Turning the Tide: The University of Alabama in the 1960s

7. Campus Militancy Grows: A Past Still Present

7 Campus militancy Grows A Past Still Present The past hangs like a perpetual present over the Capstone with the Woods Hall Quadrangle providing a majestic reminder of what was—and is—the University of alabama. in addition to Woods, three other historic buildings bound the Quad: Clark, manly, and Garland Halls.These four structures represent the rebirth of the university in the post–Civil War era, their presence reflecting tradition. across a broad street, nestled next to the amelia Gayle Gorgas library, is the small, white roundhouse armory where, during a thunderstorm late on the night of april 3,1865,cadets picked up muskets for an expected encounter with yankee raiders, one that resulted in a brief skirmish before President Garland withdrew the cadets, avoiding a needless bloodletting at the war’s end.Today, every few minutes one of several “Crimson ride”buses pulls up to the library, ferrying students to and from dormitories at the northern edge of campus and parking lots nearly a mile to the east. The campus was smaller in the summer of 1968 when most alabama students abjured political and social activism, whether from apathy or concentration on educational and professional goals. While a few students focused on issues like the war in vietnam and the struggle at home for racial justice, most took advantage of a few years of relatively carefree living, doing enough to get by while still “doing their own thing” by partying, dating, or watching Tv. an adventurous handful, taking Timothy leary’s advice, turned on, tuned in,and dropped out.The majority,however,disapproved of campus disruptions and avoided demonstrations. over the next two years, as unrest spread across the country, mounting tensions between a growing number of alabama’s dissidents and the administration prompted a series of increasingly contentious confrontations. bama’s band of activists consisted of students disillusioned with a system 150 / Chapter 7 they thought incapable of changing itself. at the higher level, the system included both the federal and state governments. from the student dissidents’ perspective, the university’s power structure and its policies were things they could confront and possibly alter. in the fall of 1968, they became more determined and, when confrontation failed to bring about change, frustration led to disruption. Conservative elements in the state—especially the legislature—attached the label of “Communists”to the small cadre of campus radicals.outlandish attire and making heroes of revolutionaries like Che Guevara and murderous despots like Ho Chi minh and mao Tse Tung fed suspicions among older alabamians and also alienated dissenters from the majority reluctant to abandon established symbols of middle-class orthodoxy.1 in the spring of 1968, while students for a democratic society claimed seven thousand members and thirtyfive thousand supporters on campuses across the nation, it had yet to establish a chapter at alabama.2 a Handful of Troublemakers in late april,a thousand miles north ofTuscaloosa,Columbia University erupted into sds-inspired mayhem.There, in the middle of new york City, a red flag flapped atop Columbia’s administration building while a huge portrait of Karl marx dominated the entrance to a nearby classroom building. a banner erected by the black Panthers proclaimed, “Power to the People!”3 Grayson Kirk, Columbia’s sixty-four-year-old president, handled his campus crisis the way many other presidents did theirs: the wrong way. He let the demonstrators seize the initiative in a confrontation designed to diminish the administration’s authority. Columbia’s uninvolved students were the primary target of the two hundred or so members of sds and their sympathizers.after a week of negotiations resulted only in increased demands from sds, Kirk finally sent in hundreds of police to do what a squad might have done on the first day. it was theater staged to win uninterested and apathetic students over to sds. The administration fell into their trap.4 although sds didn’t have a chapter at alabama in the summer of 1968, the democratic student organization (dso) did. according to Jack drake, dso coordinated its activities not only with sds but also with the southern student organizing Committee (ssoC),a group that grew from fifteen chapters in ten southern states in 1964 to thirty chapters four years later.5 despite ralph Knowles’s predictions of an imminent explosion of campus Campus Militancy Grows / 151 unrest, frank rose clung to the notion that dissent emanated from a...