Ripples From a Protest Past

Walking past the heavy wooden doors of Willard Straight Hall that April afternoon in 1969, Ed Whitfield felt relieved. For 36 hours he and other members of the Afro-American Society had occupied Cornell University’s student union, and now, with the tense standoff over, the lanky sophomore was leading his fellow protesters out into the cool Ithaca air.

In his left hand, he gripped notes he had taken during the negotiations with administrators to end the occupation; in his right, a loaded rifle, a 7.65-millimeter Argentine Mauser.

As he and other armed students left the building, a crowd of students, reporters, and other onlookers seemed stunned.

“Oh my God, look at those goddamned guns,” said Steve Starr, a photographer for the Associated Press, who snapped a picture of the dramatic departure, a shot that would win a Pulitzer Prize.

Looking back, Mr. Whitfield, now 66, says he never expected to become a symbol, one that is both celebrated and derided. As the group’s president, he was focused on the safety of the other black students and himself.

“We wanted to make our leaving a public activity for the sake of our own protection,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking what the photographs would look like.”

Yet that iconic photo has become something of a Rorschach test.

To some it shows a victory to be celebrated, a moment when higher education started listening to African-American students and offered them an opportunity to help shape their own academic experiences.

To others it is a deplorable example of administrators capitulating to physical intimidation, an event that ultimately helped enshrine a culture of political correctness and sensitivity to challenging ideas about race and other topics on campuses.

While there’s little consensus on what the volatile mix of guns, racial politics, and national attention meant at the time, the Straight crisis, as it is known, was a watershed event for higher education. It helped shape the thinking of such influential scholars as Allan Bloom, the philosopher, and Martin E.P. Seligman, the psychologist. It spurred wealthy conservative donors to back efforts that represented their values in academe. And, according to historians, the protest at Cornell was a harbinger of today’s campus debates about free speech and racial inclusion, with implications for resurgent protests like those at the University of Missouri last fall.

“The parallel is that black students and their allies have lost faith in the ability of faculty and administrators to bring about change that is going to make their campus and academic environment beneficial to them,” says Ibram X. Kendi, an assistant professor of African-American history at the University of Florida who has studied black-student activism in the 1960s. “After losing that faith, they felt it was on them to make the university a better place by any means necessary.”

In the dawn hours of Saturday, April 19, 1969, members of the Afro-American Society began entering the Straight, as the building is known. Though the protest is often recalled as an armed takeover, students did not carry rifles and shotguns when they arrived. Those would come later.

The students did cause a ruckus. It was parents’ weekend, and the student union was housing several moms and dads who had come to visit. The protesters roused them from their sleep, ushered them to a garbage room at the back of the building, and forced them out, according to Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. That 1999 book by Donald A. Downs, now a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, provides a detailed account of what happened at Cornell.

As word of the occupation spread, a group of Delta Upsilon fraternity brothers tried to force their way inside, presumably to retake the building. The black students, who numbered more than 80, repelled the white interlopers.

But that incident, along with a fear that the police would try to seize the Straight, prompted the Afro-American Society to sneak in about 15 firearms for self-protection, writes Mr. Downs.

As some of the occupiers point out today, hunting is a popular pastime in upstate New York, and firearms were legal and ubiquitous. The shooting deaths of three black student protesters a year earlier at South Carolina State University by highway-patrol officers weren’t far from Mr. Whitfield’s mind either.

Zachary W. Carter, who participated in the occupation, says the original plan was for a “peaceful sit-in,” but the situation quickly escalated. If the Afro-American Society members had marched in with guns at the start, he says today, he probably wouldn’t have joined in when he was a freshman.

Other participants emphasize how at the time they saw the occupation as part of a greater cause.

“I’ll borrow a phrase from New Hampshire, ‘Live Free or Die,’” says Thomas W. Jones, who was outspoken on campus at the time. “So that was what was in my mind. I was fully committed. What was happening on campus at Cornell was part of a much broader context, and that fight was about fundamental human rights and dignities for African-Americans.”

By Saturday night, when Cornell’s administration learned that the occupiers had firearms, a delicate situation became even more difficult for President James A. Perkins. Administrators began negotiating with the Afro-American Society, with a peaceful resolution being the overriding goal.

