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STEPHEN DONADIO
Ray Brown and Bill Sales
INTERVIEWER:
What do you regard as the most important issue in the
Columbia conflict: that is, what issue do you think best defines the
kind of conflict it is?
SALES:
I think Columbia University's building of a Jim Crow gym–
nasium on public park land in Harlem is representative of the most
significant issue at stake here: that is, the relationship of an urban
university to the community surrounding it. Columbia University in
collusion with the city administration acquired public park land from
the community without the community's say, to build a private, :a
segregated facility, to only 15 per cent of which the community was
to have access (as defined by the University). The method of acquiring
land here is significant, as is the fact that Columbia got it for very
little
(2.1
acres for $3,000 a year, a 400-year lease renewable every
five years after the first hundred years.) Moreover, Columbia will,
over the next decade or so, employ this same method-or similar
methods-to acquire land in the surrounding community in order to
expand the
University'~
living accommodations: in other words, to
turn West Harlem into a white enclave. In this way, Columbia will
be
decreasing the supply of ghetto housing while the number of peo–
ple who need that housing increases; and this can only perpetuate the
dilapidated conditions and the social pathology that you find in the
ghetto.
BROWN:
The black students are specifically opposed to Columbia Uni–
versity's use of its position of political strength to take advantage of
the powerlessness of the black community. It's our position that inso–
far as we are able we will either stop that kind of usurpation of
power or focus attention in it by dramatizing it in the manner we did.
INTERVIEWER:
At this point, to what extent are the aims of the black
students involved with those of the Strike Committee?
BROWN:
We have four demands: (1) that construction of the gym–
nasium be terminated and the slate wiped clean;
(2)
that the Uni–
versity use its good offices to see that charges are dropped against
all persons arrested in previous demonstrations at the gym site;2
(3) that faculty and administrative ties with the Institute for Defense
Analyses be severed; (4) that amnesty be granted to those involved
in the demonstration.
Ray Brown and Bill Sales represent The Black Students of Hamilton Hall,
a group composed of black students from various divisions of the University
(Columbia College, School of General Studies, School of Social Work, etc.)
which occupied Hamilton Hall from April 23 to April 29. Mr. Brown is a
senior majoring in history in Columbia College, Mr. Sales a graduate student
in Public Law and Government.
2 Prior to the occupation of Hamilton Hall which began on April 23, there
were several demonstrations at the gymnasium site in which numerous com–
munity persons and Columbia students were arrested on charges ranging from
criminal trespass to felonious assault.
