PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
“Free Huey” was a rallying cry for tens of thousands of people across the country. The amount of new Panther offices that were starting up all over the country then was just phenomenal. When I first started hanging out with the Panthers in Oakland, there were three offices, and about two years later, I think seventy offices opened up across the country. It seemed like a hundred because they were just everywhere. It was exciting.*7
BERNARDINE DOHRN (SDS officer)
I’m an absolute original classic Midwest radical, but I didn’t come from a radical background. My parents voted Republican their entire lives, but not as ideologues. I’m a first-generation college graduate. I’m kind of a stereotype in that sense, being an innocent Midwest girl at the height of the American empire, knowing nothing about the world. So I had a very steep learning curve.
I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in ’67. There were six women in my law school class, not a single person of color in my class, and less than twenty in the whole law school. Every single guy in my class became draft eligible that day. So it was a unique moment.
I moved to New York and went to work for the National Lawyers Guild, where I started organizing student chapters. We organized lawyers and law students to support the mass arrests that were happening at antiwar demonstrations. We were mobilizing law students and lawyers to be there, to document police abuses, to get the names of people who are being arrested, to have a team of people show up in court. At the Pentagon demonstration in 1967,*8 the police drove people to armories in Virginia as they arrested them in hordes. They had a strategy for what to do with them, but we had a different strategy. We also did draft assistance and military assistance. I spoke at a lot of military bases. I traveled full-time that year, organizing student chapters of the Lawyers Guild and trying to get lawyers to join the movement.
BILL AYERS (University of Michigan, SDS member)
I grew up in an affluent Chicago family and I’m the middle of five children. One of my brothers, Rick, went to Canada to escape the draft, where he organized a home for deserters in Vancouver. John, who’s younger than me, joined the Democratic Party and tried to build a peace wing within it. I joined the movement in the mid-sixties as a student at the University of Michigan, became an activist and then an organizer. We worked for three years, tirelessly, with lots of arrests, lots of beatings, lots of organizing. The hardest work in those early years was going door-to-door for three straight summers urging people to sign a petition or take my literature against the war. Our plan was, during Vietnam Summer in ’67, to touch every working-class home in the Midwest—in Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and Columbus, and Chicago, and Detroit. So, I would knock on a stranger’s door, present them with an argument or evidence about the war, and have one person slam the door in my face and tell me to go back to Russia, and have the next person say, “My cousin was killed last month. Come in. Have a cup of coffee.” It was heartbreaking. And it was revelatory. It was life changing.
MARK RUDD
At Columbia we developed a strategy of attacking the university’s involvement with the Vietnam War. The administration was sending students’ class ranking to the draft board; the bottom of the class would be drafted. That was a very easy one to organize against, because students didn’t want their ranking sent to the draft board. But also there was naval ROTC, recruitment to the CIA, and to various branches of the military on campus. So we’d have these little campaigns around confronting recruiters, for example, or a referendum on class rank. And in the course of these campaigns, we’d knock on doors, and hold dorm meetings, and show films, and hold teach-ins. It was a combination of educational work and confrontation.
To a large extent, the model came out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That started with an innocuous request by the Berkeley students to set up tables to recruit students to work for the civil rights movement in the South. The university opposed it and it led to a major confrontation, and the beginning of the building of a widespread student movement. So that was a model for us at Columbia.*9 The University of Wisconsin was another model. We learned what was happening at different campuses from New Left Notes, which was a weekly national publication out of the Chicago SDS headquarters.
What happened in the spring of ’68, leading up to the Columbia occupation, was kind of like a perfect storm. From the end of January to April of ’68 was the Tet Offensive in Vietnam,*10 the abdication of LBJ, and the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4.
These three events and the response to those events politicized everyone. But at Columbia, the organizing dovetailed with all these political events, so that on April 23, we called a demonstration to protest the fact that a number of people, including myself, had been reprimanded for a previous demonstration. The right wing, the pro-war jocks, as we called them, were out demonstrating in force, because they knew it was going to be a confrontation. So we met at noon at the Sundial, in the center of campus. There were speeches, and somebody yelled, “Let’s go to the gym site!” There were two issues: the building of the gym in Morningside Park*11 and the university’s complicity with war research at the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA.*12 So suddenly the crowd streamed over to the gym site, and there were fights at the gym site with the jocks, fights with the cops, and I tried to quiet the group. It was really a mob scene.
I said, “Let’s go to Hamilton Hall.” That was the main building of Columbia College, and the classrooms were there, and the professors’ offices. And so we all streamed into it, several hundred people. By then, we had entered into a de facto coalition with the Student Afro-American Society (SAS), and we immediately formed a steering committee and started meeting continually.
