For the past several weeks, SDS had been circulating a petition around campus demanding that Columbia withdraw from IDA, and now that fifteen hundred faculty members and students had signed it (among them Ferguson and Amy), SDS decided to confront both issues in a single action on March twenty-seventh, one week after the now forgotten pie-throwing caper. A group of one hundred students entered Low Library, the white domed building modeled on the Roman Pantheon that served as the university administrative center, and defied the injunction against indoor picketing and demonstrations by carrying placards with the words IDA MUST GO! written across them. Amy was there with the protesters, Ferguson was there in his capacity as witness-reporter, and for about half an hour the students wandered around the halls chanting slogans (one through a bullhorn), after which they went upstairs to the second floor and delivered the petition to a high-ranking university official, who assured them he would pass it on to President Kirk. The group then left the building, and the next day six of them were singled out for disciplinary measures, Rudd at the top of the list along with four others from the SDS steering committee, just six out of the hundred who had participated because, as one dean explained, they were the only ones who could be identified. For the next two weeks, the IDA 6 refused to meet with the dean, which was standard protocol for resolving disciplinary matters (a private discussion followed by what was supposed to be just punishment — as in most kangaroo courts), insisting instead that they be tried in an open hearing. The dean responded by telling them they would all be suspended if they didn’t come to his office. On April twenty-second, they finally went in to see him but would not discuss their involvement with the IDA demonstration. Upon leaving the office, they were all put on disciplinary probation.
In the meantime, Martin Luther King had been murdered. Harlem did what Newark had done a year earlier, but Lindsay wasn’t Addonizio and no National Guard or state police were called in to fire bullets at the demonstrators, and as Harlem burned just down the hill from Columbia, the craziness in the already crazy air on Morningside Heights was mounting into what Ferguson now felt had become a full-blown fever dream. On April ninth, the university shut down for the day in homage to King. Only one event was scheduled — a memorial service to be held at St. Paul’s Chapel near the center of the campus, which wound up drawing a crowd of eleven hundred people — and just as university vice president David Truman was about to deliver his eulogy on behalf of the Columbia administration, a student dressed in a jacket and tie stood up from his seat in one of the front rows and walked slowly to the pulpit. Mark Rudd — again. The microphone was immediately turned off.
Speaking without notes, without amplification, without knowing how many people could hear him, Rudd addressed the crowd in a subdued voice. “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King,” he said. “How can the leaders of the university eulogize a man who died while trying to unionize sanitation workers when they have, for years, fought against the unionization of the university’s own black and Puerto Rican workers? How can these people praise a man who fought for human dignity when they steal land from the people of Harlem? And how can these administrators praise a man who preached nonviolent civil disobedience while disciplining its own students for peaceful protest?” He paused for a moment and then repeated his opening sentence. “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King. We will therefore protest this obscenity.” Along with forty or fifty fellow protesters (both black and white, both students and non-students) Rudd then walked out of the chapel. Ferguson, who was sitting in one of the middle rows, silently applauded what had just happened. Well done, Mark, he said to himself, and bravo to you for having the guts to stand up and speak out.
Before Martin Luther King’s assassination, there had been one group (SDS) and two issues (IDA and discipline) propelling left-wing political activity on campus. Then came a second group (SAS), and then came a third issue (the gym), and within two weeks of the King memorial, the big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.
The Columbia gym, which also went by the alternative name of Gym Crow, was to be built on one of the parcels of land in Harlem Rudd had accused Columbia of stealing, public land in this case, the dangerous, dilapidated, never-used-by-white-people Morningside Park, a steeply descending crag of rocks and dying trees that started at the top in Columbiaville and ended at the bottom in Harlemville. There was no question that the school needed a new gym. Columbia’s basketball team had just won the Ivy League championship, it had entered the NCAA tournament ranked fourth in the country, and the current gym was more than sixty years old, too small, too worn out, no longer viable, but the contract the administration had negotiated with the city in the late fifties and early sixties was unprecedented. Two acres of the park would be leased to the university for the nominal sum of three thousand dollars a year, and Columbia would become the first private institution in New York history to build a structure on public land for its own private use. Down below at the Harlem end of the park, there would be a back entrance for members of the community leading to a separate gym-within-the-gym, which would occupy twelve and a half percent of the overall space. After pressure from local activists, Columbia agreed to augment the Harlem share to fifteen percent — with a swimming pool and a locker room thrown in for good measure. When H. Rap Brown came to New York for a community meeting in December 1967, the chairman of SNCC said: “If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down. And if they get nine stories built, it’s yours. Take it over, and maybe we’ll let them in on the weekends.” On February 19, 1968, Columbia went ahead and broke ground on the project. The next day, twenty people went to Morningside Park and put their bodies in front of bulldozers and dump trucks in order to stop work on the construction site. Six Columbia students and six neighborhood people were arrested, and a week later, when a crowd of a hundred and fifty turned out to protest the building of the gym, twelve more Columbia students were arrested. None of them was a member of SDS. Until then, the gym had not been an SDS issue, but now that the administration was refusing to reconsider its plans or even discuss the matter of reconsidering them, it quickly became one, and not only for SDS but for the black students on campus as well.
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.