I was in New York last November when a dozen young women came marching down Broadway on the upper West Side, carrying flags with Arabic writing and banners, “Free Palestine!” They were laughing and singing, and I found the sight unpleasant. Earlier that day, in a nearby café, a longtime friend who’s a Rabbi told me, “This is the hardest time in my entire life as a Jew.”

That seemed an exaggeration, but five months later, in April of this year, the Atlantic published an issue with the cover line: “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.”

Student protests had begun at Columbia in March and were spreading fast across the country—the largest student protests since the 1960’s. When I’d seen the women marching, I thought back to the first student demonstration in which I’d participated, in 1964.

I was at UC Berkeley when CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was staging a nationwide protest against Lucky markets for failing to hire blacks, or Negroes as they were called then. There was a small Lucky market on the main street, Telegraph Avenue. Students from CORE started protesting by holding a “Shop-in.” They’d pile carts with food, and after a checker rang them up, they’d say, “Oh, I forgot my wallet,” and leave all the groceries there. At the end of the first day, the store was a shambles, with fruit, cans and bottles all over the floor. No one could possibly shop there, which was the point. But when my roommate and I arrived and saw this, we were uncomfortable. We supported the cause but squirmed at turning the store into a dump.

Around that time, young black guys started hanging out around Berkeley and were invited to parties. One asked me to dance, and when the record ended, said in a soft voice, “Ya know what it’s like? Bein’ a spade? I can’t get no job. I can’t get no decent place to live. Can’t go to no school like this. I could get shot any day…for nothin’.”

We danced one more slow number and I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room.

I thought about what my father had told me when he’d dropped me off at my dorm, one of the “new dorms,” that was called what seemed a propitious name, “Davidson Hall.” My father had warned me, “Don’t sign anything. Don’t join any kind of cause. We’ve seen how things people support when they’re young can be used against them when they’re older.”

Sign what? I thought.

I was living with three women in an apartment near campus, and we talked a lot about “civil rights,” especially the right for Negroes to vote. Steadily I began to feel I could support that cause, despite my father’s warning.

In the spring, a large demonstration was planned at the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco, which, it was alleged, had a policy of not hiring Negroes. Everyone we knew was going—it was the event of the semester. We were told to wear nice clothes, suits for the men, so bystanders could sympathize and identify with our cause. After arriving, we picked up hand-made picket signs and marched around and around the city block which the Sheraton occupied, greeting friends and gossiping. Around ten p.m., one of the leaders, Tracy Sims, a young black woman, grabbed a megaphone and said, “The hotel representatives are not negotiating in good faith. So we’re all—all of us—going to march inside and sit down in the lobby. Are you willing to get arrested now for what you believe in?”

“Yes!” roared the crowd, but I looked at my two girlfriends and we  mouthed, “No.” We weren’t up for that yet.

The key word that spring of 1964 was “committed.” “Are you committed—to civil rights, peace, equality for Negroes?” We became the committed generation, following what had been considered the apathetic or silent generation.

The following year, 1965, I was a grad student at the Columbia School of Journalism, and was surprised, looking around campus, that there were no signs of student activism. I asked other students, “Where do people go to hang out?” There was nothing like the Terrace at Berkeley, or the Med coffee house on Telegraph, where people went to hang out when they were between classes. All there was at Columbia was a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee shop across from the University that had only one counter with a dozen seats. When young people didn’t have classes, they disappeared into the local subway station or to nearby dorms.

Three years later, in 1968, when Mark Rudd became the leader of a student revolt at Columbia, I was married, living near the University, and reporting from New York for the Boston Globe. The trigger for that student uprising was that Columbia was planning to tear down housing in Harlem to build a new, state-of-the-art gym for the university. I was sympathetic to the cause, but now I was part of the “bourgeois capitalist press.”

More than a thousand students took part in demonstrations, and a smaller number occupied Hamilton Hall, which also was to figure in the 2024 protests at Columbia. In ’68, students didn’t just enter the building but set up camp in the office of the dean, Grayson Kirk. An iconic photo was taken of a student, David Shapiro, sitting in the dean’s chair at the dean’s desk, wearing dark glasses and smoking a cigar he’d found while rummaging through the dean’s belongings.

The photo was taken by a student and appeared the next week in Life magazine. It also appeared in the student newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator, with the caption, “Up against the wall…” a reference to what students heard the police yell when they entered Hamilton Hall and arrested the protestors: “Up against the wall, mother fuckers!” It was picked up and became the rallying cry of the demonstrators. “Up against the wall, mother fuckers!”

NEXT:  Part 2 – In 2024, another generation of students invade Hamilton Hall