In the first part of this series, I’ve made the case that our society experienced a rapid ideological shift around 2014 towards heightened sensitivity to race and inter-racial dynamics, and that this shift is empirically observable across multiple sets of polling data. Now I’d like to begin exploring the causes of this shift.
Anyone familiar with this topic has probably been exposed to a wide range of hypotheses trying to explain the shift - such as Critical Race Theory, Postmodernism, “Neo-Marxism”, the passing of our institutions on to the Millennials (a generation firmly tied to the rise of social media), an earlier generation of paranoid “helicopter parents” churning out millions of over-sensitive “snowflake” children, Ferguson, Trump, Twitter, the Frankfurt School, ubiquitous smart phone cameras capturing police brutality combined with an online journalism industry that monetizes outrage, etc.
But ultimately all of these phenomena are symptoms of deeper, underlying historical trends. Lately there seems to be a particular emphasis on Critical Race Theory as a primary culprit behind the recent cultural shifts, especially with regards to the now widely known concepts of systemic racism and white privilege, concepts which, prior to 2014, were mostly discussed within the confines of academia (or Tumblr). While Critical Race Theory has certainly played a major role in advancing the cultural shift by formalizing many of these concepts and providing a common vocabulary, it is also merely a symptom that emerged from deeper historical trends.
Conceptually, the recent cultural shifts towards a heightened racial sensitivity can be broadly explained as an acceleration of a long-term trend among the political left away from an emphasis on class struggles and towards an emphasis on racial (or more broadly, identity-based) struggles.
This is a topic that is difficult to cover comprehensively in a single post, because the full story involves multiple trends converging and playing off of each other at key moments throughout history. In this post and subsequent posts I’m going to explore this long term trend. Each post will emphasize a different aspect of this trend leading up to the 2014 shift. This current post will focus on the radical student activists on college campuses that shifted the focus of student protests towards race and identity.
Viral Social Justice
Perhaps the best place to begin is with one of the most obvious, and jarring initial symptoms of the cultural shift. I’m talking about the various video clips of bizarre, racially-charged student meltdowns across college campuses that went viral between 2015 and 2018. The most famous of these is probably the Evergreen incident, where a relatively small group of college students essentially took over the administration, while making seemingly bizarre and nonsensical demands centering around accusations of rampant racism. Benjamin Boyce created a thorough documentary going over this incident and the circumstances surrounding it in exhaustive detail. Similarly, there was the incident at Yale in 2015, where again, a small group of college students confronted a professor, hysterically screaming and sobbing, while voicing fears over racism and fears for their safety on campus. At one point, a student begins screaming hysterically at the befuddled professor, spewing profanity, before storming off. (That incident began after a college administrator sent out a mass e-mail suggesting that mildly offensive Halloween costumes might not be so bad.) At the time, the students involved were widely criticized by the media, spawning countless opinion pieces lamenting this new generation of “snowflake” and “safe-space” students.
Some opinion pieces at the time attempted to defend the behavior of the Yale students, by placing the incident within the wider context of a series of offensively-themed college parties that had occurred at different Universities, thousands of miles away from Yale. Regardless, it’s likely the reason these videos went viral is that, at the time, the behavior of these students seemed disturbingly bizarre and difficult to explain. To an outside observer, it appeared as if the students had undergone a shared mental breakdown, fearing for their safety (or even their lives) over vague concerns about prejudiced attitudes on campus.
But was this indicative of some kind of national trend, or just some weird quirk of Yale and Evergreen? Well, a related, but perhaps less insane, incident occurred at Brown University in October of 2013, when NYPD Chief Ray Kelly, who was scheduled to give a talk and participate in a question and answer session, was prevented from speaking by a group of disruptive students in the audience who began screaming and chanting. The disruption was organized in an effort to protest the NYPD “Stop and Frisk” policy. Irene Rojas-Carroll, a student who organized the protest, told the Brown Daily Herald that “Our goal was for the lecture to be canceled from the beginning”.
This incident in particular centered the controversy around free speech, which of course has remained a common theme in today’s discourse. The students who participated in the disruption released a statement published in the Brown Daily Herald, which read:
We organized because students have a right to feel safe at their university. Many Brown students who oppose racial profiling bring their past and continuing experiences of police harassment to the discussion and feel genuinely unsafe around proponents and enactors of these policies. It is unacceptable to invite a speaker to campus who makes students feel threatened or intimidated. Our demonstration was an act of self-defense. We protected our rights to feel safe on the campus we now call home.
Again, we see various themes in common with the disruptions at Evergeen and Yale, such as the need to “feel safe” on campus. After this incident, a crowd of Brown students gathered in the University President’s office, with a list of demands that included the disarming of campus police. Again, it appears the disruptive students here represented a small minority of students on campus. The Brown Daily Herald reported that 72.3% of students did not approve of the actions of the protesters. A year later, Kate Nussenbaum, a Brown student writing for the Herald, followed up with some of the student protesters involved in the incident. Two of the students that organized the Ray Kelly protest moved to the San Francisco Bay area and got involved with an organization called “#Asians4BlackLives.” Nussenbaum framed the protest as part of the ongoing campus debates between safety and free speech:
The conversations that played out at that faculty meeting echo the types of conversations that have occurred across campus forms over the past few years — debates that students and faculty members interviewed said are too complex to be boiled down to “safety” versus “free speech.”
