Developing their minds without losing their soul: black and Latino student coalition-building in New York, 1965-1969.

This essay focuses on late-1960s African American and Latino student coalition-building on two New York City campuses: Lehman College in the Bronx and City College of New York in Harlem. Based on oral histories, archival documents and printed sources, the two case studies show parallels, contrasts, and linkages between New York City student activism and student movements in other regions. A tentative framework emerges for explaining why the black and brown student movements happened and why they became confrontational. In addition, these case studies provide an understanding of how black and Latino students worked together to fight institutional racism within and beyond their college campuses, the conditions that made these coalitions successful and the reasons they faltered. Black and brown students' class backgrounds and racial-ethnic identities played an important role in shaping the outcome of many late-60s campus radical initiatives, especially those that sought Black-Latino unity. In the late 1960s, young blacks and Latinos both shared impatience with the institutional racism of educational institutions and the resulting cultural marginalization of minority groups. The City College and Lehman College case studies indicate how interethnic political relationships on campuses tended to be strongest, and campus radicalism most impactful, when it was among younger African Americans and Latinos who shared the same class status and ethnic-group identity. (1)

Black Power and Brown Power politics, as well as international liberation movements, linked together several different factors that defined late-1960s African American and Hispanic campus radicalism: local campus protests and demonstrations for the establishment of programs in Black and Latino American Studies; increases in black and Latino student admissions, and an increase in the number of black and brown faculty members. In New York, these student movements illustrated the explicit tensions rooted in the limitations of Black Power ideology when it came to inclusion of and sensitivity to Latino perspectives and objectives.

This article's analysis of campus radicalism at City College and Lehman College responds to two trends in the historiography of the Black Power movement and late-1960s student activism in general. First, scholars contend that the Black Power movement and the advent of Black Nationalism inspired black separatist militants and confrontational student movements. Second, scholars theorize that the Black Power movement and its leaders influenced the student movements, and that the movements thus spread from historically black colleges and universities to predominately white campuses. The article's case studies, however, reveal some elisions within these approaches.

Within the first trend, there is a tendency to obscure the complexities of "Black Power" and to sometimes ignore altogether its complex relationship to "Brown Power." The Black and Latino student movements in New York emerged as part of the larger civil rights, Black Power, and Brown Power movements, and the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Black power in its various manifestations (depending on the group espousing it) was rooted in the black revivalism of Malcolm X, in direct-action protests, in the political and economic organizing campaigns of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and in the armed resistance against police brutality of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In addition, in the 1950s and 1960s militant African independence movements and student anti-Apartheid movements in South Africa had stirred black and brown students to action, producing a new "brilliant" generation of black intellectuals that rivaled the generation of the Harlem Renaissance. (2) Both the urban riots that followed the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and several other important figures within the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the failure of American liberalism shaped the development of student movements on college campuses. In Report from Black America, published in 1969, the activist and civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin observed that African American students in the early 1960s "began to get Blackenized." Black Power proponents such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), H. Rapp Brown, Amiri Baraka, and others called for "thinking black" and for moving beyond the double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois had outlined in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, and toward a new, independent, proud black identity. (3)

Scholars correctly note that Black Power ideology influencec a black movement ethos that rejected white student participation, favored separatism, and championed black agency in achieving desired goals. (4) However, scholars most often fail to recognize that although black students barred whites from participating in their movement, they often worked in solidarity with Latino students and Latino organizations. This is precisely what occurred in the student movements at Lehman College and City College of New York. Scholars who write about the Black Power movement commonly overlook the agency and participation of Latino students "in separatist black movements," which actually were not separatist, but rather what social scientists should more accurately call "black-and-brown" movements. This essay, then, presents a revision of Black Power scholarship and calls for social scientists to move beyond treating Latino militants in the same way that Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" was treated--which is to say, as "Invisible Activists." (5)

The historian Stefan Bradley, for example, argues that black students and residents in and around Columbia University made race a factor in the 1968 movement to stop Columbia from encroaching into Harlem, which Bradley inaccurately describes as a "black community." (6) Correction: it was Columbia's black students and Harlem's black and Puerto Rican residents who made race a factor; already by the 1930s Harlem (and the Bronx) was a community consisting of both blacks and Latinos (largely Puerto Ricans and some Cubans). (7) Similarly, Peniel Joseph focuses almost exclusively on black agency and black institutions as being decisive in the radicalization of black students (although he does acknowledge the role of international meetings, such as the Bandung Conference, and of the travels of some black intellectuals to Cuba in the early 1960s). (8) Still, Joseph and others writing about the Black Power movement ignore the radical legacy of the Chicano movement in California and Texas and its influence on both black and brown students. (9) In addition to the Black Power movement, the Chicano movement helped to radicalize both brown and black students in the late 1960s. By 1967, Lehman and City College of New York (CCNY) had small but militant cadres of black and Puerto Rican students who were attending school in increasingly black and Hispanic communities and were deeply influenced by these expansive trends. In the late 1960s, these young women and men came together to confront school administrators and state officials to transform higher education in North America.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were a number of programs for recruiting minority students, including CUNY's Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) and the College Discovery initiatives programs; the State University of New York's (SUNY) Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) program; and the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) of the state's private universities. Thus, thanks to both public and private college and university programs, the number of black and Latino students on New York campuses increased dramatically. A CUNY ethnic census released in December 1967 showed that CCNY had the "highest percentage" of black and Puerto Rican students among all of its four-year undergraduate and graduate degree-granting institutions. At CCNY, 87.3 percent of the matriculated students were white, 4.9 percent Puerto Rican, and 4.2 percent African American ("Others" made up 5.8 percent, and "No response" 0.8 percent). Of CCNY's non-matriculated students, 55 percent were white, 8.4 percent Puerto Rican, and 28 percent African Americans ("Others, 7.4 percent, and "No response," 1.3 percent). (10) In the spring of 1968, one hundred black and Latino students from poor neighborhoods entered Hunter College in the Bronx under the SEEK program. That year, CUNY officials renamed the school Lehman College, after its separation from Hunter. Dr. Benjamin Lapkin, program director at the Bronx campus, characterized SEEK as a "revolutionary program, one whose effect will ultimately shift the structure of our society." (11)

