Five days after that, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Another bullet fired by an American nobody, another blow to the collective nervous system, and then hundreds of thousands of people ran out into the streets and started smashing windows and setting buildings on fire.
One hundred and twenty-eight Newarks.
The five concentric circles had merged into a single black disk.
It was an L.P. record now, and the song it kept playing was an old blues number called Can’t Take It No More, Sugar, ’Cause My Heart Hurts So Bad.
* * *
SPRING 1968 (I). Amy was seldom around anymore. It was her last semester at Barnard, and because she had already fulfilled her academic requirements and had nearly enough points to graduate, her course load was exceptionally light that spring, which allowed her to spend most of her time doing political work with SDS. Until then, Ferguson’s greatest worry had been Berkeley Law (which accepted her in early April, a few days after King was murdered in Memphis), but now he was afraid he would lose her before the summer began. Her positions had hardened during the crazy-making months of early sixty-eight, pushing her deeper into a stance of radical militancy and anti-capitalist fervor, and she could no longer laugh off their small differences of opinion, no longer understand why he didn’t agree with her on all her points.
If you accept my analysis, she said to him one day, then you necessarily have to accept my conclusions.
No, I don’t, Ferguson replied. Just because capitalism is the problem doesn’t mean that SDS is going to make capitalism disappear. I’m trying to live in the real world, Amy, and you’re dreaming about things that are never going to happen.
One example: Now that Johnson had withdrawn, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy were both running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ferguson was distinctly unexcited and didn’t support either one of them, but he paid close attention to their campaigns—especially to Kennedy’s, since it was clear to him that McCarthy had no chance—for even if he was lukewarm about the New York senator, he felt that RFK was a better choice than discredited Humphrey, and any Democrat was preferable to Nixon or, even more troubling, Ronald Reagan, the governor of Amy’s future state, who was even farther to the right than Goldwater. It wasn’t that Ferguson felt any enthusiasm for the Democrats, but it was important to make distinctions, he told himself, important to recognize that there were bad things in this flawed world but also even worse things, and when it came to voting in an election, better to go for the bad over the worse. Amy refused to make those kinds of distinctions anymore. As far as she was concerned, the Democrats were all the same, each one a sell-out liberal, and she wanted no part of them, they were the ones who were responsible for Vietnam and all the other horrors America had visited upon the world, and a pox on them and everything they stood for, and if the Republicans happened to win, well, maybe that would be better for the country in the long run, because America would be turned into a fascist police state, and eventually the people would rise up against it, as if the people who had just elected the Republicans would want to overthrow them once they came to power, as if the people might not prefer to live in a fascist police state if it would lock up anti-American radicals like her.
The girl who had wept over the murder of John Kennedy in 1963 now saw his brother Robert as a tool of capitalist oppression. Ferguson was willing to shrug off such remarks as an excess of ideological enthusiasm, but by early April he too was coming under attack, and the political had suddenly become personal, too personal, too much about them rather than the ideas they were discussing. Ferguson wondered if Amy wasn’t carrying on a secret dalliance with one of her SDS brethren, or if she and her Barnard pal Patsy Dugan weren’t exploring the mysteries of Sapphic love together (she talked about Patsy a lot these days), or if she wasn’t still irritated with him for not having gone to California with her last summer. No, not possible, he realized, none of those possibilities was even dimly possible, for it wasn’t in Amy’s nature to do things behind his back, and if she had fallen for someone else she would have told him about it, and if she still resented him for last summer it couldn’t have been a conscious resentment, since that had been over and done with for months, and in the months after that there had been countless good times together, not to mention how glorious she had been in the sad days after his grandmother’s death, taking up the slack from his nearly immobilized mother and orchestrating the apartment cleanout with the speed and precision of a Sandy Koufax fastball. Something had happened since then, however, and if it hadn’t been caused by any of the usual causes, it also seemed impossible that it had been caused by a stupid disagreement about politics. He and Amy had always disagreed. One of the pleasures of living with her was the extent to which they disagreed and yet continued to love each other in spite of that. Their battles had always been fought about ideas, never about themselves, but now Amy had started going after him because his ideas didn’t mesh with hers, because he was reluctant to jump into the revolutionary volcano with her, and therefore he had become a backward-thinking reactionary liberal, a pessimist, an ironist, an agenbite-of-inwit boy (meaning, he supposed, that he was too fond of Joyce and all things literary), a bystander, a dilettante, an old fogey, and a lump of shit.
From Ferguson’s point of view, it all came down to one essential difference: Amy was a believer, and he was an agnostic.
One night when she was out late with her friends, no doubt arguing with Mike Loeb in a booth at the West End or plotting with Patsy Dugan about how to increase the female membership of SDS, Ferguson crawled into the bed in Amy’s room, the same bed he had slept in for the better part of the past two years, and because he was especially tired that night, he fell asleep before Amy returned. When he woke the next morning, Amy was not in the bed beside him, and when he examined the plumped-up state of her pillow, he concluded that Amy had not come home and had spent the night somewhere else. Somewhere else turned out to be the bed in Ferguson’s room next door, and when he walked into that room to look for a fresh set of socks and underwear, the noise of the creaking parquet floor woke her up.
