Hamilton Corridor, the constructing at Columbia College that protesters occupied early Tuesday morning, has been occupied a number of occasions by pupil activists over the previous half-century.
Listed below are a number of the notable moments of pupil protest on the constructing.
1968
The constructing, which opened in 1907, was the primary that lots of of scholars seized in April 1968 throughout protests over the Vietnam Struggle, racism and Columbia’s plans to construct a gymnasium in close by Morningside Park. College students barricaded themselves inside, stopping the performing dean, Henry S. Coleman, from leaving his workplace for one evening.
As demonstrators used furnishings to maintain Mr. Coleman inside, protesters who had been a part of an African American pupil group requested white college students within the constructing to depart. That created a separate protest for Black college students, because the white college students went on to display in different buildings on campus.
Per week later, the police entered the constructing by way of underground tunnels and cleared the scholars. Cops trampled protesters, hit them with nightsticks and dragged some down concrete steps. Greater than 700 folks had been arrested.
Throughout one other spherical of protests in Might 1968, about 250 pupil protesters occupied Hamilton Corridor once more. The police eliminated them from the constructing about 10 hours later.
1972
College students additionally locked themselves in Hamilton Corridor, which was named after Alexander Hamilton, the primary treasury secretary of the USA, throughout antiwar protests in 1972. Protesters took furnishings from lecture rooms and workplaces to make use of as barricades. In addition they locked doorways with chains as directors informed them to depart.
The police cleared the constructing of protesters after a few week, once more by coming into by way of an underground passage. Nobody was injured or arrested. However the college mentioned that the scholars can be prosecuted for prison trespass and contempt of a courtroom injunction that had forbidden the occupation of Columbia buildings.
1985
In 1985, protesters occupied Hamilton Corridor as they demanded that the college divest from corporations that had been doing enterprise in South Africa. The college was reluctant to conform.
Three weeks later, the scholars ended their occupation simply earlier than a choose ordered them to reopen Hamilton Corridor. Whereas there have been no ensures of any change in coverage, the scholars considered the protest as an ethical victory. Later that yr, Columbia’s board of trustees voted to promote all the college’s inventory in American corporations doing enterprise in South Africa.
1992
In 1992, college students occupied Hamilton Corridor in protest of Columbia’s plans to show the Audubon Theater and Ballroom, the place Malcolm X had been assassinated in 1965, right into a biomedical analysis advanced. The blockade lasted lower than a day.
