At Columbia, Remembering a Revolution

Reunited Friday on campus were some of Columbia's 1968 radicals turned professionals. Shown at "Columbia 1968 + 40" are from left, Raymond Brown, Nancy Biberman, Robert Friedman and Mark Rudd. (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

When police arrived, black students holding Hamilton Hall gave up and were arrested without violence. But whites in the other four buildings resisted -- some passively, others by hurling chairs at police. In all, 136 students and faculty members and 12 police officers were injured in the melee. Dean Henry S. Coleman was released unharmed.

From the beginning, the students formed an awkward coalition of white antiwar activists and black students of all political persuasions.

"Other people said, 'Stop the war.' I just talked about the gym," said Brown, then an officer of the Student African American Society. "There was a growing sense among the black students that while some of our fellow students thought this was a revolution, we knew it was a demonstration."

In fact, the Class of 1968 was the first at Columbia with a sizable number of black students -- about 20, said Brown, speaking at Friday's forum. They entered college 10 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed school segregation.

On campus, security guards would stop black students to ask for identification, black alumni said. White students used racial insults, and many of the African American students identified more with Harlem than with the campus overlooking it.

Soon after the students took Hamilton, the black students asked white students to leave and occupy other buildings. They took over four. Columbia officials did not move in right away, fearing that Harlem residents would turn their anger on the institution.

Once the students were barricaded inside Columbia's buildings, they became the focus of outside activists. Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers visited. Juan Gonzalez, now a journalist at the New York Daily News, recalled finding rifles, smuggled in by outside agitators, lined up against a bathroom wall.

Nancy Biberman, who was a member of the radical campus group Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, was a courier who ran back and forth among the strikers' meetings. "It was exhilarating," she said.

But at the same time, Biberman said, she began to realize that as a woman, her role was limited: "I was typing up what was discussed at meetings to which women were not invited. . . . It's what propelled me into law school. I wanted to have a professional title."

In the end, Columbia abandoned plans for the gym and cut ties with the think tank. "Ordinary folks faced with superior power don't need to lose," Brown said.

But not all were able to seamlessly incorporate the experience of the protest into their lives.

Rudd was leader of the campus SDS chapter, and the protest made him a media star. Afterward, he said, the spotlight pushed him to be ever more radical.

"My friends and I took the success at Columbia and felt it could be replicated, not only on university campuses, but in the society as a whole," he said.

He helped form the Weather Underground, but after three comrades died when a bomb they were making exploded, Rudd became a fugitive. "I went too far," he said. "I've spent the past 25 years trying not to be Mark Rudd."