What are you doing in here? Ferguson asked.
I felt like sleeping alone, she said.
Oh?
It felt good to sleep alone for a change.
Did it?
Yes, very good. I think we should keep on doing it for a while, Archie. You in your bed and me in my bed. What you might call a cooling-off period.
If that’s what you want. It’s not as though it’s been very warm lately when we’ve slept together in the same bed.
Thank you, Archie.
You’re welcome, Amy.
Thus commenced the so-called cooling-off period. For the next six nights, Ferguson and Amy slept alone in their own beds in their own rooms, neither one of them certain if they had come to the end or were merely taking a pause, and on the morning of the seventh day, April twenty-third, just hours after they climbed out of their separate beds and made their separate ways out of the apartment, the revolution began.
* * *
SPRING 1968 (II). On March fourteenth, Ferguson and his Spectator comrades had elected Robert Friedman as their new editor in chief, the same March fourteenth on which Amy and her SDS comrades had voted in Mark Rudd as their new chairman, and from one instant to the next both organizations had changed. The paper continued to report the news as it always had, but its editorials became tougher and more outspoken, and Ferguson was pleased that Vietnam and black-white relations and Columbia’s role in prolonging the war were now openly discussed, often pugnaciously discussed, as a matter of policy and conviction. With Students for a Democratic Society, the shift in tactics was even more striking. The national leadership had called for a move from “protest to resistance,” and at Columbia the so-called Praxis Axis contingent had been replaced by the more confrontational Action Faction. Last year, the goal had been education and awareness, the timid gesture of approaching marine recruiters in order to
“ask some questions,” whereas now the aim was to provoke, to disrupt, to stir things up as often as possible.
One week after Rudd took over as chairman, the director of the New York headquarters of the Selective Service System, Colonel Paul B. Akst, came to the Columbia campus to deliver a talk at Earl Hall about recent modifications to the draft laws. One hundred and fifty people showed up, and as Akst stepped forward to begin his talk (a squat man bulging in full military garb), there was a commotion at the back of the auditorium. Several students dressed in army fatigues started playing a fife-and-drum rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while others waved around toy weapons. As if by reflex, a band of jocks leapt forward to quell, repel, and expel the pukes, and with everyone’s attention diverted by the wrangling in back, someone sitting in the front row stood up and threw a lemon meringue pie in Colonel Akst’s face. As in all good slapstick films, it was a direct hit. By the time the audience had turned around again, a side door had mysteriously opened, and the pie thrower and an accomplice had escaped.
That night, Amy told Ferguson that the pastry commando was an SDSer imported from Berkeley and that the accomplice was none other than Mark Rudd. Ferguson was highly amused. Too bad for the colonel, he thought, but no harm done, especially in light of the big harm being done by the war, and what a deft little frolic it had been. The Praxis Axis never would have dreamed of attempting a stunt like that (too frivolous), but the Action Faction was apparently not opposed to using levity as an instrument to make its political points. The administration was furious, of course, promising to “throw the book” at the mischief-maker if it turned out he wasn’t a Columbia student and to suspend him if he was, but one week later the university found itself confronted by a more serious challenge than lemon meringue pies, and the guilty ones were never caught.
At that early stage of the drama, SDS was focusing its activities on two principal issues: the Institute for Defense Analyses and the ban against demonstrating and/or picketing inside university buildings, a new policy that had been initiated by President Grayson Kirk back in the fall. IDA had been set up by the Pentagon in 1956 as a conduit for enlisting the help of university scientists in weapons research for the government, but no one had been aware of Columbia’s connection to the program until 1967, when two members of SDS found documents in the library stacks that referred to Columbia’s membership in IDA, which had twelve university members in all, and now that faculty committees at Princeton and Chicago were recommending to the heads of their schools that they quit the program, students and faculty members at Columbia were asking their university to do the same, even though Kirk had been a member of the board for the past nine years, but how not to feel revulsion over the fact that IDA research had led to the development of chemical herbicides such as Agent Orange, which was being used to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam, or that the bloody tactic of “carpet bombing” was the result of IDA work on counterinsurgency techniques? In other words, Columbia was taking part in the war, it had dirt on its hands (as Amy often put it), and the only sensible action was to force it to stop. Not that the war would stop, but persuading Columbia to stop would constitute a small victory after so many large and small defeats. As for the ban on indoor demonstrations, the students argued that it was a violation of First Amendment rights, an unconstitutional act against the principle of free speech, and therefore Kirk’s dictum was invalid.