But she never explains what is meant by “safety”. Safety from what? Regardless, Nussenbaum’s article reveals that in February 2015, faculty members voted to indefinitely postpone a resolution to reaffirm “Brown’s commitment to the principles of academic freedom.” Nussenbaum says the faculty were divided on the issue, and couldn’t reach a decision. Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies, said further conversation about the issue would not be productive and would only “extend the pain”. So it seems at this point, in the debate between “safety” and “free speech”, safety was currently winning.
An interesting example of early reactionary backlash to all this is found in an article published pseudonymously by M. Dzhali Maier in the Brown Daily Herald, which voices the now typical “anti-SJW” perspective:
Microaggressions, trigger warnings, “check your privilege,” multiculturalism, cultural appropriation, gender spectrum, spiritualism, animal rights, protests, the social construction of virtually everything, human rights, indigenous rights, rights for the homeless, feminism, Black Lives Matter, the list goes on. They all have their problems. Somewhere, the pure logic of all these advocacy points falls apart. Feminists run up against transgender activists, LGBTQ rights advocates conflict with critics of Western “imperial domination” in the Middle East.
This same author attempted to publish a controversial article called “Columbian Exchange Day” in October of 2015, which was never published due to its offensive content. The actual article can still be found online. This again kicked off the debate about free speech, leading a group of students to release a statement entitled “On whiteness, free speech and missing the point”, which voiced the social justice position on free speech versus sensitivity to race:
The problem is that freedom of speech is not a universal reality. Free speech assumes a level playing field among speakers that does not exist. Power always affects interactions and what people can and do say in the context of a given relationship, institution or society. In this case, at an elite, predominantly white university, race and class are inseparable from any social interaction, let alone the curation of content in an established campus publication.
…
These arguments for free speech are often deployed to silence voices of color. … The right to free speech is a protection against the abuse of power, not a guarantee of a platform for all ideas. The Herald has both institutional power and a public platform. It can and continues to publish offensive material in spite of student complaints.
…
Censorship has a particular meaning that has been lost in these debates. Censorship is the exercise of power to suppress challenges to the status quo. People of color calling attention to racism does not constitute an overbearing power structure that will limit free speech. The oppressed by definition cannot censor their oppressor.
The argument here seems to be that censorship is not actually censorship when an oppressed minority does it. The authors believe minority students do not enjoy the same freedom of expression as the majority - which seems somewhat paradoxical given that “Columbian Exchange Day” was censored for offending minorities, while their statement was published in the Daily Herald.
At around the same time, another student group at Brown, Asian/Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), issued a similar response to M. Dzhali Maier's offensive article:
... no apology can sufficiently rectify the violence enacted by The Herald in silencing, speaking for, and erasing Native and Indigenous students. A publication of such prominence and prestige is obligated to maintain a certain quality that includes, at minimum, factual accuracy and a meticulous editorial process. The Herald is obligated to amplify the voices of marginalized students, and obligated to ensure it does not provide a platform for ableist, classist, cissexist, heterosexist, imperialist, racist, and sexist content.
Note the oddly distorted use of the word “violence” (now common), the paradoxical usage of “silencing” and “erasing” (labeling offensive speech itself as a form of suppression or censorship), along with the typical litany of -ist adjectives.
It seems a great deal of the faculty also agreed with the pro-censorship position, because an op-ed entitled “Brown University Faculty Members” was published in the Daily Herald in November, 2015, which read:
In response to M. Dzhali Maier’s article, an Op-ed published by “Brown University Faculty Members” served as a declaration of support for minorities, and a rebuke to free speech. When these students read a racist rant in The Herald, they had the courage to say “enough.” Sadly, some inside and outside of Brown were then shocked that they dared to speak at all and rode swiftly to the defense of supposedly embattled free speech and imperiled academic freedom. Calling out racism, we submit, is not an impingement on “freedom of speech” or “academic freedom.” It is an act of self-defense.
Hundreds of professors put their names on this op-ed.
Kids These Days
Okay, so maybe it was just something in the water at Brown, Evergreen and Yale. Well, no… in fact, similar incidents, with varying degrees of insanity, had occurred on at least 80 University campuses across the United States. A list of the demands made by students at each protest or disruption was compiled on the website thedemands.org.
After the students at Brown University prevented NYPD Police Chief Ray Kelly from speaking in 2013, Marisa Quinn, VP of Public Affairs and University Relations at Brown, said: “I have never seen in my 15 years at Brown the inability to have a dialogue”. While this statement is anecdotal, it indicates that this level of disruptive student activism was perceived as something new in 2013 - something that had not been seen at Brown for at least 15 years. In later posts, I attempt to meticulously document the frequency and severity of disruptive student activism on University campuses over the years, however, for now it’s sufficient to say that what happened at Brown was, in fact, not really anything particularly new. While the 1980s and 1990s saw a lull in student activism, what happened at Brown was merely a continuation of the same sort of disruptive radical student activism that had commonly taken place on university campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Student activism in the 1960s is widely remembered as being associated primarily with the Vietnam war. This is partially true - a significant percentage of disruptive student activism focused around the presence of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) recruitment centers on campus. Radical student activists wanted the ROTC kicked off the campus, in protest of the draft and the Vietnam War. Protests or disruptions often manifested in the form of “sit-ins” or “lie-ins” and other disturbances typically associated with the hippie movement. However, in 1968, there was a significant shift in ideology and an escalation in disruptive tactics. By that point, being against the Vietnam War was a mainstream position. Both Robert Kennedy and 1968 Democratic Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy voiced their opposition to the war. “The Man” himself was against the war, so the radical student activists needed a different cause.
