Note: this is notes for a talk that followed this, but was made worth listening to by eye contact, little asides, jokes– all the things that happen between a speaker and an audience.

OUTLINE: We Were Your Children
Meredith Sue Willis
Ethical Culture Society of Essex County
Sunday Morning Platform
May 11, 2008

– Introduction
– 1968– When was “The Sixties”? ackground, events
– What happened at Columbia
– People at CU week-end– who we were, who we are
– Conclusion– should lead into discussion with audience

INTRODUCTION– WHAT THE COMMEMORATION WAS

40 years ago, at the very end of April 1968, I was a transfer student at Barnard College at Columbia University. I took part in protests that I usually call the Columbia Sit-ins but others call the Columbia University Rebellion or the Columbia University Riots. It ended with over 700 students, including me, getting arrested.

This spring, April 2008, I participated in a commemoration of those events.

This talk and discussion are in small about that, but in large, it’s about the relationship of the individual to history. I’m going to read to you a little from a couple of books, including mine, about what it was like to be part of that.

I got the title from J. Anthony Lukas’s 1971 book
Don’t Shoot: We Are Your Children
with studies of various people in the so-called “Youth Rebellion” of the late 60's.

Seeing people 40 years later is a physical shock–the bald guy in the blue blazer who used to have the most magnificent achingly lovely long hair... Etc. But, and here is the rather weak connection to mother’s day, we were clearly no longer anyone’s children– have reached out sixties, the age at which We care for our parents,

What was it that about?

– a Youth Movement? (In which case, we are out of it)

– was it OUR Movement, in which case it’s ours and no one will ever do so well again–some sentiment along these lines– “these kids today...”

– Or simply A Movement, social action, Activism– in which case we are part of a continuum.

I am very much in that latter camp: I think every generation has its special place in history, and I certainly don’t believe that the struggle for peace and justice and freedom belong to the young or to one age cohort.

It was, however, a point in time when an unusual number of private people felt the call to participate with more or less consciousness in history.

What we call The Sixties usually can be counted as from JFK’s assassination till the US finally got out of Vietnam, and Nixon resigned.

Take a look at the very partial list of what was happening in the world in the spring of 1968, we were part of an upsurge of international activism and political ferment. This was Prague Spring; it was the spring when Lyndon Johnson announced he was not going to run for president. Black Students were killed by police in Orangeburg, SC during a protest, left-wing terrorism in Germany, general strike in France!

Events in the World in the First Months of 1968

* January 5 - Prague Spring: Alexander Dubcek is elected leader of the Comm. Party in Czechoslovakia.
* January 13 - Johnny Cash records Live at Folsom Prison.
* January 22 - Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In debuts on NBC.
* January 23 - North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo
* January 30 - The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across S.V. * January 31 - Viet Cong soldiers attack the United States Embassy in Saigon.
* February 1 - Vietnam War: A Viet Cong officer is executed by Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The event is photographed by Eddie Adams. The photo makes headlines around the world, eventually winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, and sways U.S. public opinion against the war.
* February 8 - A civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina is broken-up by highway patrolmen, leading to the deaths of 3 college students.
* February 24 - Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive is halted - South Vietnam recaptures Hué.
* March 16 - Vietnam War: My Lai massacre - American troops kill scores of civilians.
* March 16 - U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) enters the race for the presidential nomination.
* March 19-March 23 - Afrocentrism, Black power: Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., signal a new era of militant student activism on college campuses in the U.S.
* March 22 - Daniel Cohn-Bendit ("Danny The Red") and seven other students occupy Administrative offices of the University of Nanterre, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead France to the brink of revolution in May.
* March 31 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.
* April 2 - Bombs placed by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin explode at midnight in German stores
* April 4 - Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots erupt in major American cities for several days afterward.
* April 6 - A shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police results in several arrests and deaths, including 16-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.
* April 11 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
* April 23 - Surgeons at the Hôpital de la Pitié, Paris, perform Europe's first heart transplant, on Clovis Roblain.
* April 23-April 30 - Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
* April 29 - The musical Hair officially opens on Broadway.
* May - "May of 68" is a symbol of the resistance of that generation. Agitations and strikes in Paris lead many youth to believe that a revolution is starting. Student and worker strikes, sometimes referred to as the French May, nearly bring down the French government.
* May 17 - The Catonsville Nine enter the Selective Service offices in Catonsville, Maryland, take dozens of selective service draft records, and burn them with napalm as a protest against the Vietnam War.
* May 19 - Nigerian forces capture Port Harcourt and form a ring around Biafrans. This contributes to a humanitarian disaster as the surrounded population was already suffering with hunger and starvation.
* June 3 - Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.
* June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day.
* June 6 - The film Yellow Submarine is released by The Beatles.
* June 8 - James Earl Ray is arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

