It was Parents' Weekend at Cornell University, where 2,000 visitors would soon hear President James A. Perkins give a timely speech entitled "The Stability of the University." He never gave it. Shortly before 6 a.m. on Saturday, 120 black students seized Willard Straight Hall—the first crisis in a week of chaos that almost destroyed Cornell and deeply alarmed universities throughout the U.S.
Shouting "Fire!" at the top of their lungs, the black guerrillas swept through Straight Hall, Cornell's student union, rousing 30 frightened parents from their beds and sending both them and 40 employees into the chill morning air. While some blacks guarded the entrances with fire hoses, others barged into the campus radio station, grabbed a microphone and proclaimed the seizure as a protest against Cornell's "racist attitudes."
Countermeasures. Rushing to the blacks' support, white members of Students for a Democratic Society set up a picket line outside the building. University officials tried to negotiate with the blacks, but were firmly turned away. Determined to recapture "The Straight," 20 whites, most of them from Delta Upsilon fraternity, whose membership is entirely Caucasian, smashed through a window and scuffled with the blacks. They were beaten back.
By nightfall, rumor had it that eight carloads of armed fraternity men were about to hit the hall. Negro Graduate Student Harry Edwards, organizer of last year's Olympic boycott, advised the blacks to take defensive countermeasures. In the dark, they smuggled in a small arsenal of rifles, shotguns and knives. Next day Cornell was treated to the Castroite spectacle of armed students, draped with ammo belts, marching defiantly out of their stronghold.
How did it happen? Ironically, Cornell had been recruiting ghetto blacks since 1965—and soon found itself faced with mounting Negro militancy as a result. At first, Perkins' administration yielded to many of their demands. It gave blacks a house for an Afro-American Center, set up a private dormitory for Negro coeds, and planned a black studies curriculum. A Quaker and champion of liberal causes, Perkins even let two blacks fly to New York in the university's plane to buy bongo drums for last year's Malcolm X Day ceremonies. But he rejected the major Negro demand: that the program of Afro-American studies be made into a separate college entirely run by blacks. As he saw it, Cornell would no longer be a true university if its trustees and faculty surrendered such control to students.