Amy had underestimated the magnitude of the discontent, the epidemic of unhappiness that had spread through the ranks of the non-SDS majority on campus, most of whom seemed headed for nervous breakdowns as the unwinnable war thundered on and the Nobodaddies in the White House and Low Library kept speaking their dark words and issuing their obscure laws, and as Ferguson ran alongside the crowd that was running to the park, he understood that the students were possessed, that their souls had been taken over by the same fusion of anger and joy he had witnessed in the streets of Newark last summer, and as long as no bullets were fired, such a crowd could not be controlled. There were policemen in the park, but not enough of them to stop a gang of students from tearing down forty feet of the chain-link fence that surrounded the construction site as other students tussled with the outmanned guards, and there was David Zimmer, Ferguson noticed, and there was Zimmer’s friend Marco Fogg, gentle Zimmer and even more gentle Fogg were in the gang attacking the fence, and for a moment Ferguson envied them, wishing he could join in and do what they were doing, but then the feeling passed and he held his ground.
Almost a battle, but not quite. Skirmishes, flare-ups, shoving matches, cops against students, students against cops, students jumping cops, students kicking cops and pushing them into the dirt, one Columbia boy hauled off in the middle of it (white, non-SDS), charged with felonious assault, criminal mischief, and resisting arrest, and when more cops began descending into the park with their billy clubs out, the students left the site and headed back toward the campus. Meanwhile, the other crowd of students — the ones who had stayed behind — were now marching toward the park. The advancing group and the retreating group met in the middle on Morningside Drive, and when the retreaters told the advancers that their business in the park was done, both groups walked back to the campus and reassembled at the Sundial. There were about five hundred of them at that point, and no one knew what was going to happen next. An hour and a half ago there had been a plan, but events had overpowered that plan, and whatever happened next would have to be improvised. As far as Ferguson could tell, only one fact was clear: the crowd was still possessed — and ready to do just about anything.
A few minutes later, most of them were on their way to Hamilton Hall, where hundreds spilled into the lobby on the ground floor, a mass of bodies crammed into that small space as jocks jostled and pukes pushed back and more bodies poured in, everyone charged up and confused, so confused that the first act of the campus rebellion was the misguided, self-defeating error of locking the undergraduate dean in his office and holding him hostage (a mistake that was rectified the next afternoon when Henry Coleman was released), but still the students involved in the takeover of the building had the wherewithal to form a steering committee composed of three members from SDS, three from SAS, two from the College Citizenship Council, and one unaffiliated sympathizer and come up with a list of demands that set forth the aims of the protest:
1. All disciplinary action now pending and probations already imposed upon six students to be immediately terminated and a general amnesty be granted to those students participating in this demonstration.
2. President Kirk’s ban on demonstrations inside University buildings to be dropped.
3. Construction of the Columbia gymnasium in Morningside Park cease at once.
4. All future disciplinary action taken against University students be resolved through an open hearing before students and faculty which adheres to the standards of due process.
5. Columbia University disaffiliate, in fact and not merely on paper, from the Institute for Defense Analyses; and President Kirk and Trustee William A. M. Burden resign their positions on IDA’s Board of Trustees and Executive Board.
6. Columbia University use its good offices to obtain dismissal of charges now pending against those participating in demonstrations at the gym construction site in the park.
The doors of the building remained open. It was early afternoon on a normal school day, and as Rudd later told Ferguson, the SDS contingent felt they couldn’t afford to alienate the nonparticipating students by blocking their access to classes, which were still being held on the upper floors. They wanted to win those students over to their side, and it wouldn’t have made sense to do something that would have turned the majority against them. The building wasn’t “occupied” at that point, then, there was a sit-in taking place within the building, and as the day advanced and word got out about what was going on at Hamilton Hall, dozens of people who were not connected to the university began turning up, SDSers from other colleges, members of SNCC and CORE, representatives from various Peace Now organizations, and as those people arrived to lend their support, in came food, blankets, and other practical necessities for the people who would be spending the night in the building. Amy was one of those people, but Ferguson was busy taking notes and had no time to talk to her. He blew her a kiss instead. She smiled and waved back (one of the rare smiles she had given him in the past several weeks), and then he dashed off to the Spectator office in Ferris Booth Hall to write his article.
That night, the frail, short-lived alliance between SDS and SAS fell apart. The black students wanted to barricade the doors and shut everyone out of Hamilton until the six demands had been met. They were ready to make a stand, they said, and with talk circulating in the halls that guns had been smuggled into the building, the implication was that the stand they were talking about could be a violent one. It was five o’clock in the morning at that point, and hours of discussion had led to an impasse, the open door — closed door dispute could not be resolved, and now SAS was politely suggesting that SDS leave the building and occupy a building of its own. Ferguson understood the SAS position, but at the same time he found the split depressing and demoralizing, and he understood why SDS should have felt so hurt by the divorce. It was Rhonda Williams saying no all over again. It was his father saying all those repulsive things after the Newark riots. It was what the world had come to.
The irony was that without the SDS expulsion that morning, the rebellion at Columbia never would have spread beyond Hamilton Hall, and the story of the next six weeks would have been a different story, a much smaller story, and the big thing that eventually happened would not have been big enough for anyone to notice it.
In the minutes before dawn on April twenty-fourth, the banished SDSers broke into Low Library and barricaded themselves inside President Kirk’s suite of offices. Sixteen hours later, one hundred students from the School of Architecture took control of Avery Hall. Four hours after that, at two A.M. on the morning of the twenty-fifth, two hundred graduate students locked themselves inside Fayerweather Hall. At one o’clock in the morning on the twenty-sixth, a spillover group from Low Library took over Mathematics Hall, and within hours two hundred students and non-student radicals were in charge of a fifth building. That same night, Columbia announced that it was acceding to Mayor Lindsay’s request to suspend construction of the gym.
The university had shut down, and there was no activity on campus anymore that was not political activity. Low Library, Avery Hall, Fayerweather Hall, and Mathematics Hall were no longer a library and three halls but four communes. Hamilton Hall had been renamed Malcolm X University.