PARTISAN REVIEW
519
Two weeks later, after the burning of the buildings, the physical
attacks on each other by whites and Blacks,
all
the irony and perspective
were gone. A Negro student who had elegantly dismissed the Black
Power leaders in the privacy of my office rushed up as I was standing
outside the Senate and warned with blazing eyes that the school would
have to be shut, the demands acquiesed to, or there would
be
guerrilla
warfare. What had happened? Foolery had turned into madness. When
the music building went up in flames, the fires of rage that were
smoldering in Black and white breasts burst out, the campus was in the
hands of incendiaries suddenly, people hitting each other with sticks,
stones, even the kids from SDS were caught off guard. I saw them
staring in confusion as a huge backlash crowd of white students pushed
back through the gates of the South Campus to keep it open, shouting
a welcome to the arriving police cars, applauding the cops. Yet even
at the height of the tension, Black and white were mingling in the
crowd, politely elbowing each other to get a better look at what was
going on. A peculiar hysteria reigned. There were secondhand reports
everywhere of verbal atrocities committed. A hysterical female student
of mine, Jewish, called to insist I do something. (I suspect it was to
rush over to her Bronx house and give her a hug.)
They
had beaten
up a friend of a friend of hers, shouting, "Hitler didn't get enough of
you!" Now while it was true that some of the Black students resented
those paramilitary geniuses, the Jewish Defense League, making them–
selves the chaperones of City College, as I wound through the crowds
day after day I found no animosity to my big Semite beak. There was
plenty of obscenity on the floor of the Senate but no snide or nasty
remarks about Jews. The apocrypha of horror, however, buzzed in my
ear. Jews share with Blacks a paranoid vision of the world, amply
justified in both by history.
Yet something ugly was in the air at the college.
If
it was a mass
therapy session, the feelings exposed were truly unpleasant. All over the
campus Blacks and whites were talking, trying to understand one an–
other but the burning smoke of the music building was an acrid taste
in every mouth. I met my classes in the following weeks with a sick
feeling in my stomach, somehow the compact between members of the
College had been broken. Everyone sat uneasily. Attendance was not just
irregular; it was desultory. Students would come in, try to listen, then
just get nauseous, sinking down into their chairs, collapsed, their faces
hopeless. The whole of the College seemed like a mental ward. A team
of psychiatrists, not teachers, was in order.
Sixty percent disadvantaged versus 40 percent competitive seemed