It’s within this context that the New Left would latch onto the cause of anti-black racism; a cause that would bring with it the concepts of “white privilege” as well as a shift away from “class consciousness” towards an emphasis on “race consciousness”. This shift was the result of an internal debate among the radical left regarding the best strategy to unite the American working class in an effort to kick off a socialist revolution in the United States. Of course, ultimately no revolution was forthcoming. But the ideological shift towards “race consciousness” would reverberate down through the decades. The shift began in 1968, as the New Left began to turn their attention away from Vietnam and towards the racial tensions brewing in American cities at the time.
Columbia University goes Full Evergreen
In April of 1968, hundreds of Columbia student protesters took over five different campus buildings. They occupied the buildings, slept there, and in one case, barricaded themselves inside. They remained for almost a week, effectively shutting down the campus for the remainder of the semester, and even took the Dean hostage for a night. They refused to compromise with the Administration. Eventually, hundreds of NYPD officers were called in to remove the students. Chaos and violence ensued.
But this was not entirely about Vietnam. In fact, the students were protesting the construction of a new gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park near the Columbia campus in upper Manhattan. This gym had become a new symbol of encroaching white supremacy, because it was being constructed in a park that bordered Harlem.
The “Columbia rebellion” involved two different groups that ended up taking over the campus. The first group were the mostly white student radicals. The second was a group of black community activists (regularly called “militants” by the newspapers of the time) active in the Harlem area. Leading up to the campus takeover, racial tensions between Columbia University and the activists in Harlem had worsened significantly over the construction of the gym. An article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, entitled “Violence Predicted Against Columbia University” reported that Harlem leaders were warning that violence may erupt around Columbia University unless construction of the gym was halted. Victor Solomon, assistant director of the Harlem chapter of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) spoke at an anti-Columbia rally in Harlem to a crowd of over 400 people, saying “it is very possible for the violence to move to Columbia”, and that “massive direct confrontation” with the University would begin “no later than next weekend”.1
Black activist organizations in Harlem that opposed the gym included the Congress for Racial Equality, the West Harlem Community Organization, the African National Pioneer Movement, and Harlem's Mau Mau Society, led by Charles 37X Kenyatta, a former bodyguard for Malcolm X. Kenyatta criticized Columbia University while brandishing his usual gimmick: a machete with a blade that was partially sheathed by two books.
Unlike today, where a significant percentage of black community activism occurs under the nebulous banner of Black Lives Matter which sometimes adopts the rhetoric or aesthetic of earlier Black Power or Black Liberation movements while remaining somewhat ideologically ambiguous, the black activist organizations of the late 1960s usually promoted very specific ideologies. These ideologies were often (but not always) separatist in nature - they promoted “Black Power”, which meant establishing black institutions that could function independently of the white power structure. Broadly speaking, there were two flavors of Black Power movements in the late 1960s. One was the Pan African variety, exemplified by the pseudo-Islamic Nation of Islam or the anti-Colonial Mau Mau Society. The other is best exemplified by the Black Panthers, who saw themselves as the Vanguard party in a Marxist-Leninist/Maoist revolution. The Harlem activists involved at Columbia seem to have mostly stemmed from the Pan African organizations.
The SDS: Neo-Turbo-Hyper-Marxism
But the group that actually initiated the Columbia campus takeover was mostly white students. These students were led by an organization called the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Remember this organization, because they come up over and over again. While they are mostly forgotten today, it cannot be overemphasized how influential the SDS was in furthering radical politics on campuses in the 1960s. Founded in 1960, the SDS was a national organization, with over 300 local campus chapters and around 30,000 supporters by 1969. In the mid-1960s, the SDS focused most of their energy on protesting the Vietnam War. But beginning in 1968, they began to focus their attention on civil rights, with a specific emphasis on fighting anti-black racism.
It’s difficult to compare them to any analogous group today. A comparison with something like Antifa would be very misleading, because the SDS was not in any sense anonymous or “underground” - they were a national organization that handed out leaflets, printed newsletters, and recruited openly on campuses across the nation. However, they were known for authoritarian, radical tactics, that included “cancelling” anyone they disagreed with (e.g. preventing controversial speakers from actually speaking by causing disruptions), as well as intimidation and violence. They were also explicitly Marxist, and like the Black Panthers, they saw themselves as the Vanguard party (as per Marxist-Leninist doctrine) that would usher in a Socialist revolution in the United States. As we shall see later, it was in the context of internal SDS discussions about strategies for igniting a worker led Socialist revolution that the concepts of “white privilege” and “white supremacy” (in the modern academic sense) were first formalized.
It should also be noted that in the late 1960s, the idea that a bunch of college kids could actually kick start a nation-wide Socialist revolution was not as outlandish as it seems today. In the wake of the partially student-led Maoist revolution in China, as well as the 1968 Paris Uprising which almost toppled the Charles De Gaulle government in France, the idea that students could organize to the point where they were able to sufficiently disrupt the economic functioning of a nation to push it to the brink of collapse was not entirely ridiculous.
Shit gets real at Columbia
At around 1:30 in the afternoon of April 23, 1968, SDS activists led over 400 students and Harlem community activists into Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus, demanding to see “The Man”, while chanting and clapping. “The Man”, it seems, was manifest in the form of Acting Dean Henry S. Coleman. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, a mob of students “closed quickly behind Dean Coleman as he walked into Hamilton, and as of midnight last night he had not left his office.” Students crowded in front of Dean Coleman’s office chanting “Racist gym must go!” and “We want Coleman”. A smaller group of students, who were opposed to the SDS occupation, stood around the Dean to protect him. No actual violence between students took place.
