A hastily constructed blockade of overturned picnic tables and a line of demonstrators who linked arms while singing the chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved” was all that stood between the NYPD and an occupied Hamilton Hall on Columbia University’s campus last Tuesday, April 30.
Then came the stark sonic contrast of police slicing through a bike lock clamped on the century-old building’s front door by student protesters, and of officers dragging the picnic tables by their metal legs against the pavement, marring what protesters said was otherwise peaceful action in their efforts to force the university to divest from Israel.
Ultimately, the NYPD arrested 112 people for charges ranging from burglary and trespassing to resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. That same night, a similar sweep led to the arrests of another 170 protesters roughly 20 blocks north at City College of New York (CCNY).
Exactly 56 years ago to the day, police were called to the same Hamilton Hall. An autonomous Black student demonstration occupied the building for a week to demonstrate against the university’s encroachment on Harlem, namely its planned construction of a private gym on the public land of Morningside Park, which offered limited access and a separate entrance for a public composed largely of non-white New Yorkers.
Linking ‘68 to Gaza solidarity
The striking parallels between ‘68 and the current Columbia protests are intentional, said Sherif, a Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) student organizer who will be identified by his first name due to privacy reasons.
“We were inspired as we studied 1968,” he told the Amsterdam News over the phone. “What happened then meant the world to us, that they confronted the university at a time when the university was very directly tied to very serious depression and a very serious war. It was a moment of study [and] a moment of reflection, and we took ‘68 as a guide [and] as a compass.”
“We chose Hamilton Hall to say we build on the work of our elders, we center them and we are grateful for them for what they have already done, and confronting the university in a different time,” Sherif added.
Hamilton Hall became Hind Hall under the new student occupation, swapping namesakes from Founding Father Alexander Hamilton to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces this past January.
Organizers like Sherif said the building’s rechristening underscores the significant casualties of the war abroad, which has seen deaths of Palestinian children climb to 14,500 over the past seven months, per United Nations figures, while also calling out a mainstream media they say is an apathetic, if not antagonistic.
But the initial protest started last semester following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, growing this year into an encampment on the university’s South Lawn.
Columbia Prof. Frank Guridy, who teaches a class on the ‘68 protests, told the Amsterdam News the two movements are linked by their polarization, if nothing else.
“Protesters were standing up against the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War [and] what they saw against what they saw as a racist effort to build a gym, a private gym [on] public West Harlem parkland—Morningside Park. There were a host of other issues as well. It galvanized Black and white students together and separately by occupying buildings [and] engaging in civil disobedience.
“The opinion around the Vietnam War was super divided and, in fact, at that time, the anti-war movement was just getting famous in this country against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Even though the Vietnam story and the Gaza story are different and their context is different, the polarization [is] analogous.”
The mayor, governor, and U.S. president have all criticized the movement, accusing protesters of disrupting classes and making Jewish students feel unsafe, while supporters have hallowed the protesters as heroes, with notable progressive-to-leftist figures like Dr. Cornel West, actress Susan Sarandon, and Amazon union organizer Christian Smalls having visited the encampment. This week, Grammy-winner Macklemore released a track titled “Hind’s Hall” and promised to donate the proceeds to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees once the song reached streaming platforms.
Following a congressional hearing, Columbia president Minouche Shafik invited police to remove protesters for the first time on April 18 in a letter penned to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters Michael Gerber. She claimed students were suspended for participating in the encampment and therefore “not authorized to be on University property and are trespassing.”
The NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), a militarized protest unit, arrived and removed more than 100 protesters from the lawn encampment. But police officials deemed the demonstration nonviolent, even as they arrested and charged them.
Soon after, students erected what would be known as the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on a nearby lawn in defiance. Other encampments began popping up on campuses nationwide as students pushed back on their own schools’ investments.
But the protesters continued to call for the university to divulge its financial holdings and subsequently divest from any links to Israel. When their demands weren’t met at the bargaining table, demonstrators took Hamilton Hall.
‘68 remembered
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Mark Naison points to the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the flashpoints unifying Black student organizers and the biggest anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), during ‘68. The planned construction of the private gym prompted both groups to spring to action.
Naison, now a Fordham University professor of history and African and African American studies, was aligned with SDS at the time, but was dating a member of the Students’ Afro-American Society. And the two groups were at odds on taking Hamilton Hall after they entered it.
Black student organizers wanted to barricade the building, Naison recalls, but white students did not. It was frustrating, and by the time he got back from lunch, the Black student organizers had asked their white counterparts to leave.
“They barricaded the building, kept the dean in his office, and the white students then proceeded to take four buildings,” he said. “It [became] a seven-day occupation of five buildings at Columbia—it was not planned. And the level of rage among everybody because of the war, the construction of the gym, and the assassination of Dr. King produced this just electric atmosphere and people taking risks they would have never dreamed of taking.”
Like the encampments, college students all over the country began their own building occupations.