Basilio Serrano was a Puerto Rican student at CCNY in the late 1960s. He describes himself as a former "member and observer" of the Puerto Rican Student Union (PRSU). Student activists from several CUNY campuses (and most likely from private schools like Columbia and Fordham as well) had formed the PRSU in the fall of 1969. According to scholars Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, the group served as an "intercampus organization that linked the student movements in Puerto Rico and the United States." (12) Serrano recalls that the "New York area in the 1960s witnessed a remarkable surge in university student activism that was part of a general upheaval in U.S. society." The years 1967 and 1969 represented the height of the black and brown movements in New York with student organizations established on college campuses that became increasingly more militant in the face of campus racism, black activist lectures on campuses, and student political radicalism that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Between 1965 and 1970, at the same time that black and brown student populations were increasing, majority white students and faculty on college campuses were becoming radicalized around the Vietnam War. The new minority students created organizations with links to community activists, the national black and brown revolution, and, in some cases, international liberation movements. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., had a radicalizing, boomerang effect that spread from Harlem (at Columbia University and City College) to the Bronx (Lehman College and Fordham University), to Ithaca (Cornell University), back to Harlem, and once again to the Bronx. Two keys to understanding this phenomenon can be found by analyzing the development of student organizations on the affected campuses and by looking at how members of these organizations made a space for their views and politics in campus newspapers. The student activists co-opted student government association (SGA) funds as well as campus newspapers, and turned the latter into a critical component of the black-and-brown liberation movement infrastructure. SGA funds supported those activists who largely made their living by getting their message out on the campus speaker circuit, and the campus newspapers then reported on this work and on the tactics of like-minded activists both on and off college campuses. The CCNY and Lehman case studies of student activism demonstrate these patterns. Student activist organizations at these campuses used both SGA funds and the campus newspapers to advance their own agendas and that of the larger liberation movement. In the end a radicalizing boomerang effect defined the student movement, as seen in the specific confrontations that occurred at CCNY and Lehman.

KUBANBANYA

According to available sources, the students at Hunter College in the Bronx were the first to establish Kubanbanya, an "Afro-American society," before any other metropolitan college campus in New York (13) Lehman's campus newspaper, the Meridian, provides the best remaining written record of the society's founding on that campus. The word kubanbanya is Swahili for "those who are seeking." Established at Hunter College in 1965, Kubanbanya's membership was made up of black and Puerto Rican students. One of the organization's detractors, a female African American staff writer for the Meridian named Noelle Douglass, did some undercover investigative reporting into the group's activities, including a report on a November 1967 informational meeting. Douglass described the members of Kubanbanya as "bourgeois" blacks and Puerto Rican students from "Queens and North Bronx." (14) Its leaders, according to Douglass, were staunchly militant Black Power ideologues who denounced the more conservative strategies of such civil rights leaders as Roy Wilkin and Whitney Young for improving the condition of black people. (15) In the December 15, 1967, edition of the Meridian, contributor Ronald Walcott published an article in which he wrote that Kubanbanya "is composed exclusively of blacks because no whites have attempted to join." (16) One can only speculate that the students on campus viewed Kubanbanya's Puerto Rican members as being black, because of their solidarity with the militant blacks on campus and because of their appearance. The campus community, however, clearly considered Kubanbanya a black organization because it was guided by the Black Power ideology of the late 1960s, which was largely exclusionary of other peoples of the African diaspora present in U.S. urban communities, such as Puerto Ricans.

Participants in the Black Power movement juxtaposed black organizations against what they perceived as dominant white organizations, like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and they associated those organizations with the terms "black" or "Afro," or perhaps a Swahili word, like "Kubanbanya," in their name, as being in solidarity with the black liberation struggle. But where did that leave the equally African-influenced organizations that had begun to proliferate, as early as the late 1960s, in the multiethnic communities of color in, for example, metropolitan New York? Latino organizations, like PRSU and the Young Lords, to name two, included some African Americans members and that they overtly supported the various political movements of the era as well as the demonstrations that groups like the Black Panthers and Kubanbanya sponsored. The reverse was true for African Americans, who stood in solidarity with Latino groups, like the Young Lords. (17) As a Meridian reporter Noelle Douglass wrote in November 1967, Kubanbanya really was seeking to organize "black (including Puerto Rican) students" on the campus of Hunter College in the Bronx. (18) At a meeting of the group, one of the leaders had suggested taking over the college's student council as a strategy for promoting black power on campus. An article in the Meridian provides evidence that Kubanbanya had links to the Intercollegiate Afro-American Council. The 1ACC was a nationwide intercampus organization. (19) This researcher could find no additional references to the 1AAC, but links did exist between Kubanbanya and a similar organization at CCNY called the Onyx Society.

THE ONYX SOCIETY

Shortly after students at Lehman started Kubanbanya, African American students at CCNY approached Dr. Allen B. Ballard, an African American faculty member in the Political Science Department and dean of the college's SEEK program. The students wanted Ballard to serve as faculty advisor for a new student organization to be called Onyx. Ballard recalled that in 1966 the first members of the Onyx Society "w[ere] a group of comparatively conservative students, all admitted under regular City College standards, and all of whom felt some need to relate to one another socially and to do service in the community." (20) Very quickly, however, Onyx became a much more radical organization, seeking links with international liberation movements. In Ballard's words, "The leadership of the society had passed to more militant students--still regularly admitted-who began to draw for membership on the students specially recruited under City College's SEEK program." (21) In the late 1960s, CCNY had two newspapers--The Campus and Tech News. Much of what we know about the student movement at CCNY comes from these two papers. African American student Paul Simms, who had been a staff writer at Tech News, became the paper's managing editor for the 1967-68 school term.

In the fall of 1967, Onyx president Edwin Fabre ('68) led what was a Black Power-oriented Onyx Society, one with a distinctive African consciousness. Fabre referred to Onyx as an unabashedly black student organization, one rooted in a strong sense of its members' African origins: "The word black refers to people who were brought from Africa; who recognize their origins and appreciate them. Members of the Onyx Society are Black--not Negro." Fabre went on to say, "We concern ourselves with the members of the Black community. They are our concern because we are a part of them. And this is Onyx's business. This is what occupies nearly all of its time." (22) Fabre described the organization's goals as providing for the "cultural educational and social well-being and advancement of all black people." Onyx wanted to spearhead the "necessary changes on campus and off' to improve the conditions for black people. "For example, there is a lack of curriculum here at the College which has real relevance for Black students. There have also been no meaningful attempts to secure Black professors for teaching here. There are very few Black teachers here. Just think, if you did have such educators you'd be able to plan courses which would study intelligently Black Culture. This is what the Black Community needs." (23)

