A legacy contested, a legacy revived.
By Cecilia Zuniga
The spirit of ’68 lingers today in the dimly lit corridors of Fayerweather Hall. Pieces of its history lay scattered around Columbia University’s campus, like bits of a whole to be sewn together—or perhaps intentionally kept separate. You might feel it yourself, like a faint echo of rallying cries or chants pulsating beneath creaky hardwood floors. Undeniably, 1968 is alive in room 301M.
On Tuesdays at 2:10 p.m., Columbia’s past meets its present. Professor Frank Guridy teaches the undergraduate research seminar Columbia 1968, where 12 students piece together the incendiary history of the 1968 Columbia student strike. Seeking to understand the protest’s causes, context, and legacies, the course paints a vibrant local and national picture of the ’60s. Sifting through firsthand accounts of protesters, multimedia anthologies, and campus archives, students excavate the University’s history of 1968 to produce their own original research on Columbia’s legacy of student activism.
301M is a prototypical history classroom, tucked away in the heart of Columbia’s history department. The building is also a historic landmark in itself. Along with Hamilton Hall, Low Library, Avery Hall, and Mathematics, Fayerweather was one of five Columbia buildings occupied by hundreds of impassioned students in a direct action takeover in April of 1968. The strikers demanded that the University halt its militaristic and racist policies, namely Columbia’s ties to the Vietnam War and its plans to construct a segregated gym in Morningside Park.
56 years later, the year has become cemented as a focal point in Columbia's collective memory, national headlines, and the generational tongue of campus counterculture. It is a novelty reference in classrooms and organizing spaces alike. Students today continually remind themselves why protest is so palpable on campus, tracing the lineage of activist culture from past to present.
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In 1968, Students for a Democratic Society was an invigorated and bookish faction of Columbia organizers. Inspired by antiwar New Left ideology and looking to politicize their peers, SDS led the push against the Vietnam War on campus. The group was already a powerful voice, leading the charge to ban ROTC and CIA recruitment at Columbia. However, its fight against American militarism escalated after the 1967 discovery of Columbia’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis—an independent organization contracted by the Department of Defense to conduct weapons research. The student reaction to the IDA connection was visceral. Not only did the discovery reinforce the ever-winding tendrils of the U.S. war machine, but it also cemented Columbia’s role in innovating, manufacturing, and exporting chemical and missile warfare to Vietnam.
A New Jersey suburbanite turned revolutionary, Mark Rudd described himself as “not political” before arriving at Columbia in the fall of 1965. But his antiwar radicalization and SDS initiation quickly followed. “When I was first exposed to these kids who had already been studying the war—not in classes, but on their own—I realized that the war in Vietnam was part of a much bigger picture, which was American imperialism.” Rudd soon rose to the position of SDS chairman.
Simultaneously, the Students’ Afro-American Society was grappling with Columbia’s structural racism. Inspired by the words of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, the Black student organizers of SAS represented another vanguard of political action at Columbia. A central tenet of SAS was their unwavering commitment to Harlem’s working-class community, which was facing displacement and segregation at the hands of Columbia’s “Community Gymnasium” in Morningside Park. Along the western edge of Morningside Park, Columbia students would have had street-level access to the building, whereas Harlem residents would have been relegated to a separate, basement-level entrance on the park’s eastern border, granted access to only a select portion of the building. It was an undeniably anti-Black affront to Harlem.
Concerted antiwar and antiracist mobilization efforts had been underway for years leading up to the incendiary spring of 1968, when SDS came into powerful alignment with leaders from SAS.
Tuesday, April 23, 1968. Noon on Low Steps. Hundreds of students gathered for the first joint protest of SDS and SAS. Newly elected SAS President Cicero Wilson, CC ’70, and SDS Chairman Rudd gave fiery speeches to a sea of over 300 students, who were eventually spurred into action. Marching from Low Steps to the Gymnasium construction site, the electrified crowd eventually rushed into Hamilton. Disrupting classes and barricading the office door of Dean Herbert Coleman, SDS and SAS crafted six demands—most notably, the call for Columbia to sever all ties with the IDA and to stop construction of the gym. Allied in their mission, students in Hamilton refused to leave unless all demands were met.