According to Amsterdam News archives, Hamilton Hall protesters were described as not only peaceful, but decorous. An op-ed by then-NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, in the issue dated May 11, 1968, recounted the demonstrators tidying up the building and collecting trash for disposal each day, an alien concept in today’s New York City.
“No one of us, thirty or forty years older than these students, can judge them fairly because our times are so far apart,” he wrote. “Trespass remains trespass under our laws and theirs, but who can say that the motives for the action today are not morally more acceptable than they were in 1928?”
Outside agitators or a community united?
Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD believe “outside agitators” are co-opting the protests. They claim 29% of Columbia protesters and 60% of CCNY protesters were not affiliated with the universities at which they were arrested.
“As the anti-Israel protests began to escalate, it became abundantly clear that individuals unaffiliated with these schools had entered these different campuses and, in some cases, were even training students in unlawful protest tactics, many which we witnessed escalating into violent conduct,” Adams said. “What is now even clearer is the extent to which outsiders were actually present.”
That would run counter to the historical record. Amsterdam News reporting on the 1968 protests notes non-student participation; in a piece headlined “Harlem Backs Columbia Sit-Ins,” onlookers noted how local residents contributed to the occupation of Hamilton Hall from outside university gates.
Harlem mothers dropped off “huge pots” of food for the protesters, maintaining the Black students needed “balanced diets of hot foods,” even as April rain poured outside. Local high schoolers “invaded the college campus” to collect “meat money” for those inside Hamilton Hall. And white uptown residents joined in support, marching with the picket lines outside campus on 116th and Amsterdam. As the article recounts, there was “no scarcity of chops and steaks” inside Hamilton Hall — all, as one student demonstrator told the paper, “‘Thanks to Harlem.’”
When Columbia football players and wrestlers attempted to blockade food and supplies from entering Hamilton Hall and the administrative Low Library, where SDS had taken over, hundreds of Harlem high school students swarmed the campus to stave them off. In fact, both Naison and Guridy say Harlem’s support of the protesters allowed them to successfully negotiate against the gym’s construction due to concerns of mass urban uprisings in predominantly Black communities following Dr. King’s assassination.
As the AmNews reported recently, the current Columbia protesters demand divestiture from Israel in tandem with calling on the university to end displacement in Harlem. Public historian Tommy Song, who recounted the university’s history of protester crackdowns in The Nation last week, said while Harlemite concerns seem disparate from Vietnam or Palestine, he believes they are a connected struggle.
“When folks see protests happening in Harlem [and] protests happening on Columbia’s campus, [they] tend to think those two are distinct,” he said. “And yeah, they are absolutely distinct in a lot of ways…but I think what folks also tend to forget is that the category of the student and the category of the resident is arbitrary, and they’re both socially constructed as well…[if] we view the boundary of the university as arbitrary, then we understand that anybody who protests the violence of the state will go punished.”
Alex Vitale, professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, said distinctions between student protesters and “outside agitators” are “incredibly misguided,” especially for local public universities like CCNY.
“Some of the best things about CUNY are its deep ties to communities,” Vitale said. “I have students involved in research projects [and] internships on bringing community leaders to campus. Now we’re being told any involvement of the community is a danger, is to be excoriated [and] is to be prevented…this will alienate the community from the university in ways that will hurt our students.”
CUNY marches against tuition hikes
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Now a prominent voice in the police abolition movement, Vitale was once a graduate student organizer during the CUNY student protests in the 1990s. He recalls the protests arriving off the heels of building occupations by Hunter College students of color in response to budget cuts and tuition hikes.
Soon, small-scale demonstrations popped up and representatives from many CUNY campuses began meeting. They ended up converging into one centralized walkout march on City Hall. Vitale found himself on the coordinating committee.
“A decision was also made not to apply for permits or cooperate with the police department in structuring the event,” Vitale said. “And another decision was made not to invite elected officials to speak. And the feeling on both fronts was that this was how movements get watered down, get taken over by party politics, get turned into pep rallies for elected officials that don’t really deliver.
“We invited union people, of course, all kinds of students to speak instead…and the goal was to try to be disruptive—to occupy streets as much as possible. So the NYPD took a very strong stance towards the whole thing and said, ‘We’re gonna just barricade you into the park.’”
In the end, some tuition increases and budget cuts were rolled back, according to Vitale.
The Amsterdam News’ reporting from the time details the protests leading up to Vitale’s action, pointing to a multiracial coalition of “concerned students” fighting to stop then-Gov. Mario Cuomo’s budget cuts, which would raise tuition by $500 and eliminate tutoring and counseling services.
In 1991, CCNY students took over a building despite suspension threats. Hunter College students, who were already occupying a university building on their own campus, held a hunger strike in solidarity. The AmNews noted the scenes were reminiscent of 1960s protests when the building takeovers reached their second week. A New York Tech student advisor told the paper that the protest was nonviolent when police were sent in, despite direct demands by the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus to the CUNY Chancellor not to send in NYPD to clear the buildings.
