1968 - Mark Kurlansky [118]
“Well, give it back,” his father answered.
The front-page article in The New York Times the next morning, raising the student movement to at least the level of the Linda LeClair case, accurately reported the wild events of the day, differing from Rudd’s own version only in that it credited him with knowing what he was doing. It read as though Mark Rudd, identified as the Columbia SDS president, had planned to lead the march from the sundial, to the park, and back to the sundial and then, at just the right moment, to call for the taking of a hostage. The reading public did not know that the SDS trained its “leaders” to discuss, not to make decisions. It also appeared to the Times that by bringing in some activists from Harlem, Rudd had involved CORE and SNCC and so Columbia was now part of a national protest campaign.
Tom Hayden came in from Newark. The Newark inner-city operation was being closed down, and he was about to move to Chicago, where SDS national headquarters was being established. After trying to live on a dollar a day with rice and beans and failing to recruit the support he had hoped for, he was astounded by what had occurred at Columbia.
I had never seen anything quite like this. Students, at last, had taken power in their own hands, but they were still very much students. Polite, neatly attired, holding their notebooks and texts, gathering in intense knots of discussion, here and there doubting their morality; then recommitting themselves to remain, wondering if their academic and personal careers might be ruined, ashamed of the thought of holding an administrator in his office but wanting a productive dialogue with him, they expressed in every way the torment of their campus generation.
He felt that “he couldn’t walk away.” He offered his support, but in the SDS way made it clear that he was to have no leading role. The protesters seemed pleased to have him, even in a silent capacity. He speculated, “What could be more fitting, perhaps they thought, than to involve Tom Hayden, the (twenty-nine-year-old) old man of the student movement, in this turning point of history?”
The longer they held the buildings, the more students joined them. As they ran out of space, they moved to other buildings. By this point Rudd had resigned from the SDS because the group refused to join the students and occupy more buildings. By the end of the week, Friday, April 27, students held five buildings. The New York Times continued to give front-page space to the student strike and to describe it as an SDS plan.
Hayden was in a building. Abbie Hoffman had arrived. But no one was leading. Everyone was discussing. Each building arranged “strike committees.” The blacks in Hamilton Hall, who had released their hostages shortly after the whites left, insisted on their autonomy from the other four buildings. Each building was having its own debates. Students were literally cranking out press materials around the clock on old-fashioned mimeograph machines. Banners went up on occupied buildings declaring them “liberated zones.” Some borrowed the slogan from César Chávez’s United Farm Workers, “Viva la Huelga” and others the old labor sit-in slogan “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
The campus was divided. Some wore red armbands, for revolution. Others wore green armbands, meaning they supported the uprising but insisted on nonviolence. The jocks, the short-haired male students who wore Columbia blazers and ties, seemed to the student radicals to be comic and irrelevant leftovers from the past. Even when the jocks attempted to blockade supplies to the occupied buildings, the radicals laughed and taunted, “Columbia lines never hold”—a reference to the fact that they always lost at football.
By Friday, April 26, when Columbia announced the suspension of work on the gym and closed the university, it was not the only university that had been closed. Throughout the United States and the world, students cut Friday classes to protest the war in Vietnam. There was a noticeably