East Hill Notes with Gary Stewart: Episode 10
In a series of compelling testimonials, Ithaca city residents recall local life before April 19, 1969—when African American students took over Cornell's student union, Willard Straight Hall—the events that led up to the takeover, and the aftermath.
Guests: Kent Hubbell, Lucy Brown, Jackie Melton Scott, George Taber and Jane
>via: http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=440__________________________
The first in a series of articles about the four-decade legacy of the 36-hour student takeover of Willard Straight Hall that began April 18, 1969.
Associated Press Images/Steve Starr
The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Cornell students emerging from Willard Straight Hall after the takeover.
Early in the morning of Parents' Weekend, 40 years ago this Saturday, 11 fire alarms rang out across the Cornell campus. At 3 a.m., a burning cross was discovered outside Wari House, a cooperative for black women students. The following morning, members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest Cornell's perceived racism, its judicial system and its slow progress in establishing a black studies program.
The events that were to prompt decades of social, cultural and political change on campus were in play.
At 9:40 a.m., in an attempt to take the building back, white Delta Upsilon fraternity brothers entered the Straight and fought with AAS students in the Ivy Room before being ejected. Fearing further attacks, the black students brought guns into the Straight to defend themselves.
On the evening of April 19, in freezing rain, rookie Cornell police officer George Taber patrolled the perimeter of the occupied Willard Straight Hall unarmed. Members of Students for a Democratic Society -- students far to the left of many of the black students inside -- formed a ring around the Straight to lend support.
Today, Taber recalls the period as "a whirlwind. One thing after another. I was a raw rookie. I had no idea what was going on."
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
On April 20, 1969, student leader Eric Evans reads a statement following the takeover.
Within hours, police deputies from Rochester, Syracuse and across New York state massed in downtown Ithaca. "Had they gotten the command to do so, they would have gone and taken the Straight back and arrested people, or who knows what would have happened. It could have made Kent State and Jackson State look like the teddy bear's picnic. It would have been just absolutely terrible," Taber reflects.
On Sunday afternoon, following negotiations with Cornell officials, the AAS students emerged from the Straight carrying rifles and wearing bandoleers. Their image, captured by Associated Press photographer Steve Starr, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, appeared in newspapers across the country and on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the headline, "Universities Under the Gun."
Although physical disaster was averted, deep psychological scars burned into the minds of many on campus. Four decades later, feelings in some quarters are still raw. The university as a bastion of reasoned argument, thoughtful debate and academic freedom seemed to be under siege. Relationships among faculty members were destroyed. Students were torn. An atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety gripped the campus and the nation. The AAS students were not punished, outraging some faculty members, students and alumni.
Students march across the Arts Quad following the peaceful resolution to the Straight takeover, April 20, 1969.
Within Cornell, the takeover has come to be seen as an event that gave birth to enormous social, governance and ideological change. In fact, institutional change was already under way.
In 1963, his first year in office, Cornell President James Perkins had launched the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) to increase enrollment of African-American students at Cornell and provide them with support services -- the first program of its kind at a major American university.
Perkins, who had chaired the board of trustees of the United Negro College Fund, said Cornell wanted to "make a larger contribution to the education of qualified students who have been disadvantaged by their cultural, economic and educational environments." COSEP later expanded to include Latino and Hispanic American, Native American and Asian-American students.
Only days before the Straight takeover, on April 10, 1969, the Cornell administration had approved $240,000 to create an Afro-American Studies Center and a director, James Turner, had been identified months earlier. "The students wanted an autonomous program; they wanted the center to have control of its own destiny," said Eric Acree, librarian at the Africana Studies and Research Center.
But change did come even more quickly after the takeover. "You now have recognition that other people need to be studied -- women, gays and lesbians, Latinos, Asian Americans -- and all of that is an outgrowth of the black studies movement," said Acree.
According to Robert L. Harris, professor of Africana studies, entire scholarly fields had been ignored. "The seriousness of Africana studies as an academic endeavor had been questioned, simply because the breadth and depth of existing scholarship was not widely known," he said. "In the decades since, the field has been the source of vast quantities of indisputably serious, relevant, compelling work."