As part of its community outreach program, Onyx members ran a tutorial service. As Fabre explained: "The main purpose of the program ... is to bring those students who are behind up to grade level. In the process we try to give the children a realistic sense of identification with their black heritage." (24) In 1966, Onyx members conducted a clothing drive to assist Harlem families who had lost their homes to a fire, and they sponsored an event for Harlem residents that they called "The Symphony of the New World," which featured a largely African American orchestra. (25) Starting with the 1966 fall semester, Onyx began holding a "weekly forum," open to the community, where people could come to leam about and debate issues related to the civil rights and black liberation movements. Some Onyx members held militant views, and in the wake of several race riots that happened in the summer of 1966, they advocated organized direct action. At the time of the race riots, Onyx president Edwin Fabre was quoted as saying, "If you see a white man being beat up by forty Blacks you don't go help that white man. You become the forty-first Black beating up that white man. ... This is the reaction of the Black man who sees his brothers shot down in the streets. This is the reaction of the Black man being subjected to a racist war against non-white peoples in Vietnam. This is the reaction of the Black people whose very existence is being threatened. To some it's a question of whether we'll accept an inevitable American Auschwitz." (26) Serge Mullery ('69), chairman of the society's Education Committee, added that blacks needed to "think black." "We have to able to think for ourselves, to start a new way of thinking. We can organize an intellectual revolution." (27) Responding to Mullery's remarks, Gail Powell ('70), the corresponding secretary of Onyx, said, "You can't just have theory you've got to get right down to the community level if you want to teach. ... That's what we need. The community must take part in the programming. What is taught must be relevant to the community." (28) Fabre explained that the problem in New York City was that black and Puerto Rican people didn't have any control over resources and decision making. "We don't have any piece of the pie. We want our share. In a city that is fifty percent Negro and Puerto Rican we deserve half and we are going to get it." (29) To meet its goals and objectives, the Onyx society, using SGA funds, organized teach-ins and brought activists to campus.

In April 1967, for example, Onyx sponsored an all-day conference on black power and how to use the movement's principles to meet the community's political and educational needs. The conference's featured speakers were Donald Smith from CORE, Eugene Calender of the New York Urban League, and Isaiah Robinson of the Harlem Parents Association. Onyx president Edwin Fabre explained that the organization wanted to use the conference to develop "programs to aid the community," instead of "dialogue for dialogue sake." (30) Campus newspaper accounts provide evidence that Kubanbanya and Onyx members knew of one another and that they possibly attended each other's campus events, like the Onyx Society's all-day Black Power conference. The two campuses were close, and easily accessible using New York City's mass transit system. In Tech's December 5, 1967, edition, for example, Paul Simms published an interview he had conducted with Kubanbanya president Jonathan Irons. In the article, Irons insisted that Kubanbanya's goals were similar to those of the Onyx Society: "to portray a sense of [the] worth and dignity of black people" and a "positive self--image." He added that the members of Kubanbanya would "always be proud and stand up for our human dignity." (31)

After 1964, white student activism approached a new level, in tandem with increased levels of faculty assertiveness in the work of organizations like SDS. Between 1965 and 1968 on the campuses of colleges across the country, teach-ins now escalated to become sit-ins and then violent confrontations between administrators, faculty, and students over the presence of military recruiters on campuses. It was in this environment of hotly politicized confrontation that the white college administrators of New York's campuses began actively recruiting black and Latino students. The largest increases in minority student enrollments occurred between 1967 and 1971. (32) At the time, according to former CCNY professor Allan Ballard, "few white institutions had taken positive action toward the elimination of racism, either in the country at large or in the institutions in particular." (33) Few had any black or Latino faculty, and few understood the difficulties confronting those black and Latino students in the colleges, who were grateful for the opportunity to go to college, but who were full of grievances they rarely expressed. For their part, the colleges accepted as "normal" such conditions as an all-white administrative staff and a faculty largely unaware of and uninterested in programs in Black Studies and Latino Studies. The colleges, furthermore, operated on the assumption that they were doing black and Latino students a favor merely by granting them admission. And, according to Ballard, they "felt no particular pressure to make special arrangements for ... youth who not only had experienced deprivation and white scorn but were also sensitive to every conscious or unconscious manifestation of racism." Indeed, Ballard added, "if the sheer whiteness of most campuses had not been stimulus enough to explosive action," then the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1968, and the rhetoric of the black-and-brown movement, "would have triggered the difficulties experienced on most campuses." (34)

The SGA provided spaces critical for student organizations like Kubanbanya, the Onyx Society, UNICA, and PRISA (two Latino student organizations that will be discussed at greater length below) and for the formation of a collective black-and-brown response to institutional racism, both on New York City college campuses and in the black and Puerto Rican communities that surrounded them. The academic buildings and those sections of the campuses that were taken over by black-and-brown student alliances also served a similar purpose.

THE GROWTH IN STUDENT MILITANCY

On October 3, 1967, Onyx member and Tech News managing editor Paul Simms published an interview that he had conducted with William Wright, president of the United Afro-American Association (UAAA). In 1967, the UAAA was a Newark, New Jersey-based Black Power organization dedicated to uniting black Americans, improving their condition, and raising their political consciousness. Insofar as they pertained to the roots of black-and-brown solidarity, Wright insisted that the same racist, white-controlled, political parties and structures that had "enslaved the black man will try to enslave the Puerto Rican." (35) Wright's suggested solution to the political oppression facing both blacks and Puerto Ricans was to prepare "all the necessary tactics for fighting on a battlefield," to begin communicating with other oppressed peoples of the world, and to seek their aid in the struggle. (36)

On October 24, 1967, Paul Simms reported in the pages of the Tech News on a lecture that H. Rapp Brown, then the "outspoken" chairman of SNCC, had delivered to a standing-room-only crowd in the grand ballroom of CCNY's Finley Student Center. The organizer of the event, the Onyx Society, had denied whites entrance to the lecture, which Onyx paid for in part with SGA funding. During his lecture, Brown insisted that "America is practicing a genocidal war against black people now. Thirty percent of the casualties in Vietnam are black; they got rid of Adam Clayton Powell; Muhammad Ali received the maximum sentence and the maximum fine." Programs like SEEK, he went on, "will not save you ... You saw that in Detroit--the honky beat the middle class niggers with middle class sticks." Brown continued: "In order to alleviate this condition we must move as a common force. ... Power as Chairman Mao says, comes from the barrel of a gun." (37) Brown told his audience that the "black revolution will go on wantonly until you [educated] brothers and sisters give it some direction." He wanted the college-educated to radically revise the history courses as they were then taught in the United States. He challenged the CCNY students to learn "the little facts" in history that most "educated people don't know," and to then get engaged in the rewriting of the history books and in teaching history. (38) There is evidence that Brown's message quickly spread to other college campuses throughout metropolitan New York and even as far as Ithaca, because, shortly after his speech, the students did indeed rise up--first at Columbia, and then at Lehman, CCNY, and Cornell--with a list of demands for radically changing their respective colleges. A vibrant movement for community control of public schools in predominantly black and Puerto Rican areas throughout Brooklyn and Harlem also provided a context for increased black and brown movement militancy on the City College and Lehman College campuses. (39)

