Emplotting the Crisis: Remembering Cornell ‘69

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for Honors in History

By Daniel Waid Marshall

April 16, 2015

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Setting the Stage

On Saturday, April 19, 1969, the Afro-American Society (AAS), an organization of black

students at Cornell University, barricaded themselves inside Willard Straight Hall, the student

union. The night before, a cross had been burned on the porch of Wari House, the black women’s

cooperative, and fire alarms were set off in multiple dormitories on campus. Soon after the

occupation had begun, members of Cornell’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS), a predominantly white organization of the New Left, formed a protective picket outside

of the occupied building. A few hours later, at around 10 o’clock that morning, a group of

fraternity brothers from Delta Upsilon snuck in the building through a side window. They were

confronted, and a fight ensued, leaving three white students and one black student injured. After

receiving numerous death threats and hearing rumors of armed white students conspiring to take

back “the Straight,” the AAS decided to bring guns into the building for the purposes of self-

defense.

When word of the guns spread, negotiations intensified with Cornell administrators, who,

seeking to avoid an armed confrontation, eventually acquiesced to the AAS’ demands the

following day. Meanwhile, hundreds of police deputies from the surrounding area amassed in

downtown Ithaca, waiting to be summoned up the hill. On Sunday afternoon, the black students

marched, guns and spears in hand, out of the Straight, and signed an official agreement with

several administrators, including President Perkins, who later declared martial law and banned

the possession of guns on campus. A key demand was the nullification of reprimands issued by

the campus judicial body to AAS members on the day before the Takeover. The AAS argued that

the judicial body was unqualified to judge them given that it was not a neutral body in the

conflict. Additionally, the AAS accused the body of racism, for its selective punishment of black

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students; the campus judiciary had ignored similar actions by white students earlier in the

semester. In order for the reprimands to be nullified, the Faculty Senate had to affirm the deal.

However, the following day, April 21st, the Senate voted not to nullify the reprimands, on the

grounds that the faculty was being intimidated. Immediately afterwards, SDS, the Inter-

Fraternity Council (IFC), and the AAS held a teach-in-turned-mass meeting in Bailey Hall with

about 2,500 attendees, who voted overwhelmingly to condemn the Faculty Senate’s decision and

to support the AAS’ demands.

The next day, on the 22nd, SDS held another mass meeting in Bailey Hall, with the

intention of gaining support for an occupation of Day Hall, the administrative center of campus,

in solidarity with the black students’ demands. By that time, Day Hall had already been

evacuated due to rumors of an impending student takeover, and AAS member Tom Jones had

taken to the radio and, without the consent of the rest of AAS, threatened several faculty

members and administrators, whom he pronounced racists. Due to the massive crowd, the teach-

in was relocated to Barton Hall, Cornell’s gymnasium. Thousands of students and faculty

attended. AAS member Tom Jones made a speech in which he reiterated his threat that “Cornell

has three hours to live.”1 However, instead of seizing Day Hall, the crowd decided to stay in

Barton Hall. The throng of students formed an assembly that passed several resolutions, the most

significant of which declared the “seizure” of Barton Hall in solidarity “with the black

demands.” Estimates place the numbers in Barton Hall at as many as 10,000 students at its peak,

or over two-thirds of the entire undergraduate population, which is striking given white students’

initial hostility to the seizure of the Straight. Around fifty faculty members were in attendance,

and nearly sixty, known as the “Concerned Faculty,” signed a letter declaring their support and

willingness to seize a building should the faculty decision not be overturned the following day.

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Students stayed in Barton Hall, playing basketball and Frisbee, and deliberating throughout the

night. Students discussed the situation at hand, but also expressed a general frustration with their

lack of power in the University and the “irrelevance” of their education to the societal problems

they faced. The assembly—and the general atmosphere—at Barton Hall became known as the

Barton Hall Community.

On Wednesday the 23rd, the Faculty reversed their previous vote, and nullified the

reprimands. President Perkins relayed the news to a euphoric crowd at Barton Hall. Several

influential professors resigned in protest, angry letters poured in from alumni, and the national

media berated the Cornell administration for their “capitulation.”2 Meanwhile, many students

turned their attention to the University in general, and began a process of reimagining the

societal role—and internal constitution—of the University. Over the next weeks, the Barton Hall

Community would give birth to the Constituent Assembly, which created proposals to restructure

the University by redistributing power to the students and workers. A mild version of their

proposal, known as the University Senate, was implemented in 1970. Meanwhile, SDS

demanded that Cornell draw at least half of its incoming class from the working class. The

following spring break, the newly christened Africana Studies Center, which had been agreed to

by the administration just days before the Takeover, was burned to the ground.

This summary is not an attempt to construct an ultimate, legitimate narrative of the events

of April 1969 at Cornell. Its purpose is to introduce readers to a series of contested occurrences

so that they understand the analysis that follows. This thesis is not an investigation of the events

that occurred, or a definitive account of what transpired; in many ways, it is about the

impossibility of doing so without making profound political decisions about what to include or

exclude in the narrative. The Takeover elicited many reactions and interpretations; even as it was

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occurring, the memory of the events of April 1969 at Cornell University was contested. Since

then, the story of “Cornell ‘69” has undergone numerous revisions, abridgments, and

adaptations. What follows is a story of stories, a narrative of narratives: a history of our memory

of the Takeover, first as it embedded itself in the cultural psyche of Cornell, and then as it

changed forms over the following half-century.

Prologue

How should one emplot the crisis? –Cushing Strout, Professor Emeritus, American Studies, Cornell University3

The most significant aspect of Cushing Strout’s question is, perhaps, that it is a question.

As a published historian of “the crisis,” and a participant in the events that unfolded, Strout is

familiar with the moment of hesitation in which his question sits. Like a diver who inhales in

anticipation of plunging into unknown waters, the historian prepares to craft a narrative, pausing

with the tips of their fingers over the keyboard. The hesitancy invoked by the rhetorical question,

“How should one emplot the crisis,” represents the agency of the author. The word “how”

reveals that there are options, while the word “should” implies that there is an obligation to

choose the right one. Driving the question itself is the assumption that whatever narrative track is

laid thereafter is not an inevitable one, that uncertainty, for at least a moment, reigned.

Strout’s piece is unusual in the sense that it displays its foundation transparently. The vast

majority of the narratives describing the events at Cornell University in the spring of 1969

masquerade as “Cornell ’69” itself, qualified only rarely by a disclaimer that they are based on

personal experience or a particular perspective. These accounts embody historiographical

theorist Émile Benveniste’s dictum that history includes neither “I” nor “you”—that through the

effacement of the narrator, history acts “as if the events tell themselves.”4

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One of the most salient factors in how a history is recounted is the context in which the

history is written. In 1979, histories of the Straight Takeover are written to help explain the “new

apathy;”5 In 1989, the campaign to urge Cornell to divest from South Africa loomed over the 20th

anniversary;6 in 1994, the Day Hall Takeover provided the impetus for quarter century

reflections;7 in 1999, the culture wars,8 and in 2009, the inauguration of the first black President,

Barack Obama,9 each provide contexts to frame their respective commemorative analyses.

History, as Benveniste implies, is ultimately situational, written not only by the hand of a human

being, but with and in the light of the present moment.

As the historian gazes from what can only be the ironic pedestal of the present, they are

inevitably writing back, looking at the past from a changed world, straining to reconstruct life

before, during, and immediately after the event. In this way, uncovering an event can be less

about its act-by-act reconstruction as about undoing everything that has happened since.

However, in the case of a historic event, the effects of which ostensibly changed the world, one

cannot help but see the world in which the author writes as being partially—even if barely—

created by the event. In a way, the narrator who might write “I” or “you” is a product of this

event.

Popular memory is like this: An event explodes itself into a multitude of small pieces,

which, infinitely distributed, lodge themselves in the collective imaginary of a community. The

narrator, having inherited this collective imaginary, recognizes that chunk of memory lodged

within their own imagination, processes it through their own system of understanding (likely

somewhat inherited as well), and speaks it. When these traces all write back, and form a

discourse with discernible patterns and tendencies, the event reveals itself in a way that it does

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not even to those who have experienced it or observed it firsthand. It is in this way that, in

paradoxical contradiction to Benveniste, “the events tell themselves.”

A study of the memory of Cornell ’69 is only possible with Strout’s pause for reflection.

The uncertainty that his query implies reveals that the story could be different. The uncertainties

of narrative creation, ironically, are the key to unlocking the apparent certainty with which

particular narratives, once sedimented in a community’s popular memory, reproduce themselves.

Strout’s rhetorical question means that these patterns of discourse are, in fact, significant. These

patterns signify as they persist, change, or suddenly cease.

Introduction

When I first found myself in the archives of Kroch Library, staring excitedly at what are

now my sources, I did not know that the old newspaper and mimeographed flyers would lead to a

thesis. The summer before my sophomore year, a family friend had loaned me Donald S. Downs’

book, Cornell ‘69. Toward the end of the book, I came upon a short section titled, “The Barton

Hall Spirit.”10 At its end, there was a quote from a letter that a student participant had sent home

to his parents:

This body was the most incredible meeting and coalition of every type of person you could think of—from long hair to fraternity athletes. The conduct of the thing was dumbfounding. Parliamentary procedure, order, patience, rationality, openness. There were six thousand kids, a stage, a microphone, and a purpose—I’m sure the University would have been blown sky high were it not for this thing.11

The description itself was striking, but I was struck even more that, despite reading about the

Takeover, asking some questions, and being somewhat well informed on the history of Cornell

activism, I had never heard of “this thing.” I wondered how an event that was so central to one of

the participants could occupy such a marginal space in the book, let alone the story of the

Takeover that I had inherited. Out of the many times I had heard casual recitals of the story of

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Cornell ’69, not once had anyone mentioned that thousands of white students had “seized” the

largest building on campus in solidarity with the AAS’ demands. I was intrigued by the event

itself, but I was even more intrigued by its erasure.

I wrote a term paper my sophomore year on the disappearance of the Barton Hall

Community from popular memory, and its relationship with what I saw as the disintegration of

large-scale grassroots political activity at Cornell. At first, my thesis was to be a comprehensive

version of this argument. Ironically, the Barton Hall Community led me back to where I started:

the Straight Takeover. In my research, I began to notice the ways in which the Barton Hall

Community’s erasure from the popular record was not only a somewhat recent phenomenon, but

was only one facet in a larger and more consequential project of confiscating the memory of

Cornell ’69 entirely. I realized that, in many ways, Cornell ’69 was an event racially and

politically illegible to my generation, who had reinterpreted it in the language of post-racialism.

As a consequence, the Takeover, an event arising from militant calls for black self-

determination, became about “diversity,” post-racialism’s way of acknowledging race while

simultaneously erasing it.

In this sense, I have found that present-day rituals of remembrance that disown or ignore

the Takeover’s own distinct, powerful political vision function as mechanisms for sanitizing,

appropriating, and ultimately forgetting the Takeover and the radical critique it represented.

Instead of centering the grievances of black students, the Takeover was about “everybody.”

Instead of black liberation and separatism, the Takeover, even in many of the former

participants’ own words, became about integration, assimilation and abstract inclusivity.

Although there are many complex, structural reasons for these changes, such as broader shifts in

racial and political discourse, I trace these transformations at Cornell back to the 20-year

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anniversary of the Takeover, when the Administration began the practice of officially sponsoring

commemorations.

Through this process of sanitization and erasure, the militants of the Afro-American

Society, always assertive in their right to liberation, were turned into cowering, passive victims

of both “cultural misunderstanding” and isolated acts of racism, lashing out in the hope that

someone would acknowledge their tribulations. The “armed insurgents”12 that were remembered

in the 1970’s became the young, somewhat confused and misguided idealists found in post-1989

retrospectives. This transformation in the story told about the Takeover, I came to understand,

was directly related to the later erasure of the Barton Hall Community in popular memory.

Ironically, it was only by isolating the black students from their white supporters that one could

turn the “problem” of Cornell ’69, namely that of institutional and extra-institutional racism, into

what we now call “diversity.” Notably, this isolation makes them a “minority,” that is, a group

that is disadvantaged simply because it exists in smaller numbers than another group, not

because of structural oppression or institutional racism, as the black students at the time argued.

The story that I tell in this thesis has two main acts: in the first, I take as my point of

departure a series of persistent “myths”13 about the Takeover, and explore their significance to

the story itself. In seeking to understand these misconceptions, which are primarily glitches in

the story’s narrative sequence, I discuss the relationship between the Takeover and its historical

context. Finally, I diagram the processes by which the Takeover became its memory through

these narrative configurations; I describe the mechanisms by which these narratives are

reproduced, transformed, and rearranged. In the second, I concentrate on unraveling the afterlife

of Cornell ’69, and how popular conceptions of it have changed since it occurred. Chronicling

the many narratives that emerged in the event’s aftermath, I trace their transformations over time

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as they persist parallel to the procession of history itself, echoing history’s own movements. In

particular, I focus on Cornell President Frank Rhodes’ administration’s decision to sponsor the

1989 commemorations, and the ways in which this fundamentally changed the discourse

surrounding the Takeover.

Insofar as there can be no neutral memory of the Takeover, I am invested in a memory of

the Takeover that centers the critiques and aspirations voiced by the AAS during and

immediately after the Takeover. In the spirit of such a project, I am interested in rendering

visible—that is to say, challenging—the administrative discourse of “diversity” by resuscitating

the memory of the Barton Hall Community, understood as massive popular support for, first, a

platform of black self-determination and autonomy, and second, a radical critique of the

University. It is my hope that the historical inquiry and analysis of this thesis will uncover some

of the processes that work against such a project, while laying the groundwork for its future

realization.

Chapter 1

The Willard Straight Takeover’s legacy began with a mistake. As soon as the students of

the Afro-American Society walked proudly out of the front door of Cornell’s student union,

wearing bandoliers and raising their fists in silent triumph, the first entries of what would

become “the Takeover” in the historical record were being formulated and wired across the

country. Administrators lamented the New York Times reporter, Homer Bigart, who

sensationalized their “capitulation” as the letters of furious alumni, vowing never to donate

again, began to arrive at Day Hall.14 None were as upset with the way the Takeover was

characterized by the press than the students in Barton Hall. The Mass Media Committee, an

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offshoot of the Barton Hall Community, formed because they “were deeply concerned with the

manner in which the recent events on our campus had been presented to the public and received

by the entire nation.”15 The Committee’s report contains about twenty “representative examples

of some of the more pronounced errors…which appeared in national newspapers reporting the

disruptions at Cornell University beginning April 19th, 1969.”

