Columbia building barricaded by students has long history of occupation
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 [May 01, 2024]
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) -The building that Columbia University protesters seized early
on Tuesday morning, Hamilton Hall, has a history of student takeovers
over the decades.
The current demonstration on the Ivy League campus in Manhattan echoes
those past protests, almost all of which took place in April as well.
Some activists have said they studied them for lessons on tactics and
strategy.
The eight-story 1907 campus hub today houses undergraduate classrooms as
well as the classics, Germanic languages and Slavic languages
departments, according to the Columbia website. Here are some of the
notable instances when past student activists occupied Hamilton Hall:
1968
Hundreds of students held a demonstration on April 23, 1968, to protest
the Vietnam War as well as Columbia's plans to build a gymnasium in
nearby Harlem that activists claimed would effectively be segregated.
After marching to the gym construction site and tearing down protective
fencing, protesters returned to campus and barricaded themselves inside
Hamilton Hall, preventing the acting dean from leaving his office,
according to an online exhibition curated by the university's libraries.
By the next morning, Black students – who renamed the hall "Malcolm X
Liberation College" – asked white students to leave to ensure their
specific grievances were heard. The white students moved their
demonstration to other buildings on campus.
After a week-long occupation, the university called in the police. The
Black students at Hamilton Hall left peacefully, heading straight to
police vans waiting to take them into custody; students in other
buildings, however, violently clashed with officers as they were dragged
outside. Many students suffered injuries, and hundreds were arrested.
1972
Students locked themselves inside Hamilton Hall for a week in April 1972
during more antiwar protests, using furniture to barricade the doors.
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Protesters stand on a balcony of Hamilton Hall, where students at
Columbia University have barricaded themselves inside as they
continue to protest in support of Palestinians, despite orders from
university officials to disband, or face suspension, during the
ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group
Hamas, in New York City, U.S., April 30, 2024. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Police officers cleared the building after entering in the early
morning via an underground passageway. No one was injured or
arrested, according to a contemporaneous New York Times account.
1985
About 150 students blockaded Hamilton Hall for nearly three weeks in
April 1985, demanding that the university end indirect investments
in South Africa because of the country's racist apartheid policy.
The protesters, who renamed the building "Mandela Hall" after
then-imprisoned opposition leader and future South African President
Nelson Mandela, ended their demonstration on the same day that a
judge ordered students to remove chains and padlocks from the hall's
front doors.
1996
About 100 students occupied Hamilton Hall for four days to demand
the university create an ethnic studies department, while a handful
of students also staged a hunger strike that lasted two weeks.
The protesters and the school eventually reached a settlement to end
the occupation, which included a pledge from Columbia to hire more
minority faculty members and to give dedicated space to Asian and
Hispanic studies, according to a Times article published at the
time.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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