UNICA

While battles for community control raged in Brooklyn, black and Latino college students' militancy also increased. Frank Critton, the treasurer of Kubanbanya, announced that organization's agenda for the 1968-69 school year. Kubanbanya would focus on developing "racial pride, identity, purpose and direction in order to secure economic, political, social and cultural power and influence for the Black peoples in America." Critton went on, "We will need the cooperation of the Administration and faculty members. We seek the cooperation of the white students on campus also. We feel they can help their race overcome their subconscious racism, by (a) organizing poor whites around their own self interest, and (b) educating the middle class to its need to understand Black Power and to understand its own racist attitudes." (40) Specifically, Kubanbanya intended to launch "Project Confrontation," which sounded a lot like the curriculum and community engagement initiatives of the Onyx Society membership at CCNY. (41)

Beginning in September 1968, Kubanbanya, like the Onyx Society, began working closely with the growing black and Puerto Rican community around Lehman. It sought to radically change the college's teacher-education training curriculum and thereby meet community needs for culturally sensitive public-school teachers--needs particularly urgent in light of the city's movement to decentralize the schools, its community schooling programs, and the actions of UFT members during the 1968 teachers' strike. Specifically, Kubanbanya members wanted to "introduce into the school curriculum a course on Afro-American history, and literature, and African art," and to help spearhead the community "fight for Black Administrators on the junior and senior high school levels." (42)

In late October, Kubanbanya's new president, James Harris, presented the group's demands to the acting dean of the Education Department, Rita O'Hare. The group's demands were also published in the school newspaper, the Meridian. Kubanbanya sought the immediate adoption of three courses, on (1) The Afro-American and the American Education System, (2) The Puerto Rican in the New York City Public School System, and (3) Human Relations, plus a fourth course on Third World Groups in the American Education System. (43) Kubanbanya also demanded the sole right to decide how the new courses would be taught and who would teach them. (44) O'Hare responded by inviting student representatives of Kubanbanya, SEEK, and others to discuss their request with her department's faculty. (45) As the vested constituencies on campus mobilized, the Latino students at Lehman established a new student organization, UNICA. The November 5, 1968 edition of the Meridian described UNICA as a student organization "representing Spanish speaking students." According to the news report, UNICA members worked with Puerto Rican youth in the Bronx, seeking to prepare them for campus life and to discuss "the various teacher-students controversies which exist in the city's ghetto schools" (46) On the same day that students at Lehman's Bronx campus were learning more about UNICA through their student newspaper, a confrontation between students and CCNY officials was unfolding in Harlem.

There, some 250 students--almost all of them exclusively white and SGA and SDS members and/or supporters--had set up a protest in front of the administration building at CCNY. They were denouncing an NYPD raid on the campus to arrest an AWOL Vietnam vet and 170 students who had granted and assured his sanctuary in the school's ballroom. The students had used an expired permit to occupy the ballroom, and they had then effectively seized the building, having refused staff requests that they leave the facility. In reaction, the president had called in the police to dislodge them. Students had become incensed at CCNY president Dr. Buell Gallagher because he had invited the NYPD onto the campus, thereby violating an earlier pledge not to do so "without prior consultation with the faculty." (47) In the aftermath, student protestors had hammered out a list of demands to deliver to the president in order to end the tumultuous demonstrations. Among them: no more police interference in student political activity; and a demand that the college end its ROTC program and its affiliation with the military and that the space the ROTC program occupied be given over to the SEEK program. (48) Onyx Society president Tom Shick commented about the protests and demands that "black students had not been involved in any planning of the demonstration and therefore could not pledge allegiance." Shick went on to say that Onyx was "preparing for a confrontation which will be directly relevant to Black students." (49) Meanwhile, UNICA, Kubanbanya, and SEEK had formed a new black-and-brown student coalition, and had begun moving closer to a confrontation with school officials over control of the campus and the community.

A week after the demonstrations at CCNY, an article ran in the Meridian relating UNICA's demands for a revised School of Education curriculum at Lehman--one that would focus even more on "Puerto Rican culture and heritage, and the failure of the educational system to respond to the needs of the half million Puerto Rican children in the public school system." (50) Like Kubanbanya's demands for black faculty, UNICA wanted Puerto Rican faculty teaching the education courses. UNICA also wanted the Education Department to "allocate funds for the translation and distribution of materials from Puerto Rico." UNICA representatives, the school paper reported, believed the materials "would be relevant to the need of giving the [Puerto Rican] school child a sense of pride in his bilingualism and heritage." (51) A demand for bilingual assistants in classrooms had a clear antecedent in the black-and-brown community control movement that had arisen in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. There, the black-and-brown governing board had introduced bilingual reading programs, trained three hundred parent aids, created a student-run community newspaper, and initiated new after-school programs. As a result, student and parent participation and support in the school district had increased drastically. (52)

UNICA, moreover, wanted a representative from its delegation, "with an equal vote," to be part of the body making decisions about curriculum changes. (53) UNICA's demands point to the likely reality that elements within the Puerto Rican student community found Kubanbanya insensitive and/or ignorant about the challenges facing recently arrived black and Spanish-speaking students from the Caribbean in New York City public schools. UNICA members argued that the "educational sequences of Lehman College, which produces a sizable number of teachers is inadequate because it leaves prospective teachers culturally starved." They went on to argue that teachers graduating from Lehman "lack an awareness of the culture, heritage, language, and philosophical outlook of the Spanish-speaking community." (54)

From the beginning, progressive faculty members, including the dean of the Department of Education, Rita O'Hare, called the student's demands "reasonable." (55) However, the students soon learned that, in the words of former Lehman Black Studies professor Charlotte Morgan-Cato, "foot dragging" by "entrenched" Lehman administrators and faculty, CUNY administrators, and state administrators would hamper the speedy implementation of the black and brown students' demands. White administrators and white faculty found lots of reasons why such changes could not be implemented quickly, claiming a "shortage of qualified faculty" or restrictive state requirements. (56) As the confrontation developed between the administration and the black-and-brown student coalition at Lehman in the Bronx, black and brown students at CCNY--members of the Onyx Society and of PRISA, a newly formed Puerto Rican student organization-also came together to make similar demands.

