Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (review)

In 1626, the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lanape Indians for a cool twenty–four dollars. Three hundred and forty–two years later, the residents of Morningside Heights and Harlem avoided a similar land grab by yet another group of powerful white Manhattan oppressors. Or such is the impression one gets after reading Stefan Bradley's penetrating Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, a wonderful example of the potential of microhistories to provide perspective on broader historical movements.

Bradley tells the story of Columbia University's 1968 attempt to encroach upon Morningside Park to build a gymnasium complex and the angry response of black Manhattan and Columbia students to the plan. Columbia's sense of entitlement, bolstered by the inherent mandate of the city and the hubris accompanying Ivy League membership, led the school to seek its own best interest and (not for the first time) forget the realities of the majority black neighborhoods that surrounded it. At the same time, however, the school was, Columbia argued, filling a student need. Its students were predominantly white, but, regardless of race, the gymnasium wasn't something they saw as a constituent part of their best interest. Thus Bradley sets the stage for a series of race and class confrontations that would be emblematic of the era. The further dynamics of black student activism at a "white" college and the influence of the national student and Black Power movements continue to layer those confrontations. So too does the fact that the bulk of this showdown happened in the weeks following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The story has far broader bounds than the sidewalks surrounding a local park.

Still, the park remains the focal point, the grounding element for the broader interpretation, and at the heart of the debate about the park, Bradley tells us, was ownership. Ownership was intrinsically important to a black community who had historically suffered as the owned for so many centuries. Jim Crow exacerbated the problem in the South. Residential segregation in the north created a new kind of ownership mentality, one that held to ownership as a way of maintaining the sanctity and protection of autonomous neighborhoods. But ownership is something more than fancy words on written, notarized deeds. Ownership in Bradley's hands is also a function of perception, and something fundamentally more powerful than squatter's rights. Harlem's position wasn't a land claim because "we were here first." It was a land claim that argued, "This land is ours because it means more to us. It is not additive as it would be for you. It isn't an annex. Isn't an addendum. It is intrinsic to who we are." This seems reasonable enough, but the black community outside of Columbia wasn't the only group making an ownership claim. The New York power structure—that is to say, the city's most prominent white people—were saying much the same thing about Columbia. The university belonged to the city, and its growth and development only benefited the island that claimed it.

So, ultimately, this is a book about identity—that venerable stand–in for almost every kind of ownership claim. But such contests over identity almost always take the form of a stakes game—as this one clearly does—in which the powerful tend to have the deck stacked in their favor. Or so it would seem. It's true that Columbia's powerbrokers had significant national influence, but so too did Harlem, the de facto center of black America.

The most interesting identity battle in the contest over Morningside Park, however, had little to do with the Columbia administration versus the representatives of its surrounding black neighborhoods. Instead, that battle came in the form of the students themselves, members of one community who chose the other in the stakes game going on above their station. The students were, for the most part, against...