Perkins, who died in 1998, had been working for months alongside his colleagues to meet a host of the activists’ demands, some of which echo those of student protesters today: better mental-health services for minority students, more minority faculty and students, and professors sensitive to black perspectives.

While the institution as a whole was receptive, the reaction by a few faculty members was, “How dare any students demand that faculty make changes, let alone these black students who should just be happy to be here,” says Frank R. Dawson, who was a freshman and self-described member of the “infantry” during the takeover. “They finally have an opportunity to take advantage of this wonderful education. Why don’t they just shut their mouths and be quiet and assimilate and be thankful?”

In his book, Mr. Downs shows that Perkins and other professors were committed to racial inclusion on the campus and in some ways were ahead of their time. In 1963, when Perkins became president, he started the Committee on Special Education Projects to recruit more black students, especially those from poor city neighborhoods, and support them while on campus. With help from that program, the number of minority undergraduates grew from eight in 1963 to 250 in 1968-69. (Cornell had about 10,000 undergraduate students that year.)

But the university, like most, was unprepared for the growing radicalism among white and black students alike.

In 1968 the Afro-American Society, fueled in part by a growing national black-power movement and the unrest after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, pursued increasingly aggressive tactics. One of them included a forced takeover of the economics department after accusing a visiting lecturer of teaching racist views. Foreshadowing debates during the Straight crisis, the Cornell chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the administration had ignored standard policies protecting academic freedom in settling the case against the instructor.

Perhaps the most contentious question was what direction a new black-studies program would take. The administration was largely supportive of an academic effort focused on African and African-American perspectives, but the debate hinged on how independent it would be from the university’s departmental structure and what approach it would take in teaching a highly political topic.

Students like Mr. Whitfield, who had come to Cornell on a scholarship from Little Rock, Ark., wanted a program that would teach them practical skills to help confront urban poverty and other societal ills facing black neighborhoods.

“We wanted to make sure that our experience at the school was going to be useful in terms of the kind of social transformation we wanted to see outside the school back in the communities that we’d left,” says Mr. Whitfield, who was studying math and philosophy in an experimental undergrad-to-Ph.D. program. “There was this boiling civil rights and black liberation going on in our own communities that we were wanting our experience in the college to remain a part of.”

Some professors, Mr. Downs writes, were concerned that the students’ proposed program would be academically unsound and politically slanted.

With that debate simmering, a provocative act of vandalism sparked the rebellion. In mid-April, a wooden cross was set aflame outside Wari house, a dorm for African-American women. The culprits have never been identified, and Mr. Downs’s book quotes former administrators who accused black students of carrying out the crime to stir up outrage. While finding that hypothesis in the “realm of possibility,” Mr. Whitfield says that he was never told about such a plan and that the Afro-American Society certainly never sanctioned it.

Regardless of who was responsible, the burning of a cross, an act that historically preceded violence against African-Americans, helped fuel the siege mentality inside the Straight.

On April 20, worried about a potentially explosive situation, Perkins and his administration gave in to most of the Afro-American Society’s demands, including allowing the students to leave the building armed, which they had argued was for their own protection, and granting them amnesty for seizing the Straight, as well as for earlier protests.

The protesters made no specific demands about the future shape of the black-studies program. But they and some historians call the Straight takeover a catalyst to its creation — and its initial design as largely autonomous.

“What happened at Cornell provided a model for black studies, which is something they gained during the protests,” says Stefan M. Bradley, an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University who has studied black-student activism. “That became a model years down the road.”

Mr. Bradley and other scholars also credit the Straight takeover and other prominent protests of the time, like the student occupation at Columbia University in 1968, with ushering in a broader definition of shared governance to include more student voices.

Of course one crucial element makes the Straight occupation stand out from other student protests: the occupiers’ rifles and shotguns.

In response, New York’s Legislature would eventually pass a law banning guns on campuses — an ironic move, notes Mr. Kendi of the University of Florida, now that several states today have approved concealed carry at colleges in the name of public safety.

But the law was only one small repercussion of that public display of firearms on a college campus. To many on and off campus, the deal Perkins and the administration struck seemed like capitulation, and the implied threat of force challenged fundamental notions of what a university is: a place where disagreements are settled with reason and where physical intimidation should not shut down the free exchange of ideas. What’s more, the image of the armed black students, especially taken out of context, touched a raw nerve with the American public.