The student insurgents said they were determined not to move until their list of demands had been granted. They prepared themselves for an extended stay in the hallways and classrooms of the building. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, the demonstrators were
… armed with blankets, food, and guitars, [and] had transformed Hamilton Hall from an academic center to a protester’s hotel. ... For the first time Hamilton lobby saw blow-up pictures of Lenin, Che Guevara, and several anti-war posters hung on its walls and columns. Life-size photographs of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X flanked the Dean’s office - indicative of the prominent role played by black students in [the events]. Also, a Che Guevara placard with the words “In Revolution One Wins or Dies” hung overhead.
The students insurgents had a lot of support from the outside. They were provided with boxes of bananas, oranges and apples2. Dean Coleman sat in his office, while the mob of students remained outside, refusing to let him leave. At around 3:30 AM, Dean Coleman addressed the students, saying “Are those students who are not going to let me leave this building prepared to sign a statement to that effect?” The students replied “No, Never!”3
The students held a vote to decide whether or not to continue holding the Dean hostage. Apparently they voted to keep him around, because a representative from the student demonstrators announced “We're going to stay here with Dean Coleman as long as the University does not accede to our demands.” (Note they never explicitly say they are keeping him as a hostage - it is simply implied; the same dynamic occurred over 50 years later at Evergreen.) At around 4:30 AM, Dean Coleman stated the Vice President of the University would meet with the students to discuss the demands. The demonstrators refused, and set minimal conditions for a meeting.4
Meanwhile, on April 24th, the Columbia faculty seemingly caved due to the pressure from the students, and recommended that the University arrange an “immediate suspension of on-site excavation of the gymnasium facility in Morningside Park”. However, the faculty voted not to grant amnesty to the student “insurgents”.5
At some point a rift seems to have occurred between the white SDS students and the black Harlem community activists. The white students were apparently asked to leave Hamilton Hall by the black students and activists. Mark Rudd, the chairman of the SDS at Columbia and apparently the liaison between the white students and the black activists, announced to the white students that “the blacks have asked us to leave - it’s their stand.”6 The white students left Hamilton Hall and decided instead to take over Low Library, the main library at Columbia. They broke the glass of the Library security doors, cutting a security guard’s hand in the process, and 75 students forced their way into the library.7 Students also took over other buildings, including Avery Hall, Fayerweather Hall and the Mathematics building.8 After the white students left Hamilton, the black students and activists released Dean Coleman and then barricaded themselves inside.9 They renamed Hamilton Hall to “Malcolm X University”.10 The occupation would last for almost a week. Two student demonstrators even got married during the occupation, holding a wedding ceremony inside one of the occupied buildings.11
But on April 30th, 1968, the Columbia revolution came to an abrupt end as over 1,000 NYPD officers were called in to forcefully remove the students.
Now, consider the situation for a moment. Multiple campus buildings were occupied by radicalized students, and the occupation was racially segregated. In four of the occupied buildings, all the “insurgents” were white, tuition-paying college students. But in one of the occupied buildings, the occupiers were black community activists from Harlem, whom the newspapers of the day regularly called “black militants”. Also, it was the 1960s. So, who do you think the NYPD treated more harshly?
The answer, surprisingly, is the white students. As the police cleared a building that white SDS students had taken over, violence broke out and the police punched, kicked, dragged and "blackjacked" students. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator:12
In a brutal bloody show of strength from 2:30 until 5:30 this morning, New York City police, at the request of the Columbia administration, cleared the five buildings held for the past week by student demonstrators. Almost seven hundred students and faculty were arrested and at least several hundred injured, some seriously, in the action. A minimum of four faculty members received severe head wounds.
…
A spokesman for St. Luke's Hospital stated this morning that 75 persons were being treated for wounds received during the police action. Thirty-five people were treated in an infirmary set up in Philosophy Hall.
The black students and activists occupying Hamilton Hall, however, were removed peacefully in a special tactical operation13. The Columbia Spectator reports:
While police resorted to violence at other campus buildings to remove demonstrating students, a small detachment of the Tactical Police Force - without billy clubs - peacefully removed about a hundred black students from Hamilton Hall. Led by Chief Inspector Wade, about thirty policemen lined up in front of Hamilton at 2:15 AM. The students inside were asked three times to leave voluntarily and were informed that a warrant has been sworn out in the name of the Trustees of the University charging them with ‘total trespassing.’ The students gave no indication that they intended to leave, and after waiting about ten minutes, four Negro officers, including Inspector Wade, began to move to the door of the building.
Some students and teachers attempted to prevent the police from entering Hamilton, and there was some pushing, but no violence occurred. The black students and activists were arrested, apparently peacefully, their names were taken and they were led to police buses through tunnels under Hamilton Hall14.
Debunk the Police
In the aftermath of the “Columbia rebellion”, both the SDS and many Ivy League students and faculty harshly criticized the NYPD for excessive brutality. Mark Zanger, writing for Yale Daily News, wrote “The students held a demonstration, but the police staged a riot.”15 Meanwhile, writers in the Columbia Daily Spectator blamed the police for damage and vandalism inside the occupied student buildings, claiming the student demonstrators did not damage any property. The Columbia Spectator reports on the state of the Mathematics Building after the student occupiers were cleared16:
… general damage was considerable throughout the building. On the sixth floor, where, according to observers, students occupied only two rooms, windows were smashed in almost every office and many doors were axed.