It was a time of feeling unusually aware of history–
For young men at the time, it was the shock and unfairness of the Vietnam War or perhaps leaving your country for young men .

Conversely, for many of those same young men, there was the desire to prove your manhood if you rejected war.

Specifically at Columbia University, there was an unusually political group of people, many Jewish, some first generation English speakers, some red diaper babies, plus the black students who were the first cohort of any size, and women beginning to make analogies draw lessons from the civil rights movement in their own lives

Here is what I wrote, many years later, in a novel about that spring:

From TRESPASSERS by Meredith Sue Willis

Chapter Twelve

The war in Vietnam connected everything. The ruling class, we said, needed poor people mentally prepared by television and violence on the streets to fight for its interests abroad. The same ruling class, we said, sat on the boards of corporations and were the trustees of the University, where they voted to support war research. They also voted to build a gymnasium for the University in the only open park in Harlem. Thus, we reasoned, the young people of Harlem would be ever more frustrated, ever more violent, and ever more ready to go as soldiers.
In my mind I saw the youth of Harlem standing next to the poor people I had known in VISTA, who were next to my patients in the crowded charity wards at Bellevue, who were next to us students listening to irrelevant lectures at Barnard and Columbia. I felt a thrill as the circle closed around us like a hangman's noose. It was one, single, vicious system. I was exhilarated to recognize it, and I wanted to be the finger pointing it out. I would scream at the administrators at Bellevue who had air conditioned offices on the floors above the sweltering wards: Racist Imperialist Fascists! I wanted to feel the words pouring out my throat. I wanted my body to be an exclamation point on the crest of the wave of history.

We had very specific political demands, aimed at the University, although King’s assassination and the Vietnam War were behind them:

Specifically–
Asking the University to stop building the gym in Harlem
Get out of war research Institute for Defense Analysis
Get rid of the rule vs indoor demonstrations
No reprisals against the demonstrating students

Let me give you an outline of what was going on, then some readings, and, I hope,
your memories of that time and discussion, by reading someone else’s witness, a memoir this time, by Hilton Obenzinger, one of the organizer’s of the commemoration last month. I’ve talked a little about the 1968 context, and now here is something about those events as they happened (I’m going to interrupt this a couple of times to make sure we’re all on the same page):


From BUSY DYING by Hilton Obenzinger

From a section called “Columbia Revolts”

[RAP BROWN AND OTHER BLACK LEADERS HAD BEEN IN HARLEM LATELY, SPEAKING AGAINST “THE GYM.” LIKE NYU AND COLUMBIA TODAY, TAKING OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD–THIS IS ONE THE PROTESTS BY STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY STOPPED]

It’s hard even to tell when it all began. On Monday a leaflet had circulated around the campus: “Can democracy survive at Columbia University? Will Mark Rudd be our next dean?” Signed by “Students for a Free Campus,” the flyer called for a counter-demonstration against Students for a Democratic Society’s usual noon rally at the Sundial in the center of the campus the next day. But most ominously, it ended with a cryptic note: “Be there on the 23rd– Prepared.” WE could only assume that “Prepared” meant that the right-wing jocks would pick a fight, so everyone had to come to the next day’s noon rally at the Sundial to back up Students for a Democratic Society.