Inside Hamilton, Black student organizers were wary of the risks of the takeover. Sherry Ann Suttles, BC ’71, was an SAS member and occupier of Hamilton in the early days of the strike. “Black students wanted to be very controlled and measured in our protest,” she reflected, noting the request by SAS leadership that the white students leave the building and occupy their own. Black students stood clear about their role as representatives of the Harlem community and also worried that white students might underestimate the University’s threat of police repression. White protesters complied. Upon leaving Hamilton, Rudd and other SDS members charged into Low, some even charging into then-President Grayson Kirk’s office. The student occupation at Columbia commenced.
Nearly 1,000 students joined in on the occupation of campus buildings. Occupying students relished in their direct action communities, laying jackets as makeshift beds and reclaiming the space as their own. Supportive Harlem neighbors brought hot meals to Black students in Hamilton, then renamed “Malcolm X Liberation College” by its occupants.
The administration had canceled all classes by Wednesday, scrambling to meet with faculty, create task forces, and contemplate police deployment into occupied buildings. WKCR, Columbia’s student-run radio station, paused their usual music programming, opting instead to become a 24/7 newsroom to report on the demonstrations. Robert Siegel, CC ’68, a devoted WKCR broadcaster, set up coverage stations all over campus to provide minute-to-minute accounts of student protests for the Morningside Heights community. All eyes were on Columbia, with local and national history in the making.
On the night of April 30, the week-long strike came to a brutal finale as the administration ordered occupying students to remove themselves from the buildings. With no response from protesters, the NYPD burst in, prepared to take “all necessary action” to remove students in compliance with the University’s complaint of trespass. Occupying students braced themselves as the police barreled in, breaking down barricaded doors and dragging students out. Inside Low, officers violently yanked apart students’ linked arms, replacing their melodic “We Shall Overcome” with shrieks of pain and horror. Over 700 students were arrested, many brutalized with fists and batons.
The strike had come to an end, but its memory had just begun.
Nancy Biberman, BC ’69, recalled the media’s immediate characterization of student protesters as “alienated.” “It was used pejoratively,” Biberman reflects, “that somehow we weren’t willing to follow the straight and narrow, that we were just profoundly alienated, that we were somehow protesting against everything about our lives.” The institution sought to delegitimize moral and political outrage by diagnosing its students with pathological loneliness.
Columbia ’68ers were far from disaffected. A handful of students stepped foot onto campus already activists, being “red-diaper babies” of leftist, New Deal–era parents, or participants in ongoing civil rights organizing. “I came out of my mother’s womb as an activist because my mother was,” said Suttles, reflecting upon her predisposition to advocacy and social justice organizing. “When I got to Barnard at age 18, in 1965, we had already been—me and my sister and my mother—out in the movement.”
Suttles epitomizes the alumni push for student memory of 1968 in her documentary Black Columbia, which she screened at the 40th anniversary conference in 2008 and the San Diego Black Film Festival in 2009. With the directorial vision of her son Kamau, the film centers Black student organizers narrating and reflecting upon their participation in the strike. “I was witness to it, the transition from a civil type of community to just a revolutionary one, music-wise, social-wise, art-wise.” The four years she spent at Barnard left an indelible mark on her generation, with Black Columbia as a testament to remembering.
Rudd, like Suttles, underscored 1968’s historic resonance. “Something in me said, I can’t stand by while this moral atrocity is happening.” Rudd was expelled for his role in the occupation; however, when reflecting upon his strategy as SDS chairman, he emphasized that it was not a desire but a need that spurred action.
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January 2024. Guridy’s 301M. A student asks on the first day of class if the class would discuss current events. Guridy answers, “I don’t see how we’re not gonna talk about the present … to not talk about the present would be absurd.”
