Archive for April, 2009
Barbara Bernstein
The morning of April 23, 1968, my boyfriend and I accidentally slept in. I awoke upset that we were missing a demonstration at the Sundial to stop the Morningside Park Gym. Rushing up Amsterdam Avenue we ran into a throng of students coming from the contested gym site. The fence around the construction site had [...]
Meredith Sue Willis
I’ve been reading a memoir by a friend of mine, a generation older than we are, who was born in Austria and escaped on a Kindertransport just ahead of the Holocaust. Her sense of herself in history is profound, and I’m thankful that my age cohort too can see itself in history. We [...]
Mitch Sisskind
First, I want to thank Hilton for the hard work he has done on putting the 68/08 event together. After not seeing Hilton for about 35 years it was great to meet up with him again at the Columbia Review reunion a couple of years ago. I have so much respect for Hilton as a [...]
Kathy Seal
After graduating in ‘69 I went to Paris where living for a year was very, very cheap. With help from Reid Hall, a Columbia grad friend and I found an apt. in the first arrondissement. I went to a few demos at the American Embassy, got through Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, worked cutting [...]
Thomas Wm. Hamilton
Looked at by most observers, people would probably expect my background to assure profoundly conservative values and opinions. I attended a military school before Columbia, winding up as editor of the school newspaper, editor of the school yearbook, valedictorian, and with the rank of Sergeant/Major. But as an undergraduate I picketed the [...]
Rashid Parker
If I want to speak to the Masters of this System and this Mindset of American Capitalism and Racism, this idea that bigger is always better, and that too much is never enough, this idea that has become a threat to American Democracy and to Life itself, what to speak of Liberty and Happiness; what [...]
St. Clair Bourne
St. Clair Bourne was born on February 16, 1943 in Harlem, New York. While attending Georgetown University in the 1960s, he became active in the peace movement and left college to join the Peace Corps. Stationed in Lima, Peru, Bourne became something of a local celebrity when he took on the editing and publishing duties [...]
Linda (Elovitz) Marshall
La plus ca change….It’s an aberrantly warm February day in a very strange winter as I write this. There’s barely been a day below freezing all year and then, suddenly, two feet of snow dumped onto the island of Manhattan. I’m sitting in a sidewalk café, Isola, writing this and I’m about 40 [...]
Steve Goldfield
By way of introduction, I arrived at Columbia in September 1964. In 1965, I participated in an anti-ROTC demonstration. I was a national member of SDS, but there was no Columbia chapter. We formed one in the spring of 1965; I think it was in John Fuerst’s fraternity. SDS, however, was not very active. The [...]
Michael Jacoby Brown
It was about four in the morning, April 30, 1968 and we were blasting “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” when the window in Fayerweather Hall lounge opened and a huge belly of a man appeared on the window sill. Then the rest of him landed. It was a New York City Policeman. Behind him [...]
