton Hall on the Harlem campus.45 Prior to the campus takeover on April 23, SAS and SDS had collaborated as well, and during the takeover SAS received support from SDS students, the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters, and Latin American and Asian students.46 Black students from CCNY and other campuses, along with activists such as SNCC leaders, supported Columbia’s SAS members. Harlem residents brought in home-cooked food, which fed the student protesters who were locked in Hamilton Hall. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, a native South Carolinian—a culinary writer, activist, and, anthropologist—lived in Harlem at this time. In addition to her other activities, cooked “neck bones, chicken feet stew, biscuits, greens, and grits” and “batches of fried chicken, cornbread and potato salad” for SNCC fundraisers. She played an important part in literally feeding civil rights activists in New York thereby feeding the civil rights revolution itself. Fried chicken recipes from all over made important contributions to the Black Power, community control, and student movements as
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one of many signature soul foods that became fashionable, popular, and gave black people a sense of pride in regard to their food.47 At this point, however, many SAS members thought it might be time to separate from SDS and other groups. Thus days into the standoff, the student forces began to fracture along racial lines. Naison wrote, “What started out as a united protest had turned into a tension-filled standoff, with black students in one side the building and white students in the other.”48 While members of SDS were opposed to the gym, they were primarily concerned with staging an antiwar demonstration. But members of SAS were centrally focused on protesting racial injustice. In addition to blocking additional development in Harlem, the SAS student mobilization was aimed at forcing Columbia’s administrators to hire more black faculty, offer more Black Studies courses, and admit greater numbers of black students.49 One of the SAS leaders, William Sales, gave a speech during the occupation that went even deeper, linking the local fight in Harlem to the broader movement for selfdetermination and to the struggles of freedom fighters in Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.50 Differences in priorities and ideology led to a bitter confrontation between white and black students, and the SAS members asked the SDS members to leave. The SAS retained control of Hamilton Hall, renaming it Nat Turner Hall of Malcolm X University (figure 3.1), and the white members of the SDS moved into Low Library, which housed the president’s office.51 The SAS side of the demonstration was not made up of only Columbia students but included students from New York University (NYU) and CCNY, black and Puerto Rican residents of East and West Harlem, CORE members, and activists involved in a nascent school-board struggle in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn. “In addition to students who had Columbia IDs, there were at least an equal number of these community forces who stayed with us throughout the demonstration,” said Sales in Tech News, the CCNY newspaper. Notably, when the white and black students parted ways, Harlem’s Puerto Rican community closed ranks with its black neighbors. Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, heavy hitters from the national Black Power movement, also visited the campus during the standoff to show solidarity and attract greater press coverage for the demonstrators.52 The protests ended after six days when police stormed both buildings. One hundred and fifty students were injured and at least thirty were
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Figure 3.1 Students picketing at Columbia University, 1968. (Private Collection of Photographer
Nancy Shia)
suspended, but both the SAS and SDS achieved their immediate central goals: Columbia ended its affiliation with the weapons firm and scrapped its plans to build a gymnasium on Morningside Park. Harlem residents said they felt as if they had gained a new level of control over their community and their future.53
Ocean Hill People’s Board of Education Soon enough, a new front in the battle for racial equity in the educational system opened up in the Ocean Hill section of Brooklyn in East New York. It was part of a nationwide movement by blacks and Latinos to reform school curricula, introduce black history, boost black and Latino parent participation, and win greater control for local communities over the operations in their school districts. “Across the city, schools with black and Latino majorities received fewer resources, were overcrowded, and were often saddled