But the author appears to blame the damage mostly on the police. One Columbia professor voiced the conspiratorial claim that the police purposely damaged the occupied offices in order to blame it on the students to publicly justify the police operation on the campus.17
The conservative view of the whole situation was voiced by the “Committee for Defense of Property Rights” in an op-ed in the Columbia Daily Spectator which read18:
What distinguishes the events at Columbia from other incidents of mob violence that have been occurring with ever increasing frequency and intensity is that at Columbia the representatives of savagery have been arrayed against an institution which has taught them to be savages. The violence all about us, the direction in which our country and world are headed, are not causeless. They are the product of ideas, of the ideas propounded in the classrooms and books of professors …
…
That at least, after insufferable provocation, the police were grudgingly allowed to perform their righteous duty and clear the occupied buildings of the vermin which infested them, for which [the police] are now denounced as the criminals in the case, is only another manifestation of the inverted teachings of the contemporary intellectual establishment.
…
Thus [Columbia students] have been reduced to the grotesque position of believing that those who interfere with the use of property are not guilty of violence, and that only the defenders of property rights - the police - are guilty of violence.
Yale pulls a mini-Evergreen
Why exactly did the (mostly white) SDS students at Columbia suddenly decide to align their organization with the interests of black community activists in Harlem? Before exploring that question, let’s look at another SDS-inspired campus meltdown that occurred at Yale, about a year and half later, on November 4th, 1969.
Colia Williams was a working class black woman who worked as a waitress at a Yale Dining Hall in 1969. She had been hired on a 30-day “trial period” as a new waitress, which I assume was a policy of the Dining Hall administration at Yale at the time. John Lewis, the Dining Hall manager, fired her for reasons that are difficult to precisely identify given the mess of contradictory testimony in the campus newspaper at the time.
According to one report, she was fired for being “too slow” or uncooperative19. The Yale Daily News also reports that Mrs. Williams had accused a bursary manager of harassing her. Apparently she also threw a glass of juice at this bursary manager at some point.20 Two bursary workers accused her of being a “crummy worker”, but two waitresses said “[Colia Williams] wasn't fired fairly. She wasn't even given a chance.”21
Regardless of whether she was treated fairly, the Yale SDS immediately saw a cause they could get behind. On November 4th, 1969, a mob of approximately 60 (mostly white) Yale students, led by the SDS, poured into Wright Hall and took over the office of Henry Kremski, Personnel Supervisor of Dining Halls and Housekeeping. A man named John Embersits, Business Manager of Yale University, met with the students and offered to look into the firing of Colia Williams. Embersits asked the students to choose three student representatives, who would be present at a future hearing to look into the circumstances that led to the firing of Mrs. Williams. The students refused this offer, and said they would not allow John Embersits to leave unless he rehired Mrs. Williams immediately on the spot.22 The students also accused Yale of “institutional racism”.23
The Yale Daily News reports:24
… the occupation began at 2:45 in the afternoon when approximately 30 students broke past four University police officers at the Personnel Office doors. Others followed them later. The sit-in ended at 6:35 when the students left the building because they feared arrest.
The Yale Daily News quotes John Wilkinson, Dean of Students at Yale, saying “The faculty will not look upon this as a minor offense. It is more than an occupation. The students forcefully captivated several people for over an hour.” Additionally, according to the Yale Daily News25:
[John] Embersits, University Dining Halls Director Albert Dobie, and Employment Supervisor William Carney were not permitted to leave the offices during the occupation. Henry Kremski, Personnel Supervisor, was allowed to leave after several hours out of respect for his age.
Dean Wilkinson also said that “former economics instructor David Levey and his wife [Sandra Levey], several unidentified graduate students, and two Yale alumni were also involved in the occupation”, indicating that both Yale students and faculty members were radicalized and supported the SDS. David Levey is a name that comes up multiple times in stories related to the SDS. A few weeks later, on November 17, 1969, David Levey was among a group of SDS members accused of using physical intimidation or coercion to prevent a rival student group from handing out leaflets on campus.26
Ultimately, the student occupation ended after they were threatened with suspension and arrest. 45 students were suspended over the incident.27 43 of the suspended students wrote a collective statement, printed in the Yale Daily News, which summarized their motivations for taking over the Personnel Office28. They argue that Mrs. Colia Williams was severely underpaid, and that
Black and women workers are disproportionately stuck in the worst jobs at Yale, as everywhere else in the United States. ... Mrs. Williams had been receiving $60 a week on welfare to support herself and her four children. The $78 waitressing job made a difference in her livelihood and meant an escape from the welfare system. The contract prevented the union from protecting Mrs. Williams during her probationary period. We thought that the case of Mrs. Williams was a gross injustice.
The students justified their extreme actions (taking over an administrative office) by arguing that John Embersits was merely stalling, and that due to Mrs. Williams’ financially precarious situation, action had to be taken immediately.29 Other groups voiced their suspicions over the motivations of the SDS in defending Colia Williams. Glenn deChabert, moderator of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY), challenged the SDS’ support of Mrs. Williams by saying “Your ego trip is messing up the lady’s job”. The Yale Daily News reports that a shouting match occurred between deChabert and several SDS members.30
Yale Student Marvin Olaskly wrote in the November 11, 1969 edition of Yale Daily News:31
Although cries of “Rehire Mrs. Williams” continued throughout the afternoon, many observers began to realize that for some of the more militant members of the occupation forces, such as former Yale lecturer David Levey, the reinstatement was not the primary purpose of the afternoon. ... [David Levey] and several of his co-religionists believed SDS finally had the issue it had sought since [the anti-ROTC movement fell apart]. Very likely several members of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY) were correct when they accused SDS of “using” Mrs. Williams.