[NOTE– ALL THE STUDENTS WERE NOT RADICAL! BUT IN THE END, RADICALS AND SYMPATHIZERS PREVAILED]

Most of us didn’t think of ourselves as especially political, and we thought SDS was pretty ineffective. We were “freaks,” stoned out and seeking cosmic inklings, poets and artists, but the jocks regarded both SDS and us as “pukes,” and like them we hated the war and the racist bullshit, so we came to the defense of SDS.
....
Every spring there had been protests–against the Navy ROTC, against Dow Chemical, against CIA recruiting. Every year the “Spring Offensive” got heavier, although it never really amounted to much, and even though there had been the stunning Tet Offensive only a couple of months before, we really hadn’t hatched a plot to raise the Vietcong flag over the Math building.
But I count the real beginning as when LBJ announced he wouldn’t run for president again. It’s not that anything actually happened right then; certainly not much did on campus. But it was that brief week or so after his abdication speech, those few days at the end of March, when we felt that maybe, just maybe, the war would end and the country would dig itself out from under its mountain of shit. It was that brief flicker, that moment when even the inconceivable took wing.
And when King was gunned down soon after, when city after city exploded into flames, the bitterness was worse than ever before.
That was when it all started: when we got a whiff of the possible. Expecting a rumble, we gathered around the Sundial that Tuesday, along with about a hundred jocks holding signs like “Send Rudd Back to Cuba,” and a crowd of professors trying to keep the two sides apart.
“There may not be a Columbia University after this summer,” Cicero Wilson, speaking for the black students, warned, and in response, a dean offered to hold a meeting with students.
Then Tom Hurwitz from SDS jumped up and yelled, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to go to Low?” The crowd roared, and chanting, “I-D-A must go!” They pushed across Campus Walk to the side door of Low, which was locked, of course. Rudd stood on an overturned garbage can trying to hold a meeting about what to do next when someone else shouted, “Let’s head to the gym, let’s go to the gym site!” And the crowd bolted.
It looked like one more aimless, ineffectual outburst, so I stayed behind, hanging out with...my friends from the college literary magazine, on South Lawn.

[THIS IS WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR MOST PEOPLE: SITTING ON THE LAWNS HANGING OUT, EXCITEMENT– I WAS WRITING A PAPER DURING THESE INITIAL EVENTS AND DIDN’T JOIN TILL LATER]

After a while, people who had remained at the Sundial to hear more speeches also headed for the gym site, only to collide with the first contingent marching back. It turned out that when they had stormed into the gym site, they stomped down the cyclone fence around the construction work in their fury, the cops jumped in, and a student was arrested. No one knew who this student was, but the idea that the cops were arresting students made everything suddenly seem very different and much uglier.
Bill Sales, from the Student Afro-American Society, got up on the Sundial and gave a speech on how there was one oppressor– in the White House, in Low Library, in Albany. “You strike a blow at the gym, you strike a blow for the Vietnamese people. You strike a blow at Low Library and you strike a blow for the freedom fighters In Angola, Mozambique, South Africa.” But then he criticized white students for being an incoherent mob. “We have to get more sophisticated,” he ended. “Now, need I say more? I don’t want to get arrested for sedition.”
At this point the crowd was ready for anything when Rudd got up and spoke in his offhand, lanky manner: “We don’t have an incoherent mob; it just looks that way.” I-D-A must go, he yelled, the gym must be stopped, and that student who no one ever heard of before must get “un-busted.” Rudd went on some more, but then he ended with a surprise. He said there was only one thing left to do, and then he yelled, “We’ll start by holding a hostage!”
Later, Rudd told me that what he really meant was that we should take a building hostage and not an actual person, but it didn’t matter. “Seize Hamilton!” someone screamed, and almost a thousand students did just that. That’s when Dean Coleman barricaded himself inside his office, and suddenly we really did have a hostage.
Some big jocks stood guard in front of the door, glaring at us, but we filled the lobby around them. Posters of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X went up. Che’s face dangled crookedly over the dean’s door. Coleman never did try to leave, even when the jocks offered to run a block for him, and we stood around listening to speech after speech. A steering committee of black and white students was formed, six demands were hammered out– including stopi9ng the gym, cutting all ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis, amnesty for the student rebels, and more....We didn’t block the doors– students passed in and out going to classes– and Coleman remained safe behind his big mahogany door.