The student demands on New York's campuses occurred just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the staging of the Olympic Games in Mexico City. In the weeks before the Mexico City Olympics, a reactionary Mexican state had massacred Mexican college students who were demonstrating against rampant government corruption. And during the Olympics themselves, black athletes had given the Black Power salute in support of the black liberation movement during an award ceremony that was viewed live on television around the world. In the fall of 1968 the latter event had a direct impact on the growth of black and brown student militancy in New York. The Onyx Society at CCNY sponsored a rally in support of Olympians John Carlos and Tommie Smith just before the establishment of PRISA in November of 1968, and the group was also involved in a black-and-brown campus shutdown several months later. In the last week of October 1968, H. Rapp Brown and Harry Edwards accompanied John Carlos on his visit to CCNY. Onyx Society president Tom Shick ('69) noted, "We want to give Black Students a chance to express their support for these men, who are our heroes." (57) When Carlos came to the microphone to speak, a largely all-black capacity crowd greeted him with a "wave of cheers and shouts of 'Black Power,' and 'Peace Brother.'" (58) Carlos, speaking of his decision to give the Black Power salute at the Olympics, told the crowd, "1 had to find some way to help Black people." (59) Harry Edwards also spoke at the event. Edwards, who had earned his M.A. in 1966, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 1967, had organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights in the fall of 1967, and it was his work that had been the inspiration for the two U.S. medal winners' decision to give the Black Power salute in Mexico City. Edwards insisted, "We're not going to let these Black Athletes be isolated like Cassius Clay has been. ... When we get hurt, we'll hurt back." (60) Teachers from neighboring P.S. 175 brought some 150 elementary school children to the rally. After thirty minutes of speeches, John Carlos, ended the event by proclaiming, "All right now, are you ready? Say it Loud." And the crowd roared back instantly, "I'm Black, I'm Proud." (61)

PRISA

In November 1968, one week after the CCNY event, the Puerto Rican students on campus organized a new group, Puerto Rican Student Activities (PRISA), dedicated to Puerto Rican self-determination. The group's president, Henry Arce ('70), acknowledged that PRISA would "probably form a coalition with the Onyx Society." He went on to say, "There are Puerto Rican necessities that have to be taken care of on campus. We plan to go about it in our way, just as any organization would." (62) Other PR1SA student leaders included Tom Soto and Eduardo "Pancho" Cruz. As we shall see, the fight for campus and community control, with demands similar to the black-and-brown movement at Lehman, also united African American and Puerto Rican students at CCNY. PRISA and Onyx Society members would go on to form the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community (BPRSC). As happened at Lehman and at CCNY, students at Bronx Community, and at Brooklyn and Queens Colleges as well, organized similar coalitions and mobilized for open admissions and for the creation of programs in Black and Puerto Rican Studies. (63) The excitement for these coalitions, 1 would argue, came from the expanding links that were being made between the student movements and off-campus black and brown activists. For example, Stokely Carmichael, the radical "Black Panther Prime Minister," spoke on the CCNY campus just a week after the organization of PRISA and its stated solidarity with members of the Onyx Society. At the end of the fall semester, on December 3, 1968, Onyx rented CCNY's Great Hall for Carmichael's talk. Proceeds from the one dollar admission fee were dedicated to the Black Panther Defense Fund. (64)

In the audience were some notable black activists, including Kathleen Cleaver, spokesperson for the Black Panther Party and director of the Black Panther Defense Fund; she had briefly been a student at Barnard College in 1966. Her husband at the time, Eldridge Cleaver, was then living in exile in Cuba. H. Rapp Brown, Carmichael's successor at SNCC, also attended the lecture, along with Carmichael's then wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba. Carmichael lectured on what he called a "blueprint for 'armed struggle' against American racism and capitalism" before a nearly capacity crowd "from all over the city as well as the college." (65)

During his hour-long speech, Carmichael directed some of his remarks specifically to the CCNY students: "The best black students can do inside a white university is ... politically educate the masses of our people who are being prepared for the confrontation." (66) The "confrontation" of which Carmichael spoke would happen in the future, he said, after blacks and Puerto Ricans had united to use "revolutionary violence" to "destroy the status quo and to implement a new system that speaks to the desires of the masses of our people." (67) Carmichael defined "revolution" as that period after you have won and taken power and you have the ability to make revolutionary changes. "The period that precedes the revolution is known as armed struggle ... fighting for the benefit of the masses of our people." (68) Carmichael also drew a distinction between black militants and black revolutionaries. A militant, he said, is "angry at white folks for keeping him out of the system. ... A black revolutionary wants to overturn, destroy, wipe-out, and completely and thoroughly and resolutely destroy the system and start all over again." (69) According to Tech News, another speaker with a similar message addressed CCNY students two weeks later, just before the winter recess, but this time the speaker was Puerto Rican.

On December 12, 1968, CCNY's DuBois Club hosted the antiwar activist Dennis Mora, a member of the "Fort Hood Three." In 1966, Mora, who was Puerto Rican, along with James Johnson, an African American, and David Samas, of Lithuanian and Italian descent, had been sentenced to twenty-eight months at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War. Speaking before a group of twenty-eight students at CCNY, Mora emphasized the necessity of unity, organization, and sound ideology. He particularly praised Black Panther socialism, with its emphasis on community control and armed confrontation against violent racist systems. The Panthers saw the North American capitalist system as violent, exploitative, and imperialistic, he noted. On the question of alliances between the white Left and the black liberation movement, Mora said that the Left had been "historically untrustworthy" to black people. The example he used was the 1968 teachers' strike in New York City. "You don't see them involved in the school strike issue, but the Blacks and Puerto Ricans united to fight the racist structure and left the [L]eft behind." (70) In an interview with a Tech News reporter following his lecture, Mora advised all radical and revolutionary groups to read, among other writings, the works of Che Guevara and Franz Fanon, and to "begin to apply them to [the] every day situations" of working-class blacks and Puerto Ricans. "The question," he went on, "is how to make these Black and Puerto Rican brothers realize what's happening to them, given the situation in which they live." (71)

