Looking out at a crowd of demonstrators, an American university student spoke of a machine that has grown so “nasty” that it leaves well-meaning people with little choice. There should be protests.
“You have to put your body on top of the gears, the wheels, the levers, all the equipment to stop it,” he said. Students will soon flood into the campus administration building.
That scene unfolded 60 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley. The words were directed at university leadership and referred to university restrictions on campus political activity. However, student leader Mario Savio's speech and the subsequent sit-in could have taken place yesterday.
The protests against Israel's war in Gaza that have erupted on college campuses across the United States are just the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism that stretches back at least to the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. .
Protests often take place on university campuses, sometimes in the same buildings as the previous year. Columbia University's Hamilton Hall was occupied by students during the 1968 protests, last week's protests, and at least four other times in between. . In some cases, protests seem to have adapted off-campus, such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and recent racial justice demonstrations.
Like today's protests, most of the old movements were highly polarized. Some observers at the time praised the courage and idealism of the demonstrators, while also pandering to and embracing rhetoric and ideas that were misguided, self-serving, or irresponsible and dangerous. Some criticized him for feeling guilty.
High levels of aggression appear to be closely intertwined with the fresh thinking college students bring to the world's most difficult questions. “When you're talking about college students, you're talking about people who have just barely made it out of childhood,” historian and author Rick Perlstein said in an interview this week. “Sometimes people who have just come out of childhood and are basically on their own for the first time and are exploring ideas for the first time can say some weird things.”
Some student movements, such as the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement, helped achieve specific goals that became widely accepted over time. Others continue to spark debate over its wisdom and effectiveness. The current movement is notable for the division it has caused not only among ordinary Americans but also among self-identified liberal Americans over the difficult question of when criticism of Israel turns into anti-Semitism.
Like older movements, the current one is likely to be the subject of decades of research into its origins, purpose, and subsequent impact. In the short term, politicians, including potential Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, believe that the 1968 demonstrations helped doom Hubert H. Humphrey's Democratic presidential candidacy and victory. It is a tacit admission that it has the potential to sway elections, as is often believed. Richard M. Nixon.
Former President Donald J. Trump called the protests “a disgrace to our country.” On Thursday, President Biden sought a compromise after violent clashes between protesters and police on campuses including the University of California, Los Angeles. “You have the right to protest, but you don't have the right to cause chaos,” he said.
1960s
civil rights movement
The idea that progressive college students are a force in social life is a relatively recent development.
“Universities from the Middle Ages until probably the 1930s were considered sanctuaries from politics and society,” said Kenneth Heineman, a historian at Angelo State University in Texas. Student protesters caused a stir in the early 20th century, but the epitome of student protest movement coalesced in the 1960s. This led to baby boomers increasing the number of universities in a wealthy country that was beginning to confront a long history of racial discrimination and would soon become embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. In the Vietnam War, 61 percent of the 58,000 American soldiers killed were under the age of 21.
One of the earliest sit-in protests calling for the desegregation of restaurants and other public places in the South was held by four students from historically black North Carolina A&T State University. They took up positions at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. When asked, I politely refused to leave.
Many of the participants in the 1961 Freedom Rides were also college students and faced the violent mobs they encountered in the Deep South. A university group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) participated in Freedom Rides and engaged in voter registration efforts in Mississippi.
These and other efforts have led American college students to be seen as catalysts for profound structural change. However, the protests did not bring universal praise. In a 1961 Gallup poll, 57 percent of respondents said sit-ins and freedom rides would do more harm than good to the cause of integration.
“Student movements in the United States have never been popular off campus,” said Robert Cohen, a historian at New York University. “And it reflects a kind of underlying cultural conservatism in this country. It's like, 'Shut up and study.' You don't respect your elders. You should be seen and not heard. ”
1964
Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley
In 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, protested against restrictions on free speech that had previously been enacted amid fears of the radical left.