Nearly all of the major errors were about guns—or more specifically, at what point the

AAS had brought guns into the Straight. The report’s likely incomplete enumeration of

“representative examples” includes five mistakes of this nature from the New York Times alone,

in addition to one from The Baltimore Sun and The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.16 A

typical example of one “of the more pronounced errors” appeared in the Cleveland Press, which

reported: “University administrators signed an agreement under gunpoint… The blacks seized

the student union building early Saturday and evicted parents who were visiting for the weekend.

Apparently some of the eighty demonstrators had guns then….”17

Firmly sedimented into the minds of observers, the image presented by these details

cemented a narrative that would prove nearly impossible to undo in the years to come. Despite

the Committee’s best efforts, Dennis A. Williams ’73, a Cornell alumnus and administrator

writing for Cornell Magazine, was still clarifying the chronology twenty-five years later. “In

fact,” Williams elucidates, “much of the common perception is wrong, beginning with the

widespread assumption that the students were armed when they seized the building; the guns

arrived later, after an attempt by white students to retake the building.”18 Williams is referring to

the episode in which white fraternity brothers, upset and scandalized by the takeover of “their”

student union, attempted to evict the AAS, but were physically repelled from the building. Three

white students and one black student were injured in the fight.

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The slip in “common perception” Williams describes is not trivial, for it is the point at

which most narrative trajectories of the “event” diverge. In fact, whether or not this

misperception is explicitly addressed is the single greatest indicator of the position of the narrator

in the many narratives surrounding the Takeover. It is a common feature in sympathetic accounts

of the Takeover to make a point of clarifying this fact, and it is a feature of conservative

accounts—which align themselves with alienated faculty whose academic freedom was infringed

upon—to ignore it. Whether the Takeover was a “coercive” act of seizing a building with guns to

pressure the University into accepting student demands, or an act of self-defense against the

threat of racist violence, can rest entirely on when, and thus why, the guns were brought into the

Straight. To misunderstand the internal sequence of the event is to misapprehend the event’s

delicate meaning entirely; in other words, the Committee’s clarification of the narrative

sequence—an intervention also attempted incessantly by former AAS members—had profound

political stakes.

The persistence of sequence errors—mistakes in the narrative’s chronology—in the

memory of the Takeover is filled with implication, not just for an analysis of the Takeover’s

legacy, but also for the popular memory of the 1960’s writ large. Despite routine attempts at

intervention, these misconceptions have been as persistent as the legacy itself. As critical

distance from the events has increased, and scholarly work on the Takeover has been published,

popular conceptions of the Takeover remain stubbornly inaccurate. What makes these mistaken

accounts so compelling? What is at stake in their correction? What role do they play in the

Takeover’s emergence and preservation as a “historical event,” worthy of anniversaries and

commemorations? In what ways does the Takeover transcend these sterile acts of remembrance

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and remain a dangerous story to tell at Cornell? What implications do these corrections hold for

the subversion of the master narratives of “the protest era,” the 1960’s?

Events and Structures Structures are comprehensible only in the medium of the events within which structures are articulated, and which are tangible as structures within them… Structures once described and analyzed then become narratable as a factor within a greater context of events. The processual character of modern history cannot be comprehended other than through the reciprocal explanation of events through structures, and vice versa.19 – Rheinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past What do Cornell students, writing in the 21st century, mean by “the sixties?” When they

commemorate the Takeover every year in late April, refer to it in conversation, or deploy it in a

polemic, what is signified? For historiographical theorist Rheinhardt Koselleck, the relationship

between historical events and historical structures is reciprocal: events are often explained

through their structural causes, and structures can only become legible through the chronicling of

events and the construction of narratives. For example, most discussions of “the sixties” at

Cornell revolve around the Takeover, and most discussions of the Takeover are careful to place it

gently in its era, “the sixties.” What Koselleck describes as “the reciprocal explanation of events

through structures, and vice versa,” suggests that in order for an event to be properly “historical,”

it must function as and through a kind of tautology. The historical event must symbolize its

epoch, yet this epoch is nothing more than a series of historical events such as itself, accounted

for and counted through their very likeness.

The structure of the epoch mimics that of the event. Events themselves, Koselleck

reminds us, “can only be recounted in a chronological manner to be made meaningful.” In other

words, the Takeover can only be significant when placed in relation to what happened before and

after it, in terms of its causes and effects, and its place in the broader story of “the sixties” at

Cornell, or “the sixties” in general. Yet, the Takeover itself is only a series of occurrences that,

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placed in a particular order, become a narrative: the story that is “the Takeover.” Put more

succinctly, not only do events constitute narratives, narratives constitute events.

What access do we have to an event after it has occurred? We have the empirical traces it

left behind; perhaps we can see the infrastructural damage done to the Straight, the injuries

sustained in the scuffle. We might have the guns, the pool cues that were turned into spears, and

some stray tracts or mimeographed manifestos collected diligently by the archivist. We might

have a series of video or audio recordings, photographs from both inside and outside of the

building, and the testimonies of the participants and direct observers. Finally, we might have a

set of institutions that emerged from the event, a word in our vocabulary that had not previously

existed, or some physical or discursive practice that had not been recognized as legitimate prior

to the event.

As unassembled evidence, disaggregated from any unity of meaning, these traces are not

recognizable as “the event.” These fragments still require narrative—the work of assembly, of

re-construction, before they can even be recognized as pieces of “the event.” The narrative labor

of assembling evidence, of accessing memory (from one’s own experience or others’ written

accounts), or of telling the story, is what allows the event—as memory—to persist over time. As

a consequence, symbolic interpretation is not just a part of the historical event, it is the historical

event, in the sense that the event, and its many parts and parcels, only become legible through

narrative.

How are the narratives of Cornell ’69 structured? How does one event come to stand in

for an entire narrative of events, a structure? How does the commonly remembered story of the

Takeover relate to the story of the sixties in which it is embedded? In what ways do corrections

of the historical record challenge this relationship?

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Structural Dislocations: The Crisis Before “The Crisis”

By the spring semester of 1969, Cornell University was understood by many of its

constituents to be, if not in crisis itself, residing within a deeper conflict that was developing on a

national and global scale. Resistance to the War in Vietnam was approaching a crescendo,

Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, SNCC had changed its name to the Student

National Coordinating Committee (excising the word “nonviolent”), and on the political left, a

deep intergenerational rift had developed between increasingly politicized or countercultural

youth and their insufficiently radical elders, both in black and white communities. A June 1969

memo from the Cornell Office of Public Information recounts the findings of a “survey

undertaken at the request of the University’s Board of Trustees to get at the causes of the April

disorder.” The survey, which interviewed 200 students (as well as 100 faculty, 30 administrators,

300 alumni, and 20 trustees), found not a trouble-making minority of student activists, but rather

a “‘ground swell’ of unrest” that reflected a “‘malaise’ over still broader social problems in the

country.” According to the report, “student sentiments had to do not only with the war, racial

difficulties and their views on how the older generation handled social problems, but also with

dissatisfaction regarding the educational process in general.”20

In his 1989 article, “Reflections on the Crisis of April ’69,” David Burak, a member of

the Cornell chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), argues the same basic point:

“My contention is that immediate events at Cornell University throughout the year prior to April

1969 had a limited relationship to the eruption of energy that took place. The combination of

anger, militancy, frustration, and concern that characterized so many of us was more a reaction to

historical forces that were beyond the university's control.”21 Indeed, the overarching student

indictment of Cornell was termed “complicity,” a charge suggesting that Cornell’s major fault

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was in not extricating itself as an institution from the racist, imperialist, capitalist, and patriarchal

social order on which it had been founded and in which it was still deeply embedded.

Notably, this critique is not confined to retrospective analysis. Before the “unrest” of

1969 began, a 1968 article written in The Public Interest by recent Cornell graduate Nathan

Tarcov described the shift in student sentiment. “The change in student ethos,” Tarcov observed,

“is…partly the result of developments outside the university, chiefly the war and the national

administration's conduct and account of it, the draft, especially the abolition of graduate

deferments, and the racial crisis.”22 However, Tarcov cautioned that the administration “cannot

afford to assume that student unrest would disappear with the resolution of these external

problems…. Even granting a host of peripheral demands cannot remedy a pervasive discontent

with the fundamental characteristics of education in the arts college.”

The deep structural crisis in the middle of which Cornell found itself was thus widely

acknowledged. Tarcov describes a tense and brewing political climate, in which New Leftists

turned the Straight into a set for daily scenes of political confrontation and incitement. Political

leaflets and tracts were produced and distributed on a regular basis, graffiti was scrawled across

the campus walls, and the FBI had long been infiltrating and monitoring student groups.23 SDS

member and draft resister Bruce Dancis had already publicly burned his draft card, Cornell’s

investments in apartheid South Africa were being challenged more fiercely than ever before, and

black students had sat in at the Economics Department after a visiting professor had claimed that

economic development, and the rational patterns of behavior underpinning it, could only be

found in European civilization.24

Numbering only about 300 in a school of roughly 13,000, black students were confronted

daily by the intentional and unintentional racism of the predominantly white student body. In one

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widely recounted incident, a group of black women doing their hair “in the privacy of [their]

own rooms” were reported for smoking marijuana because of the unfamiliar smell.25 These

experiences found daily iterations in the lives of many black and Puerto Rican students (who

were also in the AAS and involved in the Takeover). However, instead of asking to simply be

included in the predominantly white “community,” the AAS developed a separatist politics of

autonomy and self-determination. The AAS demanded their own institutions as a prerequisite to

equality. Just as the older generation was mostly unaware—and genuinely surprised to

discover—that a pervasive “ground swell” of discontent and disillusionment had radicalized a

significant proportion of the student body, most white students were unaware of the extent to

which a different sort of ground swell—the re-emergent influence of militant, black

internationalism—had radicalized the members of AAS. The staunch Western traditionalism—

and the racial politics behind it—that served as Cornell’s ideological façade and the full-scale

arrival of assertive, Black Power politics within Cornell’s growing black community was a mix

that proved combustible.26

Homer “Skip” Meade, who participated in the Takeover as a senior, described the shift in

campus climate as a “major change in atmosphere” in which Cornell moved from being “idyllic”

to experiencing what historian William H. Sewell calls “structural dislocations.”27 Sewell argues

that historical events—especially those signifying a rupture—occur after a long period of

building tension, characterized by major shifts in previously undisturbed societal structures. In

language that could aptly describe the Takeover, he writes of the French Revolution in 1789, and

its effects on those living through it: “the emotional tone of action can be an important sign of

structural dislocation and rearticulation. The more or less extended dislocation of structures that

characterizes the temporality of the event is profoundly unsettling.”28 In nearly parallel terms,

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Meade concurred: “By the fall of 1966, Cornell was ‘already being disrupted’ by the social and

political climate of the country, including the civil rights movement and administrative changes

such as affirmative action, Meade said.”29 The Sun 1989 Supplement included the following in

its historical narrative: “The discontent at the root of the takeover had been building for years.”30

The Inevitable Surprise

In a 1979 interview with the Sun, then-Provost Dale Corson stated bluntly what most

retrospective descriptions of the Takeover only implied: “The explosion was inevitable.”31

Corson recalled that the night before the Takeover, while stranded at the Syracuse airport, he had

dinner with a professor, with whom he shared a prophesy: “I don't know what's going to happen,

but something is going to happen and it's going to happen soon.”32

Meanwhile, the AAS was preparing to seize the Straight. Despite the way the action

would be framed in the coming weeks, the Takeover preceded the grievances with which it came

to be associated. The 1979 Daily Sun Supplement argues that, rather than being spontaneous, the

Takeover “had been in the planning stage for weeks,” and that the “judicial decision and cross

burning had merely provided the justification for the AAS to proceed with an operation it had

been preparing for a long time:”

Shortly after his election as AAS chairman in January, Ed Whitefield [sic]...appointed another AAS member to begin preparations for a takeover. In a June, 1969 speech reviewing the takeover, Tom Jones...said, “our action was planned to occur at a critical juncture for Cornell: namely Parents Weekend...To seize a vital building in the midst of the weekend when the University is about the job of trying to impress everybody so they can get some more contributions, was something that the University just couldn't ignore.”

In his memoir, Resister, prominent SDS member Bruce Dancis explains the symbolic importance

of the “vital building” chosen by the AAS:

By occupying the student union, the AAS undoubtedly surprised the Cornell administration. From the perspective of both the administration and campus radicals, Day Hall, the administration building, was always viewed as the most likely target for a

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building takeover. Day Hall represented the seat of power at Cornell. The Straight, on the other hand, was the focus point of student activities at Cornell and more relevant to the daily lives of students than almost any other building on campus.33

The AAS did not release demands until the afternoon. According to an AAS graduate student

heavily involved in the Takeover, “the AAS's original intent was giving an emphatic warning to

the campus to ‘get off our backs’...to seize the building for one day only and then surrender it

peaceably.’”34 In other words, the action was symbolic: the AAS thought the reasons for their

action were self-evident, and the gesture of occupying the Student Union on Parents’ Weekend

would be sufficiently communicative.

President Perkins, who ostensibly knew about the disciplinary proceedings and the cross

burning, and had been made aware of AAS member Tom Jones’ announcements on the radio,

released an incredulous statement just a few hours after the takeover began labeling the action

“both…astonishing and regrettable.”35 Just a day after the disciplinary proceedings concluded,

and weeks after the administration had agreed on the creation of the black studies program,

Perkins claimed, “We are not yet completely clear about the reasons for the seizure of the

building since the black students inside have refused to communicate.”36 Regardless of its

sincerity, Perkins statement played upon the double emotion of outrage and confusion felt by

both the older generation (articulated most angrily by alumni) and the majority of the white

student body. Rumors circulated about hundreds of armed whites preparing to re-take the

Straight, which led to an additional shock: the introduction of guns.1

“Good Sixties/Bad Sixties”

                                                                                                               1 Dancis remarked, given the Black Power movement’s unapologetic belief in the principle of armed self-defense, “the decision [by the AAS] to obtain arms shouldn’t have been a complete surprise.” In fact, AAS members had acquired their arms (purchased on their behalf by members of SDS) over a year earlier after they received anonymous threats while struggling for a black studies program.

