4 3 2 1

  SAS (Students’ Afro-American Society) had more than a hundred members, but until King’s assassination it had not taken part in any overt political activities, concentrating instead on how to increase black enrollment in the college and talking to deans and department heads about adding courses on black history and culture to the undergraduate curriculum. As with every other elite college in America at the time, the black population at Columbia was minuscule, so sparse that Ferguson had only two black friends among his fellow undergraduates, two friends who were not close friends, which was true for most of his white acquaintances as well, who seemed to have no close black friends either. The black students were isolated because of their numbers and doubly isolated because they kept to themselves, undoubtedly a bit lost and resentful in that white enclave of tradition and power, more often than not looked upon as outsiders, even by the black security guards on campus, who would stop them and ask to see their IDs because young men with black faces could not have been Columbia students and therefore had no business being there. After King’s death, SAS elected a new board of radical leaders, some of them brilliant, some of them angry, some of them both brilliant and angry, and all of them as bold as Rudd, that is, with enough confidence in themselves to be able to stand up and address a thousand as easily as they talked to one, and for them the biggest issue was Columbia’s relationship with Harlem, which meant that IDA and discipline could belong to the white students but the gym was their affair.

  Two days after the King memorial, Grayson Kirk went to the University of Virginia to deliver a speech on the occasion of Thomas Jefferson’s two hundred and twenty-fifth birthday (tempestuous as those days might have been, they were also thick with absurdities), and there the former political scientist who sat on the boards of several corporations and financial institutions, Mobil Oil, IBM, and Con Edison among them, the president of Columbia University who had succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower after the general left Columbia to become president of the United States, there for the first time Grayson Kirk came out against the war in Vietnam, not because the war was wrong or less than honorable, he said, but because of the damage it was doing at home, and then he uttered the sentences that would soon find their way back to the Columbia campus and add another dose of gasoline to the fire that was already starting to burn there: “Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.”

  On April twenty-second, the day the IDA 6 were put on probation, SDS published a one-off four-page newspaper entitled Up Against the Wall! in advance of the rally scheduled for noon the next day, which was supposed to culminate in another indoor demonstration at Low Library, where dozens or scores or hundreds would show their support for the IDA 6 by breaking the same rule that had gotten the 6 into trouble. One of the articles was written by Rudd, an eight-hundred-and-fifty-word letter addressed to Grayson Kirk in response to the remarks he had made at the University of Virginia. It ended with the following three short paragraphs:

  Grayson, I doubt if you will understand any of this, since your fantasies have shut out the world as it really is from your thinking. Vice President Truman says the society is basically sound; you say the war in Vietnam was a well-intentioned accident. We, the young people, whom you so rightly fear, say that the society is sick and you and your capitalism are the sickness.

  You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism.

  There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

  Ferguson was appalled. After the eloquent speech Rudd had given at the King memorial, it made no sense that he should commit such a bad tactical blunder. That wasn’t to say the substance of the text lacked merit, but the tone was obnoxious, and if SDS was trying to increase its support among the students, this kind of thing would only push them away. The article was an example of SDS talking to itself rather than reaching out to others, and Ferguson wanted SDS to win, for notwithstanding certain reservations about what was possible and not possible, he mostly stood behind the group and believed in its cause, but a noble cause demanded noble behavior from its advocates, something finer and more self-controlled than run-of-the-mill insults and cheap, adolescent shots. The pity of it was that Ferguson liked Mark Rudd. They had been friends since their freshman year (fellow New Jersey boys with almost identical backgrounds), and Mark had been impressive as chairman so far, so impressive that Ferguson had been blinded into thinking he could never make any mistakes, and now that he had slipped up with this Dear Grayson and motherfucker business, Ferguson was feeling let down, stranded in the awkward position of being against the ones who were against, which was a lonely place to be for a person who was also against the ones who were for.

  Remarkably enough, Amy did not disagree with him. They were still in the midst of their two-bed cooling-off period and hadn’t seen much of each other in the past several days, but when Amy came home from her SDS meeting on the night of the twenty-second, she too was feeling let down, not just because of the article, which she admitted was both crude and childish, but because only fifty to sixty people had come to Fayerweather Hall for the last meeting of the school year, whereas most of the gatherings in the past months had drawn two hundred or more, and she was afraid that SDS was losing ground, that nearly every inch of the ground it had won had now been lost, and tomorrow was going to be a disaster, she said, a feeble last stand that would end in failure and shut down SDS at Columbia for good.

  She was wrong.

  * * *

  SPRING 1968 (III). Never before in the annals of. Never before so much as thought. The widening gyre, and all at once everyone turning within it. Nobodaddy doubled over with stomach cramps, the shits. Hotspur hopping, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a horde. How who, who what, and all suddenly asking him: Why darkness & obscurity in all thy words and laws? The centre could not, the things could not, the horde could not not not do other than it did, but anarchy was not loosed, it was the world that loosened, at least for a time, and thus began the largest, most sustained student protest in American history.

