What Is Relevant?
As we have seen, 1968 was a year of change. All of the various threads that made up radicalism in America seemed to coalesce at the same time and the result was a society far from what it had been. As a result of the murders of leaders such as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., riots were erupting in our major cities. The Black Power movement, which included Black Panthers and other African-American movement groups, successfully stole the thunder from SDS and the other white radical groups. That movement, with its emphasis on self-reliance, encouraged a shift away from any alliances with any white groups and empowered African Americans:
The Black Power movement instilled a sense of racial pride and self-esteem in blacks. Blacks were told that it was up to them to improve their lives. Black Power advocates encouraged blacks to form or join all-black political parties that could provide a formidable power base and offer a foundation for real socioeconomic progress. For years, the movement’s leaders said, blacks had been trying to aspire to white ideals of what they should be. Now it was time for blacks to set their own agenda, putting their needs and aspirations first. An early step, in fact, was the replacement of the word “Negro” (a word associated with the years of slavery) with “black.”
The movement generated a number of positive developments. Probably the most noteworthy of these was its influence on black culture. For the first time, blacks in the United States were encouraged to acknowledge their African heritage. Colleges and universities established black studies programs and black studies departments. Blacks who had grown up believing that they were descended from a backwards people now found out that African culture was as rich and diverse as any other, and they were encouraged to take pride in that heritage. The Black Arts movement, seen by some as connected to the Black Power movement flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Young black poets, authors, and visual artists found their voices and shared those voices with others. Unlike earlier black arts movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, the new movement primarily sought out a black audience.1
The movement itself, for all of its effects as a positive force, was riddled with factions; the more radical members saw their more conservative members who advocated nonviolence and negotiation as sell-outs and “Uncle Toms.” Many of them, it appeared, would rather be pure than successful. Some observers, however, view these schisms more as categories than divisions:
“I would see them as complementary more so than anything else,” says Gerald Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moore Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. The prolific historian is author of over 30 books, including the upcoming “Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity.” While noting the limited analytical value of such a conventional two-tiered construct, Horne says, “I think they both played a role” and both had “their assets and their liabilities.”
“They are interrelated struggles and the one grows out of the other,” says Paul Coates, owner of Black Classic Press, one of the oldest Black-owned publishing institutions in the country. The former black power leader notes how the civil rights movement recedes in the late ’60s as “what we look at as the Black Power movement really comes in to fore” with the “more confrontational extension of demands” for Black liberation and human rights. Coates clarifies “they are connected and part of the same struggle.”2
While the Black Power movement was rising, SDS itself was splintering. New members, younger and more aggressive than the old hands, were splitting the group apart, creating a crisis of factionalism and therefore causing many of its leaders to wonder whether they were even relevant anymore.
Todd Gitlin, an SDS leader, wrote to Carol McEldowney, another leader, that he had been talking with other members about the end of the movement. McEldowney replied, describing what Gitlin called a mix of desperation and bravado and saying that all of the action now was coming from African-American radicals and she did not know if there was a place for white people anymore.3 Having nowhere else to go, the young white radicals turned on the universities. At this time, Tom Hayden says, “Campuses around the world exploded with spontaneous and uncoordinated student occupation of campus buildings, the only method by which students might gain leverage against their uncaring administrations. The revolt made the Port Huron Statement seem mild. This was the lunch counter sit-in extended to the liberal north and the free speech movement gone global, exposing the complicity of the universities within the larger system.”4
It is questionable how spontaneous and uncoordinated the student strike at Columbia really was. In March of 1967 Columbia law student and SDS organizer Bob Feldman, while doing research in the college library, came across some documents that struck him as interesting. What he found was a sheaf of papers describing Columbia’s work with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a weapons research think tank that reported to the Defense Department. SDS made the connection public by submitting articles by Feldman to left-wing publications. The group also led a series of protests that continued for a solid year, demanding that Columbia shed the affiliation. The university responded by placing six ringleaders of the demonstrations on probation.5
At this same time, Columbia—which had a history of callous treatment of the African-American population who lived in the neighborhood (a few years earlier they had evicted 7,000 Harlem residents from properties the college owned)—made another move that was widely viewed as insensitive and deliberately racist: they planned to build and operate a whites-only gym in Morningside Park.6 This time, instead of banning people of color from the buildings the college owned, they would ban them from a property that belonged to the city in which they all lived. Although not much help in doing it was necessary, SDS helped stir up outrage about this plan. For months the park and the campus overflowed with protestors. In the face of massive protests, Columbia altered their plans; they would add a basement community facility that Harlem residents could enter from the Harlem side of the building. Local residents would be able to use the lower level of the building without a white person ever seeing them. Neighborhood residents did not see this compromise as much of a solution. They referred to the building as “Gym Crow” and continued to picket the construction site.7
After police arrested demonstrators who tried to stop the construction of the gym, members of SDS and Student Afro Society marched on, and occupied, Hamilton Hall, where the Columbia administration had its offices. Together the two groups held the building overnight, but in the morning the SAS shocked the white protesters by demanding that they leave. Tensions rose between the groups and for a while they occupied separate areas of the building. But finally the white protesters left, taking over Low Library, which housed the president’s office, and immediately occupied it.8
Mason, Barry’s former roommate and the man who prompted my involvement in the Woolworth demonstration many years back, was a student at Hunter College when Columbia was taken over. At a Jefferson Airplane concert on his campus, mimeographed fliers were passed around—take advantage of other people’s crowds, Abbie Hoffman had said, to get your own message across. The fliers asked that, as a display of solidarity, students come and join the protesters at Columbia. Mason decided to go. When he arrived at Low Library he saw what looked more like a fraternity party than a serious demonstration. Students lounged everywhere in the president’s office. New SDS leader David Shapiro propped his feet up on the president’s desk while he smoked a cigar from the collection he found in a desk drawer and toyed with the stuff he found on top of it. A couple of dozen people sat on the floor and a young man was snoring loudly, stretched out on the carpet like a corpse. Someone had brought in beer and many occupiers were drinking from cans. Other protestors were giggling like twelve-year-olds as they passed joints around.
