Columbia wouldn’t hesitate to call in the cops to drag the white students out of the buildings if necessary, but the black students in Hamilton Hall posed a more delicate and potentially more dangerous problem. If the police attacked them or handled them roughly while they were being arrested, the spectacle of white-on-black brutality could ignite the people of Harlem and send them rushing onto the campus in retaliation, and then Columbia would find itself at war with a vengeful black mob intent on ripping apart the university and burning Low Library to the ground. Given the anger in Harlem following Martin Luther King’s murder, violence and destruction on such a massive scale was more than just an irrational fear, it was a distinct possibility. A police action to expel the trespassers in the five buildings was planned for the night of the twenty-fifth/twenty-sixth (the same night Mathematics Hall was taken), but when undercover plainclothesmen started banging their nightsticks on the heads of the white-armband professors gathered in front of Low to protect the demonstrators inside, Columbia backed off and canceled the operation. If this was what the Tactical Patrol Force would do against the whites, what were they not prepared to do against the blacks? The administration needed more time to negotiate with the SAS leaders in Hamilton so its faculty emissaries could work out a separate peace that would spare the university from a Harlem invasion.
As for the white students, the general feeling in the Spectator office was that SDS had already gained the upper hand on the two most important issues that had launched the protest, for it was almost certain now that the university would detach itself from IDA and that the gymnasium would never be built. The students in the occupied buildings could have walked out unharmed at that point and declared victory, but the four other demands were still on the table, and SDS refused to budge until all of them had been met. The most controversial item was the one about amnesty (that a general amnesty be granted to the students participating in this demonstration), which turned out to be something of a conundrum for most people on campus, even members of the Spectator staff, who were almost unanimously sympathetic to the occupiers in the buildings, for if, as SDS was claiming, the university was an illegitimate authority that had no right to punish them, how could they expect that same illegitimate authority to exonerate the protesters for what they were doing? As Mullhouse jokingly put it to Ferguson one afternoon in his pretend cowboy twang, It’s a real doggone little head-scratcher, ain’t it, Arch? Ferguson scratched his head in response and smiled. You’re damned right it is, he said, and unless I’m mistaken, that’s precisely what they want it to be. Their reasoning is absurd, but by holding out on a point they know they can’t possibly win, they force the administration’s hand.
To do what? Mullhouse asked.
To call in the cops.
You can’t be serious. Nobody can be that cynical.
It’s not cynicism, Greg. It’s strategy.
Whether Ferguson was right or wrong, the cops were eventually called in at the close of the seventh day of the occupations, and at two-thirty in the morning on April thirtieth — an hour, as someone pointed out, when Harlem was asleep — the bust began. One thousand helmeted troops from the New York City riot police fanned out across the campus as a thousand onlookers stood in the chill and the damp of that eeriest of all black nights while others swarmed and howled and chanted No Violence! at the police and the blue-bands cheered them on and the white-bands and the green-bands tried to block the T.P.F. from entering the buildings, and the first thing Ferguson noticed was the animosity that existed between the police and the students, a mutual resentment that had nothing to do with the white-black antagonisms everyone had feared but white-white class hatred, the privileged students and the bottom-rung cops, who saw the Columbia boys and girls as rich, spoiled, anti-American hippie brats, and the professors who supported them were no better, pompous anti-war intellectual radicals, Reds, the rancid poisoners of young minds, so first they took care of evacuating Hamilton and getting the blacks out as smoothly as they could, and because there was no resistance from the proud, tightly organized students of Malcolm X University, who had voted not to resist and calmly let the police escort them through the tunnels under the building to the paddy wagons that were parked outside, not one punch was thrown at them, not one nightstick cracked down on any of their skulls, and Columbia, through no efforts of its own, managed to escape the wrath of Harlem. By then, the water supply to the other buildings had been shut off, and one by one the T.P.F. and their plainclothes undercovermen set about clearing Avery, Low, Fayerweather, and Math, where the occupying students were hurriedly reinforcing the barricades they had erected behind the doors, but each building had its own battalion of white-bands and green-bands in front of it, and they were the ones who got the worst of the pounding, the ones who were clubbed and punched and kicked as the cops plowed through them with crowbars to force open the locks and then charge in to bust up the barricades and arrest the students inside. No, it wasn’t Newark, Ferguson kept telling himself as he watched the police go about their business, no shots were being fired and therefore no one was going to be killed, but just because it wasn’t as bad as Newark didn’t mean it wasn’t grotesque, for there was Alexander Platt, associate dean of the college, being punched in the chest by a cop, and there was philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, he of the white sneakers and unraveling sweaters and zinging ontological quips, being banged over the head by a nightstick as he stood guard at the back entrance of Fayerweather Hall, and there was a young reporter from the New York Times, Robert McG. Thomas Jr., showing his press card as he mounted the stairs in Avery Hall and being ordered to quit the building, at which point he was slugged in the head by a cop using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, then shoved down the stairs and hit with a dozen billy clubs as he tumbled to the bottom, and there was Steve Shapiro, a photographer from Life magazine, being punched in the eye by one cop as another cop smashed his camera, and there was a doctor from the volunteer first-aid crew dressed in doctor’s whites being thrown to the ground, kicked, and dragged off to a paddy wagon, and there were dozens of male and female students being jumped by plainclothesmen hiding in the bushes and having their heads and faces clunked by saps, sticks, and pistol butts, dozens of students stumbling around with blood pouring from their scalps and foreheads and eyebrows, and then, after all the demonstrators in the buildings had been pulled out and carted away, a phalanx of T.P.F. warriors began systematically moving back and forth across South Field to clear the campus of the hundreds who remained, charging into crowds of defenseless students and pummeling them to the ground, and there were the mounted police on Broadway going at full gallop after the lucky ones who had eluded the clubs in the campus assault, and there was Ferguson, trying to do his job as reporter for his humble student rag, being hit on the back of the head by a billy club wielded by yet another undercoverman dressed to look like a student, the same head that had been stitched up in eleven places four and a half years earlier, and as Ferguson fell to the ground from the impact of the blow, someone else stomped on his left hand with the heel of a boot or a shoe, the same hand that was already missing its thumb and two-thirds of its index finger, and when the foot came down on him Ferguson felt the hand must have been broken, which turned out not to be true, but how it hurt, and how quickly it swelled up afterward, and how much, from that moment on, he came to despise cops.