JUAN GONZÁLEZ (Columbia student activist):
You cannot understand the Columbia student revolt without understanding that it happened three weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, on April 4. At that point, it wasn’t a question of what career you were going to choose, it was a question of whether the country would survive a civil war.
MARK RUDD (Columbia student, S.D.S. leader):
It was the perfect storm in terms of the events of the late winter/early spring of ‘68. The three events were the Tet Offensive, the abdication of L.B.J., and the murder of Martin Luther King—those major events politicized everyone on the Columbia campus.
ROBERT FRIEDMAN (Columbia student, Columbia Daily Spectator editor):
It was a time of growing frequency of protests on campus over issues having to do with the draft and Columbia’s involvement with something called the Institute for Defense Analyses (I.D.A.), which was a think tank that was doing war research for the Pentagon.
RUDD: At Columbia, the organizing dovetailed with all these political events, so that on April 23 we called a demonstration at the sundial [in the center of campus] to protest the fact that six people, including myself, had been reprimanded for a previous demonstration [against Columbia’s affiliation with the I.D.A.].
PAUL AUSTER (Columbia student):
The Vietnam War was driving everyone crazy. Things were cracking apart and you felt that chaos was ruling now—nobody knew where we were going. The frustration of not being able to stop the war led me out to the sundial that day.
ELEANOR STEIN (Columbia Law School student):
It started off as a protest about the disciplinary procedures against the I.D.A. Six, but it quickly became about both the gym and about the university’s ties to the I.D.A.
STUART GEDAL (Columbia student, S.D.S. member):
The thing that was different about April 23 was that the black students, the Student Afro-American Society (S.A.S.), and the S.D.S. had agreed to speak at the same demonstration. And this was completely new.
ARNIM JOHNSON (Columbia student, S.A.S. member):
I remember on April 23, when the movement started, we were protesting the gym that Columbia was building in Morningside Park. There were a lot of community objections to the gym, mainly because it was being built on a public park that Columbia had muscled from the city. Morningside Park is one of the few parks in Harlem. The university said the gym was going to be mixed-use, but it really wasn’t. The Columbia people would enter on the top floor, the Harlem-neighborhood people would enter on the bottom level. It was very bad visually. So the Harlem community was pissed off, and the black students were pissed off.