“Those black faces and huge guns agitated the many fears many Americans had been accruing after four straight years of violent urban rebellions and black-power protests,” says Mr. Kendi. “It not only sent shock waves across America. It sent waves of fear across America.”

That mix of national attention and a divided campus set the stage for a crisis few colleges have ever experienced.

“Cornell University has three hours to live.”

Those words echoed from the radio, broadcast by WHCU, Cornell’s station. The intent of the dramatic announcement was unclear. Was it a metaphor? A call to action to spur more student occupations? A deadly threat?

It was two days after the end of the takeover, and Mr. Jones, who had participated in the Straight occupation, decided to give a searing radio speech that remains controversial to this day. In it, he called Perkins and several Cornell faculty members racist, and then said the president and two others “are going to die in the gutter like dogs.”

The university, still in chaos, did not need that. Perkins had tried to reassert control by, among other things, barring firearms and disruptive protests on campus, yet law-enforcement officials were poised to take over the restive university, which by now was national news. “Cornell Negroes Seize a Building,” said a headline on the front page of The New York Times. “Universities Under the Gun,” blared a Newsweek cover that featured the now-famous photo.

Meanwhile, the faculty fiercely debated whether to approve the administration’s deal to give the Afro-American Society members amnesty. Rumors flew of other possible occupations, and the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which had supported the occupation of the Straight, organized a meeting of thousands of students in Cornell’s Barton Hall to hear speeches about racism and what action to take if professors abandoned the deal.

With his radio address, Mr. Jones had tossed a rhetorical firebomb into the turmoil. In 2009 he told the Cornell Alumni Magazine his assertion that Cornell “has three hours to live” was a “metaphorical statement.” In an interview with The Chronicle, he declined to discuss the details of what happened in 1969, saying that he is writing his autobiography and will share them there.

Members of the Afro-American Society did not support his comments at the time. Mr. Whitfield says Mr. Jones’s radio speech and another equally militant one to the people in Barton Hall were “incredibly dangerous.”

Whatever the intent, some professors took the threats seriously and left their homes, taking their families to hotels for safety.

After Mr. Jones’s speeches and under a threat of retaliation, the faculty reversed itself and voted overwhelmingly on April 23 to support amnesty for the students and to give students more voice in university governance. Some professors told Mr. Downs they had acted out of fear, in hopes of restoring order.

But a small group of professors had had enough. To them, the administration had allowed students to intimidate faculty decision-making and hamper professors’ ability to freely express opinions, eroding the university’s core values: academic freedom, open inquiry, and the intellectual pursuit of truth.

Some would eventually leave Cornell for these reasons. Among them was Martin E.P. Seligman, an assistant professor of psychology who would become regarded as the “father” of positive psychology. He declined an interview with The Chronicle but shared a chapter of his planned autobiography, “A Positive Psychologist,” that deals with Cornell.

He maintains that the majority of faculty members abandoned their principles by surrendering to the students’ demands. “Giving up the freedom to teach what one believes, giving in to violence,” he says, “this is not what a university is about.”

Mr. Seligman writes that he eventually left Cornell after he found himself self-censoring in a lecture that dealt with a controversial theory by Arthur R. Jensen, a Berkeley scholar, on race and intelligence. After that moment, he writes, “I know that the time for me to leave Cornell had come.”

As a result of the contentious debate among Cornell’s faculty members, long-held friendships were ruptured, some permanently.

“Those times brought out the worst in all of us,” says the political scientist Andrew Hacker, who was a professor in the government department, which fractured as a result of the campus debate. “It was posturing, on the left and on the right. You’re with our black brothers; you’re in favor of academic freedom; it’s the decline of Western civilization. We were all posturing.”

Two years after the crisis, Mr. Hacker left for Queens College of the City University of New York, where today he is an emeritus professor. His departure wasn’t related to the events of April 1969, but he says they helped shape his thoughts on race relations. He would later explore those ideas in his critically acclaimed 1992 book, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

The crucible of Cornell in 1969 helped forge the career paths of other noted scholars. Among those who resigned in protest over how the administration handled the crisis were Allan Sindler, a chairman of the government department who would later lead the public-policy school at Berkeley; Donald Kagan, a historian who left for Yale and in the 1990s became a controversial figure in a public battle over the teaching of Western-civilization courses there; and Allan Bloom, the philosopher and social theorist.

