progressive radical forces around the world and in the united states the apex of the movement of the one thousand nine hundred seas that also singled the beginning of the chaos that would soon and gulf the left we at the radical imagination see it more as reverend william barber of the new poor people's campaign has put it martin king isn't going to get up again the ole boy leaders aren't going to come to life again it's not about commemorating so much as passing the baton and getting on with the unfinished business of transforming the world we need to become long distance runners for a world of peace and justice fifty years ago on april twenty third one nine hundred sixty eight hundreds of students a commune averse in new york started a revolt on campus in which they occupied and barricaded themselves inside five buildings protesting columbia's tied to military research aiding the vietnam war and plans to build a jim crow ivy league version of the university gymnasium in a public park overlooking harlem against the will of the people of the community the protests occupations and subsequent new york city's police department tyco police force busts and arrests on april thirtieth of more than seven hundred people the largest mass arrests in new york city  y inspired student protests across the country and occurred less than three weeks after the assassination of dr martin luther king jr on april fourth columbia protests were seen as a high point of the campus movement against the vietnam war quoting the student radicals we demand an end to all affiliation and ties with the institute for defense analysis a department of defense venture that collaborated the university continues to have profound implications and consequences for political and cultural struggle in the country today many of the same issues juden radicals attempted to confront still exist in a variety of forms and permutations and in even more troublesome and seemingly intractable waves in literally three weeks on may fourteenth two thousand and eighteen  another fifty years and fiftieth year anniversary there will be simultaneous nonviolent civil disobedience actions in thirty to forty state capitals and washington d c as a new poor people's campaign seeks to carry on the struggle martin luther king initiated fifty years ago this would be the first time in american history that a movement has attempted to accomplish such simultaneous direct actions raise political consciousness and dramatize the plight of america's poor of all races and it will continue for six weeks of direct action coming in a mass gathering in washington on june twenty third and continue from then on for as long as it takes as king put it and as the baton is passed to revel in barbour after selma and the voting rights bill we moved into a new era which must be an era of revolution in short we've moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society in that sense one nine hundred sixty eight and the columbia uprising got it right as we continue in a variety of ways to move ahead from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights where there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power an end to poverty racism militarism excessive materialism and ecological devastation today on the show we're proud to have two leading long distance runners on the radical imagination who've been passing bhutan their entire lives and continued to do so with even greater commitment and fervor than they had fifty years ago we're joined by ray brown on the show he's former leader of the student afro american society columbia one of the leaders of the black students who occupy come university's hamilton hall he's now a prominent criminal defense lawyer who also practices international human rights law and we're also joined by todd gitlin who was a former president of s d s students for democratic society from one nine hundred sixty three to one hundred sixty four the group that helped organize the protest tide is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the ph d program and communication at columbia he's written widely on politics intellectual life in the arts has been an internal critic of the american left t his classic work the sixty's years of hope days of rage and most recently occupy nation the roots the spirit and the promise of occupy wall street welcome both good to be here to the radical imagination it's great to have you on and we need so much to talk about this incredible event fifty years ago the combi uprising and  the leader of the african american student who took over one of the building gives us a little bit of background here what was going on campus let me clarify by saying i was a leader and that we very much moved by consensus absolutely that aside and talk about that day of course is to say is to for the moment forget the long history that leads up to it in terms of our relationships with the harlem community and our role as part of a much larger movement but for the moment the twenty third the night before that actually been some discussions and to my recollection many people said students are tired demoralized they just want to graduate and go home there was going to be a rally at the sundial just to talk about this idea he has to for defense analysis and the university's determination despite many protests to build a gym in morningside park morningside park there was a brolly at the sundial a number of people spoke cicero wilson who was the the new leader of s a s spoke number of other people spoke as a as other groups and to show the role of provocat as somebody said let's go to low library which was the main administrative building right so the crowd moved towards the library which the security personnel immediately locked down so there wasn't much to go to happen another voice and some people claim you know these voices were some people claim they were women's voices said let's go to the gym site and so everybody went to the gym site where there was a scuffle with some policeman there was a big hole in the ground and some bulldozers and a fence the fence was dismantled morningside drive and at the right in the park site w there and there was a scuffle as i recall it an old police sergeant sort of broke it up and i don't think anybody was arrested and somebody else said let's go to hamilton hall i don't know who that force was back to hamilton hall ever but he goes and that most students have to go to several of dean's offices where there was the main administrative hub for the college in the lobby were just hundreds of students milling