Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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      Figure 2.5. (continued)

      The goals of the ABC were threefold. First, the members of ABC wanted to express their dismay with what they viewed as the president’s inaction on the issue of South African divestment. Second, they wanted to highlight their commitment to raising the issue to the larger student body and all those who would listen. Third, ABC wanted to “sensitize as many individuals as possible to the need for serious moral commitment against racism throughout the world.”106 When the internationally acclaimed New York Times picked up the story, it brought light to the students’ struggle to sensitize the masses.107

      At one point, there were hundreds of students and some faculty members outside the building observing the demonstration. Some disagreed with the tactics of the protesters but sympathized with their cause. One observing student said: “It’s just not pragmatic” to take over buildings, and suggested that the ABC “had to do something to keep the issue going.” Another student opined: “Just in itself, it’s tremendous.… It was great to see something like that happening here, seeing this place break out of its complacent attitude.” Regarding the ABC and SDS’s efforts, one student commented to a reporter that “the ABC guys are really concerned and committed on this issue.… The SDS seems to be more of a bandwagon-type group.” Still other students, frustrated with the disruption, unsuccessfully attempted to physically remove the demonstrators by attempting to open the doors.108 Under the leadership of student Rod Hamilton, who was in charge of security, the ABC protected their position and rebuffed the would-be intruders.

      ABC evacuated New South twelve hours after the initial takeover. The group’s leaders claimed that the demonstrators did not leave for fear of punishment or arrest but rather because “the administration has already began to shift the emphasis on our protest away from [the] moral issues of South Africa to the legitimacy of our tactics.”109 Such a statement not only pointed up the seriousness of the students, but it also illustrated a strategy in black student activity whose origins dated back to the earliest parts of the modern Civil Rights Movement. That strategy was for demonstrators to focus onlookers’ attention on the issue without making the methods a distraction.

      Interestingly, years later, Henry revealed an often overlooked facet of protesting: boredom. Drama did not fill every moment of the demonstration (and most actions). He and the other students realized that after having made the statement against apartheid and refusing to leave when the administration ordered them to, there was not much to do inside the building besides study. If the intention was to draw attention to immorality of apartheid and the collusion of the university with the racist system, then they accomplished that goal, reasoned ABC leaders. With that in mind, they decided to leave that night, after twelve hours, making the demonstration “a tidy event,” as Henry recalled.110

      ABC leadership asserted that the takeover was only part of their larger movement. Although the students faced disciplinary consequences, they refused to recognize any punishment that the university imposed. “We cannot accept in good faith any so-called moral judgments made by such an immoral institution,” Rod Hamilton of the ABC stated.111 Realizing that a single takeover was not enough to change policy, the student activists explained: “The battle for disinvestment will not be won quickly, but it will be won.”

      In a bold act, the white student members of the joint student-faculty disciplinary committee refused to participate in proceedings that would punish the demonstrators. Eventually, five black demonstrators were punished just as the spring break began and therefore did not miss any classes or activities. Perhaps more students would have been punished, but the disciplinary committee claimed that it could not identify any others. Although the black student demonstrators did not receive amnesty, they faced little to no punishment for their act of rebellion.112 Inasmuch, the university averted a potential crisis like those that occurred at universities around the nation.

      Princeton, unlike some of the other universities that featured student disruptions, had voted—without the impetus of demonstrations—to not give academic credit for Reserved Officer Training Corps courses and to establish an Afro-American Studies program. With respect to the anti-apartheid protests, the administration wisely did not call police onto campus, which may have hastened or even provoked violence. Finally, the administration, particular President Goheen, reasoned with students regarding their demands that Princeton become a more “moral” institution. At some institutions, administrators refused to reason or negotiate with respect to any university policy.113

      While disruptive, the activity of the black students who demonstrated improved the university. Gerald Horne, a demonstrator at Princeton in the late 1960s, believed that black students had to act “to put the elites [powerful white institutional officials] on alert that we [students] were not inert.”114 Indeed, in the twentieth century, black students moved from matriculation to activism at Princeton. Horne has noted that “activism is one of the best teachers.” His fellow activist, Henry, agreed: “When you come to a place like Princeton, your world vision expands,”115 which ideally should happen to all college students. In the case of Henry, Horne, Hamilton, and the other activists in ABC, their ideas of blackness expanded beyond the borders of the United States as Pan-Africanism gripped the progressive black activist community. In this case, activism taught students that their presence was not an end goal and that they should think outside of themselves. Activism also taught an elite white institution to improve its relationship with black people domestically and abroad.

      The student activists did not get all they wanted but they made progress for black people on and off campus. In 1969, after graduating, ABC leader Brent Henry campaigned for and won a position as trustee of Princeton. Black students were infiltrating every level of the university. Henry commented on the liberal nature of some of the board members when he joined the body after graduating in 1969.116 Surely, some of the board members had been in their positions for years and had been aware of the experience of black students. Nearly all of the board members were alumni, so they saw the travails of the few black students during their time in school. The late 1960s must have been the moment that captured the officials’ desire to act.

      Princeton did not observe the constant demonstrations that other institutions did during the period. The protesting black students at Princeton did not go as far in their actions as other students, in part because of the presence and advice of Carl A. Fields. Henry explained that Fields acted primarily as a mentor to the students but also as a liaison to the administration, which allowed for a certain amount of understanding between officials and students that was not always available at other institutions.117 About the small number of confrontations on campus, Fields said that one of his objectives was to “change the nature of confrontation” regarding black students and administrators. He pointed out that “there are a hell of a lot ways to be militant,” and that building takeovers, strikes, and physical displays were only a few methods.118 Noting that students at Princeton were not necessarily less militant than their peers at Northwestern University or San Francisco State College, he commented that “one of the reasons we haven’t had any more confrontations than we’ve had is not because our guys (black men on Princeton’s campus) are any more passive” than other campus activists “but because the University has created mechanisms that make confrontation unnecessary.” That served both Princeton administrators and students well because they could work toward agreement on issues in a less dramatic way than was common elsewhere.

      By 1970, the president of Princeton and all other school officials had an awareness of the experience of black students and felt pressure to improve the situations of the students on campus. Goheen remarked in his annual report of 1968–1969 that “differences in [the] previous experience and background between white and black students are likely to produce suspicions, hostility, and forms of intolerance.”119 Speaking to the behavior of white students, the liberal president wrote: “Too few white students, I think, have an adequate conception of the black students’ situation on campus.” He could have said the same about white СКАЧАТЬ