  20

To be at Barton Hall was to be a part of the news. It was also to be part of history. Even during the ’60s it was clear the ’60s were “The Sixties.” Something was afoot in the world, and a piece of it was loose in Barton Hall. –Ed Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of The Cornell Daily Sun during the spring of 1969 In anticipation of the Takeover’s tenth anniversary, Dale Corson, who succeeded

President Perkins when he resigned in the summer of 1969, reflected: “[Without the guns] it

would have been just another building takeover, of which there were many at the time.”37

Corson’s terse remark reveals what most accounts admit readily, that the presence of guns was

central to the significance of the event. Over forty-five years later, what do the guns signify?

In his Revolution in the Air, historian Max Elbaum summarizes

the interpretation of the 1960s that is now dominant within liberal and progressive circles, and especially within the academic left. That framework paints a picture of the “good sixties” turning into the “bad sixties:” supposedly the early 1960s movements stand out as humane, sensible and worthy of emulation in contrast to the heartless, violence prone and irrational tendencies dominant after 1968—which are largely blamed for wrecking their more noble predecessors.38

Elbaum’s argument suggests that what is at stake in Williams’ simple clarification of the

chronology is actually the master narrative of the 1960s. What happens when the popular

narrative of the Takeover is at odds with the popular narrative of “the sixties?” A shift in the

narrative of the Takeover necessitates a shift in its meaning, which in turn necessitates either the

collapse of its power as a symbol, or a parallel shift of that which it is meant to symbolize. Once

“the Takeover” begins to mean something else, in order for The Takeover to continue to

symbolize “the sixties,” “the sixties” must, by definition, begin to mean something else as well.

In Elbaum’s figuration of the “bad sixties,” the guns—when placed out of context—

become the perfect symbol for the times. They represent the excess of radicalism, the melodrama

of militancy, and the violent absolutism of the era. They represent the turn to Black Power as a

fall from grace. This narrative is exemplified in the introductory paragraph of Professor Cushing

  21

Strout’s “In Retrospect, An Ironic Melodrama,” which was included in the 1979 Daily Sun

Supplement:

What is hard to endure, say the poets, is often sweet to remember. So some teachers and students occasionally speak nostalgically of the 1960s. I suppose they are thinking of the good causes—antiwar and racial equality—not the arson, window-smashing, the building takeovers, or the denial of free speech to opponents. The causes were surely good. But by 1968, protesting tactics had become intimidating and coercive of others; while the murder of Martin Luther King marked the emergence of a militant, separatist Black Nationalism as the ideological orthodoxy for any development of a black studies program. These escalations split the Left, gave ammunition to the Right, and heightened tensions on campus.39

Significantly, Strout’s argument depends on the Takeover being an example of “coercion,” a

claim immune from the intervention that Williams would attempt 25 years later. What would it

mean for the guns to be placed in their proper context as a reaction to a threat? What would it

mean to see the Takeover as a symbol of self-defense rather than coercion? In that context, the

late sixties become a time of extraordinary white supremacist violence, especially as a reaction to

demands for black self-determination.

The good sixties/bad sixties master narrative is also heavily racialized. In Strout’s

narrative, the supposed turn to violence and irrationality—the “window-smashing, the building

takeovers, or the denial of free speech to opponents”—is identified primarily with “the

emergence of a militant, separatist Black Nationalism.” The moment at which the actions—and

the political analysis—center black students is the moment at which they are no longer seen as

sympathetic. The Barton Hall Community is notably marginal in Strout’s “Ironic Melodrama.” In

the master narrative of the sixties, the Barton Hall Community, with its emphasis on discussion

and idealism, not to mention its whiteness, would be an emblem of “the good sixties.” However,

unlike the “good sixties” in the master narrative, the Barton Hall Community occurred after the

Takeover, after the turn to black nationalism, and after the introduction of guns. This alternative

  22

sequence sees militancy not as signaling the end of the period of “good causes,” but as the spark

for an idealist, democratic restructuring of the University. When the story of the Takeover

changes, so does the story of “the sixties.”

The same can be said for the Takeover’s place in the sequence of Cornell history; like its

internal sequence, the Takeover’s causes and effects are misremembered. “A common perception

also holds,” Williams writes, “that the Straight takeover was critical to the creation of the

Africana Studies and Research Center, which in fact had already been scheduled to begin

operation the following semester.”40 While Williams mentions that some faculty acknowledge

that the Takeover “reinforced the university’s commitment to establishing it as a permanent

academic entity,” and in some interviews AAS President Ed Whitfield portrays the Takeover as

part of a struggle for the program’s autonomy,41 the explicit demands of the AAS during the

Takeover were more limited in scope; the crux was the nullification of the reprimands issued by

the campus’ all-white judicial body for protests earlier in the semester. The other demands were

more concerned with the occupation itself, investigating the cross burning, and ensuring the

protection of black students on campus in the days to come.

Williams reminds the reader that the Takeover did not necessarily mark the beginning of

the diversification of the campus—which was initiated several years earlier by the Committee on

Special Education Projects (COSEP), the minority recruitment program—and also did not

directly lead to the creation of the black program house, Ujamaa. In a section entitled “Impact on

the University,” Williams reiterates the point that the Takeover left comparatively few traces,

and that many question its status as a historical event at all. Unlike Jackson State or Kent State,

no one died; unlike the urban riots that were rocking the country, hardly any property was

destroyed; and unlike the unrest at Columbia University, no police came on campus, and no one

  23

went to jail. A few professors got upset, and a smaller number resigned, but on the whole, not

much happened besides the appearance of guns. As then-Vice President Stephen Muller bluntly

concluded, “I don't believe it changed Cornell forever or left a mark.”42

These reminders that, in fact, the Takeover’s structural legacy of change at Cornell is far

more limited than many imagine sits awkwardly next to Williams’ claim, made just paragraphs

earlier, that “More than any other single public event, the Straight takeover symbolizes the

modern history of Cornell.” The takeover and the events that surround it are portrayed in every

variant of narrative as a, if not the, decisive moment in modern Cornell history, the moment that

changed everything. In many abbreviated histories of Cornell ’69, including Williams’ article,

declarations of the supreme significance of the Takeover are often made immediately before a

seemingly inevitable reminder that, in fact, the Takeover changed very little.

Similar claims are often made that the Barton Hall Community, and its institutional

offspring, the Constituent Assembly, led to the “restructuring of the university.”43 As prominent

AAS member Tom Jones pointed out in a speech in June of 1969, “[Before the events,] The

faculty had monopoly dictatorship power with the board of trustees. Now, the Faculty has

monopoly dictatorship power with the board of trustees. What did they do? You have the power

to recommend. People have always had the power to recommend.” “That’s why you don’t see us

jumping up and down about this Constituent Assembly thing,” Jones explained.44

Yet just weeks earlier, while addressing a euphoric Barton Hall after the faculty had

“capitulated,”45 Jones was far more optimistic about the effects of the Barton Hall Community.

According to the Statement of the Committee on Mass Media, after the faculty decided to

nullify, “Tom Jones then took the microphone to say, ‘I was right in what I said because the old

Cornell died at 9 o'clock last night when 6,000 of you stood up for black people. The old order

  24

has ended and this is the University Community.’”46 This sentiment is echoed in a term paper

dated May 25, 1969, now in the Cornell archives, in which student John Bandfield argued that, in

contradiction to the media portrayal of the Faculty Senate’s decision to nullify the reprimands,

the faculty had not capitulated to the black students in the Straight. “If the faculty surrendered to

anyone, it did so to the students in Barton Hall who numbered around nine thousand by

conservative estimates at noon on Wednesday. As Tom Jones of the AAS stated, the decision to

grant the black demands was not made by the faculty; it was made by those students in Barton

Hall.”47

These structural glitches demand more than a reconceptualization of “the sixties;” they

represent a challenge to common understandings of the historical event as well. Cornell ’69

somehow represented structural change, but caused none itself. The Takeover created what had

already existed, and the Barton Hall Community changed everything before it changed nothing.

The new order and the old order were out of order; they weaved among themselves until the

world had been turned on its head and then restored to its original state: a full revolution.

The Event as Symbol

If historical narratives themselves depend on a series of events, which are in turn causally

and sequentially related to each other, the Takeover presents an especially challenging case. The

Takeover, notably, occurred after the structural change with which it came to be associated. The

irony is that the Takeover’s repeated failure to signify accurately—to represent itself and only

itself—is precisely what entrenches it so deeply into public memory. In other words, the

Takeover persists not despite the fact it is misremembered, but precisely because it is

misremembered. The common misperceptions recounted by Williams—that it was an armed

takeover, rather than a nonviolent takeover that escalated to an armed standoff, or that it resulted

  25

in a black studies program, rather than, at most, elicited a recommitment to it—simultaneously

obstruct and make possible the memory of Cornell ’69. They obstruct the memory in that they

cloud the memory with inaccuracies; yet, they make the memory possible in the sense that the

inaccuracies allow the Takeover to stand in as an event of its time, to “symbolize the modern

history” of not just Cornell, but of the “the sixties” in general.

The Takeover has persisted as a “historical event” not only because it changed things, or

because it constituted a historical rupture, but because it became symbolic of, or came to signify,

that change and rupture. That is why the structural change—the creation of the Africana

Center—could have happened before it was made visible by the Takeover. In some sense, the

rupture of the Takeover is unthinkable without the structural dislocations that preceded it, from

the sudden influx of working class students of color at a predominantly white and elite

institution, to the national and international context of war and Third World anti-colonialist

movements. In this sense, whether or not the Takeover directly caused the rupture is irrelevant;

the Takeover was the rupture insofar as it staged and performed it. The Takeover signaled that

formerly dominant ideologies were changing, bursting, or falling apart, and formerly uncontested

structures were being challenged. In some sense, the event can be said to have elevated into the

status of historical event when it takes on this double meaning, standing in both for itself (a

series of occurrences) and the structural changes that underlie it.

Recurrence

It may well be many more anniversaries before Cornell submerges the scars of the bitter spring of 1969. The University had more than three hours to live, it turned out, but those terrible days so wounded us that as we attempt to confront Cornell's present era of transition, we are, in Fitzgerald's words, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”48 –Stuart Berman, editor of the 1979 Daily Sun Supplement

  26

The paradox that governs the memory of the Takeover rests on this question: how can the

event be simultaneously irrevocably confined to the past (as a series of actions tied to a context)

and eternally relevant for the present (as a series of contested narratives about what the event

“means”)? As a symbol, the Takeover appears as an ambiguous image. In the Pulitzer Prize-

winning photograph by Steve Starr, there are black students with guns and bandoliers, walking

triumphantly out of a building in loose formation, surprisingly calm and casual. Yet equally

prominent in the photograph is the “Welcome Parents” sign on the building, evoking a gentle

status quo that had been violently woken from its sleep at five o’clock in the morning, and would

never quite recover. Like the event itself, the image is a site of contested meaning, standing in

either for the crisis of the liberal university,49 “a moment that galvanized black people all over

this nation,” 50 or the beginnings of the political correctness regime.51 The malleability of the

Takeover as a symbol lends it to a variety of interpretations by a variety of interpreters.

Cornell’s now yearly observance of the Takeover in late April is an unearthing of both

Cornell ‘69 and the era that it symbolizes. But in every commemoration, there is the hope, or the

fear, that the Takeover will return someday. The anniversary, in particular, sets a stage on which

to dramatize the interplay of occurrence and recurrence that defines historical rituals of

remembrance. In 1989, the Daily Sun wrote,

American blacks are returning to the spirit of activism they embraced in the late 1960s, gradually propelling the country into the midst of a social revolution, according to Cleveland Donald, who helped take the Straight as a graduate student 20 years ago. “History is coming back to the 1960’s,” the veteran activist said. “I’m seeing a return to where we should have been 10 or 15 years ago.”

For many unsympathetic accounts, especially those written for the 1999 thirtieth anniversary, the

Takeover lives on as stifling political correctness or as the seeds of multiculturalism. Daniel J.

Silver, for example, writing a review of Donald Downs’ book Cornell ‘69 in 1999, concludes by

  27

announcing, “30 years later, without any militant garb or weapons, illiberal forces still occupy

our schools.”52 Divestment from apartheid South Africa,53 the culture wars, and the election of

President Barack Obama54 all become backdrops for the Takeover’s relevance. For many

sympathetic accounts, the Takeover is relevant either because there is activism going on, or

because there is no activism going on. James Turner, the longtime Director of the Africana

Center, argues that the Takeover is relevant precisely because students do not remember it:

This young generation has not been educated to the history of 20 years ago. That’s still the great problem we have. The inability of us to formalize and institutionalize the knowledge of our experience so it can be passed on to the next generation. And because of the absence of this knowledge, many of these young people don’t see that they have any responsibility to continue the struggle for freedom and justice. They are the byproducts of the benefits of that struggle. Prior to that, everyone understood in the black community that they were experiencing conditions of objective racial oppression as a result of segregation. Today, these young people don’t experience that. They think it’s up to them individually… They have acquired materialism.55

Dennis A. Williams, however, sees the legacy of the Takeover as a living protagonist. Towards

the end of his article, Williams argues that the Takeover “created a chain of solidarity that is

continually reforged by black students in times of real or perceived threat.”