Of them all, Bloom, who died in 1992, most shaped discussions about colleges today. In his controversial 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, he offers the Cornell crisis as the prime example of how the liberal arts have been perverted. Universities like Cornell, he wrote, gave in to an ideology of multicultural relativism, no longer valuing the exploration of the more universal truths exemplified by Plato and Socrates.

Almost 20 years after the book’s publication, Bloom’s ideas — and his experience at Cornell — continue to shape the thinking of some of higher education’s most prominent scholars.

“Even though I didn’t live through the crisis itself, it did affect me,” says Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist and author of The End of History and the Last Man.

Mr. Fukuyama, a Cornell graduate and Stanford University professor, says Bloom was an early mentor whose emphasis on deeper truths still rings true.

“Higher education has been affected for some time by political correctness,” he says. “You have these social issues like race, gender, ethnicity, and identity politics, and now it’s gay marriage and a lot of other things, which are all important social issues. They are questions of great meaning to various groups in the society, but the importance of them tends to get magnified in the fishbowl of a university setting. It displaces interest in the more enduring questions.”

Another onetime student of Bloom’s has a different take on the lasting impact of the professor’s ideas.

Mr. Whitfield, the former Afro-American Society president, describes dinners with Bloom during which the professor tried to persuade him to be a philosopher and not an activist, a choice the former student radical says didn’t have to be an either/or.

“Allan Bloom said we destroyed the university, we destroyed academic freedom, and I’m going, The university looks likes it’s pretty healthy still,” says Mr. Whitfield. “The academy is still intact despite what we said.”

At Cornell today, the legacy of the Straight crisis still holds sway. In 2009 at the 40th anniversary of the protest, then-President David Skorton said the incident had “changed Cornell, and to some extent American higher education.” He gave the speech at the college’s Africana Studies and Research Center, the descendant of the much-debated black-studies program that started in 1969, the same year as the Straight occupation.

For black student activists at Cornell, the story of the Straight takeover is empowering, says Amber Aspinall, the political-action chair of Black Students United, a Cornell student group. In November, the group issued seven pages of demands to the administration on how to improve the racial climate at Cornell. Some of them could have been copied almost verbatim from the Afro-American Society of 1969. Ms. Aspinall, a junior, says the administration has so far been responsive to the students.

Kent L. Hubbell, Cornell’s dean of students, says the administration tries to be proactive in creating a constructive dialogue with student activists, a lesson gleaned in part from the Straight takeover. Mr. Hubbell, who was a senior at Cornell in the spring of 1969, says the crisis is never far from his mind. His office sits above the doors where the members of the Afro-American Society made their historic exit. “I’m reminded every day of what happened at the Straight.”

He says one of the key lessons of that event was President Perkins’s “forbearance” toward the black protesters inside the Straight, which included not calling in the police.

Not everyone agrees on that lesson.

Perkins resigned two months after the crisis in the face of a rising backlash from Cornell’s faculty and Board of Trustees.

One former trustee, John M. Olin, a Cornell alumnus and industrialist, saw the administration’s decisions about student conduct and other issues as indicative of a much wider problem within academe.

The Straight crisis was “one of the spurs,” though not the principal one, that caused him to dedicate his foundation to supporting the study and teaching of free enterprise at American colleges, says James Piereson, who served as executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation from 1985 to 2005. The foundation, which awarded some $370 million before shutting down 11 years ago, established a host of conservative think tanks and law programs.

But a conservative backlash isn’t the only repercussion from the takeover.

In his book, Mr. Downs, who was also a Cornell undergraduate at the time of the Straight crisis, is sympathetic to Perkins and the administration for trying to help right, in a small but significant way, centuries of racial oppression and inequity.

Yet Mr. Downs, a scholar who has written extensively on the First Amendment, ultimately sides with those like Bloom who left Cornell. He says that in 1968 and early 1969, the president and others had given the black activists deferential treatment in the name of fighting racism, forgoing campus rules and failing to support professors who disagreed with the Afro-American Society. As he puts it, the “social-justice mission” of the university trumped the “intellectual mission.”