[I JOINED THE PROTEST IN HAMILTON HALL THAT EVENING...]

A little more about the sit-ins:

A couple of notes of fact: the black students asked/told the white students to go take their own building. Didn’t think the whites were serious, thought they had much more to lose (a lot of this came out forty years later– families would be hurt, etc. Also, “community radicals” joined in. )

White students took Low Library first, which was a real comedy of errors for a while: police came, but only took out art work, no arrests. The “jocks” started surrounding Low Library, other buildings were occupied: Avery Hall, Fayerweather, Math. Each had its own personality, and people last month proudly said, I was there for the hippy wedding in Fayerweather! I was in Militant Math!

Professors tried to negotiate, Mayor John Lindsay got involved, rumors that if the black students were arrested, there would be a riot in Harlem.

It was, of course, scary times.

If you are really interested, read my novel, Hilton’s memoir, and other books on the list I’ve provided.

The 700 plus arrests; students bloodied; at least on the second night one police officer.

But–
On the other hand,
War went on another six years, that gym was stopped (but Columbia expanding again); DID get out of war research, some student input into decision making.
Columbia is back at expanding into Harlem. Some recruiting ended, CU’s association with the Defense Contractors was, at least for a while, limited or stopped, and the war research. President Grayson Kirk left, etc.

Many follow-up movements– feminism, gay rights
Academic changes: black studies programs; women’s studies; some democratic reforms at the university.

There was also Weatherman, the SDS extremist group, some terrorist bombings by our people, some deaths.

Much of this was the substance of what was discussed at the

THE PANELS AT THE COMMEMORATION

There were panels on how the events of April 23 through April 30-May 1 transpired; there were panels on black rights; feminism; protest and the law; youth activism today; and much more (Film screenings, planting a tree in Morningside park, memorials, readings by writers who were part of the sit-ins, etc.)

I’m not my any means going to survey this, but I would mention a few things that struck me, and seemed emblematic during the week-end’s discussion, and a few impressions:

– one recurring point of discussion was how alienated the black students felt at Columbia University. (Remember, CU was all guys in 1968, and Barnard’s presence, while important, was often not the focus). Black students felt marginalized and picked on. Athletes described something called “stacking” which meant that all the black athletes, of whatever skill set, were “stacked” at one position, so you didn’t get to go in unless the other black athlete went out. There was a lot of fear about Harlem, and security guards gave the young men a hard time

– another recurring point was how women (Barnard students mostly) tended to be marginalized by the very macho Columbia Students for a Democratic Society. One had to make the decision if you would make the peanut butter sandwiches or not. I did a lot of chores, but no PB&J making.

One speaker on the feminism panel was Grace Linda LeClair, who some of you may remember in early 1968 as living off campus with her boyfriend. A real media frenzy, she was the Sex girl who moved in licentiously with her boyfriend. (You have to keep in mind that the speaker is a woman of sixty with pleasant Yankee looks (she was from New England) a mother, grandmotherly, big smile, pleasant speaking style, and she’s talking about how she was turned into this crazy sex symbol. The glaring inequality, however, was that her boyfriend was never disciplined at Columbia College; she was suspended from Barnard and offered the right to return under circumstances she wouldn’t’ accept.

– There was a program on new youth activism at CU (LUCHA, mostly Hispanic, woman led) and they organized not a panel, but a fishbowl, a nice lesson in how to get more people involved in the conversation

– On these beautiful April days, middle of Columbia, the famous sundial where speeches made, the sit-ins officially began, there were students ringing a gong and calling out the 90,000 dead due to our adventure in Iraq: “three American soldiers– dong dong dong” “Mother, four children, grandfather”

– 40 years of productive life to talk about– which leads me to...

