1968 - Mark Kurlansky [48]
Protesters understood that with constant protest they had to do more than just march carrying a sign in order to make the newspapers. A building had to be seized, something had to be shut down. To protest Columbia University’s plans to build a new school gymnasium displacing poor black residents of Harlem, a student hopped into the steel scoop of an earthmover to obstruct construction. In mid-March, the Columbia antiwar student movement called for a daylong boycott of classes to protest the war. In all, 3,500 students and 1,000 faculty members stayed out of classes. About 3,000 students looked on at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as antiwar protesters planted 400 white crosses on the lawn of Bascom Hill near the administration building. A sign read “Bascom Memorial Cemetery, Class of 1968.” Joseph Chandler, a former student, then working at the Madison-based Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, said, “We thought the campus ought to look like a graveyard, because that’s where most of the seniors are headed.” The first week of spring, between 500 and 1,000 students took control of the administration building at Howard University, the leading black university, and refused to leave. They were protesting the lack of black history courses in the curriculum. Then black students seized a building at Cornell. Students blocked a building at Colgate.
And it was not only students. The New York Times reported on March 24 that hippies had taken over New York’s Grand Central Station and “transformed a spring be-in to a militant antiwar demonstration,” which in turn led to a lengthy article on the possibility that hippies, whom the establishment had defined as undermotivated types, were turning into political activists. But these particular hippies were in fact Yippies!, from Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party, which had always been political.
In Italy, students protesting inadequate facilities carried a long red flag from building to building on the University of Rome campus as the university was reopened after being closed for twelve days in mid-March because of violence. On the first day alone, two hundred students were injured by police, and by the second, faculty members protesting police brutality had joined the demonstrators. Some were calling for the resignation of the rector for having called in the police in the first place. The students made clear that they intended to continue demonstrating. The Italian communists were attempting unsuccessfully to take control of the student movement.
By early spring 1968 a German student association had organizations in 108 German universities and represented three hundred thousand German students. They had organized around protesting the war in Vietnam but had started moving on to German issues such as the recognition of East Germany, the resignation of high officials with Nazi-tainted pasts, and the right of students to have more of a say in their own education.
Meanwhile, after being quiet for a generation, Spanish students were demonstrating against an openly fascist regime that in April sanctioned a mass for Adolf Hitler in Madrid. Spring began with the University of Madrid again closed because of student demonstrations. The university did not reopen for classes until thirty-eight days later in May.
In Brazil, armed violence that killed three protesters in the opening months of 1968 failed to keep students from protesting the four-year-old military dictatorship.
Japanese students were violently protesting the presence on their soil of the U.S. military machine engaged with Vietnam. This generation whose parents had brought ruin on their country with militarism—a country that had suffered through history’s only nuclear attack—was vehemently antimilitary. The student organization Zengakuren was able to turn out thousands of protesters to block a U.S. aircraft carrier,