THE COMMITTEE OF TEN AND THE FIVE DEMANDS

Just one month after the start of the 1969 spring semester, black and Puerto Rican students mobilized in full force at CCNY. On February 6, 1969, the so-called Committee of Ten, made up of black and Puerto Rican students, met in the school's Grand Ballroom to discuss the demands they would present to University president Gallagher. The ballroom was filled to capacity, with standing room only. Following the meeting, the entire group departed for the administration building to present their demands to Gallagher. (72) The "Five Demands" of the black and brown students were for:

  --a separate school for Black and Puerto Rican Studies;
  --a separate orientation program for black and Puerto Rican students;
  --a voice for SEEK students in the setting of all guidelines for the
  SEEK program, including the hiring and firing of personnel;
  --that the racial composition of all entering classes should reflect
  the black and Puerto Rican population of the New York City high
  schools; and
  --that black and Puerto Rican history and Spanish-language
  proficiency should be a requirement for all education majors. (73)

The students left their demands with the president, who agreed that he would give them an answer within one week. On February 13 the students mobilized outside the Administration Building to hear his response. After the president stonewalled the students, displaying a "cynical apathy," the students proceeded to occupy the Administration Building, informing administrative staff to "utilize their well-known good discretion and to vacate the premises." (74) During the occupation, the students assembled a makeshift band complete with saxophone, marimbas, tambourines, and conga drums, which played "African and Spanish music that "creat[ed] an outlet for the release of tension." (75) They also used Buttenwiser Lounge, on St. Nicholas Terrace, as a closed meeting place. According to Tech reporter Evelyn Watson, the following day the students were still showing that they were "united, organized, dead serious, and definitely not playing ... to the press rules on campus disorders." (76) By April, CCNY administrators remained intransigent in implementing any of the five demands, although the faculty had unanimously approved them. In response, black and brown students called for a strike, which was also supported by members of SDS. Indeed, SDS members even held rallies in support of the Five Demands.

At the end of April, the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community (BPRSC) organized a campus-wide rally in support of the implementation of the Five Demands. At 11 a.m. on April 23, a multiracial assembly of 1,500 striking students marched toward Wagner Hall. Rally leaders from the BPRSC "carried the red, black, and green flag of the Third World and a dummy labeled 'Racism.'" (77) The students marched through the campus calling upon others to join in a strike and general shutdown of the university. Eventually, black and Puerto Rican students occupied CCNY's South Campus, setting up camp and renaming the school "Harlem University." (78) Among the first actions taken by the students was to raise the Puerto Rican flag at a location normally reserved for the U.S. flag, and to rename campus buildings in honor of such black and Latino leaders as Malcolm X, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos, and Che Guevara. (79)

As a result of this action, the Education Department at CCNY invited "student participation in curriculum planning," and a committee was formed to "report on a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Program." In addition, moves were made to address the demand for a separate orientation program and to give SEEK students more "voice in curriculum and personnel" decisions. (80) The above account of the CCNY movement is drawn from the pages of the Lehman College student newspaper, the Meridian. A smaller confrontation between students and administrators occurred in the Bronx on Lehman's campus there; that student movement displayed strong parallels to the trajectory of events at CCNY.

LEHMAN AND THE BLACK STUDENT ASSOCIATION

The black student coalition at Lehman presented its demands in October. By November, James Harris, president of Kubanbanya, reiterated to the administration in an editorial published in the Meridian that "there is a dire need for more Black educators on this campus and the Black students emphatically stress that there be provisions made immediately for the fulfillment of this need." (18) After several more months of delays, Kubanbanya went on the offensive at the start of the spring 1969 semester, staging what one Meridian reporter described as a series of "mini-demonstrations ... intended to show the Administration that the Black students on this campus are united." (82)

For example, members of Kubanbanya staged a protest at a January 28, 1969, basketball game between Lehman and Southern Connecticut State, delaying the game for ten minutes. At the halftime break, two black Kubanbanya members, flanked by about thirty other black students, took control of the microphone on the gym floor. They passed out flyers which listed their demands. First, they wanted their original list of courses that had been approved by the Education Department made a mandatory part of the teacher-training curriculum. Pat Critton of Kubanbanya argued that the faculty council had "shown nothing but opposition in attempts to make the courses mandatory." (83) Second, Kubanbanya now demanded the establishment of a Black Studies Department that "would serve in the interests of black students at Lehman." (84) Such a department would more specifically represent student interests in evaluating faculty for teaching Black Studies courses, and would make recommendations to departments across the campus on "curriculum affecting blacks on campus." Finally, the students demanded the hiring of a black administrator in the Registrar's Office, to assist in increasing the number of "minority students" on Lehman's campus. (85)

Shortly after the basketball game protest, the members of Kubanbanya turned up the heat, sending a letter entitled "Grievances from Kubanbanya" to the college president, Dr. Leonard Lief, and two of the college deans. (86) The letter reiterated the students' demand that the Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies courses in the Education Department be made mandatory, and it called for the creation of a separate Black Studies Department. In addition, the students called for the creation of a "Black Associate Dean of Admissions position." (87) By March 1969, SEEK and Kubanbanya had merged to form the Black Student Association (BSA). One of its first acts was to meet with President Lief to present him with the demands of the new black-and-brown student movement. The BSA sought a 10 percent increase in the number of black and Puerto Rican students, arguing that in the face of looming budget cuts from Albany, "it is imperative that the Administration act immediately to insure the admission of a significant number of Black students to Lehman." (88) The group once again mentioned its wish for a black dean who would deal exclusively with the admission of black students.

In response to the students' demands, the faculty called an emergency meeting at which they voted in favor of establishing new areas of concentration (majors) in Black Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, and other ethnic group studies. In addition, the faculty directed President Lief to appoint a special student-faculty committee that would make the establishment of an area of Black Studies a first priority. However, the faculty "refused to support a motion stipulating that the student body be composed of 10% Black Students," citing the rationale that such an act might be unconstitutional. (89) Charlotte Morgan-Cato, a former professor of Black Studies at Lehman, recalled that Lehman's black and brown student organizers had followed the events at CCNY, and that they knew about the enormous changes "sweeping the country and were fully conscious of their participation in this movement." (99) According to Morgan-Cato, "They met off campus in groups, and one Sunday afternoon in Harlem more than 150 persons gathered in a dance hall to plan the successful strategy which forced university administrators to capitulate." A majority of black and Hispanic students walked out of classes on the designated day and time and "chain-lock[ed] building entrances." Morgan-Cato says that "the faculty were locked in a lecture hall where they were debating the establishment of Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies" when approximately one hundred members of the BSA and a newly formed Latino student group called the Puerto Rican Students' Movement (PRSM) disrupted the faculty meeting. The black and Puerto Rican students surrounded the Faculty Council, including President Lief, sealed off all the exits, and presented their demands for immediate consideration. (91)