The old activist days fondly recalled by many 40-something alumni have never ended for Cornell's minority community. Virtually every generation of black—and now Latino—students for the past 25 years can point to a time of crisis and conflict: COSEP reorganization in the ’70s, South African investments in the ’80s, financial aid and the Hispanic American Studies Program in the ’90s and several intermediate skirmishes. And behind all of them looms the legend of the Straight, inspiring, motivating, and empowering… When [minority students] encounter resistance, whether that comes from paranoia or practiced patience on the part of the university, their frustration rises to a sense of urgency. And that urgency compels them to clutch at the symbolism of the past for reassurance that progress can be made.56

Williams’ “shadow” is thus not only a memory, a myth of origins, or a legendary standard

against which current students are measured; it is itself a participant in the struggle. The

Takeover is a story that is impossibly and inevitably reproduced, slipping through the gaps of the

new generation of individualistic Cornellians, yet maintained through structurally induced

  28

periods of renewed interest. For both Williams and Turner, the Takeover is a necessary history

because it both created the Cornell in which students live and helps them continue the fight to

survive there. Ironically, the fact that the Takeover did not change everything once and for all,

that it did not eliminate institutional racism permanently from Cornell, has ensured that it will

live on as long as that fight continues. In his conclusion, Williams alludes to the eternal

relevance of the Takeover in the minds of students of color:

‘The students keep it alive,’ says one minority administrator of the Straight takeover. ‘They will never let that legacy die.’ Not, at least, until they are able to believe that taking over a building will no longer be necessary, because they have truly occupied the university itself.57

Event Becomes Structure

Cornell Magazine published Williams’ article in April of 1994. The opening

sentences frame the Takeover, primarily, as a memory:

Nothing could have been a more vivid reminder of April 1969. Three days before Thanksgiving last fall, hundreds of mostly Latino and African-American students gathered outside a barricaded Day Hall waving signs, chanting slogans, eventually even sitting down in the street to block traffic at the intersection of Tower Road and East Avenue.58

This article, entitled, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall—25 years later,” never seems to

make up its mind about whether it is more about “The Takeover” or the “25 years later.” Having

arrived on campus just months after the Takeover, Williams’ own intimate distance to the events

allows his writing to pursue them in experiential terms—not as they “actually happened,” or in

some representation of their essential meaning, but as the events were felt and perceived, at the

time and since.

Williams’ piece is crucial because it reveals that the central problems of popular memory

are also what allow such recollections to exist and be relevant. The past’s refusal to be confined

to itself both means that it is free to live among us and that this past is a perpetual fugitive in our

  29

attempts to secure it, to make its meaning stable. The paradox of popular memory—the traditions

and stories that constitute us culturally—lies in history’s continual resurrection, and the erasure,

transmutation, and reproduction of its various narrative forms. Eagerly, Williams tracks down

the story of the Takeover twenty five years later as if it were simply another participant—as if

the embodied event could be found with a steady job in the suburbs, or living a humble existence

on a farm somewhere outside of Ithaca, or had taken an Endowed Chair position at the

University. The Takeover reappeared, alternately as terrible apparition and inspirational

precedent, in nearly every major conflict that succeeds April of 1969. Williams pushes us to see

“Cornell ‘69” not only as a historical drama, but as a ghostly character in its own right, a living

allusion. When stripped of the journalistic aura of empiricism, it becomes clear that his article is,

if anything, a profile of a historical shadow cast over the present: “More than any other single

public event, the Straight takeover symbolizes the modern history of Cornell. It clings to us like a

shadow.”59

Koselleck writes that, when an event becomes a symbol, it can “gain structural

significance… [It can assume] a structural status.”60 The event reproduces itself over time

through the telling and retelling of its story. In the panoply of interpretations that cling to and

inhabit the shadow of the Takeover, one can find the ripples of the process by which the event

becomes a historical event, and by which a historical event itself becomes a structure. These

interpretations are not simply readings—they are narratives unto themselves that require reading.

These narratives both facilitate the event’s development into a structure, and also mimic the

event and structure’s relationship. Just as Cornell ’69 made visible, audible, and tangible the

structural crisis that had already pushed Cornell to “the brink,” as Dancis describes it, these

stories—assemblages of evidence and memory—make Cornell ’69 visible, audible, and tangible

  30

in the present.61 These accounts mark, and trace the development of, “the Takeover’s”

metamorphosis into memory.

Chapter 2

Reproduction

"It happened five years ago today. Over 100 black students seized Willard Straight Hall in the early morning hours, rudely ousting frightened parents staying in the union's guest rooms for what turned into Cornell's last Parents' Weekend.” (The Cornell Daily Sun, 1974)

"Ten years ago today, shortly after 5:30a.m. on a cold, wet Saturday, about 100 black students entered Willard Straight Hall, expelled employees and Parents Weekend guests, and seized the building. (The Cornell Daily Sun, 1979)

“Shortly before 6 a.m., roughly 100 black students force about 30 parents visiting for Parents Weekend and 40 employees out of the Straight…” (The Cornell Daily Sun, 1989)

"Shortly after 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 19, 1969, about 100 black students walked out of a cold mist into Willard Straight Hall through an unlocked door, chained the doors shut and barricaded them and began evicting employees and Parents Weekend guests." (The Cornell Daily Sun, 1999)

Forty-five years ago Saturday, approximately 100 black students took over Willard Straight Hall and ejected University employees and Parents’ Weekend visitors from the building. (The Cornell Daily Sun, 2014)

Nearly every time the Cornell Daily Sun has written an abbreviated chronology of the

Takeover, the narrative has introduced itself with the same image.62 While the verb becomes

slightly less charged (“rudely ousting” becomes “ejected”) and the object of the action becomes

less vulnerable (“frightened parents” becomes “employees and…visitors”), the template, the set

of facts, and even the turns of phrase are essentially unchanged. The image of angry black

students awakening the parents of Cornell students—as well as innocent employees—clearly

anticipates the fear and outrage of the reader, traumatized by the black students’ audacity in

disturbing whiteness at its most vulnerable and respectable (asleep or working). The image taps

  31

into the dominant narrative in the mainstream media at the time of the Takeover, which portrays

a violent and rowdy group of black “hoodlums,”63 who, through brute force and manipulation,

coerce Cornell into “capitulating” to their demands. The headings of the front-page New York

Times coverage, in which the occupiers are referred to as “especially recruited slum students,”64

summarize this narrative concisely: “Armed Negroes End Seizure - Cornell Yields - Armed

Negro Students End 36-Hour Occupation After Cornell Capitulates.”

Notably, the imagery that begins the “capitulation” narrative, destined to be echoed

throughout the following decades by Sun retrospectives, does not originate from the Daily Sun

itself. While Cornell’s newspaper did include an article about the parents’ ejection from the

Straight, their above-the-fold coverage focused primarily on the responses of both Students for a

Democratic Society (SDS) and the Perkins Administration. Instead, the image, the syntax, and

the set of facts included in succession, seems to come from the April 20th New York Times’ front

page:

About 100 black students at Cornell University staged a surprise raid on the student union building at dawn today. They...ousted 30 sleeping parents from guest rooms. The invaders ordered the parents, and about 40 university employes [sic], to leave the building.65

Despite minor rearrangements and revisions, the narrative template established by The New York

Times in 1969 was replicated, with remarkable consistency, for at least the next 45 years. What

explains the persistence of this short paragraph?

Admittedly, much of this paragraph’s persistence can be attributed to convenience:

editors of the Sun, looking for a concise, accessible history of the Takeover for a commemorative

supplement, had to look no further than their own archives for a model. At times, editors

acknowledged this practice explicitly. For example, the “Sequence of Events” described in the

1989 Supplement includes the footnote: “This timeline was compiled…from Sun editions at the

  32

time of the Takeover.” In 2014, the author wrote, “Below is a brief history of the events that led

to and followed the takeover, based off of the reporting done in a comprehensive Sun supplement

published on the 10th anniversary of the Straight Takeover.”66

However, if convenience were the sole or primary factor involved in reproduction, what

would explain the choice of the editor of the Daily Sun Supplement in 1974 to draw from the

New York Times’ rendition of the crisis over the one originally written by their own predecessors

at the Sun? What makes The Times’ account more useful or attractive for an editor writing in

1974? In part, this might be explained by the changing political climate, which Robert D. Miller

summarizes in his article, entitled “The Dwindling Power of Communal Action:”

the communal power movement of Barton Hall has dwindled to impotence….the black power movement…as a source of militant confrontation on campus…has gone the way of communal power. Dilemmas for blacks and whites are no less perplexing, but so long as the present live-and-let-live mood persists among both blacks and whites respectively, those who are troubled by separatism on the one hand or by integrationism on the other are equally frustrated by the ambivalence, if not apathy, that greets their calls to action.67

If this “live-and-let-live mood” provided an uninspired context for the Sun‘s first

commemorative supplement, it might explain the editor’s reluctance to draw from the initial Sun

coverage, which rang with the exuberance and excitement of the time. The cynicism of the mid-

70’s, alluded to by Miller, clearly resonated with the curt, dismissive style of the Times’ account,

which displayed a palpable hostility to the Takeover. An April 22nd editorial began by likening

the events at Cornell to “the 1930’s when pictures of academic convocations in German

universities featured jackbooted students with daggers and sidearms.”68 Meanwhile, the Sun’s

1974 editorial introduction to the narrative mimicked the Times’ tone, openly expressing

skepticism of the black students’ claims:69

The Takeover, ostensibly sparked by a dispute of Cornell’s judicial system but actually the culmination of a year marked by growing racial tension, turned the University into an

  33

armed camp beset by fears and rumors as the blacks brought guns into the Straight—supposedly to defend themselves.

The words “ostensibly,” “actually,” and “supposedly” ricochet around the passage, casting

suspicion on the legitimacy of the AAS’ claims, and implicitly painting the black students as

deceptive, dishonest, and manipulative. It was in this discursive setting—and this political

atmosphere—that much of the Takeover’s memory would be constructed.

A second factor in the reproduction of the Times’ image is The Times’ national standing

and reputation. As the national “paper of record,”70 The Times’ was not simply writing news, the

Times was writing history of and in the present; its pre-eminence set the standard for other print

publications at the time, and its status allowed it to wage a disproportionate influence over the

historical record. Because of its distinction, the role of The Times in national discourse is often to

sediment the first—and often most durable—layers of narrative.

Stereotypes

However, these factors cannot alone account for the durability of the Times’ spin. The

perseverance of the paragraph is inextricably tied to the history of the image it presents. The

image of the “Black Hoodlum” that becomes so common in accounts of the Takeover (especially

accounts written from distance) has its own precedent in the stereotype of the black “brute,” a

recurring racist figure that dates back to slavery.71 The deployment of a cultural trope has a dual

function. It both facilitates the audience’s ability to comprehend the events at Cornell (i.e., to fit

them into a pre-existing worldview), and ensures that, so long as the trope is in practice, the story

itself will be cited as evidence of the stereotype’s accuracy. This predisposes such a caricature to

be re-articulated indefinitely in various forms. The history of Cornell ’69 is replete with

recognizable racist stereotypes as the variously named “ghetto kids,”72 “slum students,”73 or

  34

“black hoodlum” becomes an ideological tautology: it refracts the black students into a particular

historical trope, and then uses that trope as evidence that the stereotype is, indeed, a reality.74

The presence of stereotypes, rather than merely signaling sloppy journalism, actually

represents a significant factor in the durability of a popular narrative about an event. The

“stereotype” comes from the newspaper business: the word itself names an old printing

technique that allowed text and images to be reproduced, sometimes with small changes,

indefinitely. In this sense, the stereotype, or the mass reproduction of fundamentally similar

images, formats, and syntaxes (and therefore discourses), is both literally and figuratively built

into the form of the newspaper. Stereotypes, then, are effective not because they are original, but

because they are, to use the French onomatopoetic term for a print stereotype, clichés.75

Meanwhile, the black brute was not the only stereotype enshrined in the 1974

Supplement. In fact, one can read the entire Supplement as a kind of stereotype, in the original

sense of an image or set of texts that can be reproduced indefinitely with minor revisions. The

1974 Supplement, from its form to its content, is the foundational work in the genre that would

define the memory of Cornell ’69 over the next 40 years. The Supplement’s initial format can be

understood as an example of narrative enclosure, which first separates “fact” (the official

chronology) from “opinion” (the various commentaries), and then demarcates a series of

typologies, each representing a particular class of actors within the crisis.

“The Takeover”

Within the official chronology—the supposedly objective, disinterested narrative—the

1974 Supplement establishes the tradition of opening with a short, italicized summary of the

events. The implication of such an introductory summary is that, like a longhand version of a

heading or subheading, it both hooks the reader and tells the reader what the story is “about,” i.e.

  35

what lies at its essence. The phrase “the takeover” is repeated throughout the introduction,

nominating it for the role of symbolic metonym: the phrase by which all the occurrences of

spring 1969 at Cornell are now known. Until Donald A. Downs named it “Cornell ‘69” in

1999,76 and arguably afterwards as well, this metonym would become the dominant shorthand

for what Cushing Strout called “the crisis.” It was at this point—with the 1974 Supplement—

when “the takeover” began to take on its historic double meaning, encompassing both the AAS’

physical act of seizing Willard Straight Hall as well as the entire week of events that surrounded

that act.

Thus, what might have been remembered as “the crisis,” “the occupation,” “April ’69,”

“the events of 1969,” “the Barton Hall Community,” “Restructuring,” “the (faculty) vote,” or

even “the cross burning,” became known as “the takeover.” Just as a novel’s title foreshadows its

contents, the label “the takeover” does not simply name the events, it identifies their main

significance, pronouncing what they are ultimately about. Different choices ascribe wholly

different meanings to the events, and “the takeover” is neither the most neutral nor the most

descriptive. Choosing “the cross burning” might have located the problem in white supremacist

aggression; choosing “the Barton Hall Community“ or “Restructuring” might have centered the

transformative experience of many white students (and to some, the University as a whole).