As the academic canon broadened, so did student living options with the establishment of Ujamaa Residential College in 1971, followed by Akwe:kon in 1991 and the Latino Living Center in 1994. The current home of the Africana Studies and Research Center opened in 2005 (the first center was destroyed by arson in 1970). Students and staff now serve on the Cornell Board of Trustees. The university's need-blind admissions policy and Student Assembly can also be traced to the takeover. And only this year, an Asian and Asian-American student center was approved.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
Cornell President James A. Perkins addresses a large crowd in Barton Hall as students confer, April 23, 1969.
Perkins resigned at the end of the semester after the takeover, and for years he was widely regarded as a decent but ineffectual president. But in 1995 Thomas W. Jones, a leader of the takeover, established the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony, to acknowledge the historic role that Perkins played in changing Cornell.
"President Perkins made the historic decision to increase very significantly the enrollment of African-American and other minority students at Cornell," said Jones at the time. "He did so in the conviction that Cornell could serve the nation by nurturing the underutilized reservoir of human talent among minorities, and in the faith that the great American universities should and could lead the way in helping America to surmount the racial agony which was playing out in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. He made a courageous and wise decision and deserves recognition for it."
The radical ideals Ezra Cornell advanced in 1865 to found his university survived -- though the tumultuous events of the late 1960s forced the university to adapt. But in the end, after a long period of radical change, it has ultimately thrived.
The sixties: a decade in turmoil"The whole decade," beginning with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, "was a prelude to the takeover," recalls Cornell Dean of Students Kent Hubbell, who was a graduate student in 1969.
There were multiple issues firing the national social cauldron in 1969, in addition to the anti-Vietnam War, civil rights, women's rights and Black Power movements: calls for Cornell to divest itself of investments in South Africa because of apartheid; starvation in Biafra; youth culture; drug culture; the sexual revolution; and, above all, the specter of the draft.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
The remains of the first Africana Center on Wait Avenue after it was burned by an arsonist in April 1970.
Almost exactly a year before the Straight takeover, on April 23, 1968 -- 19 days before the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- 150 Columbia University students were injured when New York City police violently put an end to black and radical students taking control of five campus buildings in protest of the Vietnam War and racism.
On May 17 of that year, Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit assistant director of Cornell United Religious Work from 1966 to 1970, along with eight others, entered the Catonsville, Md., Selective Service office and burned dozens of draft records with napalm to protest the Vietnam War. They became known as the Catonsville Nine. Berrigan appeared on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
Also in May, student protests paralyzed France and nearly brought the government down. Eleven days before the Straight takeover, 300 Harvard students, mostly members of Students for a Democratic Society, seized the administration building; 45 were injured and 185 arrested. Even as the Straight takeover occurred, National Guard helicopters sprayed skin-stinging powder on anti-war protesters in California.
In January 1969, six years after the publication of "The Feminine Mystique" and three years after the founding of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan came to Cornell to participate in a four-day Conference on Women -- one of the first of its kind to take place on a college campus. That summer would bring the Woodstock Festival, criminal charges against Lt. William Calley for the My Lai Massacre of 109 Vietnamese civilians and ongoing turmoil.
University Archivist Elaine Engst arrived at Cornell in fall 1968 as a graduate student. "It was such a fraught time in so many ways," she said. "Civil rights, the anti-war movement, youth culture. It was a very, very hard time. Studies were interrupted; for two years in a row classes didn't finish in the spring, they just stopped. The campus was basically in a continual uproar."
Posters distributed on campus in 1969 portray a divided era. At the same time as "spring fantasy" semiformals, polo matches and art exhibitions were promoted, there were offers of draft counseling ("Draft got you bugged?") and rallies against ROTC and Cornell's research on behalf of the war -- often in day-glo colors.
And then the Straight was taken over. Within weeks, student uprisings occurred on the campuses of Dartmouth College and Princeton, Tulane and Howard universities. President Perkins, said Engst, "lost control because, like many other university administrators, he really didn't understand the situation or the levels of feeling. Cornell was fortunate to have Provost Dale Corson assume the presidency, with his knowledge and credibility among students and faculty."
