1968 - Mark Kurlansky [116]
“We will take control of your world, your corporation, your university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live as human beings.”
He promised to fight Kirk over his support of the war, over the IDA, over his treatment of Harlem. But it was the ending for which Rudd’s letter was most remembered:
There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”
Yours for freedom,
Mark
The SDS’s Todd Gitlin remarked, “It is interesting to note the civility preserved in Rudd’s polemic, however: the correct grammatical ‘whom.’ ” But to Rudd, a normally pleasant and not particularly rude person, who in an earlier speech had referred to Kirk as “that asshole,” this manner of speech was a deliberate attack on the polite decorum of the Ivy League social order. He was acutely aware that this was not the way things were done at Columbia, and that was why he did them this way.
On April 23, a cool and gray day, the protesters were to meet at a sundial in the center of the gated Columbia campus. Rudd had been up the entire night before, preparing a speech by studying Mario Savio’s “odious machine” speech. Looking on at the demonstrators from the nearby Low Library were about 150 right-wing students, the short-haired students the rest of Columbia referred to as “the jocks.” One sign said, “Send Rudd Back to Cuba.” Another, more disturbing one, said, “Order Is Peace.” Only about three hundred protesters turned out at the sundial. But as speeches were made by various student leaders, the crowd grew. By the time it was Rudd’s turn to speak, an event that was to be a prelude to marching on the library—thereby again violating the rule on indoor demonstrating—two things had happened. Vice President Truman had proposed a meeting, and the Low Library had been locked.
Suddenly the Savio-like speech seemed irrelevant. This was not the moment for grand oratory, Rudd reasoned. It was a moment in which to act. But SDS leaders never acted. Their job was to organize the debate out of which came a decision. So Rudd asked the demonstrators what to do. He told them about Truman’s offer and that Low had been locked. Suddenly a demonstrator stood on the sundial and shouted, “Did we come here to talk or did we come here to go to Low?”
“To Low! To Low!” the crowd chanted as they began marching. Rudd, because he was a leader, desperately ran to catch up and take his place at the head of the march, linking arms with other leaders as the pulsating crowd pushed them toward the library.
“Here I was,” said Rudd, “at the head of a demonstration about to burst into a locked building or else run headlong into a mob of right-wingers, and I had only the vaguest idea about what we were doing.” The one idea he did have was that disruption would provoke the police and school administration into actions that in turn would build their own support. He had noted that this approach worked well at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin. But what specifically they were going to do in a few minutes when they climbed to the top of the library steps, he did not know. When they got there, the doors were indeed locked.
Rudd looked around for something on which to stand and found a trash can. He climbed on top, from which commanding heights he would present the options for what to do next. But by the time he had mounted, the crowd was running away. A demonstrator had yelled, “Let’s go to the gym site!” Rudd was standing on a trash can watching the entire demonstration deserting him in a dash toward Morningside Park, which was two blocks off campus. He shouted after them in an effort to remain relevant,