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By Root 1035 0

any better up at Morningside Heights. On Monday, April 29, almost a week after the protest began, Columbia remained closed and the buildings remained occupied. There was, in fact, little diplomatic activity, since both the trustees and a majority of the faculty had come out against the insurrection. The school did try to negotiate with protesters in Hamilton Hall, since it was being held by black students with ties to Harlem and Columbia did not want to enrage Harlem. But the black students, holding to their promise to Rudd and the white students, refused to negotiate separately from the other students. Vice President David Truman invited Mark Rudd and several other student leaders to his comfortable professorial apartment on elegant Riverside Drive. The student rebels were seated at a polished mahogany table and served tea from a silver service set, all in the best Columbia tradition. Unfortunately, it was at this moment that Rudd decided to take off his boots. His only explanation was that his feet hurt. But the affront was reported in the Times, where Truman also described Rudd as a “capable, ruthless, cold-blooded . . . combination of a revolutionary and an adolescent having a temper tantrum.”

The talks never found any common ground. Rudd told Truman that the students had taken over the university and demanded access to the bursar’s office and the school’s financing. Each “liberated” building evolved into its own commune. Young people living together on the floor, living the revolution, waiting for the siege, made for an emotional, romantic existence. One couple decided that they wanted to be married then and there in their occupied building. WKCR broadcast that a chaplain was needed at Fayerweather Hall, and William Starr, a university Protestant chaplain, answered the call. It was the kind of wedding Life magazine would have loved. The couple borrowed their wedding clothes. The groom, Richard Eagan, wore a Nehru jacket with love beads around his neck. The bride, Andrea Boroff, wore a turtleneck and carried daisies. More than five hundred people occupied Fayerweather, including Tom Hayden. A candlelight procession led the couple through a circle of hundreds of strikers to William Starr, who pronounced them “children of a new age.” Even Hayden, who had already discovered the calamities of matrimony, found his eyes tearing. The couple called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Fayerweather.

Columbia, it seemed to these students, had become a revolutionary center. Students and student leaders from other universities and even high schools came to show their support. More and more people from Harlem, both organized groups and individuals, arrived on campus and staged large demonstrations. Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown went to Hamilton Hall, which was now renamed Malcolm X University. Young people from Harlem had come onto campus chanting, “Black Power!” It was Grayson Kirk’s nightmare.

In the dark early hours of Tuesday, April 30, hundreds of police began gathering around the university. At 1:30 A.M., WKCR advised students that an attack was imminent and they should stay in their dormitories. The police said that they had originally planned the assault for 1:30 but put it off several times for what they termed “tactical delays.” It later was clarified that these delays were caused by a desire not to move until Harlem was asleep. At 2:30, armed with helmets, flashlights, clubs, blackjacks, and, according to witnesses, brass knuckles, they moved onto the campus in a militarylike operation in which the force of one thousand police officers broke off into seven target sectors. “Up against the wall, motherfucker,” Rudd later recalled. “Some Columbia students were surprised to learn that cops really say that.”

The police beat those who resisted; they beat those who didn’t. Some officers arrested students according to procedure and led them to wagons. Others appeared to go berserk with clubs or blackjacks. Dragged into paddy wagons that completely blocked off two blocks of Amsterdam Avenue, 720 students were arrested. Students who