Guridy’s Columbia 1968 course is a labor of love. As a professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Department of History, as well as the executive director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Guridy positions his history course within an interdisciplinary framework. Guridy sees his hands-on process as a “radical pedagogical act” in itself, “cause we’re entrusting the University's history in the constituency that’s the most important, which is you folks.”
In his book-lined Fayerweather office, Guridy presented me with an array of pamphlets he kept from the 50th anniversary commemoration of 1968. With the help of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Guridy independently organized the 2018 ceremony to commemorate the legacy of ’68. Without any tangible acknowledgments on campus of Columbia’s rebellious past, the University is seemingly predisposed to bouts of amnesia, occasionally interspersed with anniversary celebrations. In 2018, the Office of the Provost was a cosponsor, but the President’s Office did not support the commemoration.
Notably, April 2018 also saw the graduate student strike at Columbia, wherein hundreds of students participated in a week-long walkout. Demanding that the administration recognize their student labor union, graduate organizers cited 1968 as an inspiration. Guridy underscored that “the memory of ’68 was being used by the insurgents of 2018” in an effort to frame their struggles in a broader culture of protest at Columbia. “They were situating themselves in that activist legacy.” The University’s hesitation to commemorate 1968 is a reflection of its adversarial relationship with student protests at large.
In 2008, however, the administration had vastly different stakes. President Lee Bollinger was breaking ground on Columbia’s $6.3 billion Manhattanville Campus, now home to the Columbia Business School, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Jerome L. Greene Science Center. Gaining nearly 6.8 million square feet of campus space, Bollinger’s project was the contentious product of a decade-long eminent domain battle, widespread community resistance, and the projected displacement of nearly 5,000 West Harlem residents and businesses. His endorsement of the 40th anniversary 1968 commemoration, as hypothesized by Guridy, may have paralleled a quiet anxiety surrounding the University’s history of encroachment into Harlem. Manhattanville eerily paralleled the gym in Morningside Park, 40 years later.
Columbia’s 1968 amnesia therefore reads as willful rather than forgetful. Reflective of an opportunistic handling of its history, the administration seems to either uplift or suppress the ’68 legacy at its convenience. Commemoration of ’68 has instead become an individualized effort, resting upon those who specifically seek to engage with it. Yet the non-institutionalization of its legacy leaves it up to students to discover and rediscover its meaning.
Ted Schmiedeler, CC ’26, is one such student. The station manager at WKCR and a history major, Schmiedeler emphasized the ever-beating pulse of 1968 in WKCR’s studios today. The station made the move toward financial independence after 1968, embracing its nickname of “The Alternative.” Program Director Georgia Dillane, BC ’25, pinpointed WKCR’s sharp cultural turn post-1968: “Even though it feels so long ago, it was such a pivotal moment in the curation of our ethos that it doesn’t make sense to let it go.” Scribbled on crinkled pieces of paper and whispering through headset sound waves is the tethered legacy of 1968. WKCR’s historic role in ’68 exists largely by word of mouth, passed down orally in programming training and audio clips. For this, Dillane expressed gratitude, commending the programmers’ intergenerational efforts to preserve this fragile history. Today, WKCR continues to propagate the memory of ’68 with its coverage of ongoing student protests.
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Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023. 4:30 p.m. at the Sundial. Proudly wrapped in keffiyehs, hundreds of students gather in a sea streaked with red and green. A low drumbeat clamors, an impassioned voice commences the chant, and the crowd takes a collective breath.
Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine have resurrected the spirit of 1968 at the Sundial. Demanding Palestinian liberation, solidarity, and an immediate end to Israeli apartheid and genocide, JVP and SJP refuse to back down despite relentless administrative hostility. Senior administrators suspended the two student groups in November, citing a contested event policy violation. The policy was revised unilaterally without University Senate input.
SJP and JVP’s suspensions ignited campus, and the Nov. 14 protest was an electrifying moment of campus-wide support, with Dar (the Palestinian Student Union), Student Workers of Columbia, and the Black Students’ Organization standing in firm solidarity with SJP and JVP. Since November, Columbia University Apartheid Divest—originally created in 2016—has resurged on Columbia’s campus with the support of over 100 student organizations. Calling for Columbia’s economic and academic divestment from Israel, CUAD is the students’ vanguard for collective liberation.