Instead, choosing “the Takeover” unites the events around a single image of black militancy that

announces not simply the occupation of a building but the taking of power in general.77 While

ambiguous enough to be embraced by black students as triumphant and powerful, the initial

usage of the moniker “the Takeover” was meant to hook the reader into a narrative in which the

black students “controlled” the administration, or by some accounts, the entire University, when

the reality was much more ambiguous. (If anyone was said to “control” the University, in the

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sense of taking power, it was the Barton Hall Community.)78 Ultimately, “the takeover” is the

necessary framing for what will become the “capitulation” narrative.79

The Actors

The recollections of former participants comprise the bulk of the 1974 Supplement. In a

common maneuver used by the popular press when recounting periods of social unrest that

involved many actors,80 the multitude of perspectives through which participants observed the

takeover are categorized and given representatives. These emblematic narratives, in the case of

the 1974 Supplement, materialize in the voices of five representatives, whose symbolic roles are

limited to five categories: “The Administration,” “The Dissenting Professor,” “The Black

Militant,” and “The White Idealist.” To each character, a narrative: then-President Dale Corson

and former Dean of Faculty Robert D. Miller emphasize that no lives were lost and note “The

Dwindling Power of Communal Action;” Werner J. Dannhauser, a Straussian professor of

Government at Cornell, denounces the University for “selling out;” AAS member Reuben A.

Munday refocuses the debate on the racism that precipitated the Takeover; and student trustee

Robert C. Platt ponders the status of the newly formed yet somewhat stagnant University Senate.

This cast of stereotypes appears, with minor revisions, during nearly every major

commemoration of the Takeover. Ten years later, these typologies yet again find their

emblematic form in the 1989 Supplement, in which an entire section is devoted to three principal

players, each with a corresponding narrative: “The Protester” (Tom Jones), “The Dissenter”

(conservative Sun Editor and Columnist Paul A Rahe Jr.), and “The Administrator” (Cornell

President James Perkins).81

Over time, the actors grow to include the alumni, the archivist, and even the

contemporary student, who appears as the reader, the character who, faced with the elaborate

  37

narrative display in front of them, clumsily grasps for a meaning that remains beyond their reach.

In a 1989 article entitled “Details Hazy for Students,” a Sun reporter notes how students are

utterly ignorant of what actually occurred, their accounts “embellished by tales of additional

violence,” yet simultaneously care deeply “about voicing their opinions on the Takeover.” The

article remarks that, incredibly, “a surprising number of students haven’t even heard of the

incident.” Students nonetheless grasp for meaning, and many ultimately decide that, “the use of

arms transforms the takeover into an event they cannot condone.”82

Transformation

72. Take over a building—Cornell Daily Sun “161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do”

(2005)

In 2005, the Daily Sun published a list of “161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do,” in

reference to the 161 steps of McGraw Tower, gleaned from the responses to a survey they had

conducted. The Takeover took its solemn place in this anthology of Cornellian popular culture at

number 72, immediately following “71. Take an unplanned nap in the library.”83 The list became

a popular and often referenced inside-joke for Cornell’s student body and alumni, listing

activities to which “every Cornellian” should aspire. The subtext is that completing all such

activities would make one the ultimate and emblematic Cornellian, the embodiment of cultural

authenticity. By 2013, the Takeover’s inclusion in that list was anything but controversial. In a

Sun column entitled “Big Red Ambition #72: (Learn About) Taking Over a Building (in AMST

2001),” the author made a pitch for a new, 1-credit course on the history of Cornell:

Well, I’m a second semester senior, and while I try not to get all nostalgic about my dwindling amount of time here on the Hill, I think it’s time we all talk about #72 (take over a building). No, I’m not planning on taking over Willard Straight –– that is so last century. I’m talking about learning about the Willard Straight Takeover of 1969, and since I don’t foresee any building takeovers in the coming weeks (meaning very few, if

  38

any, of us are going to check off #72 in its truest form), let’s alter it a bit, and make #72: Take AMST 2001: The First American University.

How did the Takeover transform from a repressed trauma into a quirk? Rather than the simple

decay of institutional memory, the fundamental transformations in the discursive memory of

Cornell ’69 came about as a result of a series of active interventions, particularly by the Cornell

administration. By tracing the developments, distortions, and transformations of the narratives

that represent Cornell ‘69, one finds that towards the end of the 1980’s, specifically surrounding

the 20th anniversary, the discourse is radically transformed.

“Glancing Back, Looking Forward—Toward Diversity”84

In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the Takeover, two contentious issues dominated

campus political discourse with respect to the events of spring 1969: minority recruitment and

divestment from apartheid South Africa. The first, which was a particular preoccupation of the

administration, was framed in the emergent language of “diversity.” In Cornell’s “diversity

timeline” (literally “diversity.cornell.edu”), the word “diversity” first appears in 1988, in

reference to a program “which prepares underrepresented students in the humanities, arts and

social sciences for doctoral study in order to increase diversity in the professoriate.”85

In the late 1980’s, Cornell’s administration became re-invested in increasing the

percentage of students of color on campus. Immediately after the Takeover, however, the

University’s somewhat clandestine support of the Committee on Special Education Projects

(COSEP), the affirmative action program which had actively recruited black students, faded. In

1971, Gloria I. Joseph Ph. D. ’67, COSEP director and a mentor to many members of AAS,

resigned in protest after Dale Corson’s administration revoked her power to handle the COSEP

budget. In 1976, the administration initiated the “decentralization” of COSEP,86 which critics

  39

argued would cause COSEP officials to be “reduced to having the role of advisors.” In response,

on the seventh anniversary of the Takeover, “about 200 black students charged through Day

Hall, ejected former University President Corson and other top administrators, and occupied the

building for about 10 hours....” Meanwhile, the University’s minority enrollments floundered.

Alongside a full-page article in the 1989 Supplement entitled “Cornell Experiences Slow

Progress,” a chart showed that the total number of black students enrolled at Cornell peaked in

1973 with 747 students, leveling out at around 650 thereafter, and staying there until 1988.87

Notably, while this trend was stable from the “decentralization” of COSEP onward, it did not

receive major coverage in the Sun—especially in relation to the Takeover—until 1989.

It was against this backdrop that the University decided, for the first time, to sponsor a

commemoration of the Straight Takeover. Dennis A. Williams describes the administration’s

rationale. After a long period of “bury your head in the sand and maybe it'll go away,”88

Cornell’s orientation towards the legacy of the Takeover shifted:

The veil of pained silence finally began to lift in 1989, with the 20th anniversary of the takeover. [Former VP for University Relations] Burness proposed a university-sponsored observance intended, he says, to get people to look at the event “as part of the educational experience of the university and the people in it.” Although by more than one account there was skittishness within Day Hall about reopening old wounds, Burness credits President Frank H.T. Rhodes with immediately understanding the value of laying to rest negative connotations so that Cornell could begin to step out of its own shadow.

Why was the 20th anniversary an opportune time for the University to enter the debate about the

Takeover’s legacy? After twenty years of hostile silence, what caused this sudden entry into such

a contentious discourse, which the University had theretofore avoided? What made President

Rhodes “immediately [understand] the value of laying to rest negative connotations?”

Rhodes would clarify this point in a public statement in January 1989. The Committee he

had appointed to plan the commemoration had disbanded after all of its black delegates had

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resigned, protesting the Trustees’ vote against full divestment from companies doing business in

South Africa. Among the committee members who resigned was Dennis A. Williams, who, just

four years away from his Cornell Magazine article (discussed in Chapter 1), condemned what he

saw as the Administration’s hypocrisy. Williams, who served as Acting Associate Dean of

Admissions and Financial Aid, expressed frustration at the expectation that he recruit minority

students while Cornell disregarded issues important to minorities. “[Minority recruitment], too, is

an investment, and one that I believe is at odds with the decision to continue the university's

South Africa-related investments.”89 In response, Rhodes stated:

I recognize that several of the committee’s members felt as a matter of conscience that they could not continue to serve on the planning committee. I respect that judgment. I am gratified by the committee’s decision to encourage that events go on as planned and that we continue to focus the campus's energy on a wide array of academic recruitment programs that help achieve our goal of enhanced diversity.90

What Williams alludes to, and what Rhodes makes more explicit, is that the official observance

of the Takeover’s anniversary, geared towards a positive recasting of the events, occurred

concomitantly with the emergence of “diversity” as a stated goal—and ostensible asset—of the

University. As Williams’ statement implies, though, this commitment was at best limited and at

worst wholly cynical. In recognition of the anniversary itself, the administration decided to close

the Straight for the day. The Daily Sun’s editorial board was not convinced by the effort:

Since the panel organized by the president to plan events for an official University anniversary was disbanded in February, the administration has offered financial support of individual events marking the takeover, but no cogent evaluation. In the vacuum left by the disbanding of the panel, it appears the closing of the Straight is a misguided and misdirected attempt at putting some official stamp on the commemoration without adequately facing the sometimes unpleasant lessons of the Straight Takeover.91

The University’s sudden, albeit superficial, commitment to celebrating the legacy of the

Takeover came at a particularly charged moment in campus politics. Rather than an isolated act

of protest, the resignations and disbanding of the Rhodes-appointed committee came in the wake

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of Cornell’s largest mass mobilization since the Barton Hall Community. The Divestment

movement, which had its campus roots in the AAS and SDS demands as early as 1968, had

reached its zenith in the mid-1980’s, when over one thousand students and faculty were arrested

for sit-ins that blocked the entrances of Day Hall.92 The “Shantytown” that students had erected

behind Day Hall provided an “eyesore” for the administration while becoming a tactic that would

be reproduced by many other campus divestment movements.93 As with all post-1969 Cornell

activism, the Takeover hung over the events as an inescapable aura. A Divestment rally vied for

space on the cover of the Sun against the university-sponsored programming,94 while President

Rhodes, in an interview included in the Supplement, “said he [wanted] to move beyond the

debate over University divestment to address other concerns of minority students, and he asked

the entire campus to help him ‘build a multi-racial community.’”95 Solemnly, Rhodes expressed

his “hope to push Cornell beyond the stage in race relations the University entered 25 years

ago.”96

The sense that the Takeover’s memory was a site of contestation was palpable, and in

1989, the Sun broke with its tradition of beginning with the image of the “black brute,” instead

using a hook that revealed more ambivalence:

Terrorism or testament to turbulent times? The armed occupation of Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall by about 60 black students 20 years ago today is a proud memory to some who see it as a turning point for blacks on college campuses. They say Cornell is a better place—more ethnically diverse—because of it. For others it remains a bitter memory, a sacrilegious attack on the freedoms and sanctity of academia, a dark chapter in the university's history.97

The article, which provided a brief synopsis of the events of 1969, sits under a large photo of

demonstrators at the divestment rally. At first glance, the paragraph is familiar and even banal,

seemingly reproducing the binary of debate that was typical for narratives of the Takeover.

However, this paragraph does not simply reproduce the binary; it significantly reframes that

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binary, and in doing so, transforms the political terrain on which the debate was traditionally

held. Rather than moving on after stating the case of the Takeover’s supporters, for whom the

Takeover is “a proud memory,” the author pauses to redefine the binary. When previous authors

framed the Takeover as making Cornell “better,” they tended to argue that Cornell would either

be more in line with its stated principles, it would be less racist, or that it would now be more

hospitable to students of color. However, the Sun’s dramatic pause—and insertion of the

qualification “more ethnically diverse”—implies that its supporters argue its importance based

on its ability to bring more students of color onto campus. Cornell was made “a better place” not

because it would be an easier place for students of color survive, but rather because the Takeover

brought more students of color on campus, making Cornell as a whole benefit from being “more

diverse.”

This discursive reorientation was replicated in identical terms in the title of President

Skorton’s 2009 opinion column, published a day after the 40th anniversary of the Takeover. The

heading, “Glancing Back, Looking Forward—Toward Diversity,”98 is full of significance and

signification: the past is to be glanced at, while the real attention is on the future; the future is not

open or unwritten, but represents progression towards the vague telos of “diversity,” always

present yet never quite attained. Forgetting as it remembers, the title is careful to clarify toward

what one looks forward, erasing the calls for militant separatism and self-determination of the

past and subsuming them into a strictly integrationist framework of “diversity.”

In fact, this framing is the traditional narrative of opposition to the Takeover, except in

reverse. For dissenting faculty during and after the Takeover, the narrative that ended with the

death of academic freedom, and maybe even the University itself, began with the introduction of

black, working class students on campus—with “minority recruitment” initiatives like COSEP.

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For them, Cornell’s shallow “diversity,” rather than being its happy ending, was its tragic

beginning. Perhaps even more significant, 1989 is the first year in which “better” is framed from

the perspective of the administration, rather than administration’s critics. In other words, by

officially endorsing—and consciously “making more positive”—the memory of the Takeover,

the University had claimed the space traditionally reserved for “pro-Takeover” arguments. In

1989, the Rhodes administration initiated a process of appropriation that would definitively

transform the ways in which the Takeover was remembered, fundamentally changing what the

Takeover “means” to the ordinary Cornell student, black or otherwise.

In explaining the ignorance of the non-activist student body regarding the legacy of the

Takeover, the Sun wrote, “Obviously, a building occupation by angry, rifle-wielding students is

not something a university likes to promote.”99 The irony of this sentence is that it was written

while the University was busy doing just that—promoting the memory of the Takeover. This

paradox testifies that glorifying the Takeover as it was remembered in 1989 would be dangerous

or embarrassing. What the article does not account for is that, as Kristen Ross writes in her book,

Mai ’68 and Its Afterlives, “Forgetting, just as much as remembering, is made possible by the

work of various narrative configurations.”100 In other words, embracing the memory of the

Takeover can be a way of forgetting it, and keeping its legacy alive—in transmuted form—

another way to bury it quietly.

The protests of the 1980’s, which made clear use of the Takeover’s legacy, showed that

the administration’s newfound appreciation of the Takeover was not due to the Takeover’s safe

distance from the present. Rather than resulting from an extensive cooling off period in which its

memory could lie unperturbed and the virulent emotional reactions of some could be assuaged,

the University-sponsored commemoration arose in the wake of radical exhortations to “smash

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racism”101 and divest from apartheid South Africa in the name of the Takeover.102 The

Takeover’s official eulogy did not result from its burial but instead from its refusal to die. The

University’s commemoration was not about remembering Cornell ’69; it was about confiscating

its memory.

