BY HANK REICHMAN Fifty years ago today, on April 23, 1968, members of the Students Afro-American Society (SAS) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their supporters at Columbia University occupied Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate classroom and administration building, demanding an end to construction of a segregated university gymnasium on public park land…
BY AARON BARLOW Since the beginning of my academic career, I have intertwined the personal with my objects of study. After tentative moves toward some nonsense dissertation related to literary theory, I chucked it all and wrote on my favorite science-fiction writer. That, as they say, was my ‘defining moment.’ At the time, there was…
BY HANK REICHMAN Prominent among the cascade of remarkable events in the incredible year of 1968 were a series of student rebellions, the most prominent of which was the uprising at Columbia University in April and May, in which I participated and about which I will have more to post next month. But the first…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following are two excerpts from an article compiled by the staff of the magazine The Week. The article provides a succinct overview of how the National Rifle Association has evolved, and it is worth reading in full. But I found these two excerpts (which are not sequential) especially enlightening because…
BY HANK REICHMAN I’ve mentioned before on this blog that, given the extraordinary events of 1968, this is a big year for 50th anniversaries. But today marks a notable 70th anniversary. On the morning of February 27, 1948, a plane traveling from Oakland to the Mexican border crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California, about an…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We do not fear arrest.” So declared seventeen full or endowed professors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in a letter to UNC Chancellor Carol Folt demanding the University take down Silent Sam, a Confederate monument that has been a focus of controversy on the campus since the Charlottesville events last…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest of all American scholars and intellectuals. To commemorate the occasion and explore the lessons of DuBois’s life and work for our time, the always thought-provoking Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society has…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the late 1960s student rebellions at San Francisco State and Cornell Universities, which led to the establishment of Black Studies programs at both schools, is now available for streaming. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes. …
BY TIRIEN ANGELA STEINBACH Tirien Angela Steinbach is the executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, the community-based clinic for Berkeley Law School, where she graduated from law school in 1999. Since its founding in 1988 by law students at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, EBCLC has become the largest provider…