Lief, who was chairman of the Faculty Council, informed the students that normal procedure allowed for only two representatives of the student body to be present at Faculty Council meetings, but that the faculty could vote on a motion to allow all the students to stay. A black student called out, "You might as well vote because we're not leaving." (92) A substitute motion, calling for the adjournment of council until the students removed themselves, was passed by a vote of 47 to 11. The Faculty Council then took a fifteen-minute recess. After the recess, the students were still occupying the building. James Harris, the president of Kubanbanya, and William Patterson, the president of SEEK, spoke to the assembled faculty in the crowded lounge, reiterating the coalition's earlier demands. The faculty members refused to take a vote under pressure, and so voted to adjourn the meeting, "with provisions made for another meeting with ten representatives of the black students." In an emergency April session, "held shortly before President Leonard Liefs inauguration ceremony," the Faculty Council overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution urging the president to take "immediate action" on the latest "reasonable" demands of the Black Student Union. (93) Lehman administrators approved the new programs and departments within six months. According to Charlotte Morgan-Cato, however, "The students failed to realize ... that traditional solutions (new departments, new courses, new teachers) would not guarantee that their goals would be achieved: empathetic, committed teachers for their children." (94)

Black student radicalism, however, never stood still. Even as the Lehman campus seizure was coming to an end, black students at Cornell were mobilizing, but their protest would bring a whole new level of militancy and radicalism to the larger black student movement. On April 20, 1969, according to historian Donald Alexander Downs, eight members of Cornell University's Afro-American Society (AAS) "marched in solidarity out of the student union, Willard Straight Hall, fists clenched in Black Power salutes." The movement at Cornell was different from the movements at Columbia, NYU, CCNY, and Lehman "for one conspicuous reason: the protestors brandished rifles and other weapons." As Downs explained, "Never before had students introduced guns into a campus conflict." (95)

CONCLUSION

By 1967 the black student movements at Lehman and CCNY had just about taken over those schools' student newspapers. The pages of the Tech News, for example, were full of black liberation news and notices about Onyx-sponsored activities. The same was true for the Meridian. By 1968 the black activists who had infiltrated the campus papers talked increasingly in terms of a black-and-brown urban political identity. The news reports they published provided detailed accounts of militant activism around the world, student activism around the country, and the speeches of activists like David Mora, John Carlos, and Stokely Carmichael. Campus papers like Tech News, The Campus and the Meridian allowed students to easily follow, support, and learn from student activism on other campuses. In the case of New York, the student movements were far more interconnected than scholars have acknowledged, and the students gleaned from one another's experiences, particularly when it came to demands and movement strategy.

Describing the relationships between black and brown youth on New York City campuses in the late 1960s requires understanding the complexity of the factors that influenced the students such as the racial politics of the New York public schools, the shared cultures that developed in black and Latino neighborhoods in the city, and the catalyzing roles played by employment, racism, music, language, and food during campus takeovers and strikes.

Latino and African American adults did not generally share the same spaces. In contrast, their children shared a common ethnic subculture on college campuses: experiences with institutional racism brought black and Latino students together in the pages of campus newspapers, SGA provided club space, and activist speeches delivered in college student centers and ballrooms. As my book Hog and Hominy shows, off campus clubs and eateries serving African American and Caribbean soul foods also played an important role in gathering black and Latino students in the same spaces. It was in such multiethnic spaces that political alliances developed. Tentatively, then, we can conclude that black and Latino students developed the strongest relationships within the ethnic subgroups in which they felt the most comfortable. The student subculture of the late 1960s in the Bronx and Harlem were particularly significant in fostering relationships across the racial divide. The two case studies on the campuses of Lehman and CCNY offer a useful starting point for organizing and explaining African American-Latino student coalitions. Both movements were linked to Black Power politics and liberation movements in Africa and Latin America. And both movements illustrate the explicit tensions rooted in the limitations of Black Power ideology when it comes to African American organizations and movements understanding and coexisting with Latino perspectives, objectives, and organizations.

Endnotes

(1) The theoretical aspects of this essay are based on an earlier published article; see Frederick Douglass Opie, "Eating, Dancing, and Courting in New York: Black and Latino Relations 1930-1970," Journal of Social History (June 2008): 79-109.

(2) See Bayard Rustin, "Black Folks, White Folks," in Report from Black America, by Peter Goldman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 144.

(3) Ibid. See also Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 37-38, 44, 46; Komozi Woodard, A Nation within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 32, 86.

(4) See Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 4; Stefan Bradley, '"Gym Crow Must Go!' Black Student Activism at Columbia University, 1967-1968," in "The History of Black Student Activism," ed. V. P. Franklin, special issue, Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 165-67; Peniel E. Joseph, "Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement," in "The History of Black Student Activism," ed. V. P. Franklin, special issue, Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 191.

(5) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995).

(6) Bradley, "Gym Crow Must Go!" 168.

(7) See C. Wright Mills, The Puerto Rican Journey: New York's Newest Migrants (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 220-21; Frederick Douglass Opie, "Eating, Dancing, and Courting in New York: Black and Latino Relations, 1930-1970." Journal of Social History Volume 42, no. 1 (2008): 80-81.

(8) Joseph, "Dashikis and Democracy," 197.

(9) Edward J. Escobar, "The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968-1971," Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1490. See also Basilio Serrano, "Rifle, Cafi6n, y Escopeta!": A Chronicle of the Puerto Rican Student Union," in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andres Torres and Jose E. Velazquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 125; Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sdnchez Korrol, Latinos in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 728.

(10) The figures cited are from The Campus, the student newspaper of CCNY (see "Study Indicates Non-White Ratio For City Colleges," The Campus, December 20, 1967,1,3).

(11) Larry Schoenfeld, "Seek Students Come to Hunter," The Meridian, October 13, 1967, 2 (The Meridian is the student newspaper of Lehman College).

(12) Ruiz and Sanchez Korrol, Latinas in the United States, 727.

(13) See Paul B. Simms, "Story Stirs Group; Libel Suit Weighed," Tech News, December 5, 1967, 1 (Tech News was one of two student newspapers on the CCNY campus; the other was The Campus).