It’s a problem that has metastasized today, he says, pointing to students’ disinviting controversial speakers, seeking “safe spaces” to avoid sensitive topics, and complaining about microaggressions by instructors.

Cornell in 1969 “lay the foundation, the basis, for these kinds of disputes,” he says. “Cornell was about the conflict between pursuing truth with academic freedom and the pursuit of social justice on campus.”

It’s “the idea that certain ideas were detrimental to a particular notion of social justice and therefore should not be tolerated.”

For the members of the Afro-American Society, the Straight takeover helped establish career paths and a lifelong dedication to social causes. They praise the Cornell administration for not resolving the occupation with force, which almost certainly would have led to bloodshed.

“We did not become Kent State before Kent State,” says Mr. Carter, the student activist who had expected a peaceful occupation. Today he is New York City’s chief legal officer, overseeing its law department.

Mr. Jones, the man who once publicly threatened administrators and faculty members over the radio, shed his radicalism long ago — and Cornell has embraced him. He is now a private-equity investment manager, philanthropist, and a trustee emeritus of the university. When he was appointed to Cornell’s board in 1993, several professors who were there in 1969 objected; Mr. Seligman, the psychologist, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the move was “obscene.”

Yet Mr. Jones has tried to make amends. Among other gifts to Cornell, he established the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial and Intercultural Peace and Harmony. This year, the prize, worth $5,000, was awarded to Mixed at Cornell, a multiracial and multiethnic student group.

Mr. Jones continues to support diversity efforts but says he wants broader coalitions of students on the campus. “All that we can do today is come together as a people of shared values and unite as a broader community that encompasses all of our diversities.”

While demands by black students on campuses today may resemble what the Afro-American Society pressed for, Mr. Jones sees only “shallow similarities because America is a dramatically different country now. We’re really not talking about basic human rights and Constitutional protections, because the laws have been changed.” America is different in “ways that we could only dream of back in the 1960s.”

He continues: “I’m sympathetic to students on campus, but to me the level of gravity of their complaints doesn’t compare to what we were fighting for in the ’60s.”

Mr. Dawson, another former Afro-American Society member who occupied the Straight, sees it differently. An associate dean at Santa Monica College and a television producer, he has made a documentary with a fellow Cornell graduate that draws a line from the Straight takeover and the student strike at San Francisco State University in 1968 to campus activism today.

The pair is screening the film, Agents of Change, at colleges and hosting discussions about it. Mr. Dawson says the goal is to educate students about what happened in the late 1960s and, he hopes, build lasting efforts to fight racism on campus.

“It’s particularly painful to see, despite the sacrifices that were made during that time, similar things could still be happening” today, he says.

Mr. Whitfield, who is featured in that famous photo, never graduated from Cornell.

He worked for a while at the now-defunct Malcolm X Liberation University, and today is co-founder of the Fund for Democratic Communities, a nonprofit in Greensboro, N.C., that focuses on community organizing.

Higher education hasn’t improved since 1969, says Mr. Whitfield, and his criticism echoes his concern about Cornell’s nascent black-studies program. “The academy should be grounded in reality and facilitate the efforts of those who want to make the world better,” he says. “That would mean sharing all of the tools of power in the world, as well as sharing the values necessary to properly employ those tools.”

He’s reluctant to give advice to administrators, perhaps remaining somewhat distrustful of them, but he does offer this: “Pay a lot of attention and be really, really real and genuine when listening. That’s the only way we’ll ever learn from each other.”

Easier said than done, as the events of April 1969 at Cornell show. But while times have changed — black student activists today seem to have shed some of the more radical tactics of the ’60s, and administrators may be less likely to engage in the appeasement that Perkins was criticized for — it’s a lesson that’s perhaps more relevant today.

As one historian, Mr. Kendi of the University of Florida, noted, Cornell in 1969 was in some ways a “climax” to an era of unprecedented student protest and activism. In 2015, the University of Missouri, where students forced out a president and grabbed headlines, inspired campus demonstrations all across the nation. Mizzou, he says, was a “trigger” to a social movement.

It’s a movement that history will ultimately judge, answering the question: Did today’s students and university leaders learn any lessons from the past?

Ian Wilhelm edits coverage of international issues and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @ianwilhelm, or email him at ian.wilhelm@chronicle.com.