1968 - Mark Kurlansky [117]
By the time Rudd reached the fence, the demonstrators had already tried to tear it down, to no avail. One SDSer was in handcuffs, and police were moving in. For lack of a better idea and because more and more police were arriving at the park, the demonstrators retreated to the campus. A group from the campus met them. It seemed to Rudd that everyone was tugging on him and offering opinions on what to do. He had surely failed as a leader. “Mark, you should act more aggressively,” he was told, but also, “Mark, you should stop the anger in the crowd.” He saw himself drowning in a deluge of competing advice. He stood on the sundial and weighed the options, along with a black student leader who did the same. Clearly neither of them was sure what to do, although at the moment, in Rudd’s estimate, they had about five hundred students ready to do anything.
But what?
Other students made speeches about revolution. Back to Rudd. He talked about IDA. He talked about the gym. But what to do? Finally he said, “We’ll start by holding a hostage!”
And they were off. Rudd’s idea of a hostage was not a person. He wanted to hold a building—a sit-in. Sit-ins were, as he later put it, “a time-honored tactic of the labor and civil rights movement.” He heard a voice scream, “Seize Hamilton Hall!” Yes, he thought. That’s the idea. He shouted, “Hamilton Hall is right over there. Let’s go!” And a mob chanting, “IDA must go!” moved toward the hall.
In Hamilton Hall, the dean, Henry Coleman, with his crew cut, approached Rudd, who was now starting to think about a real hostage. Rudd called out to the protesters that they should hold the building and not let the dean leave until their demands were met. They could decide later what the demands were. At last they had a course of action. “Hell, no, we won’t go!”—which usually referred to refusing the draft—was being chanted by the crowd. They were holding a building and a dean.
From that moment on, events rode the leaders. Up went posters of Che, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and, somewhat anachronistically, Lenin, in the occupied building. Increasing numbers of blacks from Harlem, some rumored to be armed with guns, moved into the building. Later, Rudd admitted feeling scared as they all stretched out to sleep that night on the floors. “We were still really middle-class kids, and suddenly we were in a different league from the student protest we had begun that morning.”
Immediately a racial divide was felt. White students wanted to keep Hamilton Hall open for classes because they did not want to alienate their base, the student body. But the black students, who felt their base was the Harlem community, wanted to seal up the building. After arguing points of view, they met separately. The whites had an SDS-style meeting, which included discussions of class struggle and imperialism in Vietnam and the fine points of the Bolshevik revolution. In the meantime, the blacks met among themselves and decided to close down the building and ask the whites to leave. “It would be better if you left and took your own building.”
Sleepily and sadly, the white students gathered up blankets and pillows that had been brought by late-arriving sympathizers and headed out the front door of Hamilton Hall. Rudd said he had tears in his eyes as he looked back at his black comrades closing off the building with crudely constructed barricades. It was the SNCC experience again. 1968 was not a year for “black and white together.”
Someone broke into the locked library, and like sleepy children the protesters silently climbed in. They wandered the building, drifting in and out of Grayson Kirk’s office with its Ming dynasty vases and Rembrandt. A few took cigars; others looked through files for secret documents and later claimed to have come across information on real estate deals and Defense Department agreements. In the early morning Rudd found a telephone and called his parents in New Jersey.
“We took a building,” Rudd said to