around talking very quickly the african american students who had as a group and working together for years went up stairs and started holding our own meeting and we were better discipline than the other groups we were homogenised but we were cohesive and we decided we wanted to keep that building and we decided we would best keep it ourselves and had our own meeting got it and then we were delegated several of us to go talk to right into gold i believe really using names that will be known to some of your viewers who study i think one was there and we had contemplated what results from democracy right what will happen if they say no but we s they would say no and we went down and they were a little taken aback we said we're going to hold this building remember still saying take some other buildings and so they left because now years later it is turned out there is much residual bitterness and anger over that moment but it was a critical moment because we knew what was refacing we knew eventually there were likely to be arrests we had all agreed on what the demands were especially these two critical demands about the gym and the idea and we were determined to control our own destiny which we then did for eight days we were the pivotal force the one of the things that's been lost in the welter of history and reconstruction is that without black students it wouldn't have lasted eight days because we had tremendous support from the community a community that had just risen three weeks earlier in response to dr king's death we had visible community support from people we'd work with hard you active west harlem community organization many others and we had visible support from blacks in the power structure here and around the country who came and visited us and supported us recently but we've been continually sounding the horn for fifty years saying why does this get pictured as a wild leftwing revolt when in fact at the core of it was some very disparate people who knew it wasn't the revolution  the new york times did that's that's a good fitting mystery and maybe a piece of irony but in any of it we think our role was pivotal we know it's been ignored we're not unaccustomed to history not being written in a way that reflects the role of black folks but that's three sixty four so you had something to do with what the intellectual underpinnings or strategizing forming the organization that eventually  t worrying worrying i was working for an underground newspaper as we call them then the san francisco express times ok i was involved in various movement enterprises anti war activities of different lines i was writing and when i say i was worrying i was also monitoring the trajectory of white new on happily was i felt the imperative that was in the air i felt that revolutionary zeal or aspiration the word delusion that many felt i felt it as an emotional force but at the same time i feared weft was delusional i've i wouldn't put it that starkly maybe because i was afraid to put it that's because i was going against a wind tide but i was struck by one thing you said about how you guys when you were on the way into camel patrol and during that night you were talking and strategizing so you guys were operating in i think the right spirit that is to say so what does it mean to strategize so i think this is what generals do i've never been in war but i think this is generals nonviolent or violent do you size up the situation because so who are we what are we mobilized who are they who is the enemy who might be neutralized who can we count on who can we not count on if we do x what will they what will they do and then when they do why what we do so that's all goes with strategizing and i think you know the genius of the civil rights movement for so many years was that it conducted so many acts of hard headed appraisal it was it was of course a deeply moral and a move an animated by music and religious belief and you know passion but it was also strategic you know if you look where you really were who were very self conscious that we were children of that movement we were literally children of that movement so the extent of that movement was fueled initially by world war two veterans coming back harry truman disagree in the armed forces because he sees that black g i z being lynched the tales of my father and his cohorts who came back were more of fighting white g i s including pitched battles in europe than it was of fighting the enemy the germans so we were schooled i had been on picket lines with my father other members of the group had walked in picket lines bill sales was in philly with it was an act of movement against tasty cake at the philadelphia police so we had at least some people who were self conscious being children  engaged with the west harlem community organization that other organizations so we were very conscious of that and to some things that we've been trained for this we had started counterinsurgency movements we had met with police from the new york police department some who came to arrest us at earlier points to say how the police function demonstrations what do you do to make sure you don't get your head split open what do you do to minimize getting arrested if you don't plan to get arrested what do you do to be a nonviolent participant while at the same time we're debating about the ethics the ethics and the practicality of nonviolence so we were talking about these things for years when the moment came this was our discourse and the first essentially in our minds was this is not the revolution it's the dims and as you said before you were also mindful of who are the unfair but not to get into a detailed discussion of whiteness they were s d s or they were leninists they were kids who had no ideological perspective at all but just had been demoralized by columbia's response to students there were a wide range of people and we could see was that there wasn't any strategizing at all going on you know if you want to teach and there were people who wanted to smoke weed for there were people would make love there were people who were talking politically but it wasn't something that we thought was viable going forward so the thing is that we now know that in fact it was right to doubt that this was a revolutionary moment i have come around to thinking after reflection on this for many years that nine hundred sixty eight is not so much a beginning as an end it's the end of a reform moment which it is for various permutations lasted from the beginning of the new deal through most of the sixty's and was then ruined