There were rallies in the first-floor lobby, and the steering committee was meeting upstairs. The first thing we did was write the six demands; the first two were to stop the university’s complicit involvement with IDA, and to stop building the gym, and the last one was amnesty for all concerned. So these six demands became the rallying point of the whole strike. The occupation of Hamilton Hall was totally unplanned and spontaneous, but hundreds and hundreds of people streamed in, including community support from Harlem. Harlem had blown up just nineteen days before. And so people started bringing food, and militants came in. There were rumors of guns. But at one point the blacks started meeting alone, and caucusing, and the result of that was they asked us to leave and said, “This is going to become a black occupation of students and community.”
It wasn’t a complete shock, because that was the era of black power, and the idea of separation was very current. But there was still a kind of a tremendous feeling of unity.
JULIUS LESTER
Black power was a redefinition of who we were. We weren’t Negro or colored anymore. We were black. And then also, we wanted power. I think that those were the two things that scared white people the most. To throw in the words black power was very incendiary. Also it was moving away from what whites had defined as the goal of the movement, which was integration. Integration had never been our goal. As Malcolm X put it, why would we want to integrate into a burning house? So it was a restatement of values, and in ’66, when black power came out, whites certainly felt disenfranchised.
MARK RUDD
Don’t forget that the most significant movement within the United States, the black civil rights movement, had morphed into a revolutionary and a national liberation movement. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of black power as a challenge to white liberals and radicals, especially if you were a radical. You wanted to get to the root of the problem, and you didn’t want reform, compromise, hypocrisy; that was what the liberals gave us, starting with their refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the ’64 Democratic convention.
JULIUS LESTER
In 1967 I wrote a column for The Guardian called “The White Radical Is Revolutionary,” where I said, “It is true that the black move
ment at this time is a vital and dynamic one, and its energy was the largest single factor in the creation of a young, non-black radical movement….The white radical, however, always saw himself in a direct relationship with the black radical, and was therefore stunned at the enunciation of black power and black nationalism. The result was a loss of direction for the white radical.”
MARK RUDD
Four other buildings were taken immediately after. I remember leaving Hamilton Hall at about 5 A.M., right before dawn, and all of us straggling out with our guitars and book bags and our sleeping bags, and we wandered over to Low Library with a vague notion of going into the president’s office. Well, we had to break a window, and the shattering of the glass was crossing a line. You could hear the glass shattering in the quiet silence. We forced our way up into the president’s office, and it was rather amazing. We were shocked by what we were doing. That was the first of four more buildings over the next couple of days. Well over a thousand people streamed in to occupy the buildings. It was amazing.
There were abortive attempts at negotiation, arbitration, and mediation by the faculty. There were clandestine meetings with the vice president. I was involved with one of those. But eventually, a week later, the administration finally called the police. They had over a thousand police—they were later described as having spent days gnawing on their nightsticks getting ready to attack us, and they did attack, and they beat up hundreds and hundreds of people, including bystanders, professors, medical personnel. You could only describe it as a police riot. The police were out of control.
Credit 4.3
Columbia SDS chairman Mark Rudd in front of microphones (left) as students occupy several university buildings for a week, including the office of university president Grayson Kirk. On April 30, 1968, New York City police cleared the occupied buildings, clashing violently with students—injuring more than 130 and arresting 700.
The cops at Columbia saw themselves as fighters in a class war for the government, for patriotism, for the war, against the spoiled brat middle-class white kids of Columbia, who didn’t know how good they had it in this country, and were mostly Jews anyway, and they beat the shit out of us just to prove it. Just to teach us a lesson. So they rioted and arrested over seven hundred people that day, and many more later, and the lesson they taught us was that they were brutal, and that we were in a war against the pigs. We’d gotten the term “pigs” from the Black Panthers, who had just emerged into our consciousness around that time, the spring and summer of ’68.
The significant thing is that after the bust, thousands of people who had been on the sidelines joined the strike because of the police brutality. And so Columbia exploded after the bust, and all classes were canceled for the rest of the year, and there was a second bust, a second occupation, and more rioting. As a result, we had created a model of student militancy and audacity, and that was the lesson the movement took from it, and I believe that led to the formation of the Weathermen.