The Irony of 1999

This decisive shift in the discursive landscape of the Takeover’s legacy, and the debates

which sought to define it, became more complicated during the commemorations of the 30th

anniversary. The 30th anniversary saw both the mainstreaming and the full-fledged critique of the

appropriated “diversity” narrative. The first book-length, authoritative treatment of “the crisis,”

Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, was published in 1999 amidst

a flurry of media attention and panel discussions. The book was written by University of

Wisconsin political scientist Donald A. Downs, who had been a Cornell undergraduate during

the Takeover. Downs used the Takeover as a backdrop against which to mount a polemic on the

necessity of liberal values such as academic freedom in the context of the University. For

Downs, giving his own nuanced version of the “capitulation” narrative, the Takeover was a

parable about the collapse of reason and the introduction of force on campus. In the Cornell

Chronicle, the University’s internal news publication, the ambivalence of the anniversary was

palpable. Side by side articles were titled “Book on Events Around the ’69 Straight Takeover

Selling Well on Campus”103 and “Anniversary Commemoration Focuses on the Positive Legacy

of the Takeover.”104 In 1999, the traditional narrative of opposition to the Takeover—that the act

brought coercion into the University and threatened academic freedom—sat in dialogue with the

newly-appropriated narrative of support—that it brought, or was somehow about, diversity.

  45

Urged on by Downs’ book, the debate became national, as reviews of the book used the

occasion to add commentary of their own. This commentary ranged from the harsh words of

Thomas Sowell (a black Cornell economics professor who resigned as a result of the takeover) to

alumnus and columnist Caleb Rossiter (the son of Clinton Rossiter), a prominent government

professor who committed suicide a year after the crisis.105 Sowell identified the problem with

COSEP and affirmative action, which he saw as recruiting “militant ghetto kids, some of whom

turned out to be hoodlums”106 and Rossiter saw the Takeover as “A Rare Case of Democracy on

Campus.”107 Nevertheless, most reviews, mimicking the national media response in 1969, saw

the Takeover as tragic at best and the beginnings of the political correctness regime at worst.108

Meanwhile, the Office of the Dean of Students received an award for the “positive” portrayal of

the Takeover.109

In 2009, President David Skorton expanded the University’s commitment to embracing

the Takeover. Skorton spoke at one of the commemorative events, walking with the attendees

from the Africana Center to the Wari House, and then from the former site of the Center to the

Straight.110 While he acknowledged the tension of the events in 1969, his emphasis was that the

contradictions raised in 1999 could be resolved. Skorton, in a 2009 article appearing under the

heading, “At ‘Takeover’ Commemoration, Skorton Says Diversity Challenge Persists,” the

Chronicle quoted President Skorton’s remarks on the legacy of the Takeover.

Cornell weathered the storms of the era, and despite concerns raised at the time, Skorton said, “I would argue that the center of the university as a place for rational discourse has continued to hold, even as we have gained a fuller understanding of the importance of diversity and inclusiveness. I do not see the two ideas as mutually exclusive.”111

Without any background knowledge, the statement seems unnecessary. Why would

diversity and inclusiveness, a goal in which the University is supposedly whole-heartedly

invested, come at the expense of rational discourse? In fact, the two would seem to be mutually

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reinforcing, at least to an extent. Yet, Skorton seems to imply that the uniquely tense atmosphere

of the 1960’s, from the Black Power movement to the war in Vietnam, was the reason for this

contradiction. The use of the buzzwords “diversity” and “inclusion” to describe those conflicts is

a revealing anachronism. Through the backward projection of “issues of diversity” to the time of

the Takeover, the University is able to conceal the real threat to the University at the time: the

systemic critique of the nature of education, not simply one’s access to it, articulated by both

students of color and white students. By calling both the problem and the solution “diversity,”

the University erases the social “malaise” that Tarcov complained was infecting the student

body, and the militant separatist ideals, goals, and tactics that inspired the Takeover.

Skorton concedes that the problems that caused the takeover are still with us, but

proceeds to define those problems using non-threatening frameworks. With this anachronistic

transmutation, Cornell ’69 is both confined to its time and transported into the present. The

Takeover becomes an event that can be explained by the particular structural dynamics that

brought it to life (which appear safely in the past), while defining those structural dynamics in

terms that only emerged decades after the events took place. Paradoxically, it is only at the

moment when the Takeover can be encapsulated in 21st century buzzwords (“diversity” and

“inclusion”) that it can become “so last century.”112 By bringing the Takeover into the mundane,

domesticated present, it recedes into the distant past.

The Cracks of Memory

What disappears into the cracks of the “diversity narrative?” In the 45th anniversary

account of the Takeover, the Sun’s traditional narrative of events seems to fit comfortably within

the pattern of its predecessors. The headings succinctly summarize the content found between

them: “The Afro-American Society…‘An Object on the Front Porch’…The Takeover…Arming

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the Straight…The Departure…The Aftermath.”113 For one already versed in the events of the

Takeover, however, a gaping hole appears in the narrative. Particularly conspicuous is the

absence of any mention whatsoever of the faculty votes or the Barton Hall Community. Skipping

the climax, the section entitled “The Aftermath” heads straight for the denouement, jumping

from “The black students agreed to assist in the creation a new judicial system on campus” to

The Straight Takeover left the faculty and administration divided. A handful of faculty and administrators resigned from their posts, distraught over the events that had taken place. The events culminated on May 31, 1969 when Perkins announced that he would ask the Board of Trustees to begin searching for the University’s next president.114

This exclusion follows a trend, established in 1989 yet not consistently upheld since then, of

downplaying the importance of the Barton Hall Community to the resolution of the crisis. If

portrayed at all, the Barton Hall Community is shown through the eyes of a moderate white

student, who experiences the full range of emotions during an experience that left many

transformed, radicalized, and generally spellbound. Among those transformed by the Barton Hall

Community was President James Perkins, who famously remarked that it was “one of the most

constructive, positive forces which have been set in motion in the history of Cornell.”115 Tom

Jones called it the “sole legitimate authority at Cornell.” The one thing that “The Dissenter,”

“The Protester,” and “The Administrator” narratives all have in common is that they credit the

Barton Hall Community with the reversal of the faculty’s vote, the acceptance of the black

demands, and the formal resolution of the crisis, all while minimizing its importance to the story

of Cornell ‘69. The only context in which the Barton Hall Community is remembered in Sun

commemorative supplements is as the experience of a random white student, invariably told in a

few reprinted pages of a diary. It is portrayed as a purely “circus-like” atmosphere, in which

students had to be admonished for playing Frisbee because, as a student leader put it, “We’re

trying to have an occupation here.”116

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Although the Barton Hall Community was instrumental to the narrative arc of the

Takeover, by 2014, it was seen as a non-integral aspect of the crisis. The disappearance of the

Barton Hall Community in the official story of the takeover coincided largely with the recasting

of the Takeover as an issue of “diversity” and “inclusion.” From the marginal accounts of the

previous supplements, it is easy to see why the happening at Barton Hall was not considered

crucial. For whom is it relevant, except as a curiosity of history? What happens to the dominant

narratives of Cornell ’69 when one removes the Barton Hall Community?

Suddenly, as the separatism of the AAS disappeared, so did the support they enjoyed

from thousands of white students, many of whom were willing to take militant action on behalf

of the black demands. The Barton Hall Community is the tragic climax in nearly every early

iteration of the “capitulation” narrative because it represents the moment when the occupiers of

the Straight can no longer be called “terrorists.” In his infamous speech, Tom Jones exclaimed,

“[We changed] the reality of the black people being the isolated minority…. We made the faculty

a minority.”117 Ironically, it is through the framework of “diversity” and “inclusion” that the

AAS, which, by all accounts, represented the vanguard of a campus majority that sought

fundamental change, become a minority.

The Barton Hall Community, seen not as a playpen of trivialities but rather a serious

political force, is a dangerous memory: it represents a deep-rooted, widespread “social malaise,”

a systemic critique of the University not simply for its exclusion of black students, but for its

inability to provide them—or anyone—with a meaningful or relevant education. The Barton Hall

Community is the point at which “The Dissenter” marks the death of the University, not because

the black students have taken up arms, but because they are met with applause for having done

so. In this sense, the coup de memoire of 1989 is not just the erasure of the black students’

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radical critique of the University; it is the disappearance of that critique’s massive resonance

with the majority of the student body.

Epilogue: A Series of Conclusions

On The Experience of Rupture

When the air was sufficiently electric and you did not know where things were going but you were simply keeping your antennae up to take part in and to understand what was going on, people looked different. It seems to me that it is only at moments of crisis that people have that look. There is a glow over people. They look like figures in a frieze or a historical painting. I now see why Delacroix painted that way. People take on the appearance of romance. Actual events have become historical, romantic.118

The moment that the structural conflicts latent at Cornell in 1969 erupted into a full-

blown crisis—in which Black Power demands and tactics collided with the ethos of the White,

liberal University, set against the backdrop of deep social ‘malaise’ and white cultural

disaffection—the foundations of Cornell’s social order shook with anxious fury. This period of

radical instability—the five days from the occupation of the Straight on April 19th to the reversal

of the Faculty vote on the 23rd—was a rupture palpable to all within its bounds.

The portrait above, penned by a “radical faculty member” present during the Barton Hall

Community, describes an experience of weightlessness, in which the gravity of everyday life was

suspended, and the inertia propelling the countless routines that structure one’s daily existence

came to a halt. This experience of rupture, of the near-total interruption of what Tom Jones

called “the old order,” is described in nearly every contemporary account of the Takeover as a

juncture of radical possibility.

For those sympathetic to the rebellion that unfolded at Cornell, the weeklong crisis was a

moment of profound societal malleability, in which a full-scale attempt at restructuring the

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University seemed not only possible but necessary. For those unsympathetic, the crisis had

ushered a situation that left their beloved University disfigured beyond recognition, in which, as

one professor remembered, “It seemed almost at once that the University was not going to

exist.”119 In attempting to capture the experience of “the crisis,” not simply as a political

situation but as a sensation, many accounts allude to the explosion of rumors that pervaded the

campus.

Rumor Clinic

The phone rings. ‘Hello, rumor clinic.’ ‘I heard that there's fire around the Straight. Is it safe to walk outside?’ ‘There's absolutely no gunfire at all. Don't worry, it's perfectly safe to go out.’ Another ring. ‘They say Theta Xi's on fire—’ ‘Absolutely untrue.’120 –An Account of “The Rumor Clinic” from the 1989 Daily Sun Supplement

One of the first coordinated responses to the Takeover on the part of the Cornell

Administration was the institution of a “rumor clinic” in Anabel Taylor Hall. Situated adjacent to

the SDS’ temporary headquarters, the clinic became a hub of information and misinformation. In

the “clinic,” a series of nine telephones rang off the hook as Cornell students anxiously called in

to check hearsay against the official record of what was taking place. The University’s intent in

opening the “clinic” was understandable: the chatter of rumor was reaching a crescendo on

campus and with every new inflammatory report there was a chance of panic setting in,

threatening the fragile ceasefire that reigned in Ithaca. The precariousness of the situation was

accentuated by the fact that many of the escalating factors in the conflict were, in fact, lit and

fueled by rumors.

Occurrences That Do Not Occur

Both the life and afterlife of the Takeover were narrated by rumor. In the traditional

historical narrative, the plot is driven by a series of events, each causing the next. The engine of

the narrative is the sequence, the effects of each occurrence traceable as the story progresses

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chronologically. The ultimate role of the historian, not unlike a secretary at the rumor clinic, is

often to make a final pronouncement on the veracity of popular claims: to delineate what actually

happened and reflect on the causes and effects of these happenings. In Cornell ’69, however, the

engine of the plot is not a series of events as much as a series of non-events, of occurrences that

do not occur, yet have major consequences nonetheless. Notably, the arming of AAS occurred

only after they were told “credible rumors” about white fraternity brothers drinking and arming

themselves, preparing to raid the Straight.121 While there is no way to know if this would have

happened if the AAS had not armed themselves in self-defense, the rumored raid definitively did

not occur. Many cite Jones’ array of threats on the night of the 22nd as being instrumental in

changing the minds of faculty anxious to avoid violence. 122 By all accounts, Jones’ threats were

not actualized, nor were there plans to do so.123 At one point, the administration, receiving word

that the students were on their way to take over Day Hall, collectively fled the building and

relocated their operations before realizing that no such takeover was occurring.124 Multiple

historical accounts similarly blame the cross burning on a rogue faction within the AAS,

implying that, while a cross was undoubtedly burnt, it was not planted by white students.125

Similarly, any history of the Takeover’s place in popular memory must grapple with the

prominent role that misinformation—in the form of reiterated misconceptions regarding the

Takeover—played in cementing the takeover as a cultural symbol of perpetual relevance,

representing either a capitulation to armed leftist insurgents, a catalyst for the Africana Center, or

an arbiter of “racial progress.” Yet even a survey of these misconceptions does not analyze the

extent to which rumor defines the memory of the Takeover. The Daily Sun Supplements, mostly

compilations of first person testimonies and reflections, are themselves a kind of documented

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hearsay. Cornell ’69, in both actuality and memory, persisted through rumor, in the sense that

rumor was and is the medium through which most of its beholders have understood it.

What is a rumor? Coming from a Latin word meaning “noise,” rumors are fictions of the

present, possibilities that have yet to be foreclosed as falsehood nor confirmed as truth. They

hang in the liminal space of myth and other genres that transcend the binary of truth and fiction.

Rumors proliferate in a moment of rupture because they are byproducts of imaginations intent on

filling space, whether an anxious mind projecting imminent danger onto uncertainty or a

revolutionary dreaming of radical change. Rumors come into existence as imaginative

speculation, or misperception, and spread to the degree to which they can continue to be

compelling, to which they can manage to be simultaneously exceptional and plausible. Here the

proliferation of rumor says something about the exploded possibilities of the moment: students

could both believe that there was a sniper in McGraw Tower126 and that a full-scale reimagining

of the University was imminent.

