Two days after the King memorial, Grayson Kirk went to the University of Virginia to deliver a speech on the occasion of Thomas Jefferson’s two hundred and twenty-fifth birthday (tempestuous as those days might have been, they were also thick with absurdities), and there the former political scientist who sat on the boards of several corporations and financial institutions, Mobil Oil, IBM, and Con Edison among them, the president of Columbia University who had succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower after the general left Columbia to become president of the United States, there for the first time Grayson Kirk came out against the war in Vietnam, not because the war was wrong or less than honorable, he said, but because of the damage it was doing at home, and then he uttered the sentences that would soon find their way back to the Columbia campus and add another dose of gasoline to the fire that was already starting to burn there: “Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.”
On April twenty-second, the day the IDA 6 were put on probation, SDS published a one-off four-page newspaper entitled Up Against the Wall! in advance of the rally scheduled for noon the next day, which was supposed to culminate in another indoor demonstration at Low Library, where dozens or scores or hundreds would show their support for the IDA 6 by breaking the same rule that had gotten the 6 into trouble. One of the articles was written by Rudd, an eight-hundred-and-fifty-word letter addressed to Grayson Kirk in response to the remarks he had made at the University of Virginia. It ended with the following three short paragraphs:
Grayson, I doubt if you will understand any of this, since your fantasies have shut out the world as it really is from your thinking. Vice President Truman says the society is basically sound; you say the war in Vietnam was a well-intentioned accident. We, the young people, whom you so rightly fear, say that the society is sick and you and your capitalism are the sickness.
You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism.
There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”
Ferguson was appalled. After the eloquent speech Rudd had given at the King memorial, it made no sense that he should commit such a bad tactical blunder. That wasn’t to say the substance of the text lacked merit, but the tone was obnoxious, and if SDS was trying to increase its support among the students, this kind of thing would only push them away. The article was an example of SDS talking to itself rather than reaching out to others, and Ferguson wanted SDS to win, for notwithstanding certain reservations about what was possible and not possible, he mostly stood behind the group and believed in its cause, but a noble cause demanded noble behavior from its advocates, something finer and more self-controlled than run-of-the-mill insults and cheap, adolescent shots. The pity of it was that Ferguson liked Mark Rudd. They had been friends since their freshman year (fellow New Jersey boys with almost identical backgrounds), and Mark had been impressive as chairman so far, so impressive that Ferguson had been blinded into thinking he could never make any mistakes, and now that he had slipped up with this Dear Grayson and motherfucker business, Ferguson was feeling let down, stranded in the awkward position of being against the ones who were against, which was a lonely place to be for a person who was also against the ones who were for.
Remarkably enough, Amy did not disagree with him. They were still in the midst of their two-bed cooling-off period and hadn’t seen much of each other in the past several days, but when Amy came home from her SDS meeting on the night of the twenty-second, she too was feeling let down, not just because of the article, which she admitted was both crude and childish, but because only fifty to sixty people had come to Fayerweather Hall for the last meeting of the school year, whereas most of the gatherings in the past months had drawn two hundred or more, and she was afraid that SDS was losing ground, that nearly every inch of the ground it had won had now been lost, and tomorrow was going to be a disaster, she said, a feeble last stand that would end in failure and shut down SDS at Columbia for good.
She was wrong.
SPRING 1968 (III). Never before in the annals of. Never before so much as thought. The widening gyre, and all at once everyone turning within it. Nobodaddy doubled over with stomach cramps, the shits. Hotspur hopping, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a horde. How who, who what, and all suddenly asking him: Why darkness & obscurity in all thy words and laws? The centre could not, the things could not, the horde could not not not do other than it did, but anarchy was not loosed, it was the world that loosened, at least for a time, and thus began the largest, most sustained student protest in American history.
Close to a thousand on the morning of. Two-thirds antis, gathered around the Sundial in the center of the campus, one-third anti-antis standing on the steps of Low, presumably to protect the building from assault, but also to smash and bash if it came to that. They had already published warnings, and the threat of fisticuffs had brought out a platoon of young professors prepared to break things up if necessary. Speeches to begin with, one by one the usual stuff, the SDS line, but SAS was there as well, the first integrated political rally at Columbia ever, and when Cicero Wilson mounted the Sundial to address the crowd, the newly elected president of SAS began by talking about Harlem and the gym, but moments later (Ferguson was shocked) he was attacking the white students. “If you want to know who they’re talking about,” he said, meaning racists, “you go look in a mirror — because you know nothing about black people.”
Amy, who was standing in front, interrupted him and called out: “What makes you think there aren’t white people on your side? What makes you think we aren’t all in this together? We’re your brothers and sisters, pal, and we’ll be a hell of a lot stronger if you stand with us when we stand with you.”
A bad beginning. Hats off to Amy for having spoken up, but a rocky start, and the confusion continued for some time. Low was impregnable. The doors had been locked, and no one was willing to break them down or start a fight with the security guards. Back to the Sundial, which was adorned with an inscription that read HORAM EXPECTA VENIET (Await the Hour, It Shall Come), but had the hour really come or was April twenty-third collapsing into yet one more missed opportunity? Another round of speeches, but everything had come to a standstill, and the energy of the crowd had evaporated. Just when it seemed that the rally was fizzling to its conclusion, however, someone yelled out, TO THE GYM SITE! The words struck with the force of a slap to the face, and suddenly three hundred students were running east down College Walk to Morningside Park.