Columbia's Radical Student Leaders in 1968
Three student groups provided most of what organizational structure and leadership student radicalism had at Columbia in the spring of 1968. The Student Afro-American Society (SAS) had been founded in 1964 by members of the class of 1967 and 1968, the first Columbia College classes to contain recruited black students other than athletes. [A comparable organization was formed a year later at Barnard, with the more assertive name of Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters -- "BOSS."] Among the founders of SAS was Hilton Clark (CC'67), the son of Columbia-trained, CCNY-employed psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. For its first three years SAS kept a low profile, while most black students channeled their extra-curricular energies into building one of the black fraternities on campus, and the more politically active engaged in community-organizing efforts in Harlem. It was only in the spring of 1968, with the election of a new slate of more outspoken officers, among them juniors Cicero Wilson and Ray Brown, joined by SIA graduate student Bill Sales, that SAS decided to become a more forceful and issues-driven presence on campus. Opposing construction of the long-planned but just underway gymnasium in Morningside Park became their galvanizing issue. The combined membership of SAS and BOSS numbered about 100 undergraduates.
Columbia's chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] did not come into being until 1965, three years after the Port Huron Statement that marked its founding at the University of Michigan. Among its founders was Ted Kaptchuk (CC '68), who, as chair during its first two years on campus, focused its efforts on organizing and discussion. In 1967 SDS leaders still more narrowly concentrated its energies on exposing the links between the University and the defense industry, specifically the University's role in the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). It did not play a leading role in the student protests beginning in 1965 against the NROTC or in 1966 against military recruiting on campus. Meanwhile, others in SDS and Columbia student radicals more generally, frustrated by the lack of success of Kaptchuk's "praxis-axis" approach, declared themselves ready to advocate more militant acts of civil disobedience. These "action faction" radicals included Columbia junior Mark Rudd, who, upon returning from a three- week visit to Cuba in early 1968, challenged and defeated Kaptchuk in the spring elections of SDS officers. At the time of Rudd's election as Chairman, SDS at Columbia may have numbered 100 members. Its inner circle consisted of less than a dozen true believers.
The third student organization to provide the spring protests with leadership and commitment was the Columbia Citizenship Council (CCC). Founded in 1964, supported with University funds and operating out of offices in Ferris Booth, the CCC focused on community-outreach programs, that evolved from student tutoring projects in Harlem and Spanish East Harlem to organizing rent strikes among Columbia's non-University tenants on Morningside Heights. Opposition to University expansion became its principal issue in the spring of 1968, by which time its earlier less confrontational leadership had been displaced by the more militant College juniors John Shils and Juan Gonzalez. Total membership was under 100; true believers, under ten..
There were other, still smaller pockets of radical student sentiment throughout the Columbia campus. Earl Hall, which housed the University Chaplain's office and those of the Episcopalian, Catholic and Jewish chaplains, and from which broadsides critical of University policies emanated unde the signature of graduate student Paul Rockwell, was one; the Progressive-Labor Party, whose on-campus activities were led by Tony Papert (College '69), was another. Although all these groups identified with the civil rights movement, were anti-Vietnam and opposed University expansion, prior to the spring of 1968 they operated separately. What little membership overlap existed among these 250 or so radicals was with SDS and CCC members. None of the white student radicals on the SDS Steering Committee, for example, had ever met any of the black leaders of SAS until 24 hours before the occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 23rd. And not even the most millenarian in this circumstantial alliance expected that they would soon find themselves leading a weeklong, thousand-student protest that would control six academic buildings and shut down the University.
Robert A. McCaughey
March 20, 1999