At first, the protest at Columbia University had a “carnivalesque quality,” with a student band playing music and balloons floating about as the university was brought to a shutdown.
But as the week drew on, tensions rose. A dean was briefly taken hostage. Students protested the United States’ role in Vietnam and university policies they considered racist. They seized five buildings, according to the student publication Barnard Magazine. Water, electricity and telephone lines were cut off from the buildings.
Early on the morning of April 30, 1968, about 1,000 officers from the New York City Tactical Patrol Force, called in by Columbia President Grayson L. Kirk, poured onto the campus.
In one building, the eviction was peaceful, but in others, police used their nightsticks, the magazine reported. Police, some on horseback, used force against the crowds — a mix of onlookers and those supporting the siege. More than 100 people were injured. Photos showed students with bloody faces. More than 700 people were arrested that day, mainly on charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.
About 55 years later, students are once again protesting the administration, demanding that the university divest from Israel-related investments while the Israel-Gaza war continues. More than 100 people were arrested on Columbia’s campus and charged with trespassing late last week. Columbia President Minouche Shafik called for police to make arrests and described the request as “an extraordinary step” to keep the campus safe.
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New York Police Department officers in riot gear dismantled a protest encampment and arrested students in the days after Columbia’s leaders were questioned on Capitol Hill by lawmakers who accused administrators of not doing enough to fight antisemitism.
Some of the students described the Columbia encampments as a safe space. After Thursday afternoon’s arrests, more students poured into the South Lawn by evening. They waved Palestinian flags, played Palestinian music, chanted “intifada revolution” and chatted with friends, all under overhead surveillance drones.
Some Jewish students told The Washington Post that the rhetoric at protests has become more extreme, adding that they were ordered away from an encampment.
University students across the country have expressed solidarity with Columbia’s students and have also been taken into custody. Almost 50 students protesting Yale University’s investments in military weapons manufacturers were arrested Monday at Beinecke Plaza by the Yale Police Department, university officials said. Students at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also protested, according to the Associated Press.
Students in 1968 were demanding an end to Columbia’s affiliation with a think tank involved in Pentagon weapons research. Additionally, they wanted to stop the construction of a segregated gym in nearby Morningside Park that was thought to have separate entrances for Columbia students and Harlem residents, The Post reported. The arrangement of the gymnasium struck many as a reminder of Jim Crow laws. Students were also demanding amnesty.
Many were recovering from the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. weeks earlier. Black students “were growing increasingly upset with persistent racism in American society broadly and in Morningside Heights in particular,” according to Barnard Magazine. Meanwhile, frustration with the war in Vietnam and Columbia’s participation in military programs had been growing for months.
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The protests began on April 23 and were led, in part, by Students for a Democratic Society and the Students’ Afro-American Society. At a reunion, held in New York in 2008, those involved in the student protest said that much of it was done “without any real plan.”
Protesters first headed toward Morningside Park to halt the construction of the gym. When the police arrived there, the protesters returned to campus and seized Hamilton Hall. Soon they were evicted, but they went on to occupy Low Library and Avery, Fayerweather, and Mathematics halls.
Not all of the protesters were inside the halls. Hundreds of others were outside on the sprawling campus. And not all students were supportive. Many formed a ring outside Low Library to show their opposition.
There were moments of mirth during the week-long protest, including a hasty wedding between two student protesters. Andrea Boroff and Richard Eagan were married inside a “liberated” building at Columbia University during the student occupation. The wedding was conducted by a sympathetic chaplain who climbed in the window to pronounce them “children of the New Age,” The Post reported.
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The Eagans celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary with panel discussions, a picnic and dancing on campus in 1988.
Robert Siegel, a longtime NPR host who is now retired, dubbed the events of April 30, 1968, as a “police riot,” The Post reported. “What ensued was an undisciplined little pogrom in the middle of Columbia,” he said.
Black students who had occupied Hamilton Hall were arrested without violence because they agreed to walk out peacefully, Barnard Magazine reported, but students in other halls were attacked by the police. Mounted policemen “chased fleeing students out to Broadway and down 116th Street, clubbing them as they went,” the magazine said. Students were punched with brass knuckles, kicked, dragged down concrete steps, thrown to the ground and then stomped upon by the police, according to the New York Times. Some protesters were carried out by groups of four officers, one holding each limb.
Kirk, the university president, said it was “obviously the most painful [decision] I ever made,” but succumbing to amnesty demands “would have dealt a near-fatal blow not only to this institution but to the whole of American higher education.”
Thousands of students and faculty were upset by the university’s use of what they considered excessive force. The war in Vietnam continued for several more years, Columbia abandoned plans for the gym and cut ties with the think tank, The Post reported.
Jonathan Edwards, Susan Svrluga and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff contributed to this report.
