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Journal of Social History, Summer, 2008 by Blake Slonecker

Tom Hayden was not a student at Columbia University. Still, at two o'clock on the morning of April 26, 1968, he found himself "joining a silhouetted wave of students surging across Columbia's grounds and entering, with a key volunteered by a graduate student, the darkened shell of Mathematics Hall." (1) James Kunen was among this "wave of students" that liberated the fifth academic building and created the final commune of 1968's most famous American student protest. In the ensuing days, Hayden--author of the New Left's unofficial founding document, the Port Huron Statement--and Kunen--soon-to-be author of the obscure memoir of the protest, The Strawberry Statement--participated in a barrage of political meetings. Hayden remembered these as gatherings "with countless people wanting to be heard, disparate viewpoints needing to be explored, and an internal consensus having to be built." (2) Kunen, on the other hand, passed the time wondering "if the Paris Commune was this boring" and "whether Lenin was as concerned with the breast size of his revolutionary cohorts as I am." (3) Despite their disparate protest interests, Hayden and Kunen both barricaded themselves within Mathematics Hall and joined hundreds of other students and "outside agitators" in communes across campus as they awaited the violent police eviction that would follow seventy-two hours later.

The Columbia upheaval--which extended throughout the remainder of the spring after reaching its climax during the last week of April--marked the loudest and most widely noted university protest in a year distinguished by such unrest. (4) Leaders of Columbia chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Students Afro-American Society (SAS) united a disparate set of concerns to rally support from hundreds of students. These issues included Columbia's perceived institutional racism because of its planned gym construction in municipal Morningside Park, the University's complicity in the Vietnam War through its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), and the lack of student involvement in disciplinary procedures. All this occurred despite the meager membership roll of each student group. (5) Before long, Harlem chapters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Mau Mau--along with many non-affiliated Harlem residents--also became involved in the protest by occupying the communes, feeding the protestors, or participating in rallies (6).At the protest's peak, between five and eight hundred people occupied communes in five buildings on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus and several hundred more supported the protest program.

Despite the enormous scale of the protest and its renown as a seminal event in the student movement, the Columbia protest has failed to attract scholarly attention in recent years. Although authors produced a wealth of literature on Columbia in the five years following the protest, more than thirty years have passed without an adequate reappraisal. In that time, the historiography of the New Left has changed dramatically. Organizational histories from the 1970s and 1980s view the Columbia crisis of 1968 as an important student protest, simply a stopping point for the Movement. (7) More recent historiography on 1968 as a global phenomenon also incorporates the Columbia protest as a seminal moment in an epochal "year that rocked the world." (8) While helpful, these characterizations of the Columbia protest are no longer adequate in a historiography that is increasingly concerned with movement culture and the ties between different social movements. (9) Much of import remains to be said about Columbia, particularly regarding the relationship between African American and white students, and political and cultural radicalism.

Activists at Columbia were a motley coalition. I Iayden and Kunen represented only two points on a wide spectrum of activist ideology. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and SAS representative Bill Sales advocated black separatism, while Mark Rudd and other white political leaders--some of whom would later form Weatherman--emphasized the radicalization of politically indifferent students. Many others were political moderates. The cooperative activism of such diverse organizations as SNCC, SAS, and SDS, and the participation of hundreds of politically inexperienced and organizationally unaffiliated students invite a thorough analysis of how Columbia's communes grappled with conflicts rooted in political and social difference. It is easy to read the list of student demands at Columbia and take for granted that cultural and political radicals, black and white, would unite to protest the war in Vietnam, institutional racism, and the rise of the multiversity. Such a coalition of interests, however, was far from natural. It is the rise and rapid deterioration of this consensus at Columbia that I seek to explain.

The existence of a Columbia coalition is significant for at least two reasons. First, the entwinement of political and cultural radicalism in the communes indicates that the New Left and the counterculture converged not only along the west coast and in the heart land in the late 1960s, but in the northeast. Indeed, the Columbia protest illustrates that the development of New Left counterculture was not confined to specific regions. (10) Second, cooperation between black and white activists--albeit in a relationship under continual tension--suggests that the consolidation of a singular Movement in the late 1960s was possible, if only in an ad hoc fashion around local initiatives. Efforts to create a formal Movement across race lines were prevalent in the late 1960s. They were also disastrous failures. This is most evident in the 1966 eviction of whites from SNCC and the rapid deterioration of the 1967 National Conference for New Politics. The relationship between black and white activists, however, remained a central concern for New Leftists, especially white students, throughout the late 1960s. Thus, the tenuous cooperation between black and white activists at Columbia offers one model for how a coalition between black separatists and white activists might have functioned, a model that emphasized both unity and difference.