Happy May Day
It’s a day to celebrate and recognize the contributions of the working class and workers' rights worldwide. The origins of May Day can be traced right back here to Chicago and the 1886 Haymarket Massacre and the struggle for the 8-hour day. As we do every year, family members will meet at Waldheim Cemetary this afternoon to picnic and lay flowers on the tomb of the Haymarket Martyrs.
It’s also day 213 of Israel’s war on Gaza with more than 34,500 Palestinians killed including 17,000 children. As we speak, Israeli warplanes are bombing Rafah and preparing for an all-out assault on the city. I hope the reporters covering the student protests at Columbia University don’t lose sight of that.
A servile mainstream media
I was attentively watching the live coverage of the NYPD siege on Columbia University’s campus last night, switching from CNN to ABC Prime and others. None of the special coverage of the NYPD crackdown had any explanation of what the protests were about.
Somehow they managed to push Gaza out of the picture and make the story all about the protest itself. There was no mention of Palestine, Gaza, or war crimes. No interviews with student protesters or their advocates. Near total airtime was reserved for a few students who felt uncomfortable with the crowds, the noise, the slogans, and lots of vapid chatter about “outside agitators” — as if the invading cops were checking student IDs before busting heads with their billy clubs.
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Talking last night with some of the students as I was watching cops climbing through a window to “liberate” Hamilton Hall, brought back vivid memories of the 1968 Columbia student strike. It was 56 years ago this week when hundreds of officers from the New York City Tactical Patrol Force, called in by Columbia President Grayson Kirk, poured onto the campus to clear Hamilton Hall.
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From Forbes:
The 1968 protests were principally organized by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a mainstay of the 1960s “New Left” movement, and Columbia’s Society of Afro-American Students. [I was the National Secretary of SDS and traveled from Chicago to New York to support the strike. — m.k.]
Several events spurred the mass protests in April 1968—including the university’s plan to build a segregated gymnasium in Morningside Park, a large public park bordering the majority-black neighborhood of Harlem.
Other students demanded Columbia sever its ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Department of Defense think tank heavily involved with American colleges as the U.S. escalated the Vietnam War.
Eleanor Stein, a law and human rights professor at the State University of New York, was among hundreds of students protesting the Vietnam War in 1968 on Columbia University's campus.
And if there hadn't been a movement like that, who knows how much longer the war would have gone on? So I think it was definitely worth it. And I think today it has already proven to be worth it because it's the students' demonstrations in all the different forms they're taking now and dozens of campuses around the country. — PBS
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Just saying…
I’m not implying any direct connection between the ‘68 student strike and the current protests. I talked with one student protester who said she had never heard of ‘68 strike leader Mark Rudd (one of my guests on Hitting Left this Friday.)
But there is a profound connection in this sense. Students and youth in every country are the first to rebel against injustice. In ‘68 it was the war in Vietnam and racial segregation in the South (and right next door in Harlem) that drove the revolt. Today it’s the real-time genocide and ethnic cleansing unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank and the complicity of our own universities in those horrors.
Will the circle be unbroken?
My show on Hitting Left this week will try and complete the circle between Columbia ‘68 and Columbia ‘24. My guests will be Mark Rudd and current Columbia student activist Ava Lyon-Sereno.
is this friday the 3rd or do you
mean 10th?