Protesters, now known collectively as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, watched the restrictions be lifted after a sit-in in the school's administration building. Soon, American universities entered a new era, and the paternalistic management model that controlled not only what students say but also how they dress and date began to disintegrate.
This new freedom helped midwifery's counterculture movement of the decade, but by the early 1970s it was collapsing under the weight of its own excesses. Perlstein, a leftist, once bitterly described it as “a fire of callous adventurism and callous adventurism.” Maoist masquerade ball. ”
1968-1973
Vietnam
By the mid-1960s, the United States began dramatically increasing its military presence in Vietnam. Beginning in 1964 and lasting until 1973, the federal government ended up conscripting 2.2 million men into military service. And college campuses will spend years in turmoil.
The high point of American campus protests would come in 1970 with the news of President Nixon's expansion of war into Cambodia. Students were also outraged by the shootings of students by authorities during protests at Jackson State University in Mississippi and Kent State University in Ohio. According to an analysis by the University of Washington, students at 900 schools participated in organized strikes.
The unrest in American schools was broadcast on television, radicalizing some elements of the anti-war movement and sparking a huge backlash. In a May 1970 Gallup poll, 58 percent of respondents blamed students for the Kent State shooting in which Ohio National Guard soldiers killed four students and injured nine others. (The shooting came after a protest in which some protesters threw rocks at troops and an ROTC building burned down.) A Gallup poll from the previous year found that 82 percent of Americans would expel extremist students from their schools. It turns out that he agrees with that.
But historians believe that mass protests on and off campus pressured the Nixon administration to hasten the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and the last American combat troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973. Stated.
1970-1990
anti-apartheid movement
From the end of the Vietnam era to the present, college campuses have occasionally flared up with left-wing dissent protesting U.S. intervention in Central America, internal affairs, and military action in the Middle East.
In the 1970s and 1980s, student-led movements arose on many university campuses to urge schools to divest from companies operating in South Africa, then under white apartheid rule. On many campuses, students built shacks in solidarity with South Africa's poor black people, and many schools at least partially divested from companies with investments in South Africa.
Although these were just one of the factors that led to the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, South Africa's divestment movement directly influenced current demands for schools to divest from companies linked to Israel. I did.
These demands are part of a broader effort targeting Israel, known as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, calling on states, businesses and schools to stop occupying all land occupied by Israel. It calls for severing ties with Israel unless a number of demands are met, including: In 1967, it allowed Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the lands from which they had fled during the founding of Israel.
Although not a student movement per se, Occupy Wall Street, a 2011 grassroots movement against corporate greed and income inequality, introduced a new generation to the idea of widespread protest and ultimately spread across university campuses.
The epicenter of the movement was Zuccotti Park in Manhattan's financial district, which protesters occupied for several weeks. Their improvised tent cities are also reflected in pro-Palestinian protests, with tents erected on campus being the most visible sign of Gaza protests, aside from student groups.
Until this year's pro-Palestinian protests, perhaps the most formative political experience in the lives of today's college activists was the series of events that shook the United States, beginning with the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black man by Florida vigilantes. It was an anti-racist street protest. , and culminated in 2020 after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd.
Many activists, like Tulane student and activist Von Crandell, connect the Palestinian struggle and efforts to end racism in the United States with similar broader struggles against colonial powers that exploit indigenous peoples and people of color. considered as part of the
Black activists in the United States have a long and complicated history with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Immediately after the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, increasingly radicalized SNCC leaders believed that Jews were “imitating their Nazi oppressors” by using terrorist tactics against Arabs. “There is,” he said. Such statements led to condemnation from more moderate civil rights forces, just as comparisons of Israel to genocidal regimes alarm more moderate liberals today.
There's no debate about Crandell, a Black man who was suspended from Tulane this week for participating in protests. “We are witnessing genocide in real time,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.
Regarding black Americans and Palestinians, he added, “Our struggle is all together.”
Susan Beachy contributed to the research.
