Inside the 1968 Student Protests That Changed the World
By Steve Schapiro.A scene from the Columbia student protests. Former Barnard student and Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) member Nancy Biberman notes, “Two strands of anger and disgust converged: what the university was doing to aid the war effort, and what [it] was doing that was racist in our neighborhood.”
By Richard Howard/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.S.D.S. members, including Ted Gold (left) and Mark Rudd (second from left). “In the Columbia S.D.S., there were two factions, the Praxis Axis and the Action Faction,” explains former Columbia student and S.D.S. member Brian Flanagan. “The Praxis Axis believed in door-to-door organizing, the writing of manifestos,” and so on, while the Action Faction “believed in brazen action and tools that electrified people and upped the ante, and that faction took over the Columbia S.D.S. in March of ‘68.” Rudd and Gold were both members of the Action Faction.
By Richard Howard/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.Student protesters, including former Columbia student and Student Afro-American Society (S.A.S.) leader Raymond Brown (second from left). Fellow Columbia student and S.A.S. member Arnim Johnson remembers, “On April 23 [1968], when the movement started, we were protesting the gym that Columbia was building in Morningside Park. The university said the gym was going to be mixed-use, but it really wasn’t.”
By Steve Schapiro.Protesters outside the barricaded Hamilton Hall, dubbed “Malcolm X University,” on April 27, 1968. Raymond Brown notes: “Because it was only three weeks after Harlem had just blown up over Dr. King’s assassination, you still had a great sense of tension throughout the city. Members of Mayor [John] Lindsay’s administration were on campus advising [Columbia University] President Kirk that he couldn’t do anything that would harm the black students, because they didn’t want to risk having another uprising in Harlem. And we understood that. We understood that our role was pivotal.”
By Rocke Robertson/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.Protesters, including Arnim Johnson (second from right) and a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) nurse (right), look out over a Hamilton Hall balcony.
From University Archives/Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Columbia University in the City of New York.Columbia student Juan González speaks out during the protests. “You cannot understand the Columbia student revolt without understanding that it happened three weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed,” González later said. “At that point, it wasn’t a question of what career you were going to choose, it was a question of whether the country would survive a civil war.”
By Paul Klee/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.Masses gather outside Low Memorial Library during the occupation.
By Steve Schapiro.Majority Coalition members, representing those who opposed the uprising, protest the protest outside Low Memorial Library. “I thought it was hideously hypocritical that so many of these radical leaders were from families far wealthier than [mine],” says George Pataki, a former Columbia Law School student who was active in supporting the Majority Coalition. “They were supposedly helping the oppressed by denying working-class kids like me an education.”
By Jerry Upham/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.The novelist and former Columbia student Paul Auster (second from right) during the uprising. Auster later reflected on the protest: “Things were cracking apart and you felt that chaos was ruling.”
By David Finck/From University Archives/Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Columbia University in the City of New York.Columbia College dean Henry Coleman, who was held hostage by protestors, stands in front of Low Memorial Library. When Coleman was told he couldn’t leave his office, former Columbia student and S.D.S. member Stuart Gedal says, “Coleman opened the Venetian blinds of his window, which looked on to College Walk, and . . . got someone to get him an ice cream.”
By Paul Klee/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.Professors surround Low Memorial Library. Former Columbia student and Columbia Daily Spectator editor Robert Friedman later said, “The faculty lined up to provide a buffer between students who were in the building and the Majority Coalition. You had these face-offs every day.”
From Bettmann/Getty Images.University President Grayson Kirk and Vice President David Truman in the aftermath of the unrest. Kirk “was a walking anachronism,” says Paul Cronin, the editor of a new book on the Columbia uprising, A Time to Stir: Columbia ‘68. “He was clueless and unresponsive to the attitudes, needs, and demands of his students.”
By Charles Ruppmann/New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images.Police bust the protesters, April 30, 1968. Mike Reynolds, a former Tactical Patrol Force officer involved in the bust, later said, “We thought the students were a bunch of spoiled kids . . . who needed a good spanking.”
By Larry Fink.A protest sign placed in the arms of the Alma Mater sculpture (of the goddess Athena), located on the steps leading to Low Memorial Library. “I remember vividly a cop with a frozen grin on his face going up to a girl, a Barnard student,” says Hilton Obenzinger, a former Columbia student. “He lifted up his very long utility flashlight and slammed it on her head.”
From A.P. Images.Former S.N.C.C. chairman Stokely Carmichael and the chairman of the S.N.C.C. at the time of the protests, H. Rap Brown. “When H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael held a press conference on the steps of Hamilton Hall,” former Columbia Law School student Eleanor Stein remembers, “they made the point that this liberation stood for the black movement, nationally and globally. They were saying, ‘We are standing by you.’”
By Larry Fink.A scene from the student uprising, April 1968.
By Catherine Ursillo/From the Collection of Paul Cronin.A scene from the campus-building occupation. Hilton Obenzinger remembers the occupation: “We were all living together, and we called it a commune. The spirit was of cooperation; everyone had to make decisions together; everyone had to speak; everyone had to act as a group.”
By Larry C. Morris/The New York Times/Redux.Police outside Hamilton Hall on May 22, 1968, ending the students’ month-long strike after the campus-building occupation in late April.