The satirical use of the term “co-religionist” is interesting, as it seems analogous to the way modern “woke” social justice activists are accused of “religious” behavior.
Ultimately, Colia Williams was rehired. Marvin Olasky writes that this was “great for Mrs. Williams, but bad for SDS. The most effective issue at Yale was neutralized.”32 As for the students who participated in the occupation, the Executive Committee of Yale College published a statement which said that each student would be put on disciplinary probation for the remainder of the 1969-70 academic year.33
And now the punchline: on December 18, 1969, after over 40 Yale students were suspended over this fiasco, Colia Williams quit her job at Yale anyway - seemingly on a whim - over a “disagreement with the head waitress”. Her former boss called her that evening and asked her to come back, offering to transfer her to another division of the University if she wanted. Mrs. Williams turned down the offer, and also indicated she probably would not work at Yale again and would look for a job elsewhere.34 I'm sure all 45 suspended students wished her the best of luck in the future.
Relentless Religiofication
One thing that always strikes me when watching any of those viral video clips of Evergreen students in 2017 or Yale students in 2015 is the bizarrely heightened vitriol and passionate hatred that seems to surface over seemingly trivial issues. The student takeovers that happened over 50 years ago at Columbia and Yale were not live streamed; there is no video footage of these events, and so it is difficult to get a sense of the temperament of the students involved. We can find hints here and there suggesting a similar level of fanaticism, such as the satirical use of the word “co-religionist” mentioned above. But one anonymous observer at Yale, who apparently personally witnessed the student occupation over the Colia Williams incident over 50 years ago, wrote an opinion piece in Yale Daily News. The way he describes the behavior of the SDS is extremely familiar; he’s closely describing the behavior of the modern enraged “SJW” students at Yale in 2015. Our anonymous observer wrote35:
When the supporters of Mrs. Williams arrived, they were addressed by John Embersits, business manager of Yale, who announced that the University would negotiate with three representatives of the students assembled. This ran contrary to the wishes of the crowd. What was surprising was the reaction. Embersits immediately became the object of a torrent of verbal abuse so extraordinary that one is moved to wonder whether even the appearance of George Wallace in place of Embersits could have elicited as strong a response. It seemed to me that those present were drawing on wellsprings of hatred, bitterness, and frustration within themselves which ran far deeper than the nature of the cause at hand - no matter how just or right it was - could have possibly justified.
One might raise there the issue of the psychological orientation of SDS, as a group consciousness, toward other human beings and toward the world. … It seems that it is therefore SDS’ relentless religiofication of the issues (i.e., their conversion into holy causes) which forces the majority at Yale into non-support.
This description sounds strikingly similar to the modern Woke. Our anonymous observer continues:
The fountainhead of religiofication is also the single group principle which binds SDS members into a unified whole; this is the group’s passion, which appears to this observer to be the dominant force within the group consciousness. What alienates the majority of students from SDS is the nature of this passion, a generalized orientation toward society which has, as its constituency, hatred; frustration; bitterness; basic mistrust and suspicion of all ‘opposition’ groups and power structures; and an absolute faith in the efficacy of direct, immediate action.
Again, this author’s description of the behavior and psychology of the SDS, written over 50 years ago, could easily be converted into a Tweet and repurposed as a criticism of Woke activists today.
The Black Panthers head to Yale
In this section, I’ll go over one last incident, which also occurred at Yale, before tying this all together and setting up material for the next post in this series. In the spring of 1970, radical student activists, working alongside the Black Panthers, essentially forced the entire University to go on strike - meaning students would not attend classes - in protest over the trial of Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale.
Unlike Black Lives Matter, which is a boring non-profit 501(C)(3) organization with a Facebook page, the Black Panthers were the real deal. They didn’t give a shit about registering as a 501(C)(3). They wanted to overthrow the government and initiate a Maoist revolution. While they provided many helpful community services, such as free breakfast for school children, they also sometimes operated like an organized crime syndicate. This is particularly relevant for the trial of Bobby Seale over the brutal torture and murder of a young black man named Alex Rackley.
Bobby Seale is a complicated individual. In August of 1968, Bobby Seale, along with a hilarious assortment of white radicals consisting of SDS members and Yippies were arrested for inciting a riot in Chicago after the Democratic National Convention. The trial that followed (unrelated to the trial of Bobby Seale mentioned above) in the winter of 1969 was known as the trial of the “Chicago 7” (initially the “Chicago 8”), and like the OJ Simpson trial it was considered one of the “trials of the century” - watched by everyone across the nation. Netflix recently released a film called “The Trial of the Chicago 7”, which fairly accurately portrays the events of the trial. The trial itself is not particularly significant for our purposes here, except as it pertains to Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers.
It is almost certainly the case that Bobby Seale was completely innocent of inciting a riot in Chicago. He had barely just arrived in Chicago at the time of the riot. Moreover, throughout the trial he was consistently mistreated by Judge Julius Hoffman, who seems to have been legitimately prejudiced towards Seale. Bobby Seale’s personal lawyer was unable to attend the trial because he was recovering from surgery, leaving Seale with no legal representation. The judge, however, refused to postpone the trial, and insisted that Seale use the court-appointed lawyer. Bobby Seale refused, and demanded to represent himself. Judge Hoffman did not allow this either. In protest, Bobby Seale continuously interrupted the trial with verbal outbursts, calling the judge racist and fascist, and demanding his lawyer. In response, the judge ordered Bobby Seale to be physically gagged in open court36.
