I live just down the block from the Columbia University campus and an eerie calm has settled over my neighborhood which is under a lockdown just a few hours after police removed pro-Palestinian demonstrators from the campus..
When I went out for a walk around 11 p.m., police had set up metal barricades along a seven-block stretch of Broadway. That meant I could not even go to the grocery store at the corner. A few onlookers are standing behind the metal barricades, but only police are patrolling Broadway.
The latest news reports indicate that about 100 people were arrested as police removed pro-Palestinian protesters who had occupied Hamilton Hall the night before and cleared ar tent encampment on South Lawn of the campus.
But so far there have been no reports of serious injuries during the police action. And police wore helmets, but otherwise were not clad in riot gear.
It’s probably no coincidence that protesters — and it’s not clear how many were students — decided to occupy Hamilton Hall on April 30.
That’s because in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968, police removed hundreds of students from Hamilton Hall, which had been taken over by Black students, and several other campus buildings that had been occupied in a protest against the Vietnam War and plans to build a gym for students on public land in nearby Morningside Park.
In the early morning hours, police made more than 700 arrests and there were 148 reports of injuries, The New York Times reported.
In another story, The Times described what happened that night:
They came on inexorably, a disciplined blue line of bobbing flashlights and many with nightsticks, then broke into a ragged charge. The students fell back, some tripping over low chain-link fences, and scattered like disturbed insects. There were screams, shouted obscenities and cries of “fascist pigs!”
Some protesters were trampled. Others were hit with flailing nightsticks by uniformed officers, or saps wielded by plainclothes men, some of them dressed like students in scruffy clothes, all with their badges hidden. Students were punched and kicked. Some were dragged down concrete steps outside Low Library.
I was then a high school senior about to graduate. From my apartment, I could watch club-wielding police chasing fleeing students down the block towards Riverside Park. Their screams echoed through the night.
It was a galvanizing moment for an impressionable teenager. I later took part in protests during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the following year I ended up getting suspended during my freshman year at the University of Chicago for taking part in a sit-in in the administration building.
In November 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president as anti-war protests left the Democratic Party deeply divided. Let’s hope it’s not deja vu all over again.