A Time to Stir
When the country
into which I had just set my foot
was set on fire about my ears
it was time to stir.
It was time for every man to stir.
Thomas Paine
In April 1968, at the highpoint of the war in Vietnam and the Black Power movement, only days before the general strike in France and weeks before the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, students at New York’s Columbia University were galvanized in protest and for a week occupied several buildings on campus, bringing the focus of the world’s media on a few square acres of northern Manhattan.
The catalyst for the student revolt was the university’s decision to construct a gymnasium on public land in nearby Morningside Park. Although residents of neighbouring Harlem were to be given limited use of this facility, local community leaders objected, seeing the project as encroachment upon their residential neighbourhood. At the same time, the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society was actively campaigning against what it claimed was the university’s support of research benefiting the government’s war effort. They saw Columbia University as a microcosm of an imperialist, racist and war-mongering American government. A series of campus protests throughout the fall of 1967 and early 1968 culminated in a rally planned for 23 April 1968.
On that day members of various student groups, including SDS and SAS (Students’ Afro-American Society), joined forces and walked to Low Library, home to the university’s administrative offices, where they were repulsed by security guards. Shouting ‘Gym Crow Must Go!’ they marched to Morningside Park where they tore down a section of fence at the construction site of the gymnasium before returning to campus and occupying Hamilton Hall. Yet within a few hours a racial split occurred after SAS students asked all whites to evacuate the building, leaving it solely in the hands of black students. A group of students moved on and occupied Low Library where they read President Grayson Kirk’s private files, smoked his cigars and drank his sherry.
In the days that followed, protestors – now numbering a thousand – barricaded themselves into three other buildings. All classes were cancelled, the faculty met in an attempt to resolve the crisis, and students calling themselves the Majority Coalition – opposed to what they saw as being SDS’ pseudo-revolutionary antics – surrounded Low Library to prevent supplies from reaching protestors. Fearful of a Harlem riot if the African-American students in Hamilton were harmed, the university administration hesitated for days before requesting that police clear the campus. On 30 April, the black students surrendered without a fight but a thousand police officers and members of the New York police’s infamous Tactical Patrol Force removed protesters from the other four buildings and the rest of the campus. Several hundred students, faculty and police were injured.
The ‘Battle of Morningside Heights’ – an important event in modern American history, never before told in-depth on film – had immediate consequences. Construction of the gymnasium was halted and almost the entire study body responded in solidarity when, on 1 May 1968, SDS called for a campus wide strike. President Kirk, whose response to the events had offended all sides, announced his retirement later that summer. The student revolt reflected and encouraged an emerging trend toward violence and rebellion at American universities and, in some fevered imaginations, made the campus the center of an apparently impending revolution in America. What happened at Columbia in the spring of 1968 – only three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, an event which precipitated the final fragmentation of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of militant Black Power politics – was the tipping point, that moment when legal protest against the power structure in the United States became illegal resistance. After liberal reformers among faculty and students reclaimed control of the university, several leaders of the uprising at Columbia became members of the radical Weatherman organisation. One of them was killed less then two years later while making a bomb intended to attack a military installation.
For the past three years hundreds of interviews with many of the leading players of this story, including student alumni, faculty, university administration and police officers, have been filmed. Several hours of archive footage and nearly twenty thousand photographs have been sourced from many public and private archives around the world. Much of this material has not been seen since 1968. Most has never been seen. This collection of primary material has formed the start of a mammoth historical research project, and is the basis of a first-person documentary narrative representing all points of view.
Columbia 1968 became a decisive moment for the New Left in America and the anti-war movement in general. In re-evaluating this brief moment in America’s history when Columbia was the eye of the storm, A Time to Stir goes beyond the romantic, nostalgic, journalistic and ideologically driven accounts of that period by penetrating into the complex and nuanced politics of the time. This project is not merely a visual representation of pre-existing written history, rather a visual document constructed upon first-person accounts and substantial original historical research. By documenting the story of a generation of politically committed citizens, this project has the potential to inject a new visual vocabulary into our understanding of the Columbia uprising and the widespread social unrest that pervaded the final years of the 1960s in the United States and beyond. The history of the protest movement at Columbia goes far deeper and wider than the immediate issues of 1968. This exhaustive historical venture addresses the moral consequences faced by individuals who, with the best of intentions, attempted to change a society they condemned as unjust, but in so doing ultimately were forced to come to terms with the unintended and often destructive and disillusioning results of their actions. In A Time to Stir, the perennial faults and vanities of the movement do not escape the judgment of history. No mere time capsule back to a bygone era, the film – which has received work-in-progress screenings at the Toronto Film Festival, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and the Columbia campus – speaks to our contemporary political and social crises.
Reflecting all perspectives, the project gives personal and vivid voice to participants and witnesses. Interviews with participants such as SDS leader Mark Rudd, activist Tom Hayden, WKCR Columbia radio anchor Robert Siegel, politician George Pataki, historian Howard Zinn and novelist Paul Auster give these events the context and clarity that comes with forty years reflection and impassioned memory, and make for a primer in political science. Extensive interviews with Columbia’s African-American students who were involved, most of whom have never spoken publicly about their experiences of the student rebellion, means their essential story is told for the first time. Conversations with the considerable number of students who were against SDS’s activities offers an articulate account of their perspectives and break new ground in our understanding of the issues. Discussions with female students reveal how the nascent women’s movement blossomed inside the occupied buildings for those few days, and afterwards on campus and beyond. Interviews with police who participated make vividly clear the cultural tensions of the time, and rescue them from the stereotype of being merely thugs in uniform. Extensive discussions with faculty document their varied, often opposed attempts, to save a great university from irreparable destruction. Material from unpublished memoirs and documents goes beyond the image of the university’s administration as merely obtuse and repressive to reveal an older generation doing their best in convulsive circumstances.
More than forty years have passed since these events. Much has been said about the generation of baby boomers who came of age in an era when the United States was experiencing such extraordinary political and cultural shifts. Yet never before has such a wide-cross section of the counter-culture generation, participants so involved in the issues, spoken so candidly about what they experienced as twenty-year olds, and explained why their stories and testimonies are so important to our understanding of contemporary America. These reflections need to be put to tape now, otherwise a crucial era of American history will be lost to historians. Faculty, older alumni, city officials and police who were participants are passing from the scene. Former students have reached their early sixties, a time of reflection, nostalgia and re-evaluation, while current youth are now removed from the crisis of 1968 by almost two generations. The film records the Columbia crisis when it is still well within living memory, but poised to recede into history. There is no better time to study this period of history, as the next phase of America’s history reveals itself.
For those who think they know the story of student protest at Columbia in 1968, an event that has a central place in the history of that year, a time of convulsive political and cultural events, A Time to Stir will be a revelation.
Four hours of A Time to Stir were screened at a work-in-progress event at the
Toronto Film Festival in 2008, to good reviews. Production on the project continues
apace. Thus far more than three hundred and fifty interviews have been filmed,
and close to thirty thousand newly-discovered photographs have been archived.
Many hours of film footage and tapes of interviews recorded at the time have
also been located. The finished film has a projected length of ten hours.