The call heard around the world
Police intervention has been a constant in campus demonstrations throughout the city’s history, though there has been some variation in how they have come to be involved; campus administrators historically have not defaulted to requesting police action.
“The Columbia occupation in ‘68 lasted for a week when police were called,” Guridy said. “There [were] certainly people who were on for police intervention. But the university didn’t call the police until there was an impasse [in] recent negotiations between student activists and the administration. We have plenty of well-known stories of police violence against protesters in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, [with] Kent State being the most prominent example.
“But I do think there is more of a knee jerk reaction [now] to employ police for all sorts of purposes, including the repression of peaceful protests, people exercising their democratic rights.”
A Columbia College Student Council op-ed in The Guardian last Saturday accused Shafik of flouting university bylaws established in the wake of the ‘68 protests by calling police on campus. Guridy confirmed the notion.
“The University Senate was created in 1969 as a governing structure to represent all constituencies in the Colombia community because of the lack of consultation and transparency and inclusion in the university government before ‘68,” he said. “What’s happened under this administration that they have circumvented all the rules—trampled over them completely—that we have in the Senate and other university bylaws…we have these long standing norms and laws that are directly a response to what transpired [in] ‘68 when the police came on campus and arrested students. And so the current administration has absolutely disregarded those rules.”
In a May 1 letter to the public which a Columbia spokesperson pointed to in response, Shafik thanked the NYPD “for their incredible professionalism and support” for dismantling the encampment and occupation. She acknowledged the history of ‘68, but called the protests “acts of destruction, not political speech.”
“Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa,” Shafik wrote. “Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest.”
The details of what exactly happened in Hamilton Hall continue to unfold as of this story’s press time, but it is already known that an officer discharged their gun during the raid. The Legal Aid Society (LAS) recently estimated more than 40 campus protesters charged with low-level offenses should have been issued desk appearance tickets to show up to court on their own, rather than be arrested and detained. The public defender service subsequently asked for an investigation.
And then there’s the specific deployment of the SRG to a peaceful protest, which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lambasted over X (Twitter). “Not only did Columbia make the horrific decision to mobilize NYPD on their own students, but the units called in have some of the most violent reputations on the force,” the congresswoman wrote on April 24.
Recent court ordered reforms stemming from police misconduct settlements from Black Lives Matter protests limited the SRG’s use.
But NYCLU staff attorney JP Perry, who represented the plaintiffs alongside Attorney General Letitia James and Legal Aid, told the AmNews that such protections are more limited on college campuses, particularly for private universities like Columbia but even for public ones like CCNY.
However, general guidelines established either by the settlement reforms or the NYPD’s own guidelines still must be followed.
“A lot of provisions of the settlement do apply and the principle should apply to a situation like this,” Perry said. “But could we say that Columbia shouldn’t have called the NYPD? That’s probably not something that the settlement could prohibit.”
Learning from history
Naison believed the Morningside Park gym’s construction was a “foregone conclusion” when he and 12 other activists from Harlem and Columbia were arrested at the build site. But a year later, the university scrapped plans for what critics called “Gym Crow.”
Guridy can’t predict how things will shake out for the pro-Palestinian cause. He imagines protester amnesty could be a more immediate achievement. But he can’t fault them for thinking big.
“What social movement history tells us is that movements almost always call for things that seemed unimaginable,” he said. “And very often, they achieve the unimaginable. Whether that’s the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the divestments of South Africa—all those things were unimaginable, which is not to say that this movement is going to achieve all of its goals.
“I have no idea if they’re gonna achieve their goals…but I do know social movement history shows us that it’s not unusual for movements that call for the unimaginable for them to be able to achieve them.”
After Hamilton Hall’s sweep, Columbia’s campus remains closed and its centerpiece graduation was recently canceled. A CUAD member was allegedly hit by a counterprotester’s car and subsequently arrested along with the perpetrator this past Tuesday. And the movement seems no closer to a free Palestine as Israeli tanks moved into Rafah on the southern Gaza Strip this week.
But Sherif tells the Amsterdam News that they will not be deterred. He said many of the protesters no longer care for their degrees and are centered on the cause of the Palestinian people.
“For us, this is about divestment, it’s about the university at the very least calling for a ceasefire, and it’s about amnesty for all students and faculty who have been disciplined for speaking up for Palestine,” he said. “For us, it’s also about ending the encroachment of Columbia into Harlem. it’s making sure that our demands are centered. And it’s also making sure the NYPD gets off campus…we say divestment will happen.
“It’s just a matter of how long it’ll take for these administrators to recognize that we will not stop until we succeed.”
Editor’s note: The author attended Columbia University with Song, who is quoted in this story. Amsterdam News Executive Editor Damaso Reyes participated in CUNY protests as a high school reporter organized by Vitale, who is also quoted in this story.
Correction: Alex Vitale’s former title of associate professor has been updated to his current role as professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.