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The Day Cornell Died
As gun-wielding black students seized control of a campus building in April 1969, Cornell University descended into anarchy. An account thirty years later by Hoover fellow Thomas Sowell, who was teaching at Cornell at the time.
No one who was at Cornell University in the spring of 1969 is ever likely to forget the guns-on-campus crisis that shocked the academic community and the nation. Bands of militant black students forcibly evicted visiting parents from Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus and seized control of it to back up their demands. Later, after the university’s capitulation, the students emerged carrying rifles and shotguns, their leader wearing a bandoleer of shotgun ammunition. It was a picture that appeared on the covers of national magazines and was even reprinted overseas.
What happened behind the scenes was at least as shocking. Death threats were phoned to the homes of professors who had opposed their previous actions or demands. Shots were in fact fired into the engineering building.
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In a decade noted for its student riots, this was the most violent in the nation. In an academic world noted for its weak-kneed administrators, Cornell had the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of pious rhetoric in its president, James A. Perkins. As an assistant professor of economics at Cornell at the time, my characterization of Perkins in the media was that he was “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting cross-current of campus politics.” After thirty years, there is no need to take back any of that. However, a new book published on the anniversary of that tragic academic watershed reveals in even more painful detail how this hollow man set the stage for the betrayal of the university and his own downfall.
The book is Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, by Donald Alexander Downs, a student at Cornell at the time and now a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Its value is largely that of a detailed chronology of the series of events over a period of a year that led up to the guns-on-campus crisis. Someone once said that there is a fundamental difference between telling a story and emptying your notebooks. Downs has emptied his notebooks. This is not to say that Cornell ’69 is wholly without insights. But the insights are mostly in quotations from those people who saw at the time what was happening and sought in vain to deter the university administration from its feckless and farcical policies. Downs’s own comments are pedestrian at best.
The Cornell tragedy began with one of those good intentions with which the road to Hell is paved. When James Perkins became president of Cornell in 1963, it had an almost totally white faculty and student body. When I joined the faculty two years later, I did not see another black professor anywhere on this vast campus. Perkins, like other presidents of elite colleges and universities, sought to increase minority student enrollment—and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums who terrorized other black students, in addition to provoking a racial backlash among whites.
This combustible mixture led to escalating episodes of campus disruptions and violence by black militants, each episode being rewarded by the administration, while fending off faculty demands for punishment with glib pieties and evasions.
Black students who complained about threats and violence from the militants could not even get to see university officials, while the militants themselves had easy entry to Perkins, whom they increasingly insulted to his face. There was massive capitulation to militant demands for their own black studies center, free from the academic standards and controls found in other departments and programs—and all this was before the guns-on-campus crisis.
The armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall was about reprimands—mere reprimands—received by some members of the Afro-American Society for previous disruptions and violence on campus. It was a demand for exemption from the authority of a duly constituted faculty-student disciplinary body that had dared to slap them on the wrist. Apparently existing de facto double standards were not enough, though such double standards were so well established that, when a parent, evicted from William Straight Hall by the students taking it over, phoned campus security, the first question he was asked was whether the students who had evicted him were white or black. When he said they were black, “I was told that there was nothing that could be done for us.”
While Downs presents ample quotations from both supporters and critics of the Cornell administration, his own comments seem heavily constrained by political correctness. Arguments presented by militant black students are repeatedly taken at face value, even though cynical misrepresentations were at the heart of the key events he writes about. For example, supposedly the militants got guns to defend themselves after a cross was burned in front of one of the black dormitories and a brick was thrown through one of the windows of another. Now, decades later, it comes out that these were acts committed by the militants themselves to win campus sympathy—a foretaste of the Tawana Brawley hoax of later vintage.
Downs begins his account of the seizure of Willard Straight Hall by conceding that criminal actions took place and apologizing for telling the truth (“the truth must be spoken”). This is followed by apologetics for those who committed these acts (“remember that the students were young and angry”). However, no such hand-wringing accompanied his curt dismissals of the local sheriff’s deputies who were waiting on the fringes of the university as “intolerant young rural toughs, eager to unleash their brand of justice against unruly students.” How did he arrive at this conclusion? Not even a full sentence is devoted to this sweeping indictment.