Rupture and Restoration

“We all found each other for a while. It was frightening and exhilarating and exhausting, but people were moving outside themselves and toward one another. Ordinary categorical thinking gave way to a new sensitivity and a fresh acceptance of one another as human beings…. The crisis, as a flash of sheet lightning, revealed Cornell to the world and Cornellians to themselves and their neighbors as few things have done. People for a time were set free from role-definitions.”127 W. Jack Lewis, Director of Cornell United Religious Work (CURW) in 1969 During and immediately after the uprising of May 1968 in France, many of the narratives

that emerged to explain what had happened, or indeed what still was happening, made a point of

using the terminology of the status quo in describing the crisis. There, a society that defined its

members’ identities in terms of their functional purpose—worker being one who works, student

being one who studies, etc.—experienced a crisis of categorization, in which at one point nearly

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20 million students, factory workers, and farmers were on strike, and entire areas of Paris were

freed from government control.128

In Cornell ’69, the rupture of the Takeover created something similar, if on a much

smaller scale. On the level of University relations, the vacuum of authority cited by Downs129

allowed the roles of students, faculty, and administrators to collapse into a common polity in

which the functions of each identity group partly ceased and took on aspects of the other.

Students stopped attending classes, and instead conducted “teach-ins” and governed their own

affairs democratically. Faculty threatened to stop teaching (or resign) and instead attended mass

assemblies, listening to their students explain their understanding of the present and profess their

visions of the future. The administration, faced with a campus that had become ungovernable,

stated its intent to learn from the students. The preamble to a statement written by a joint faculty-

administrator committee, which was recited aloud at Barton Hall, read: “We hear you, we care,

we are trying to understand you, and we would like to do something together with you.”130

The rupture that was catalyzed by the Takeover also ripped open a fleeting hole in the

system of white racial supremacy predominant in the United States. Black students, rather than

entering into Cornell on the terms of the white majority, refused assimilation and asserted a right

to their own self-determination, an action that was supported (first reluctantly then

enthusiastically) by the majority of white students.

It was this crisis of functionality that posed a serious problem to those trying to narrate

“the crisis” for an outside audience. Rather than attempt to explain that a suspension of certain

traditional social roles had taken place, most accounts bent over backwards in order to explain

the rupture in the terms of those traditional social roles. The white students in Barton Hall were

young and impressionable, only there for the emotional catharsis and to skip class and have fun.

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The black students were ghetto militants, carrying their violent inner city mentality to Cornell

and wreaking havoc. The administrators were spineless liberals, terrified of violence, unmoved

by the principles for which they claimed to stand. Professors were wise men whose honor had

been degraded, and who retreated in the face of personal threats, violence, and coercion.

During the crisis, the shared set of cultural symbols—stereotypical narratives, stock

characters—on which storytelling relies ceased to be relevant in the same way. However, the

participants lacked, if not a new language with which to describe the events, then the means to be

heard while doing so outside of the halls of occupied buildings. This dissonance between the new

terms of reality after the rupture and the language and cultural tropes of the old made

memorializing the Takeover a fraught endeavor. Instead of attempting to explain these new terms

of social life, most narratives, especially those written after the fact, sought to restore the before,

to cover the rupture retroactively, to explain the events in such a way as to give the impression

that no rupture took place at all.

Rather than the old trope that what changed in the 1960’s was the culture and not the

formal political structures, Cornell ’69 saw the opposite: a rapid shift in political power that the

broader culture was struggling to describe, revealing that formal political structures are, in some

situations, more malleable than their cultural counterparts. Of course, the students possessed the

new language and culture to describe what they were doing—making education “relevant,”

instituting participatory democracy—but their voices have proved less durable. As many of them

were incorporated into “the old order,” as it were, if they didn’t renounce their actions, they

renounced or forgot the language they once used to describe them.

While the next academic year saw the implementation of Cornell’s most democratic

system of governance to date—the University Senate—most students, administrators, and faculty

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receded into their previously defined roles. The fundamental terms of the social order were

challenged, but they were eventually reasserted with the reforms that were implemented. The

University Senate was still a senate, in which a larger-than-usual group of representatives made

decisions on behalf of the bulk of students, who went on with life as before. Ed Zuckerman, the

editor-in-chief of the Daily Sun at the time, described the experience poignantly: “In the end, we

had our victory. The faculty rescinded. The crisis dwindled. So did the sense of victory. Later it

was not clear what had been won or by whom...School resumed, seeming more trivial than

ever.”131

Nearly every common narrative of the Takeover today is a narrative of restoration, of the

retroactive reassertion of traditional social roles. This remains the case whether it is the diversity

narrative, the capitulation narrative, or even narratives about student activism, which seek to

sequester the global revolutionary movements of the late 1960’s into isolated campaigns of

aggressive reformism. These stories are all trying, somewhat awkwardly, to flatten the once

jutting crisis into a history of sameness, or, as Kristen Ross explains, “[to recuperate]… a rupture

in the system…so as to reinsert it back into a logic of the same, the logic of the continuous, the

logic of reproduction.”132 This narrative restores, above all, the logic of linear sequence, which

gives order to history and keeps history in the past.

The Administrative Conception of History

In her book, Mai ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristin Ross outlines what she refers to as “The

Police Conception of History.” According to Ross, sociological accounts regulate the public

“space” of discourse, effectively saying “Keep moving, there’s nothing to see here” to their

audience as the reader moves through the streets of history.

“There’s absolutely no gunfire at all. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe to go out.”

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No words could more aptly describe the Rhodes administration’s domestication of the Takeover.

Now safely in the past, the memory of Cornell ’69 has been rendered non-threatening. If we

accept Dennis A. Williams’ argument that the Takeover functioned as a type of perpetual threat

to the white establishment of Cornell,133 then any new student mobilization with mimetic

aspirations could have potentially explosive consequences. Like a rumor, the Takeover’s

memory hung in the boundaries of political discourse on campus, never quite occurring, yet

perpetually plausible. By flattening the Takeover into a sanitized moral parable, the

administration domesticated the memory of the Takeover into the administration’s own managed

sphere of reality. This formal act of appropriation was a statement by the administration, that,

above all, the memory of the Takeover would no longer be dangerous. It would no longer

traumatize, discomfort, or frighten the once-fragile status quo of the campus. Day Hall’s 1989

sponsorship was the ultimate act of recuperation, in which the “positive” aspects of the Takeover

were distilled and presented to the public.

Like an administrator assuring you that all is safe, and that you should go about your

daily routine, this narrative emerged to explain the rupture of ‘69 not as a portal to a new world

but as a hallucination. The cynicism of the later 1970’s is still often described as an experience of

collective disillusionment, implying that society was freed of the illusion that the world might

actually be changing, that the fabric of tradition was vulnerable, that the social order was

malleable. On the contrary, the value of remembering the Takeover in its most terrifying,

profound, and threatening forms is that it reminds us that the present into which Cornell students

were staring in the spring of 1969 was no more an illusion than our own present.

By necessity, this period was marked by a strange cohabitation of lucidity and confusion:

students, faculty, and other spectators were able to dream collectively of a “new University,” but

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had no idea what Cornell would look like in the morning. This was a moment in which their

visions of a transformed society (at least at Cornell) were finally tangible, but also a moment in

which they were uncertain of where they might sleep that night, or if their classes would be

meeting, or if the tension on campus would reach its violent climax and they would find

themselves in the midst of a bloody confrontation. One artifact of the crisis that might have been

poignant should the crisis have been resolved differently is a yellow notepad left behind by

participants in the Barton Hall Community. After a few pages of meeting minutes lies a bet,

conducted by two friends, wagering whether or not the police would intervene that evening. The

stakes were “a martini in Manhattan.”134 This bit of humor in the face of dangerous uncertainty

exemplifies the sublimity of the experience, at one moment organized and focused, playful in the

next, at all times terrifying, exhilarating, and profound.

Ironic Melodrama

The epigraph of this thesis, which asks, “How should one emplot the crisis?” is taken

from a contribution originally included in the 1979 Daily Sun Supplement. The piece was a

column by Professor of American Studies Cushing Strout, and was entitled “In Retrospect, An

Ironic Melodrama.” Strout, a distinguished faculty member who ranked among the most

outspoken critics of the Takeover—or more precisely, the administration’s “capitulation” to it—

ponders what literary genre would best encapsulate the events of April ’69: “Epic, Romance,

Tragedy, Black Humor, Theater of the Absurd?”

Strout was among the first spectators of the event to notice the problem of sequence that

the events posed:

Spokesmen for the takeover of the Straight announced that it was necessary to dramatize Cornell’s failure to provide a program ‘relevant to the black students.’ Yet it later turned out that the Perkins Administration for months before the takeover had been negotiating with a director, who had been proposed by the self-created, student Black Studies

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advisory committee; and the trustees had already by April budgeted $24,000 [sic] for the proposed Africana Center.

It is for these reasons that Strout proposes, “There were elements of all [those genres], but I

suggest that in retrospect we should call it Ironic Melodrama.” Buried in Strout’s categorization

of “Ironic Melodrama” is a double indictment of the Takeover: on the one hand, it was empty of

actual political grievance (i.e. purely symbolic), and on the other, it was theatrical (i.e. fake, just

for show). Importantly, Strout also implies that one can only “read” the Takeover from the

future, that is, from an ironic perspective. It is this perspective that allows one to accurately

discern the genre of the piece, and to distinguish between politics and theater.

It is this question of reality, imagination, and dramatization that haunts the Takeover. The

question is not so much a problem as an intersection: only in memory—that is, only in one’s

imagination—can one distinguish between the real and the theatrical. The corollary to this point

is that the rupture of Cornell ’69 constituted the collapse of this opposition, the collapse of the

imaginary as opposed to the actually existing. It was a moment in which reality was

conspicuously driven by the imagination, whether in the formulation of radical political visions

or in anxieties of imminent violence and collapse. What is there left to salvage of this

experience? Is it even possible to remember a rupture after it has been recuperated? Or is one

always remembering what came after it? How might one remember Cornell ’69 un-ironically,

without the sense of historical inevitability pressing at its edges?

On Prefigurative History

Nothing would seem more predictable than the desire of black students to study our history; and this was a central issue that precipitated the Straight incident. –Rueben Munday, 1974 Writing in 1974, AAS member and participant in the Takeover Rueben Munday points

out what has perhaps been the most discarded facet of the takeover: that, at the core of the AAS’

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vision was a desire to learn history. Most narratives tracing the origins of the Takeover include

the December protest in which black students danced on tables in the Ivy Room, but they neglect

the other actions they had carried out. These included a seminar outside of the president’s office

and an action in which they took books off of the shelves at the library and turned them in to the

front desk, declaring their irrelevance to them as black students.135

The AAS understood that an integral part of their ability to imagine the future was their

ability to imagine the past. They understood that the past was a source of political and strategic

knowledge, as well as an important source of inspiration. The spirit that led to the Takeover

arose, then, out of the recognition that history has political stakes. In other words, history is

historical136 and the impetus to change history attends a related instinct to, as it were, change

history.

In a paper I wrote my sophomore year about the disappearance of the Barton Hall

Community from the historical memory of modern day Cornellians, I used the phrase

“prefigurative history” as a way to describe the way that the scope of acceptable or possible

political action was determined—or at the least somewhat limited—to what the community

concerned could remember. I drew inspiration from my recent acquaintance with the traditions of

anarchist thought, which argue for a “prefigurative politics,” which posits that one must create

the new world in the shell of the old, or create the world one would like to live in (after a

revolution, for example) in the here and now. Above all, prefigurative politics represents a

particular orientation toward time; it is constantly anticipating a “new world,” but refuses to wait

for it, instead insisting that this new world is always already now.

In New York City’s financial district in the fall of 2011, I encountered Occupy Wall

Street, a rupture that felt vaster than any I could have previously imagined. As the movement

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receded into the past, and the Internet swarmed with analyses explaining “why Occupy

failed,”137 I realized that, only a year or so later, I could scarcely imagine it happening again. The

sense that I had been changed, but the society around me had not, evoked a dissonance so

profound in me that I felt the need to turn to history to prove to myself that I had not been

hallucinating. I unwittingly embarked on a process that led me to what I now call prefigurative

history, wherein one looks to the past to expand one’s visions of the future. In this case, I needed

room for my visions of the future to hibernate, and I found it in ruptures of the past—these

historical wounds that speak—that served as the intellectual counterparts, and points of

departure, for my political aspirations. So both coincidentally and not at all, I opened Donald

Downs’ book, and became interested in the events of Cornell ‘69. I began to tell people the story

of that spring, and sought to use the story’s power to create a history to illuminate a sense of

possibility that might prefigure the future.

Remembering—and telling the story of—the Takeover in its chaos and confusion, but

also in its possibility, is a project with extensive scholarly and political implications. We need to

know Cornell ‘69 because its spirit is already with and within us, in meetings of organizers,

agitators and administrators alike, at public events, in Admissions presentations, and, crucially,

in our imagination. The Takeover and the events that surround it remind us of the tremendous

stakes of history itself—not just in the sense of uncovering “what actually happened,” but also in

our understanding of the perspective that we imagine when answering that question.

One modern definition of “prefigure” is to “be an early indication of something.” While it

might make sense to say that some development in the past prefigured trends in the more recent

past, or even a situation in the present moment, the concept becomes problematic when applied

to an ethic of political action. How, one might ask, can a politics be prefigurative if one does not

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know what will happen next? From what vantage point would it make sense to call one’s actions,

in the present tense, “prefigurative?”

The answer, perhaps, is that prefigurative politics is ironic: it situates itself in the future,

looking backward, tracing its origins back to the present moment. It exists in historical time, and

thus, it is a political ethos acutely aware of the narratives in which it is embedded. The irony of

prefiguration also means it is not just in the future, but it is off to the side—a spectator—like the

audience at a historical documentary film, or the reader of a textbook.

In its archaic sense, to “prefigure” meant to “imagine beforehand.” Here, there is an

acknowledgment of the central role that the imagination plays in this kind of politics—one that

not only imagines the future, but imagines spectators from the future looking back and imagining

their past, our present. “Prefigurative history” would posit that we should understand this

definition as a double entendre of sorts, which can be read as imagining either the past or the

future: “one imagines beforehand,” or, “beforehand, one imagines.” This thesis argues that, if not

one and the same, these acts of imagination are intimately and inextricably linked. Imagining the

past often entails imagining from the future, just as imagining the future often means imagining

from the past.

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Common Acronyms/Abbreviations

AAS—Afro-American Society, the black student organization at Cornell BLF—Black Liberation Front, the name the AAS gave themselves after the Takeover SDS—Students for a Democratic Society, predominantly white student group of the New Left COSEP—Committee on Special Education Projects, Cornell’s affirmative action program The Sun, or The Daily Sun—The Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell’s widely read student paper.