For the past several weeks, SDS had been circulating a petition around campus demanding that Columbia withdraw from IDA, and now that fifteen hundred faculty members and students had signed it (among them Ferguson and Amy), SDS decided to confront both issues in a single action on March twenty-seventh, one week after the now forgotten pie-throwing caper. A group of one hundred students entered Low Library, the white domed building modeled on the Roman Pantheon that served as the university administrative center, and defied the injunction against indoor picketing and demonstrations by carrying placards with the words IDA MUST GO! written across them. Amy was there with the protesters, Ferguson was there in his capacity as witness-reporter, and for about half an hour the students wandered around the halls chanting slogans (one through a bullhorn), after which they went upstairs to the second floor and delivered the petition to a high-ranking university official, who assured them he would pass it on to President Kirk. The group then left the building, and the next day six of them were singled out for disciplinary measures, Rudd at the top of the list along with four others from the SDS steering committee, just six out of the hundred who had participated because, as one dean explained, they were the only ones who could be identified. For the next two weeks, the IDA 6 refused to meet with the dean, which was standard protocol for resolving disciplinary matters (a private discussion followed by what was supposed to be just punishment—as in most kangaroo courts), insisting instead that they be tried in an open hearing. The dean responded by telling them they would all be suspended if they didn’t come to his office. On April twenty-second, they finally went in to see him but would not discuss their involvement with the IDA demonstration. Upon leaving the office, they were all put on disciplinary probation.
In the meantime, Martin Luther King had been murdered. Harlem did what Newark had done a year earlier, but Lindsay wasn’t Addonizio and no National Guard or state police were called in to fire bullets at the demonstrators, and as Harlem burned just down the hill from Columbia, the craziness in the already crazy air on Morningside Heights was mounting into what Ferguson now felt had become a full-blown fever dream. On April ninth, the university shut down for the day in homage to King. Only one event was scheduled—a memorial service to be held at St. Paul’s Chapel near the center of the campus, which wound up drawing a crowd of eleven hundred people—and just as university vice president David Truman was about to deliver his eulogy on behalf of the Columbia administration, a student dressed in a jacket and tie stood up from his seat in one of the front rows and walked slowly to the pulpit. Mark Rudd—again. The microphone was immediately turned off.
Speaking without notes, without amplification, without knowing how many people could hear him, Rudd addressed the crowd in a subdued voice. “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King,” he said. “How can the leaders of the university eulogize a man who died while trying to unionize sanitation workers when they have, for years, fought against the unionization of the university’s own black and Puerto Rican workers? How can these people praise a man who fought for human dignity when they steal land from the people of Harlem? And how can these administrators praise a man who preached nonviolent civil disobedience while disciplining its own students for peaceful protest?” He paused for a moment and then repeated his opening sentence. “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King. We will therefore protest this obscenity.” Along with forty or fifty fellow protesters (both black and white, both students and non-students) Rudd then walked out of the chapel. Ferguson, who was sitting in one of the middle rows, silently applauded what had just happened. Well done, Mark, he said to himself, and bravo to you for having the guts to stand up and speak out.
Before Martin Luther King’s assassination, there had been one group (SDS) and two issues (IDA and discipline) propelling left-wing political activity on campus. Then came a second group (SAS), and then came a third issue (the gym), and within two weeks of the King memorial, the big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.
The Columbia gym, which also went by the alternative name of Gym Crow, was to be built on one of the parcels of land in Harlem Rudd had accused Columbia of stealing, public land in this case, the dangerous, dilapidated, never-used-by-white-people Morningside Park, a steeply descending crag of rocks and dying trees that started at the top in Columbiaville and ended at the bottom in Harlemville. There was no question that the school needed a new
gym. Columbia’s basketball team had just won the Ivy League championship, it had entered the NCAA tournament ranked fourth in the country, and the current gym was more than sixty years old, too small, too worn out, no longer viable, but the contract the administration had negotiated with the city in the late fifties and early sixties was unprecedented. Two acres of the park would be leased to the university for the nominal sum of three thousand dollars a year, and Columbia would become the first private institution in New York history to build a structure on public land for its own private use. Down below at the Harlem end of the park, there would be a back entrance for members of the community leading to a separate gym-within-the-gym, which would occupy twelve and a half percent of the overall space. After pressure from local activists, Columbia agreed to augment the Harlem share to fifteen percent—with a swimming pool and a locker room thrown in for good measure. When H. Rap Brown came to New York for a community meeting in December 1967, the chairman of SNCC said: “If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down. And if they get nine stories built, it’s yours. Take it over, and maybe we’ll let them in on the weekends.” On February 19, 1968, Columbia went ahead and broke ground on the project. The next day, twenty people went to Morningside Park and put their bodies in front of bulldozers and dump trucks in order to stop work on the construction site. Six Columbia students and six neighborhood people were arrested, and a week later, when a crowd of a hundred and fifty turned out to protest the building of the gym, twelve more Columbia students were arrested. None of them was a member of SDS. Until then, the gym had not been an SDS issue, but now that the administration was refusing to reconsider its plans or even discuss the matter of reconsidering them, it quickly became one, and not only for SDS but for the black students on campus as well.