Columbia's Hamilton Hall unrest falls on anniversary of the police arresting protesters at same building
On April 30, 1968, police arrested nearly 700 protesters who had occupied buildings at Columbia, including Hamilton Hall. Fifty-six years later, pro-Palestinian activists have taken over the same building.
The tumult at Columbia University has seized national attention, providing for many young Americans an emotionally fraught introduction to heated student activism. But the unrest engulfing the Ivy League campus in upper Manhattan is also intensely familiar, recalling one of the most dramatic chapters of the student protest movement of the late 1960s.
Fifty-six years ago, Columbia students furious over the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the school’s plans to build a segregated gym in nearby Morningside Park decided to take over Hamilton Hall, an academic building on the main campus. Overnight on Tuesday, pro-Palestinian demonstrators stormed and occupied the same building, with some drawing direct parallels between their activism and the legacy of 1968.
Black students on the balcony of Hamilton Hall at Columbia during demonstrations on April 24, 1968. Gene Kappock / NY Daily News via Getty Images“When I heard about the Hamilton Hall takeover in response to the student suspensions, I thought: Oh wow, this seems very much like what was happening back then. It’s very much like what I saw,” said Mark Naison, a Fordham University professor of history who participated in the 1968 demonstrations at Columbia. He was referring to the suspension of students at Columbia who defied Monday’s deadline to vacate a pro-Palestinian encampment set up to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
The sociopolitical conflicts at the root of the two protest eras are not precisely the same, however — and in today’s campus environment, students are also sounding the alarm about a sharp uptick in both antisemitism and Islamophobia since Oct 7. But some of the students involved in the activism at Columbia have nonetheless sought to present their political agitation as a direct continuation of late ’60s change-making.
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