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Acknowledgments I thank those who patiently listened to my ideas and vigorously critiqued and edited my work. In particular, I’d like to thank my old friends Srinath Reddy and Rudolph Roidney, both of whom helped in the editing process. I thank my Housemates for inexplicably being willing to listen to my chapter read aloud on a road trip, suffering through my various epiphanies and diatribes, and giving me helpful feedback throughout the year. Kudos, as we say. I thank my thesis advisors, Russell Rickford and Raymond Craib, as well as my informal academic advisors, Oren Falk and Isaac Kramnick, for their crucial support and feedback. I thank my parents and advisors in life, Candace Waid and David Marshall, for pushing me to write this thesis, and then once I had written it, pushing me to write it better. I want to thank my godmother, Laura Kalman, for reading my manuscript and giving incredibly helpful feedback. I honor the militants of the Afro-American Society, their supporters, and today’s generation of black revolutionaries, who continue, at tremendous risk, to challenge white supremacy and struggle for the liberation of all black people, from occupied Cayuga territories to Ferguson. I am humbled by the community of organizers I have found here, from whom I have learned immensely, and of whom I have been in constant admiration for their commitment and courage. Finally, I want to thank Karina Claire Jougla, my love.

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                                                                                                               Notes

1 Stuart Berman, “The Bitter Spring of 1969,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979. 2 John Kifner, “Armed Negroes End Seizure - Cornell Yields - Armed Negro Students End 36-Hour Occupation After Cornell Capitulates - Front Page - NYTimes.com,” accessed September 30, 2014, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F06EEDC1F39E63ABC4951DFB2668382679EDE. 3 Cushing Strout, “In Retrospect, An Ironic Melodrama,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979, sec. Supplement. 4 Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 239-241. 5 Robert D. Miller, “The Dwindling Power of Communal Action,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1974. 6 John Yaukey, “Demonstrators Rally on Campus for Divestment,” April 19, 1989, sec. City/Regional. 7 Dennis A. Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later,” The Cornell Chronicle, April 14, 1994, http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/25510. 8 Daniel Silver, “Campus Crisis - ProQuest,” Archive, Wall St. Journal Article, (May 20, 1999), http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/docview/398640496/fulltext/8A1B176AD1394829PQ/111?accountid=10267. 9 Emily Cohn, “Tom Jones Reflects on a ‘Selfless Revolution,’” The Cornell Daily Sun, April 16, 2009, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2009/04/16/tom-jones-reflects-on-a-selfless-revolution/. 10 Page 260. 11 Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/diglib.bib.5106045. Page 263. 12 New York Times Editorial Board, “Guns on Campus,” The New York Times, April 22, 1969, sec. Opinion. 13 “Home - Willard Straight Occupation Study Guide - LibGuides at Cornell University,” accessed April 8, 2015, http://guides.library.cornell.edu/wshtakeover. 14 Berman, Stuart, “Corson: An ‘Inevitable Explosion,’” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979, sec. Supplement. 15 Raul Romero, “Report on the Mass Media Committee,” May 26, 1969, Kroch Rare Manuscripts Library Cornell. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 19 Rheinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press, 2004). 20 Romero, “Report on the Mass Media Committee.” 21 C. David Burak, “Reflections on the Crisis of April ’69,” n.d. 22 Tarcov, “The Last Four Years at Cornell > Public Interest > National Affairs,” accessed November 6, 2014, http://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/the-last-four-years-at-cornell.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     23 Bruce Dancis, Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War (Cornell University Press, 2014). 24 Isaac Kramnick and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Page 161. Additionally, the Professor had described the urban poor as “unambitious, their poverty self-perpetuating, their children’s games, sickly and perverted, stressing cunning and survival, as in the jungle,” which incensed black students, many of whom came from impoverished urban communities. 25 Abby Ginzberg and Frank Dawson, Agents of Change, DVD, Documentary, (Not yet released.). 26 One of the most bizarre artifacts of the racial tension on campus is a March 1969 article, reprinted in both the 1979 and 1989 Supplements, which described in well-researched detail the AAS’ search for Bongo Drums. Entitled “Day Hall Buys Blacks Bongo Drums,” the Sun describes the controversy dryly: “Unlike most instances of student requests being choked or at best delayed by the morass of Day Hall red tape, this time a group, the Afro-American Society, legitimately able to receive funds, obtained results in unprecedented time.” The article bitterly portrays the AAS as a group receiving special privileges from an intimidated administration. In many ways, this would anticipate the narratives that would emerge of the Takeover. 27 William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Page 248. 28 Ibid. 29 Steven Frank, “Meade Remembers Rebellion at Cornell,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 30 Sara-Ellen Amster, “Time of Crisis: April, 1969,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 31 Berman, Stuart, “Corson: An ‘Inevitable Explosion.’” 32 Ibid. 33 Bruce Dancis, Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War (Cornell University Press, 2014). pp. 246-8. 34 Berman, “The Bitter Spring of 1969.” 35 Office of Public Information. Kroch Rare Manuscripts Library. Challenges to Governance Collection. 36 James Perkins, “Official Statement” (Office of Public Information, Day Hall, April 19, 1969). 37 Berman, Stuart, “Corson: An ‘Inevitable Explosion.’” 38 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Verso, 2006). Page 8. 39 Strout, “In Retrospect, An Ironic Melodrama.” 40 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 41 Gossa Tsegaye, Vision of the Struggle: Willard Straight Hall Takeover 20 Years Later, DVD, Documentary, (1989). 42 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 43 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 44 Ralph Diamant, Black Determination  : Cornell 1969, VHS, Documentary (A News Reel Film, n.d.).

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     45 Kifner, “Armed Negroes End Seizure - Cornell Yields - Armed Negro Students End 36-Hour Occupation After Cornell Capitulates - Front Page - NYTimes.com.” 46 “Statement of Committee on Mass Media” (The Committee on Mass Media, n.d.). 47 John Bandfield, “Cornell: A Portrait of the University in Crisis” May 25, 1969, Kroch Library Rare & Manuscripts. 48 Stuart Berman, “The Cruelest April and Us,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979, sec. Opinion. 49 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 50 Diamant, Black Determination  : Cornell 1969. 51 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 52 Silver, “Campus Crisis - ProQuest.” 53 Yaukey, “Demonstrators Rally on Campus for Divestment.” 54 David S. Mason, “Tom Jones: Obama Wouldn’t Be PResident Without the 1969 Straight Occupation,” Blog, Cornell 1969, (March 23, 2009). 55 Tsegaye, Vision of the Struggle: Willard Straight Hall Takeover 20 Years Later. 56 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. 61 Dancis, Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War. Chapter 13, “Brinksmanship, or Cornell on the Brink.” 62 The 1989 Sun supplement did not include a summarized introduction, and instead had a summarized timeline; the quote is taken from the entry from “April 19th” in the timeline. The unorthodoxies of the 1989 supplement will become a focus later in the chapter. 63 Thomas Sowell, “The Day Cornell Died | Hoover Institution,” accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.hoover.org/research/day-cornell-died. 64 This was a reference to the Committee on Special Education Projects (COSEP), the affirmative action program that President Perkins instituted, that was tasked with increasing the enrollment of working-class black students. 65 John Kifner, “CORNELL NEGROES SEIZE A BUILDING - 30 Visiting Parents Ejected as 100 Students Protest Disciplining of 6 Blacks Black Students Seize Cornell Building - View Article - NYTimes.com,” April 20, 1969, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9E0CEEDC103DE634A25753C2A9629C946891D6CF. 66 Tyler Alicea, “Students Took Over Willard Straight Hall 45 Years Ago,” accessed January 20, 2015, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2014/04/18/students-took-over-willard-straight-hall-45-years-ago/. 67 Miller, “The Dwindling Power of Communal Action.” 68 New York Times Editorial Board, “Guns on Campus.” 69 Barbara Linder, “Straight Crisis: Five Years Later,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1974, sec. Special Supplement. 70 “The New York Times | American Newspaper | Encyclopedia Britannica,” accessed January 22, 2015, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/412546/The-New-York-Times. 71 David Pilgrim, “JCM: The Brute Caricature,” Ferris State University, November 2000, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     72 Sowell, “The Day Cornell Died | Hoover Institution.” 73 John Kifner, “Armed Negroes End Seizure - Cornell Yields - Armed Negro Students End 36-Hour Occupation After Cornell Capitulates - View Article - NYTimes.com,” accessed October 21, 2014, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F06EEDC1F39E63ABC4951DFB2668382679EDE. 74 While the Sun does tap into this stereotype, including an article on the front page with the heading, “Parents Expelled From Straight React With Fear, Relate Events,” it does not rise to the sensationalism of The Times, whose editorial board imagines “the university administration [having] to surrender to the demands of armed insurgents.” 75 The “cliché” was the French word for the process, which originated from the sound that the “stereotype” machine made. 76 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 77 Merriam-Webster defines the word “takeover” as “an occurrence in which a person, company, etc., takes control of something.” 78 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 79 A Google Ngram chart of the word “takeover” shows its initial rise to prominence in the 1960’s, with its usage accelerating particularly during the year 1974, and then increasing steadily until its peak in 1989. 80 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 81 Tom Jones, Paul Rahe, and James Perkins, “In Their Own Words: Personal Essays,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 82 Peter Routman, “Details Hazy for Students,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 83 “Big Red Ambition: 161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do (2005),” February 27, 2005, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2005/02/27/big-red-ambition-161-things-every-cornellian-should-do/. 84 David J. Skorton, “Glancing Back, Looking Forward--Toward Diversity,” accessed February 4, 2015, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2009/04/20/glancing-back-looking-forward-toward-diversity/. Skorton, David. April 20, 2009. 85 “Cornell’s Diversity Timeline | Diversity & Inclusion | Cornell University,” accessed January 26, 2015, http://diversity.cornell.edu/timeline. Additionally, a Google Ngram plot for the word “diversity” reveals that this corresponds precisely with the time at which its general use increases exponentially. 86 Anna Chan, “C.U. Students of ’80s Still Concerned,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. 20th Anniversary Supplement. 87 Chan, Anna, “Cornell Experiences Slow Progress,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. 1989 Supplement. 88 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 89 Sam Segal, “Committee on Anniversary of Straight Takeover Folds,” February 9, 1989, http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/25305. 90 Ibid. 91 Cornell Daily Sun Editorial Board, “Barring the Straight,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989. Interestingly, in 1999, the Sun would angrily demand that the University demonstrate support, considering it an affront that they not honor the Takeover’s anniversary by closing the Straight.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     92 Brian Eden and Paul Sawyer, Looking Back at Politics: Fifty Years of Activism at Cornell, October 2006. 93 Ibid. 94 Yaukey, “Demonstrators Rally on Campus for Divestment.” 95 Sara-Ellen Amster, “Rhodes Urges Increased Campus ‘Interaction,’” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 96 Ibid. 97 John Yaukey, “Straight Takeover Continues to Split CU Community,” Ithaca Journal, April 19, 1989. 98 Skorton, “Glancing Back, Looking Forward--Toward Diversity.” 99 Routman, “Details Hazy for Students.” 100 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Page 4. 101 Kramnick and Altschuler, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015. 102 Yaukey, “Demonstrators Rally on Campus for Divestment.” 103 “Book on Events Around the ’69 Straight Takeover Selling Well on Campus,” Cornell Chronicle, May 6, 1999. 104 “Anniversary Commemoration Focuses on the Positive Legacy of the Takeover,” Cornell Chronicle, May 6, 1999. 105 Many attribute his suicide to stress and humiliation induced by the crisis. 106 Sowell, “The Day Cornell Died | Hoover Institution.” 107 Caleb Rossiter, “Cornell’s Student Revolt of 1969 A Rare Case of Democracy on Campus,” accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.calebrossiter.com/cornell.html. 108 Silver, “Campus Crisis - ProQuest.” 109 Matthew Hirsch, “University Begins Search for New Dean of Students (2000),” October 17, 2000, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2000/10/17/university-begins-search-for-new-dean-of-students/. 110 George Lowery, “At ‘Takeover’ Commemoration, Skorton Says Diversity Challenge Persists | Cornell Chronicle,” Cornell Chronicle, April 21, 2009, http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/04/campus-commemoration-student-takeover. 111 Ibid. 112 Jaime Freilich, “Big Red Ambition #72: (Learn About) Taking Over a Building (in AMST 2001),” February 6, 2013, http://cornellsun.com/blog/2013/02/06/big-red-ambition-72-learn-about-taking-over-a-building-in-amst-2001/. 113 Alicea, “Students Took Over Willard Straight Hall 45 Years Ago.” 114 Ibid. 115 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Pg. 243. 116 Colleen Kaplin, “Students Slept in Barton,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 117 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Page 252. 118 Ibid. Page 262. 119 David Folkenflik and Patrick Joyce, “Cornell’s Faculty Still Divided on Takeover,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1989, sec. Supplement. 120 Allan J Mayer, “The Typical Student: Week of Confusion,” Cornell Daily Sun, May 24, 1969, sec. 20th Anniversary Supplement. 121 Kramnick and Altschuler, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     122 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Page 238. 123 Kramnick and Altschuler, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015. 124 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. Page 182. 127 W. Jack Lewis, “The University’s ‘Human Crisis,’” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979, sec. Supplement. Originally written on May 14, 1969. 128 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. 129 Downs, Cornell ’69 Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. 130 Ibid. Page 254. 131 Edward Zuckerman, “Much Different Times, After and Before Change,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 19, 1979. 132 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Page 22. 133 Williams, “The Takeover of Willard Straight Hall--25 Years Later.” 134 Kroch Rare Manuscripts Library, Challenge to Governance Collection. Box 1. 135 Kramnick and Altschuler, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015. Page 166. 136 I mean this in the sense that one’s view of history changes over time. So, history is historical in that what we conceive of as “History” changes as history itself proceeds. Therefore, developments in little-h history interact with, and cause changes to big-H History, and vice versa. 137 https://www.google.com/search?q=why+occupy+failed&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=why+occupy+failed