In a way, the black-and-white Palestinian scarf draped over Hannah Sattler’s shoulders this week and the tie-dyed T-shirts of 1968 are woven from a common thread.
Like so many college students across the country protesting the Israel-Hamas war, Sattler feels the historic weight of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s and ’70s.
“They always talked about the ’68 protest as sort of a North Star,” Sattler, 27, a graduate student of international human rights policy at Columbia University, says of the campus organizers there.
“Even the choice to take over Hamilton Hall was always the plan from the start of the encampment,” she says. “Not only because it just made a lot of sense logistically, but it also has that … strong historical connection with the ’60s protests.”
Still, although it might be tempting to compare the nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement of a half-century ago, Robert Cohen says that would be an overreaction.
“I would say that this is the biggest in the United States in the 21st century,” says Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University. “But you could say, ‘Well, that’s like being the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas.’”
So far, there have been no bombings, like the one in August 1970 at the University of Wisconsin that killed a postdoctoral researcher and did $6 million worth of damage. There has been no repeat of the infamous Kent State massacre of May 1970, when National Guard troops opened fire on protesters at the Ohio campus, killing four.
Police have cleared encampments and made more than 2,000 arrests, and some, like the crackdown on Thursday at UCLA, have involved violent clashes. However, other actions by law enforcement, including the clearing of protesters who had occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, were carried out without incident. At some campuses, protesters have struck agreements with administrators to resolve their demands and packed up their tents.
Yet, to some, there is a feeling that the situation is just one hair-trigger moment away from tragedy, says Mark Naison, who took part in the sometimes violent protests at Columbia in 1968.
“People are terrified,” says Naison, a professor of history and African & African American Studies at nearby Fordham University.
In many ways, this does feel like the America of what Cohen calls “the long 60s.”
In September 1970, barely five months after the Kent State tragedy, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest delivered to Richard M. Nixon a “Letter To The American People.”
“This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War,” the panel wrote. “The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying opposing camps.”