  Close to a thousand on the morning of. Two-thirds antis, gathered around the Sundial in the center of the campus, one-third anti-antis standing on the steps of Low, presumably to protect the building from assault, but also to smash and bash if it came to that. They had already published warnings, and the threat of fisticuffs had brought out a platoon of young professors prepared to break things up if necessary. Speeches to begin with, one by one the usual stuff, the SDS line, but SAS was there as well, the first integrated political rally at Columbia ever, and when Cicero Wilson mounted the Sundial to address the crowd, the newly elected president of SAS began by talking about Harlem and the gym, but moments later (Ferguson was shocked) he was attacking the white students. “If you want to know who they’re talking about,” he said, meaning racists, “you go look in a mirror—because you know nothing about black people.”

  Amy, who was standing in front, interrupted him and called out: “What makes you think there aren’t white people on your side? What makes you think we aren’t all in this together? We’re your brothers and sisters, pal, and we’ll be a hell of a lot stronger if you stand with us when we stand with you.”

  A bad beginning. Hats off to Amy for having spoken up, but a rocky start, and the confusion continued for some time. Low was impregnable. The doors had been locked, and no one was willing to break them down or start a fight with the security guards. Back to the Sundial, which was adorned with an inscription that read HORAM EXPECTA VENIET (Await the Hour, It Shall Come), but had the ho
ur really come or was April twenty-third collapsing into yet one more missed opportunity? Another round of speeches, but everything had come to a standstill, and the energy of the crowd had evaporated. Just when it seemed that the rally was fizzling to its conclusion, however, someone yelled out, TO THE GYM SITE! The words struck with the force of a slap to the face, and suddenly three hundred students were running east down College Walk to Morningside Park.

  Amy had underestimated the magnitude of the discontent, the epidemic of unhappiness that had spread through the ranks of the non-SDS majority on campus, most of whom seemed headed for nervous breakdowns as the unwinnable war thundered on and the Nobodaddies in the White House and Low Library kept speaking their dark words and issuing their obscure laws, and as Ferguson ran alongside the crowd that was running to the park, he understood that the students were possessed, that their souls had been taken over by the same fusion of anger and joy he had witnessed in the streets of Newark last summer, and as long as no bullets were fired, such a crowd could not be controlled. There were policemen in the park, but not enough of them to stop a gang of students from tearing down forty feet of the chain-link fence that surrounded the construction site as other students tussled with the outmanned guards, and there was David Zimmer, Ferguson noticed, and there was Zimmer’s friend Marco Fogg, gentle Zimmer and even more gentle Fogg were in the gang attacking the fence, and for a moment Ferguson envied them, wishing he could join in and do what they were doing, but then the feeling passed and he held his ground.

  Almost a battle, but not quite. Skirmishes, flare-ups, shoving matches, cops against students, students against cops, students jumping cops, students kicking cops and pushing them into the dirt, one Columbia boy hauled off in the middle of it (white, non-SDS), charged with felonious assault, criminal mischief, and resisting arrest, and when more cops began descending into the park with their billy clubs out, the students left the site and headed back toward the campus. Meanwhile, the other crowd of students—the ones who had stayed behind—were now marching toward the park. The advancing group and the retreating group met in the middle on Morningside Drive, and when the retreaters told the advancers that their business in the park was done, both groups walked back to the campus and reassembled at the Sundial. There were about five hundred of them at that point, and no one knew what was going to happen next. An hour and a half ago there had been a plan, but events had overpowered that plan, and whatever happened next would have to be improvised. As far as Ferguson could tell, only one fact was clear: the crowd was still possessed—and ready to do just about anything.

  A few minutes later, most of them were on their way to Hamilton Hall, where hundreds spilled into the lobby on the ground floor, a mass of bodies crammed into that small space as jocks jostled and pukes pushed back and more bodies poured in, everyone charged up and confused, so confused that the first act of the campus rebellion was the misguided, self-defeating error of locking the undergraduate dean in his office and holding him hostage (a mistake that was rectified the next afternoon when Henry Coleman was released), but still the students involved in the takeover of the building had the wherewithal to form a steering committee composed of three members from SDS, three from SAS, two from the College Citizenship Council, and one unaffiliated sympathizer and come up with a list of demands that set forth the aims of the protest:

  1. All disciplinary action now pending and probations already imposed upon six students to be immediately terminated and a general amnesty be granted to those students participating in this demonstration.

  2. President Kirk’s ban on demonstrations inside University buildings to be dropped.

  3. Construction of the Columbia gymnasium in Morningside Park cease at once.

  4. All future disciplinary action taken against University students be resolved through an open hearing before students and faculty which adheres to the standards of due process.