Demonstrators protesting the treatment of Seale wore gags while picketing outside Chicago’s Federal Building. When Seale was brought into the courtroom bound and gagged, his court-appointed lawyer declared, “This is no longer a court of order, your Honor; this is a medieval torture chamber.” The judge eventually declared a mistrial for Seale, and sentenced him to 4 years for contempt of court37. But this was appealed and Seale was never retried for this case.
Nonetheless, the fact that Seale was charged in the first place in connection with the riots in Chicago, combined with the fact that the Judge presiding over the trial was an impossible asshole who severely mistreated Bobby Seale, generated significant sympathy for Seale, along with a lot of benefit of the doubt, when Seale was later arrested for ordering the murder of Alex Rackley in May of 1969.
Alex Rackley was a 24 year old member of the Black Panthers who was tortured and murdered by other Black Panthers because they believed Rackley was an FBI informant. Rackley was murdered in New Haven, Connecticut, the city where Yale University is located. According to the police, Rackley was held captive in a basement, tortured with boiling water, and eventually shot in the chest and the head. His body had multiple bruises, cigarette burns, ice-pick wounds and rope-marks around the wrists.38 Bobby Seale was charged with ordering the murder.
Erika Huggins, another Black Panther, was also charged with the murder. She was accused of participating in the torture by fetching boiling water to be poured on Alex Rackley. There is almost no doubt whatsoever that Erika Huggins and other Black Panther members tortured and murdered Alex Rackley. Before murdering Rackley, the Panthers interrogated him at length. They also taped the interrogation. Audio of the interrogation was played for the jury, but the tape was not released to the public. However, decades later, the tape was rediscovered and released. You can listen to the audio here.
Bobby Seale himself never appears on the tape. As is always the case with organized crime, it’s difficult to definitively prove whether or not some high ranking member explicitly ordered a murder. However, George Sams, a lower ranking member of the Panthers, testified that Bobby Seale ordered the murder of Alex Rackley on May 19, 1969.39 This was one day after Bobby Seale was invited to Yale by the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY) to give a speech. On May 18, 1969, Bobby Seale spoke at Yale to approximately 700 people in the audience, where he blurted out profanity and called white college students “a bunch of jackass racists”.40 But Seale also said “it’s not a race struggle, it’s a class struggle. It’s a struggle with the oligarchs, the capitalists, the exploiters, the upper ruling class.” He ended with “we’re going to fight capitalism with socialism, racism with solidarity. Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.” This is the same message preached by the SDS.
Bobby Seale was eventually found not guilty, however before the trial ended, Yale University came very close to total chaos.
Yale almost goes Full Evergreen, but then doesn’t, sort of.
In the spring of 1970, various student organizations associated with the Black Panthers called for the entire University to go on strike in protest of the trial of Bobby Seale. This meant suspending all classes at Yale. The student groups that advocated for a campus-wide strike were the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY) as well as Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). According to the Yale Daily News, a TWLF member said “Yale will be shut down to allow time and a structure for struggle.” Another member added: “the shutdown will be enforced”.41 The Black Panthers urged Yale students to show their commitment by buying guns and occupying Beinecke Library, where the University stored rare books. Douglas Miranda, area captain for the Panthers, gave a speech to Yale students saying the Panthers would unite with BSAY to “demand that the government stop the conspiracy trial. ... You can close Yale down and make Yale demand release. You have the power to prevent a bloodbath in New Haven. The most minimal level you can participate on is a call for a student strike.”42
On April 22, 1970, around 4,500 people gathered at the Ingalls Hockey rink at Yale to hear speeches from various Black Panther members, along with black Yale students and faculty. David Hilliard, the Black Panther chief of staff, gave a speech exhorting Yale students to rally behind Black Panther members on trial or in prison. Referring to one Black Panther member currently in jail, Hilliard said43:
… we have a revolutionary brother in Berkeley, charged with 4 counts of attempted murder of 4 pigs. And I don't think that’s wrong. Because everybody knows that pigs are depraved traducers that violate the lives of human beings and that there ain’t nothing wrong with taking the life of a mother-fucking pig!
Some people in the crowd booed after Hilliard spoke of killing police officers. Hilliard responded “I knew you motherfuckers were racist. Go boo me again, racists! … Go on back to your humanities classes, go back to your psychology classes or your English 3 or whatever it is.” After this, a lot of black students and faculty clapped, and some whites joined in. Hilliard was ultimately able to regain the favor of the crowd, as they applauded and chanted "Power to the people" while holding up clenched fists.44
Along with the campus wide strike, the Black Panthers and student organizations planned for a large rally on May Day (May 1st, 1970) to protest the Bobby Seale trial. Robert Brustein, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, gave a detailed account of the events surrounding the Yale “May Day” strike and the trial of Bobby Seale in New York Times magazine.45 He mentions that 9 out of 12 colleges at Yale voted to shut the campus down. Black students also began attaching some additional unreasonable demands that Yale had no power to actually carry out, such as stopping the construction of a new highway. Brustein recalls bringing up to his students some of the “downsides” of the Black Panthers, such as their open dedication to killing “pigs”, their desire for a Maoist revolution, and their hostile attitude towards Jews. He also reminded his students that somebody clearly killed Alex Rackley, so it seems that the trial should continue uninterrupted.46 Ultimately, some type of vague compromise was reached where the students voted to “redirect” the school’s activities towards protesting the trial, which possibly meant that some classes would be held as normal, but class discussions would be “redirected” towards discussing the Bobby Seale trial. Students who wished to protest would not be required to attend class.47
As the May Day rally approached, graffiti began appearing throughout the campus saying things like "theft is the moral obligation of the poor." Brustein recalls that Alex Rackley, the actual murder victim who was tortured before being shot in the head, was barely mentioned at all on campus at the time. Merchants in shops around campus boarded up windows in anticipation of the Black Panther rally over the weekend, which was expected to attract over 20,000 people. Leading up to the weekend, around 400 rifles and shotguns were stolen, 140 pounds of mercury went missing, and a fire was started in the Yale Law School library. Law students said they suspected they were targeted because they initially voted against the strike.48
On April 27th, 1969, as the strike continued, a Yale University spokesman said that class attendance had been about 80% below normal among undergraduate humanities and social science classes, and about 50% below normal in freshman and sophomore science and engineering courses. Attendance was “almost normal” for upper classmen in science and engineering courses. Some students expressed that they felt they were intimidated into participating in the strike.49
Robert Brustein worried presciently about this whole situation:50
I began to foresee a time when the University could be shutdown or “redirected” on the basis of any political crisis, thus making it impossible to proceed with the process of learning, teaching, creating and research. I was amazed at the ease with which a group of intellectuals, presumably devoted to their subjects, could suspend their right to teach, even for the briefest period. ... the anti-intellectualism of our society was now beginning to triumph, even in the home of the intellect.