by lyndon johnson's war and eventually the new issue the the gathering of the counter revolution the counterrevolution which were still in was actually more better organized more clearheaded better equipped elements into the republican party you have the destruction i mean it's not an accident that reagan's first act is to destroy a labor union i mean it meant it maximises and it begins a period of incredible inequality in american life in which wealth is increasingly concentrated in small and smaller hands and civil society elements to to challenge it or neutralize it destroy that's what organized labor this is what seems to be so important when we think back on these events i don't think back of them back on them strictly in a celebratory spirit i also think that back on them as warnings about what happens when you get the situation wrong it was not a revolutionary situation by the way even in france which looked on television like a revolutionary situation it was not the of the uprising in france which is it took place exactly fifty years ago this week was followed by an election that was won by the right and the reason it was won by all right was that even you know even the workers who went out on strike were not striking to harmonize with the anarchist students they were striking in behalf of ordinary union demands which were drugged but they were not in a revolutionary mood most of the country most of france was planets and just wanted to restore order but coming back to the us i think that the delusion that this was a revolutionary moment impaired the ability of the growing movements to get serious about what they needed to have in place in order to function so it's one of the terrible i think i but true consequences of that whole wave of confrontational of confrontations in one thousand nine hundred fifty eight and thereafter the outcome was the election of richard nixon the pursuit of the war for more than seven more years more people were killed in vietnam more americans and vietnamese killed in vietnam while nixon was president than under kennedy and johnson before them so i think that the reason the reason i think is important properly appraise what happened in the jesus the eight is in order to save our soul from illusion illusion is the enemy of progress but i think there's a distinction between what happened on the left and an area in which i'm not an expert but just an observer and what happened within what we called the civil rights movement the war created a tremendous crisis lyndon johnson who had in fact been a supporter of the civil war of the voting rights act who had been part reluctant architect of the atlanta city movement that actually the mississippi freedom movement of of changing the democratic party and finally driving the south into the arms of the republican party those were pivotal moments and remember king in sixty seven in a way created a kind of mini crisis within what we called leadership of the civil rights movement by coming to riverside and then outs in the war and beginning to talk about human rights about militar about poverty and about class issues and so it was inevitable that a movement that had started out remember at the end of world war two and i would you know maybe quarrel with you a few years about whether the new deal marks the end of an old era or a new one because within twenty years it's been transformed as a movement for civil rights in a literal sense the right to vote the right to have fair employment practices so that the nature of education which had been a driving force coming out of that era and  brown so you have a movement that has a somewhat different arc then the movement of the left it's why i mean there was a convergence and sixty eight of many forces but in many ways it was i mean i would i would like to claim that we were brilliant and geniuses that we recognize it was a demonstration of the kids on the left didn't but i think it was that we were the product of a different set of forces in one thousand nine hundred sixty four which is when my class came to columbia we were literally the children of brown versus board of education while the supreme court didn't order yes to be brought the the fact of the matter is the supreme court's decision in brown versus board of education did little to desegregate schools what it was was the death knell to white supremacy as an official government doctrine and remember that was done largely because of the cold war the united states filed an amicus brief in brown versus board of education which is we can't argue to the colored peoples of the world they should be with us and not the communists if we openly segregate and discriminate against our brown citizens at home so that was sort of some cold calculations about economics and about influence in the world the united states was making the queer calculation was how many black students were at columbia when you started sixty five mean they were maybe five or six or seven five my class had twenty which was a sea change and by the time of the arrest we had eighty students who got arrested so that's a sea change in terms of the dynamics of the school the school of course was totally unprepared they thought we'd be little white kids with brown faces little did they know that we would be nagging them and harassing them about every issue from being stopped every time we want off campus and came back by the security guards who themselves were often people of color but didn't really accept that we really belonged to a curriculum that except for people like james shit and who gave sparkling lectures about black reconstruction didn't recognize black history seriously as a voice within that community and we by and large moved outward there was for example a black fraternity formed on campus i wasn't a part of it i sort of frowned on fraternity life but it turned out the fire for turning that former colonial the heavily political group these guys were guys who were concerned about the war concerned about the gym and were one of the bulwarks of what happened in hamilton hole so our social lives looked outside the university to other parts of the community or political life was outwardly looking and to the extent that we looked in we saw what there was a strike of cafeteria workers that took place for five years at the university mainly corps and other groups that helped to support the workers largely black work at the university wouldn't even resolve it so you had a university  paragon of western virtue but is in fact at best oblivious to its obligation to be open to the very