Cornell’s 1960s Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam Protesters Return for Teach-In

In the mid to late 1960s, Cornell was at the center of the two defining movements of the decade: that for Civil Rights and that against the Vietnam War.

Fifty years later, as part of the College of Arts and Science’s celebration of the university’s sesquicentennial (150-year anniversary), a handful of some of the most prominent protest-era Cornellians returned to campus to participate in various guest lectures, panel discussion, etc. On Monday night, they gathered in Uris Auditorium to hold a teach-in, with faculty, students, and locals in attendance, too. Moderated by Professor Isaac Kramnick, government, the event featured about ten scheduled speakers, of which some were Vietnam veterans and others former student protesters.

The event got off to a slow start and never picked up pace. While the stories from the Vietnam veterans were vivid and fascinating, the Vietnam War protesters mostly all hashed-out the same stories we always hear about their “struggle” on campus. Though one can respect the stances and arguments of the war protesters, it was simply amazing to hear a protester alumni speak about the harrowing struggle of on-campus protesting—for example, slipping in the paint they used to throw at military recruiters on campus—following the account of a veteran whose company in just one patrol mission was reduced from a force of 68 to just 4.

The discussion about the Civil Rights movement on campus was markedly better, as was the showing of a segment of a documentary of similar theme produced by two Cornell alumni. The segment of the documentary, entitled “Agents of Change,” concerned the infamous Willard Straight Hall Takeover in 1969.

Interestingly, in this thirty-minute segment, there was quite a bit of time dedicated to how the black and Latino students who overtook the student union armed themselves with guns after successfully countering an attempted break-in by members of the Delta Upsilon fraternity (yes, this happened; refer to the link above). In fact, the documentary narrators and the interview subjects—both Cornell alumni who participated in the takeover as well as an assortment of historians and academics—glorified the students’ self-arming. Funny, considering that these same people who undoubtedly are liberal-progressives all probably regularly talk about how much they loathe guns, the NRA, etc.

This event, as with so many others I’ve experienced at Cornell, was drastically over-hyped and under-attended. Approximately 150 people filed in at 7:30, and by 8:30 nearly half were gone. By the time I left at 10:00, there were less than fifty remaining.

Also, here is an assortment of funny things some speakers said:

– The first speaker, a retired pediatric surgeon, said she got involved in the anti-war movement after taking a class on morality in the 20th century. She said she originally decided to take the class because she was having difficulty deciding whether or not to lose her virginity before marriage.

– Prominent Cornell protester Bruce Dancis, who served time in federal prison after leaving Cornell (he never graduated), was the first Cornellian to tear up his draft card. During his speech, he made some strange statements, including one associating Mitt Romney and Rush Limbaugh with George Bush and Dick Cheney as politicians who sent young Americans to war. He also remarked that in Vietnam the U.S. “intervened on the wrong side of the civil war.” He later clarified this statement, stating that he U.S. should have remained neutral. I think his original statement, however, was a little more than a slip of the tongue.

– Daniel Marhsall ’15 delivered a rather interesting speech. (I’m inclined to say it had poetic elements too, but in the past I’ve been criticized by left-wing students on campus for incorrectly identifying speeches as poems, so I’ll refrain from that description.) Marhsall, who helped Kramnick organize the event, apologized for being “another white dude” when handed over the microphone. He then briefly explained his senior thesis on popular memory about Cornell in 1969 and went on to say the ’60s protesters live on as “ghosts” on campus. The “ghosts” protest along with the students of campus today, “dance with us,” and exist in the “eyes of administrators.” In speaking about building a “non-hierarchical relationship with the past,” he suggested students “critique it [the past] and it [the past] critique us” and that the past “marches with us, stands with us.”