Brustein brings up a particularly disturbing incident that brings to mind many of the modern viral videos where bystanders are pressured by Black Lives Matter protesters into expressing “solidarity”. Brustein recalls an incident where he encountered a former Yale student who “had attempted unsuccessfully to revolutionize the Drama School last spring”. Upon noticing Brustein, the student raised his fist and said “Power to the people!” Brustein did not respond. The student faced Brustein and said “We’re going to give you something special to write about this weekend. You’re going to have plenty of new material for the New York Times!” Brustein thanked him and asked “am I one of the people? Am I allowed to have my say as well as you?” The student walked away raising his fist. Later, Brustein was informed by his wife that somebody called their house and said “tell the pig he is going to die!” Apparently many Yale faculty members received similar calls.51 Brustein recalls:52
There was something ironic about this. Three years ago we took our phone number out of the book because right-wing patriots, aroused over my defense of a student workshop production in which a flag was used as a blanket, were making threatening calls. Now the left was on the phone, probably because I had written some articles satirizing revolutionary play acting and criticizing radical violence.
(Note the reference to "revolutionary play acting", i.e. “LARPing”. )
On May 2, 1970, the May Day weekend, the National Guard and 4,000 Federal troops came to New Haven to maintain the peace. Despite a few isolated incidents, including one case where the National Guard fired tear gas on a small crowd of students marching towards the courthouse, the weekend miraculously concluded with minimal violence. Small groups of demonstrators engaged the police by throwing rocks and bottles. The police responded with tear gas. The police reported 17 arrests of demonstrators, and 5 people were treated for minor lacerations. There was also a bombing at the Ingalls Rink that caused some destruction, but only three minor injuries. In another incident, police used “a more potent tear gas, believed to be of the CS variety”, to disperse remaining demonstrators onto the Old Campus.53
A month later, on June 1, 1970, the Yale Daily News published a retrospective of the May Day student strike, calling it the “most cataclysmic event of the 1970 school year”. The article concludes: 54
Students, disturbed by what was seen as a nationwide conspiracy against the Black Panther Party, aroused Yale, the community and eventually the entire country for the purpose of drawing attention to the trial of Bobby Seale, national chairman of the Black Panther Party. The strike was called, in the words of the Strike Steering Committee, to “raise the level of consciousness”, about the Panthers and what they were doing.
White Privilege is a Communist Plot to put fluoride in the water
We’ve gone over three incidents in the late 1960s and 1970, where student activists either took over partial control of a University campus, or disrupted normal University functions on a large scale. Each of these cases had little or nothing to do with protesting Vietnam, but rather were focused around anti-black racism. In the first case at Columbia, the disruption was a joint effort by the SDS and black community activists. In the second case at Yale, involving the firing of Colia Williams, the disruption was entirely led by the SDS. In the third case (also at Yale), the disruption was led by black student groups and the Black Panthers, with help from white students and white student activists. There were many other similar instances across college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Many of these instances, particularly the 1968 “Columbia rebellion”, are very similar to the events at Evergreen in 2017. The student actors in both instances are characterized by a strong authoritarian bent and a complete intolerance towards ideological dissent. But there is one key difference. The whole “snowflake” and “safe space” element is entirely missing from the 1960s campus takeovers. There is no evidence that any SDS students at Yale were concerned about “feeling safe” on campus. This is likely because the SDS, and the radical left in general, had not yet quite crystallized the crucial concept of “white privilege”, which was a necessary ideological building block in the shift towards identity politics and the cultivation of victim mentalities among minority groups.
But the first steps away from “class consciousness” and towards “race consciousness” began in the late 1960s, with the convergence of white student radicals and Black Power or Black Nationalist activists. Their goals did not entirely overlap, but they overlapped enough (particularly when it came to the Marxist flavor of black nationalism, exemplified by the Black Panthers) with regard to achieving specific goals. In the next post, I’ll explore the crucial development of the concept of white privilege within the SDS that shifted the focus within radical student circles from uniting the working class to emphasizing racism as the primary obstacle preventing a socialist revolution in the United States.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/08/20/89021480.html?pageNumber=15
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/01/01/80010717.html?pageNumber=16
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/03/25/81935887.html?pageNumber=28
https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/black-panther-may-day/page/introduction