community it says it wants to embrace by the symbolic act of it and yet professionally you were disciplined enough realizing you need to play coverage was so distorted it had relationship with the d a s office i mean this is a powerful institution and as you peel back the layers you see that what looks to be i hate to use a reagan metaphor but it goes back for him a shining city on the hill intellectually it is in fact that goes back to your puritan fathers but it turns out a mistake that it turns out to be a place that while he does have this capacity to generate great intellectual discourse a power center that excerpts its power against the against the rich do you and that's something that we couldn't stomach especially since those were people that you know you said a few minutes ago something i think very important also that distinguishes you from the s t s mood at the time but i don't think you wanted to destroy columbia university  want to reform it half of our kids were first generation to go to college they were in what was well on its way to becoming the crazy left that they were in different you know and so they were you know famous moments of dialogue where professors said well you know do you really think that the university is worth less i mean you don't think it's an ambiguous thing you think it's a diabolical thing and you know the leadership of s d s said yes they're part of the system well that they were on their way into the destructive and self destructive literal explosions that ended the student movement or something you said earlier you know that into things you lose seeing things as they really are because we were in a situation where for example we reached out to how was the good of our people were injured we reached out to the n a c we reached out to the i mean these are not radical exist in the human rights commission in new york we said we want you here when there's going to be an arrest we told the police we had no weapons and we told them we  own divisions within and we could what and we engaged in what was i was going to sions within just well briefly first of all we had a left right spectrum there were those of us who were more progressive in our politics i knew rudd and s d s people i would never of joined but i knew them went to the meeting sometimes there were people who were more conservative sister wilson the president the incoming president and the head of the line of the queues was politically conservative we had folks who were deeply religious we had kids who many kids who were first generation who had never been to school before we had phone was ringing in hamilton hall with parents get your brown butt out of the place in this situation to survive you had athletes who traditionally have been very conservative and most universities but would been so mistreated by the athletic department it actually radicalized them they would all come in to be stacked at the same position so only one of them could be on the field at a given time so they were all kinds of people with different perspectives we had people who were serious christians those who were not those who are more militant in terms of their political ideology and we had some people who were so we had a whole spectrum of people a whole spectrum of classes a whole spectrum and when you have a group of people who deal with each other within you people don't like each other you have all kinds of issues and those issues were surpassed because of what held us together which is a common view of ourselves of being part of a larger movement but also understanding this was a demonstration and one in which we were taking some big chances and facing a superior force and had to marshal everything we could so when stokely carmichael wraparound came they came and they said you guys realize this could be the bluff of the century we don't know what the community is going to do community will do we know people are concerned about it but don't do anything stupid but we'll protect you so we deliberately built a cocoon around saying well we get arrested if it happens comes to that we don't want our people to be injured we're going to act in a certain way and here's an element of w respectability politics we showered every day the building was clean and when we left it when we found it would some people might find to be some kind of gesture in the direction of property rights was exact and people said it but we said we discipline and that was something else that distinguished us from the mass of white students which was they didn't seem focused on being disciplined from top to bottom i mean it's something of a clich because it was a revolt against discipline and a revolt against discipline is good for certain now because the other side of this is there was an alliance we communicate with them to build yeah place with white students crawling up and the white students had not been particularly sensitive or issues over the years so they were all kinds of tensions but having made a commitment we had no problem living to our commitment and we didn't abandon anybody and they were made they understood by the second day that commission will study the idea he said look our demands are simple and straightforward and we told the other buildings what was happening so we understood the distinctions and the similarities we understood the nature of an alliance because we understood the black look orangeburg it happened not long ago in which  and what you wanted to win was concrete you don't want you want the gym stopped and it was wanted by you sure and we did win yeah i know the new left was now caught the leadership of the new left by this time was caught in what i'm calling a delusionary or loosen a tory symbolic theater venture and you know politics is for winning i know that sounds you know hard assed but i think it's true and this is why it still makes sense to talk about nine hundred sixty eight i mean i often think this is crazy we're in two thousand eighteen when we're talking intensely when events of fifty years ago was anybody generated in the one nine hundred sixty s are still there are central questions so the question of what you do strategically in order to fight against racism when you do in order to prevent the further erosion of democracy is that what you do to resist crazy wars these are all salient so we're looking to the sixty's not simply not primarily out of a sense of what it was that wonderful to be young but out of a sense that we need to win like i think in this sense there's a further look back and this is how i will say that my