Students see and feel the administration’s antagonism. Since October, protest days have been accompanied by a hyper-militarized police presence, with zip ties fastened to uniform belts as high-flying drones loom in the air. The NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit sits outside of Columbia’s gates surveilling phone waves, and masses of police officers litter the campus.
The campus, however, is not any safer. Suppression and hostility abound, as counter-protesters hurl Islamophobic comments at student organizers, many of whom face disciplinary hearings and suspensions for protesting. Doxxing is vicious and incessant, as dozens of protesters have seen their faces plastered on trucks traversing Broadway. Harassment—by Columbia’s own professors—persists inside the classroom and online. Earlier this semester, the NYPD brutalized dozens of students at a February protest, following a chemical skunk attack on pro-Palestinian protesters.
Lea, BC ’26, a member of JVP and SJP who chose to go by only their first name, sees this excessive mobilization of the NYPD as a fear mongering tactic. “They have been doing that since ’68,” they told me, “especially with Arab and Muslim organizers, targeting them and making them feel as though they could not organize.” Columbia’s criminalization of students is not a new tactic, nor is it disconnected from their diagnosis of “alienated” students in the ’60s. In suspending SJP and JVP, the University made vague claims to their use of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” vilifying the groups while refusing to clarify the “rhetoric” in question. “They can’t afford for us to be loud,” Lea remarked.
’68ers are aware that their history is being relived on campus today. “The parallels are enormous,” Rudd remarked. Just this February, he spoke at a teach-in organized by Asian American Alliance in solidarity with CUAD. “From Việt Nam to Falastin” interwove the colonial legacies of Vietnam and Palestine while tapping into the persistent antiwar ethos at Columbia. Rudd was elated to see a room full of politically energized students taking action in support of Palestine. “It’s a moral imperative,” Rudd told me. “It’s exactly the same now.” The ongoing student movement has also taken inspiration from a variety of activist legacies at Columbia, including the 1985 student strike for divestment from apartheid South Africa. As the first Ivy League school to do so, Columbia now proudly exalts this legacy.
It was precisely this activist history which drew Cameron Jones, CC ’26, to Columbia in the first place. A Queens native, Jones had worked on a variety of grassroots campaigns for local and state politicians before stepping foot on campus. He is now an organizer with JVP. In the wake of Columbia’s unilateral suspension of JVP and SJP, Jones expressed his disillusion with Columbia’s dubbing itself as a cosmopolitan and global campus for free inquiry and robust academic debate. “What we see in reality,” Jones explains, “is they’re suspending student groups, they’re changing event policy, they’re canceling events that talk about Palestine. So it very much seems like there’s a double standard when it comes to Palestine.”
Despite relentless pushback, pro-Palestinian student voices remain strong, evident in countless teach-ins, sit-ins, poetry readings, and kite-flying events. Support across campus is widespread, and more notably, intergenerational. Lea, alongside fellow organizers, met consistently in the fall with a group of student organizers from ’68 who are now calling for Israeli divestment. Grateful for the inheritance of this knowledge, Lea expressed comfort in knowing that their movement is not alone. “We want to make it known to people that an entire generation has already gone through this,” they told me. “It’s not the first time and it also won’t be the last.”
The student movement for Palestine today is not a tenuous manifestation of 1968. It is an unbridled force in itself, evoking Columbia’s historic culture of activism, while remaining distinct in its purpose. Herein lies the beauty of 1968’s amorphous legacy.
Columbia is an institution reconciling with its undeniably fractured past. It is an administration trying to forget, with alumni refusing to let them. It is passionate history professors forging a bridge of memory, with spirited students demanding its remembrance. We process our history, a collective gasp for recognition, for reconciliation. 1968 is a legacy excavated, borrowed, recycled, manipulated, and sometimes buried.
But it persists. It breathes.
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