The crowd was not all Columbia students—or students from any college. Street hippies, older activists, and neighborhood people were there, as well as an actor from an afternoon soap opera. A Village folkie tried unsuccessfully to lead the crowd in singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and Tom Hayden, who was equally unsuccessful in trying to whip up the emotions of the crowd, tried to organize them into a coherent, unified band instead of the lackadaisical mob Mason felt they were rapidly becoming. He said later it was as if they’d been caught up in Oz’s poppy fields and could not stay awake.
Acting dean Henry S. Coleman came to the building to negotiate with the demonstrators but told the protestors he had no control over the demands they were making and even if he had he was not about to give in to any demand under conditions like these. He was taken hostage, held in his office for twenty-four hours, and then released.9 Most Columbia students shared the goals of the takeovers but despised the tactics. Three hundred students called themselves the Majority Coalition and formed a living chain around Low Library. Anyone who wanted to, they said, could leave under their protection, but no one could go in and no supplies would be allowed past them. When a group of protestors tried to crash through their line, fights broke out. That was the administration’s and the New York government’s last straw. Police were called in to clear the buildings. During the police siege the SAS was treated differently from the white SDS. African-American lawyers waited outside Hamilton Hall to represent the departing SAS protestors and a squad of African-American police officers cleared the building peacefully. White demonstrators, though, faced police violence, which led to student-police battles. Four faculty members, one hundred thirty-two students, and twelve cops were injured. Seven hundred protestors were hauled off to jail.10 For the rest of the semester, no regular classes were held at Columbia. Instead, the school offered “Liberation classes,” featuring celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, and Country Joe and the Fish.
The rebellion spread and appeared at other colleges at about the same time. Students occupying administration buildings and marching through the streets in front of their campuses became a familiar sight. These rebellions generally centered on the fact that the curriculum appeared to be irrelevant to the lives students were living. The driving word became “relevance,” as students demanded a curriculum that actually made a difference to alienated lives in a nihilistic time: what they studied now seemed to have nothing to do with life as it was actually lived. On their own, English majors were reading Vonnegut, Brautigan, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the rest of the twentieth-century texts, but the most modern author their coursework studied was the early American Gothic author Charles Brockton Brown. Psychology students studied B.F. Skinner, a man who, as educator James Herndon said, could make a pigeon do anything he wanted it to but didn’t know a damn thing about pigeons.11 Cutting-edge psychologists like Carl Rogers were ignored. Art students were being forced to paint representative landscapes at a time when light shows, “happenings,” and multimedia extravaganzas ruled and artists like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Willem de Kooning showed a new way. Modern poetry was challenging the assumptions of what poetry was and where it came from, but the departments were still arguing about whether T.S. Eliot should be considered American or British.
Most people said that time travel was impossible but that to set foot in a major college was to travel back to the nineteenth century. Students felt they deserved better and began to demand better. Songs advocating personal freedom bloomed like weeds. The Rascals caught the tenor of the times when they sang “People Got to Be Free,” while Steppenwolf declared we were all “Born to Be Wild.” Jim Post, singing with his wife as Friend and Lover, made the top ten with a pro-peace song, “Reach Out of the Darkness,” while the Animals came out with a powerful psychedelic diatribe about the futility of war: “Sky Pilot.” The Beatles tried to bring a little sanity to the table with their song “Revolution,” which pointed out how wrongheaded the self-styled revolutionary approach was.
Other than their themes, what did these songs have in common? They all used elements of psychedelic sounds, like feedback and fuzztone guitars, all were progressive, and all were as fragmented as the movement they both described and spoke to. The movement was not only splitting into two racially divided forces, it was also losing its focus, as a result losing not only its supporters but its direction and purpose.