In May of ’68 I was thrown out of Columbia and I became a regional and a national traveler for SDS, and I met a lot of other people who had been thinking along the same lines, and acting along the same lines as we were at Columbia, and this kind of hypermilitancy and aggressiveness became our strategy. We formed a faction within the national SDS leadership, known as the Action Faction. And so by the spring of ’69 there was a full-blown debate in SDS over strategy, and being basically intellectuals, people who work on ideas, our faction developed a set of ideas concerning how the revolution was going to happen. And people also developed opposing ideas that were hyperideological.
FBI MEMORANDUM, MAY 9, 1968
TO: MR. W. C. SULLIVAN
FROM: C. D. BRENNAN
SUBJECT: COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM
INTERNAL SECURITY
DISRUPTION OF THE NEW LEFT
Our Nation is undergoing an era of disruption and violence caused to a large extent by various individuals generally connected with the New Left. Some of these activities urge revolution in America and call for the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. They continually and falsely allege police brutality and do not hesitate to utilize unlawful acts to further their so-called causes….[I]t is our recommendation that a new Counterintelligence Program be designed to neutralize the New Left and the Key Activists….The purpose of this program is to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the activities of this group and persons connected with it.*13
GERALD LEFCOURT (movement lawyer)
More than twelve hundred people were arrested at Columbia during the student strike led by the Students for a Democratic Society. The National Lawyers Guild formed a mass defense office to help by seeking volunteers. I volunteered and was one of the few that had criminal law experience, so they asked me to represent Mark Rudd and Martin Kenner. They were the only two who had serious felony charges arising out of the protests at Columbia.
In 1968, when I was twenty-five, I was a lawyer working for the Legal Aid Society. Because of the outrageous caseloads and no training, we were unable to provide quality representation for the poor. I began organizing a lawyers union and was fired after several organizing meetings, but the union was formed in protest of my firing.
As a result of the political upheaval caused by the antiwar and civil rights movements a group of us formed the New York Law Commune, which was committed to fight for those struggles. The Law Commune represented every part of the movement. With several women lawyers, we were deeply involved in the emerging women’s movement led by my sister-in-law Carol. I used the term “movement lawyer,” because we were fighting for “the movement for social change.”
In the spring of ’68, the Panthers were forming a chapter in New York. My first call was that three Panthers were arrested in Brooklyn charged with assaulting the police. That call was from Charles R. Garry, who represented Huey Newton in Oakland, to William Kunstler, who asked me to handle the case because of my criminal law experience as a public defender.
ERICKA HUGGINS
The Black Panther Party was created on the heels of the civil rights movement. We were the peers of SNCC and other more nationalist organizations within the community, but we were not a nationalist organization. We were talking about redistribution of the wealth. Huey and Bobby were talking about conditions of poverty that need to change. Racist and classist notions keep us from recognizing what great people we are.
Mass media would never, ever speak truthfully about the Black Panther Party. People in the communities around the U.S. who experienced the benefit of our community programs—of which there were many—loved us and protected us. Programs like the Oakland Community School, that I was a director of, were created by the Black Panther Party, the People’s Free Medical Clinics, the housing cooperatives, the busing to prisons programs. The Free Breakfast for Children Program was the first community program we developed. J. Edgar Hoover tried to stop them. He worked with local law enforcement to shut things down. For instance, I can remember being in Oakland when the police came into a breakfast program in a church basement with their guns pointed at us—with the children right there. There was nothing going on but eggs and milk and bacon. But our stance was, you can’t ask people to step forward to make change in the world if they’re hungry, their children are starving, and no one in their house has shoes, or heat in the winter.
So the Black Panther Party was created with a feeling of love for the people it was serving and that’s my memory of it. Our community survival programs were full of love for people. All of these people, some of whom are now grandparents, would tell you that having a free breakfast or a free lunch, or the school, or the free clinic, which tested men, women, and children for sickle-cell anemia and saved their lives, literally—that their lives would not have been the same without the Black Panther Party. We were called the vanguard of the revolution. Why? Because of our way of organizing people, which was grassroots community based. The Black Panther Party drew lots of visionary young people.
And the median age of party members was only nineteen!
Credit 4.4
The Black Panther breakfast program served hot meals to children and was one of many inner-city community programs the Panthers provided, including free medical clinics, housing cooperatives, busing, and prison programs. At its height, during the school year of 1969–70, the breakfast program served one hundred thousand children in thirty-six cities.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
J. EDGAR HOOVER TO FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, SAN FRANCISCO, MAY 27, 1969
One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks….You state that the Bureau under the [Counterintelligence Program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches, which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point. The BPP is not engaged in the “Breakfast for Children” program for humanitarian reasons. This program was formed by the BPP…to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negros, and to fill adolescent children with their insidious poison….*14
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