(14) Noelle Douglas, "Civil Rights, Black Rites," The Meridian, November 13, 1967, 5.

(15) Ibid.

(16) Ronald Walcott, "Black Students at Hunter," The Meridian, December 15, 1967, 5.

(17) See Frederick Douglass Opie, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xxii, 142-53.

(18) Ibid.

(19) Ibid., 5-6.

(20) Allen B. Ballard, The Education of Black Folk: The Afro-American Struggle for Knowledge in White America (Lincoln, NE: Universe, 2004), 67.

(21) Ibid., 67.

(22) Ralph Levenson, "Onyx: Of Black People, By Black People, For Black People," The Campus, November 16, 1967, 1.

(23) Ibid

(24) Ibid., 4.

(25) Ibid

(26) Ibid.

(27) Ibid.

(28) Ibid., 5.

(29) Ibid.

(30) "College Will Host All-Day Meeting On 'Black Power,'" The Campus, April 11, 1967, 1, 3.

(31) Paul B. Simms, "Story Stirs Group; Libel Suit Weighed, Tech News, December 5, 1967, 7.

(32) Ballard, The Education of Black Folk, 65-67.

(33) Ibid., 68.

(34) Ibid., 68-69.

(35) Paul B. Simms, "The U.A.A.A.; Black Politics: An Interview with William Wright," Tech News, October 3, 1967, 652, 6.

(36) Ibid., 6.

(37) Paul B. Simms, "Rapp Lectures to Onyx; White Students Excluded," Tech News, October 24, 1967, 1.

(38) Ibid., 7.

(39) Ibid. For information on these moments of black student radicalism see, Marvin Harris, "Big Bust on Morningside Heights," The Nation, June 10, 1968, 757-63; Harris worked as a professor in Columbia's Anthropology Department during the movement; Bradley, "Gym Crow Must Go!; "Louis Lusky and Mary H. Lusky, "Columbia 1968: The Wound Unhealed," Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 2 (1969): 201-2. On the Ocean-Hill Brownsville movement for "commuity control of local public schools, see Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); "'Blast from the Past' with Rhody McCoy," excerpt from a Sarah-Ann Shaw interview that aired on the program Say Brother, March 20, 1975, available at "Open Vault: WGBH Media Library and Archives," http://openvault.wgbh.org/saybrother/MLA001112/index.html; Paul Ritterband, "Ethnic Power and the Public Schools: The New York City School Strike of 1968," Sociology of Education 47, no. 2 (1974); "Profile of New York City School Reform Handbook," available at "Open Planner," http://www.openplanner.org/node/206.

(40) Frank Critton, "Kubanbanya," The Meridian, September 20, 1968, 6.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Dave Stern, "Kubanbanya Acts to Modify Ed. Curriculum," The Meridian, October 25, 1968,3.

(44) Ibid.

(45) Ibid.

(46) Donald Nowve, "UNICA Forms," The Meridian, November 8, 1968, 2.

(47) Phillip D. Wirtenberg and Jane Tillman Irving, "SDS and Commune Supported by Student Government; Engineering Honor Societies and YR's Demand Representation," Tech News, November 13, 1968, 1.

(48) Ibid.

(49) Ibid., 2.

(50) "UNICA Proposals before Education Department Today," The Meridian, November 15, 1968, 1.

(51) Ibid.

(52) Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 230.

(53)"UNICA Proposals before Education Department Today," The Meridian, November 15, 1968, 1.

(54) Ibid.

(55) Rita Ohare, interview with author, Lehman College, Bronx Campus, Spring 2008; Dave Stern, "Kubanbanya Acts to Modify Ed. Curriculum," The Meridian, October 25, 1968, 3.

(56) Charlotte Morgan-Cato, "Black Studies in the Whirlwind: A Retrospective View," in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Lewis Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006), 54.

(57) Barhara Gutfreund, "H. Rapp Brown and Olympian," The Campus, October 30, 1968, 1,4.

(58) Ibid., 1.

(59) Ibid.

(60) Ibid., 4.

(61) Ibid.

(62) "New Puerto Rican Student Group Makes Historic Day with Marching," The Campus, November 20, 1968, 3.

(63) Serrano, "Rifle, Cafl6n, y Escopeta!" 126.

(64) Steve Markin and Libby Marcus, "Carmichael Tells Sheppard Crowd of an 'Armed struggle' by Blacks," The Campus, December 5, 1968, 1.

(65) Ibid.

(66) Ibid., 9.

(67) Ibid. 6.

(68) Ibid. 9.

(69) Ibid.

(70) "Mora Advises Radicals-Apply Revolutionary Theory," Tech News, December 16, 1968,3.

(71) Ibid.

(72) Evelyn Watson, "Admin. Building Occupied, Dr. Gallagher Pre-Occupied," Tech News, February 19, 1969, 1.

(73) Ibid.

(74) Ibid., 1,5.

(75) Ibid., 5.

(76) Ibid.

(77) Paul D. Simms, "Four Demands Approved by Gallagher; Strike Called for Monday Still Planned," Tech News, April 18, 1969, I.

(78) "1500 Protest Administration Failure," Tech News, April 23, 1969, 1.

(79) Ibid.

(80) Serrano, "Rifle, Canon, y Escopeta!" 126.

(81) "City College Ablaze," The Meridian, February 21, 1969, 3.

(82) James Harris, "Reply: 'Say it Loud, I'm Black,"' The Meridian, November 15,1968, 2.

(83) Ben Nivin, "The Fourth Estate," The Meridian, March 7, 1969, 3.

(84) Marc Teitelbaum, "Kubanbanya Broadcasts 'Grievances' to Ball Crowd," The Meridian, February 5, 1969, 3.

(85) Ibid.

(86) Ibid.

(87) Diane Agatston, "Kubanbanya 'Grievances' Mailed to Administration," The Meridian, February 21, 1969, 3.

(88) Ibid.

(89) Ben Nivin, "The Fourth Estate," The Meridian, March 7, 1969, 3.

(90) Ben Nivin, "Emergency Meeting Creates Black Studies," The Meridian, March 14, 1969, 1.

(91) Morgan-Cato, "Black Studies in the Whirlwind," 54.

(92) Carol Rosen, "Black Blockade of West Lounge," The Meridian, March 21, 1969, 1.

(93) Dora Petrou, "Faculty Passes Black Student Demands," The Meridian April 1, 1969, 1

(94) Morgan-Cato, "Black Studies in the Whirlwind," 54.

(95) Downs, Cornell '69, 1.