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Columbia College Today Spring 1968

Page 69

floor. A police officer asked the seated students to rise and leave peacefully. They refused to budge. Several students seemed frightened, and one girl began to cry out of fear. The cops then began handcuffing students, lifting them up, dragging them out by the jackets or dresses, or in some cases by the hair. A few walked out, most went limp and had to be dragged out, and a few were violent or colorfully resistant. One girl, for instance, bit a cop in the belly; another bit a policeman's fingers to bleeding. The most colorful were one boy and one girl who had pulled their pants and underclothes down to their knees to embarrass the police and make good copy for the TV and movie cameras, which they did. The resisting students were roughly stacked up on the quadrangle grass like the bodies of con-

quered hoodlums in a Batman film. The 130 students standing at the north corridor of Fayerweather all walked out peacefully, and were b'eated in the same austere but gentle manner that the Hamilton Hall students were. Behind the north corridor in Fayerweather on the same third floor is a 40x 40-foot lounge with red leather chairs, round wooden tables, and standing lamps. In this lounge, the 70 rebels who chose to resist arrest violently had locked and barricaded themselves. The police forced the door open and then remO\'ed the leather chairs, ta l,lles, and lamps tllat had been piled up by the students behind the door. Instantly, the cops were assaulted with obscenities and revolutionary slogans, coke bottles, light bulbs, erasers, and boxes. One stu-

dent hurled a wooden chair at two policemen. The police seized, cuffed, and dragged most of these die-hards out. Se\'eral students were pummeled or sb'uck with handcuffs. In Fayerweather, 268 students and outsiders were arrested. lVlathematics, the most revolutionary commune, was the last building to be cleared. About 150 policemen arrived at 3:45 a.m. and pried open the door and finished cutting its chains at 4: 00. While the police waited outside, several students threw bottles, bulbs, and pieces of furniture down on them from the upper windows. \Vhile students in the other buildings preferred singing, the revolutionaries in iVlath chose slogans and torrents of profanity. Cries of "Fascist Pigs," "Bastards,' "Up Against the Wall, :\lotherfuckers," and

College ',Valk at three ill the moming on April 3D, Shortly after, this area became the scene of considerable police l,;iolence, cousing new anti-Admil,istration hostility and bringing new SDS support.


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Columbia College Today Spring 1968 by Barak Zahavy - Issuu