It is true that as a college student I would have gone to a protest about the color of a hat, and was ready to be outraged about issues I had learned existed only five minutes before. Moral outrage does come humorously easy to a college kid of 17, 18, or 19, it's true, and I'm more prone to moral outrage than the average civilian. Chanting in unison and singing songs that mock the Man is a ton of fun. True. But what we did in April 1985 at Columbia University was righteous.
I was just a body in the famous anti-apartheid blockade at Columbia that spring, lo so many years ago. I had zero to do with its organization or leadership or anything like that. I wasn't one of the hunger strikers, and was only a beginner, Global Politics 101, when it came to the issue of divestment. But looking back on that moment of youth, I feel so lucky, so incredibly fortunate I was there and got to be, for that one damp and indelible moment, indisputably on the right side of history.
When I arrived at Columbia in late August of 1984 for orientation I was 17 years old and had zero interest in putting on my head the baby-blue — Columbia blue — freshman beanie that our incoming class had been handed by upperclassmen in a reception tent on the now-famous South Field Lawn. (The beanie was not the knit cap or watch cap that the word "beanie" refers to today, but a skullcap with a tiny brim, the kind you see sometimes on some fool's head with a propeller on top.) When hell froze over would I put a freshman beanie on my head, not even for a Polaroid. I was a punk and nonconformist who read Bukowski and wore outlandish rags, filthy Levi's covered in hand-painted rock lyrics, leather platform sandals, and vintage T-shirts with the grinning face of Bugs Bunny on the chest.
I was an idiot at 17, and didn't appreciate what I was being given when I was accepted by the admissions office at Columbia.
Along with my best friend from high school, Marcus, I didn't even pause before ditching orientation and disappearing into the streets of Manhattan, chasing the night, drinking beer at the Marlin and the West End and willfully and forcefully pretending our professors, our dormitory peers, and our possible future careers as Ivy grads and potential leaders of the Free World didn't exist. My college education was learning to order brown beef gravy with my fries at Tom's Diner, learning to pour cream slowly into iced coffee at the Mill, learning the geography of Manhattan — lower and lower we wandered by night, walking down Eleventh Avenue without a winter coat, admiring the pigeons and the bums. By the time spring rolled around, I was barely attending classes at all.
I didn't waste my youth, no, no, no. I sucked all the juice I possibly could out of all the peaches and cherries of my wayward years. But I nearly wasted my Ivy League education. I mostly wasted it. It's a regret I mention frequently to my own teenage children.
Early in April, 39 years ago, my attention was drawn back to campus when a group of protesters from the Coalition for a Free South Africa chained and padlocked the main doors to Hamilton Hall and spent the night huddled on its broad stone steps. The C.F.S.A. — it was still an era of acronyms, the A.C.L.U. and the A.N.C. — decided to camp out in front of the building until the university agreed to pull its investments from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa. I joined the movement, sleeping on the steps, which were cold, under a mess of blankets. When it rained, and it rained a lot that April, we ambled off to get a bagel (25 cents at Furnold Grocery, the student co-op), but the blockade crowd swelled again when the sun came out. We blockaded the building for three weeks. A banner over the door renamed the building "Mandela Hall." When it was all over, we marched through Harlem to the boombox chorus of "Nelson Mandela" by the Specials, a moment that, in retrospect, still gives my heart a little lift of joy.
It's a long time ago. My memory of that April is a collage, a flipbook, images herky-jerky. I remember the old-fish smell of the blossoms on a flowering pear tree that bloomed near Low Library in late April. I remember Jesse Jackson rousing the crowd in a black trench coat. I remember the hard steps, and the texture of the stone. I don't remember any tents, just a few tarps and plastic garbage bags. I remember bullhorns, and litter. I remember bullhorn bulletins on the steering committee members on hunger strike who were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital by ambulance. I remember Amiri Baraka with the bullhorn. I remember someone arriving to bullhorn the news, which had traveled all the way from the other side of the world, that the African National Congress was behind us! I remember getting a disciplinary notice, and my academic adviser, whose name and face are obliterated, dryly remarking that I had barely attended classes but somehow managed perfect attendance at Mandela Hall. I remember the university president arguing that divestment would only hurt the working people. I remember lots of lawyers, but no police. I remember the bullhorn news that a judge had said we couldn't be arrested and the police could not be called to campus. I remember exultation.
We won, in the end, and we were right.
The university divested from apartheid South Africa the following fall. Hundreds of American companies left South Africa over the next few years. The economy crumbled, the government fell. Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994.
This morning, on my daybed keeping company with my little dog and my large oat milk latte, watching like an old lady out the window as the cardinals, who have returned to the yard for spring, peck seed from a feeder, I have arrived well into middle age. I reached the stage of moral ambivalence some years ago. The certainty of youth has fled.
Every night before I go to sleep this past week of April 2024, I watch the BBC News coverage of the Gaza cease-fire protests at Columbia in my drowsy bed and have no definitive take on the tactics of the protest kids, no solid read on what the university administration is doing right and doing wrong. Cease-fire now? Absolutely. Calling in the N.Y.P.D.? Surely that was a mistake? But even the policing question seems to have no glaringly true answer: The police were not allowed to arrest us in 1985, true, but, then again, there was no one on campus in 1985 who represented "the other side," so the potential for confrontation and escalation wasn't there. (Administrators are more nervous now. Everyone is more nervous now, even though the quotidian violence of Morningside Heights cannot approach today what it was then. A lunatic waving a lead pipe and frothing at the mouth once chased me across campus and home to my dorm, and no one thought anything of it or even ejected him from his habitual sleeping nest in some shrubbery behind the journalism school.) Meanwhile, also, there's the knot inside the tangle wrapped in a cluster-buck of the free-speech debate: Running all these university presidents off Ivy campuses on a rail? That seems like right-wing hogwash to me. Free speech is not dead. Policing culture seems more the problem. And have you noticed these disgraced university presidents are mainly women? Women of color?
The certainty of youth, my blazing youth, has not just fled, it is long gone. It slunk off in my 40s, slipped around a corner, stealthily, then darted away like a thief on fleet feet in the night. We stand here in middle age in quiet befuddlement, and some sadness, like someone has stolen our purse.