WHO WE WERE: WHERE WE WENT

The people who came back and participated in the panels etc. were a varied but impressive crew. That is one of the things that struck me most strongly. With 700 or 800 young people arrested that spring, you have to assume there were all kinds of people

Generally, I was very proud of us:

On Saturday night, for example, I was honored to be one of the writers who gave a reading, and I was really honored:

Sharon Olds the poet; Mary Gordon, novelist; Paul Auster, NY writer; Thulani Davis; David Shapiro; Jonah Raskin; James Kunen, Ntosake Shange.

Of the others– we’ve been sharing one another’s stories online, and there are a few in small political parties, but many more academics and teachers (as you’d expect from an intellectually active group at a major university), lawyers.

Probably the only thing there wasn’t a lot of was stock brokers and business CEO’s.

Two Buddhist priests.

Some dead of cancer or violence:

There were also the ones who went underground and joined the infamous Weatherman:

Two popular, dependable, beautiful guys:

– Dave Gilbert, in prison for 75 to life for the October 1981 Brinks truck robbery in which 2 cops and a driver died.

– Ted Gold, dead on March 6, 1970 in the west 11th street safe house

I want to read a short passage from a book by someone NOT at Columbia sit-ins but who was part of Weatherman, Cathy Wilkerson, who was one of the ones who lived when the house exploded and Ted Gold was killed

From FLYING CLOSE TO THE SUN by Cathy Wilkerson

.... I made a series of decisions, from a standpoint of rage, hopelessness, and fear in which I accepted the same desanctification of human life practiced by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and William Westmoreland. I accepted their supposition that, in the end, violence is the only effective strategy for social change; that might makes right, despite the fact that treasuring humanity– and each life within it– was one of the values I had fought for. I abandoned myself to the sanctimoniousness of hating my enemies.

– I mentioned Linda LeClair the “sex girl” of Barnard

– Mark Rudd Maplewood/South Orange’s own (and interviewed by Ethical’s own Elaine Durbach) came out of underground and taught math in a junior college for years and is now working for nonviolent social change. He wrote an eloquent apology to an injured police officer.

Two more of many, many I want to mention are

– Gus Reichbach The Condom judge

and

– Nancy Biberman, also a lawyer, but who has been working in the Bronx to put together low-income housing with services needed to help people get on their feet.

Now the media’s story about all this, their narrative is that

Idealism was kidnaped by
Crazy left wing militants
Which led to Extremism
and the Right Wing ascendancy for the last many years

And what I saw was, first, a lot of people who have done serious work for 40 years.

The way I see it–

We each do what we can, with more or less awareness of our place in history.

Some of the things we accomplished have lasted; many (our work against the Vietnam War, for example, have been superseded by the War in Iraq.

Inasfar as there was a Youth Movement, it has spawned
feminism
abortion rights
gay rights
even the environmental movement.

It has become much harder for universities to do war research; women’s studies and African American and other such multi disciplinary studies departments in colleges have thrived.

Of course there is a war, and there is also Columbia University expanding again. It is not that I am optimistic, but that I feel is not over, the struggle is ongoing.

I think the hardest thing for our cohort to accept was that we were a much smaller part of the picture than we expected and that was the hardest for our group to fathom.

Which leads me to how I want to end this, which is with your responses, your discussion– your reaction to those times, your participation in those times, your evaluations...

[In the Q&A after this talk, one womam who had been a Trotskyist at City College at the time spoke about how angry she gets when all the attention centers on Columbia when there was so much going on at CCNY and all over the city– and the country for that matter....]

[Another person in the audience brought CC years book, Spectator publications– he joined Spec as a Freshman in the Fall of ‘68, hating to have missed the spring!]

[one speaker said she was an adult teacher going to Pratt for a masters of library science and she and her classmates were terribly worried that there would be a general strike and they’d lose their hard-earned credits]

[My husband reminded me and the audience that he and I, boyfriend and girlfriend then, broke up over me going into the buildings...]