grandfather came to jersey city in the turn of the last century  his wife who was my grandmother was educated by the stands every day and i school education and didn't want him to be just in the commissary from the logging system that he worked in that he rode logs down the clencher river and so they were forming a lynch bob dylan him and two other men whose wives had gone and said we want to paid in cash not commissary purposes so they were told him to go to jacksonville and get off at the first stop after baltimore so he stowed away on a freighter and wound up in jersey my grandfather never went south of elizabeth for the rest of his life but if you talk about the elaine rights in and then charged with crimes and sentenced to death from courts wait a minute this is a mass lynching who participated in this so to the extent that there is a deep historical undercurrent of our movement and the reason i mention this is the first thing we did after the demonstration was to hold a book launch in earl hall of a book by harold cruse called the crisis of the negro intellectual which had as its themes two things one is the tension within the civil rights movement in the left highly critical of the left and also the inner tensions between the west indian influence and the other influences in the in the civil rights movement as well as the relationship of garvey to boys and others and how that was affecting events and thoughts in one nine hundred sixty and from his point of view distorting that phase of the civil rights movement so our sense way of knowing whether it was being explored on the white left all i can say is that there was a historical resonance that goes back really to the beginning of i say interest i think if you are of the people who have to sit in the back of the bus if you are the people who are being actually some of the bitterness is still there and each of these events that i've been to this might be my last of it i don't know if you can call this an event a gathering fatigue with you fine gentlemen is this white students continually saying why did you ask us to leave which is interesting and i was correctly criticized for saying it's hurt feelings there's some thing else there about the active are saying we're ready for this that we don't think you are follow or lead but that is come across as something else  know a number of students especially more white women students from that period have said have a sense of resentment at the dynamic that set in place which had some negative components that i don't fully understand it because we're at peace with it as a beginning of the white left in the sixty's the sixty's reincarnation of the white with black people or accorded respect as not only suffering persons but rational thing to do but i also wanted to add this dimension since many of the white students right disproportion were jewish and were also from families of holocaust survivors what sort of mentality  and a red diaper baby it's in there it's his or how does that play you know the new effort from the very beginning whether the students were jewish or not we were still close enough to world war two right to know what barbarism what genocid no context you know and and so you know it was very early in the sixty's you start hearing rhetoric we're not going to be the good germans we're going to be the germans who were standing by and i still remember a moment i was doing community organizing in chicago in the mid sixty's an article appeared in one of the chicago papers it was they'd lined on a train through germany and the reporter writes i'm sick i'm on this train i sit next to a guy he says to me or unum aruch and i say yes he's the guy says i want to tell you a story because you will understand and then the guy tells a story about some war trauma trost city some anti stremme or that went through you so i think that was that was alive it was especially alive for jews but not only i don't know that the movement at columbia was any more jewish than the than the student body by the way i don't i don't know that it was or was it certainly columbia was quite jewish in general so but i again wonder what sort of interaction was going on there as another dimension of this he's typing it up and i'm doing the right signal that we say and i'm not talking to him and he says i can understand you college kids being angry what's wrong with these white kids we have this wonderful opportunity so even on the police but the truth is that the cop who led  were all host of other you know they are even our take on the war was different so thank you again todd and ray for an incredible show unfortunately we've run out of time this is jim verraros we look forward to seeing you again next week on the radical magination we're going to go out with the grateful dead at columbia university followed by a short clip of reverend william barber the poor people's campaign and those of you who are interested in what we've been talking about this past hour there's a new decent standard of living no matter where they were in this country the work of dr king clearly is fanless as a veteran that a sworn oath to this country to serve this country to see so many people more desperate situations to see racism they told us continue it that's why we got to have a poor people people will denounce what happened and solve the of the deaf person running through the crowd and say i am not like him but just because you are not like that person does not mean that you are not embracing the values of white nationalism and why supremacy saying you're not going touch this statue and we're going to protect it they were saying we can now once again celebrate that we have a separate that and a president has shown me the symbol with his inability to be clear what precipitate the rye and the boat mess of white nationalism and white supremacy in this particular moment was not merely a chunk talking and it was the policy direction the mean spiritedness and that that lined up with the policy directives of white nationalism that's what's really going on is not in just a statute is the statutes it's the law which means that people of conscious must yes yes challenge the statute but we cannot stop that we have to challenge the way in which the policy wise comes in white national is flowing through our state capitols the many policies in our united states congress but it doesn't sound like white but the impact is that the laws have a disparate racial impact them black on black people grab it and guess what hurt also more for lines and working class white so our protests must