The Sticking Place

The Columbia Statement

Paul Rockwell

When we seized five buildings at Columbia University, we engaged the force of wealth, privilege, property – and the force of the state violence that always accompanies them – with little more than our own ideals, our fears, and a vague sense of outrage that the injustices of society. Martin Luther King had just been shot, his name demeaned by Columbia officials who refused to grant a decent wage to Puerto Rican workers, and who had recently grabbed part of Harlem for a student gym, offering a back door to blacks in the be-grateful way that liberals do.

PDF here.