  5. Columbia University disaffiliate, in fact and not merely on paper, from the Institute for Defense Analyses; and President Kirk and Trustee William A. M. Burden resign their positions on IDA’s Board of Trustees and Executive Board.

  6. Columbia University use its good offices to obtain dismissal of charges now pending against those participating in demonstrations at the gym construction site in the park.

  The doors of the building remained open. It was early afternoon on a normal school day, and as Rudd later told Ferguson, the SDS contingent felt they couldn’t afford to alienate the nonparticipating students by blocking their access to classes, which were still being held on the upper floors. They wanted to win those students over to their side, and it wouldn’t have made sense to do something that would have turned the majority against them. The building wasn’t “occupied” at that point, then, there was a sit-in taking place within the building, and as the day advanced and word got out about what was going on at Hamilton Hall, dozens of people who were not connected to the university began turning up, SDSers from other colleges, members of SNCC and CORE, representatives from various Peace Now organizations, and as those people arrived to lend their support, in came food, blankets, and other practical necessities for the people who would be spending the night in the building. Amy was one of those people, but Ferguson was busy taking notes and had no time to talk to her. He blew her a kiss instead. She smiled and waved back (one of the rare smiles she had given him in the past several weeks), and then he dashed off to the Spectator office in Ferris Booth Hall to write his article.

  That night, the frail, short-lived alliance between SDS and SAS fell apart. The black students wanted to barricade the doors and shut everyone out of Hamilton until the six demands had been met. They were ready to make a stand, they said, and with talk circulating in the halls that guns had been smuggled into the building, the implication was that the stand they were talking about could be a violent one. It was five o’clock in the morning at that point, and hours of discussion had led to an impasse, the open door–closed door dispute could not be resolved, and now SAS was politely suggesting that SDS leave the building and occupy a building of its own. Ferguson understood the SAS position, but at the same time he found the split depressing and demoralizing, and he understood why SDS should have felt so hurt by the divorce. It was Rhonda Williams saying no all over again. It was his father saying all those repulsive things after the Newark riots. It was what the world had come to.

  The irony was that without the SDS expulsion that morning, the rebellion at Columbia never would have spread beyond Hamilton Hall, and the story of the next six weeks would have been a different story, a much smaller story, and the big thing that eventually happened would not have been big enough for anyone to notice it.

  In the minutes before dawn on April twenty-fourth, the banished SDSers broke into Low Library and barricaded themselves inside President Kirk’s suite of offices. Sixteen hours later, one hundred students from the School of Architecture took control of Avery Hall. Four hours after that, at two A.M. on the morning of the twenty-fifth, two hundred graduate students locked themselves inside Fayerweather Hall. At one o’clock in the morning on the twenty-sixth, a spillover group from Low Library took over Mathematics Hall, and within hours two hundred students and non-student radicals were in charge of a fifth building. That same night, Columbia announced that it was acceding to Mayor Lindsay’s request to suspend construction of the gym.

  The university had shut down, and there was no activity on campus anymore that was not political activity. Low Library, Avery Hall, Fayerweather Hall, and Mathematics Hall were no longer a library and three halls but four communes. Hamilton Hall had been renamed Malcolm X University.

  Nobodaddy’s children were saying no, and still no one knew what was going to happen next.

  Ferguson was scrambling. The five-day-a-week paper had become a seven-day-a-week paper, and there were articles to write, places to go to, people to talk to, meetings to attend, and all on little or no sleep, barely more than two or three hours a night, and all on little
or no food but rolls, salami sandwiches, and coffee, coffee and a thousand cigarettes, but the scrambling was good for him, he realized, to be so busy and so exhausted had the double effect of keeping him awake and numb at the same time, and he needed to be awake in order to see the things that were happening around him and write about those events with the quickness and accuracy they demanded, and he needed to be numb in order not to think about Amy, who was all but lost to him now, all but gone, and even though he kept telling himself he would fight to win her back, do everything he could to prevent the unthinkable from happening, he knew that whatever they had been to each other in the past was not what they were now.

  She was with the group in Low, one of the diehards. On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, as Ferguson was rushing across the campus on his way to Mathematics Hall, he caught sight of her standing on the second-floor ledge just outside the window of Kirk’s office. Standing to her right was Les Gottesman, who was no longer in the college but a student in the graduate English Department, and standing to her left was Hilton Obenzinger, Les’s good friend, who was also Ferguson’s friend, one of the stalwarts of the Columbia Review, and there was Amy standing between Les and Hilton with the sun shining down on her, a sun so strong that her impossible hair seemed ablaze in the afternoon light, and she looked happy, Ferguson thought, so damned happy that he wanted to weep.