It so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca. Nor did I find the local police to be “intolerant young rural toughs,” not even when I was pulled over for speeding at about a hundred miles an hour on a deserted highway at midnight. There was even a certain humor by the cop who handed me the ticket, advising me to keep an eye out for police cars before doing that again. It was good advice, though I never had another occasion to use it.
Certainly there was a racist backlash among some white students after innumerable incidents of unpunished violence and disruptions by black militants, as well as other needless provocations by ghetto kids with chips on their shoulders. The racial atmosphere on campus became so charged that one of the black students moved in with my wife and me to escape dangers from both blacks and whites in the dormitory. The local black community in Ithaca was also not thrilled by the importation of hoodlums by radical chic whites at Cornell.
It never seems to occur to Downs that how people conduct themselves has something to do with how others react to them. This applies across the racial lines. One of my white colleagues who had a somewhat hippie look complained to me that he was treated rudely in a certain clothing store in Ithaca—a store where they were all but obsequious to me when I came in wearing my only Hart, Schaeffner & Marx suit.
Accuracy may not be this book’s strongest suit, judging by things I am in a position to know. For example, it says on page 184 that the sit-in at the economics department office in 1968 took place on a Friday, as part of a pattern of having such things happen on Fridays for tactical reasons. In reality, the economics department sit-in took place on a Thursday, April 4, 1968—the day Martin Luther King was assassinated.
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Three days after the takeover of the student union, Eric Evans (left) and Cornell University President James Perkins address a campus rally of eight thousand. The president informs the crowd that the faculty council had just voted to overturn a reprimand of three student protesters, one of the main demands of the occupiers of William Straight Hall. (Photo courtesy of Cornell Alumni News.) |
Also contrary to this book, I did not resign from Cornell in June 1969, after the crisis, but in August 1968—eight months before the crisis—effective at the end of the academic year. Nor had I been “considering the move for some time,” as Cornell ’69claims. I was not considering the move for even a second, because I had already made it—and had not spent even a day considering my resignation the previous year, after discovering a typically contemptible action by the Cornell administration. Such misreporting makes me wonder how many other inaccuracies there are in this book.
Omissions are also troubling, especially in a book that is so wordy about small details. One of the most obvious factors that receives virtually no attention were the serious academic problems of the black students admitted under lower academic standards. How much of their disaffection and alienation was a result of this painfully humiliating fact, obvious to the whites around them, and how much was due to the “racism” that they claimed to see everywhere, is a question that needed exploration, however politically incorrect it might be to discuss such things. But this is a non-issue in this book, where more attention is given to one of the militant leaders’ supposedly almost straight-A average. Since transcripts are not shown to outsiders without authorization and the student himself is now dead, was this a verified fact or part of the romantic folklore that has grown up around this episode?
At the time, I was sufficiently alarmed by the well-known fact that half of the black students were on academic probation that I went over to the administration building and checked the files. It was here that I first learned of a pattern that would prove to be all too common at elite colleges and universities across the country: Most of the black students admitted to Cornell had SAT scores above the national average—but far below the averages of other Cornell students. They were in trouble because they were at Cornell—and, later, Cornell would also be in trouble because they were there. One of the other omissions in Cornell ’69 is that some academically able black applicants for admission were known to have been turned away, while those who fit the stereotype being sought were admitted with lower qualifications.
One of the few people who came through the Cornell debacle with flying colors for courage and integrity was a slender young black woman named Pearl Lucas, an assistant dean who refused to kow-tow to the militants or to go along with the cant of the administration. She was fired on trumped-up charges, ruining her career. Yet, the half page devoted to her in this book mentions none of this and simply depicts her as an integrationist who had “tensions” with separatists. Apparently this was just part of Downs’s emptying his notebook, when the story could have been told in the same space he frittered away on pedestrian details.
Despite commemorative writings that appeared in 1989 at the twentieth anniversary of the 1969 guns-on-campus crisis and now the thirtieth anniversary Cornell ’69, it may well be the fiftieth anniversary in 2019 before political correctness has subsided enough for a trustworthy and in-depth examination to be published.
Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
This article is reprinted with permission of the Weekly Standard; it first appeared in the May 3, 1999, issue. For information about subscribing to the Weekly Standard, call 800-283-2014.