As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC office (3 pages)
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Bruce Jackson
Oct 3, 2012, 2:52:03 PM10/3/12
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http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/30/as-college-sophomore-eric-holder-participated-in-armed-takeover-of-former-columbia-university-rotc-office/
http://tinyurl.com/8v6w55e
As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of
former Columbia University ROTC office
Published: 11:56 PM 09/30/2012
By Charles C. Johnson and Ryan Girdusky
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General
Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned
Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group
of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’
Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to
questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed
— and if so, with what sort of weapon.
Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society
(SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the
“Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in
honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis
for nationhood.”
Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of Dean of
Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has
publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.
The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim that
the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black
Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the
SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator,
a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.
Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement
official, has given conflicting accounts of this episode during
college commencement addresses at Columbia, but both the BSO’s website
and the Daily Spectator have published facts that conflict with his
version of events.
Holder has bragged about his involvement in the “rise of black
consciousness” protests at Columbia.
“I was among a large group of students who felt strongly about the way
we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our
opinions heard,” he said during Columbia’s 2009 commencement
exercises. “I did not take a final exam until my junior year at
Columbia — we were on strike every time finals seemed to roll around —
but we ran out of issues by that third year.”
Though then-Dean Carl Hovde declared the occupation of the Naval ROTC
office illegal and said it violated university policy, the college
declined to prosecute any of the students involved. This decision may
have been made to avoid a repeat of violent Columbia campus
confrontations between police and members of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in 1968.
The ROTC headquarters was ultimately renamed the Malcolm X lounge as
the SAAS organization demanded. It later became a hang-out spot for
another future U.S. leader, Barack Obama, according to David Maraniss’
best-selling ”Barack Obama: The Story.”
Holder told Columbia University’s graduating law students during a
2010 commencement speech that the 1970 incident happened “during my
senior year,” but Holder was a freshman at the time. “[S]everal of us
took one of our concerns — that black students needed a designated
space to gather on campus — to the Dean [of Freshmen]’office. This
being Columbia, we proceeded to occupy that office.”
Holder also claimed in his 2009 speech that he and his fellow students
decided to “peacefully occupy one of the campus offices.” In contrast,
the BSO’s website recounted its predecessor organization’s activities
by noting that that “in 1970, a group of armed black students [the
SAAS] seized the abandoned ROTC office.”
While that website is no longer online, a snapshot of its content from
September 2010 is part of the archive.org database.
In a December 2010 GQ magazine profile of Holder, one of his Columbia
friends confirmed that he and Holder were both part of the ROTC office
takeover.
Holder particularly “connected with four other African-American
students” at Columbia, correspondent Wil S. Hylton wrote. “We took
over the ROTC lounge in Hartley Hall and created the Malcolm X
Lounge,” said a laughing Steve Sims, one of those students.
Hylton described Sims as “the attorney general’s closest friend” and
“a man Holder describes as his ‘consigliere.’”
------------------------
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/30/as-college-sophomore-eric-holder-participated-in-armed-takeover-of-former-columbia-university-rotc-office/2/
http://tinyurl.com/99py7hy
The SAAS was part of a radicalized portion of the Columbia student
body whose protest roots were hardened in the late 1960s. Its members
collaborated with the SDS to stage a series of protests on the New
York City campus in 1968, the year before Eric Holder arrived on
campus.
Those earlier protests culminated in a separate armed takeover of Dean
Henry Coleman’s office in which students held him hostage and stopped
the construction of a gymnasium in the Morningside Heights
neighborhood, near the campus.
The BSO reported on its website as recently as 2010 that those
students were “armed with guns.”
Emboldened by their successes, SAAS leaders continued to press their
demands, eventually working with local black radicals who were not
college students. A young Eric Holder joined the fray in 1969 as a
college freshman.
The SAAS also actively supported the Black Panthers and the Black
Power movement, according to Stefan Bradley, professor of
African-American studies at Saint Louis University and author of the
2009 book “Harlem vs. Columbia University.” He has described the
Columbia organization as being separatist in nature.
“In 1969, SAAS has taken up a new campaign to establish a Black
Institute on campus that would house a black studies program, an
all-black admissions board, all-black faculty members, administrators
and staff and they wanted the university to pay for it,” Bradley told
an audience in 2009.
Though Columbia never met all of the black militants’ demands, it
brought more black students to campus through its affirmative action
program, introduced Black Studies courses and hired black radical
Charles V. Hamilton — co-author of “Black Power” with Black Panther
Party ”Honorary Prime Minister” Stokely Carmichael (by then renamed
Kwame Ture).
“The university hadn’t thought of all of this by itself,” said
Bradley. “It took black students [in the SAAS] to do this.”
In March 1970 the SAAS released a statement supporting twenty-one
Black Panthers charged with plotting to blow up department stores,
railroad tracks, a police station and the New York Botanical Gardens.
The SAAS, along with the SDS and other radical campus groups, staged a
campus rally on March 12, 1970 featuring Afeni Shakur — one of the
Panthers out on bail and the future mother of rapper Tupac Shakur.
The rally’s purpose, The Columbia Daily Spectator reported, was to
raise bail money for the twenty other Panthers and to call on District
Attorney Frank Hogan to drop the charges. All 21 defendants would
later be acquitted after a lengthy trial.
The April 21, 1970 SAAS raid on the Naval ROTC office and Dean
Coleman’s office came one month after the Black Panther arrests. The
Columbia Daily Spectator released a series of demands from the student
leaders on April 23 in which they claimed to be occupying the ROTC
office for the purpose of “self-determination and dignity.” They
needed the space, they said, because of “the general racist nature of
American society.”
----------------------------------------------------
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/30/as-college-sophomore-eric-holder-participated-in-armed-takeover-of-former-columbia-university-rotc-office/3/
http://tinyurl.com/9ennmy9
In their statement, the SAAS leaders also decried “this racist
university campus” — in particular its alleged “involvement in the
continued political harassment of the Black Panther Party” — along
with what they called a “lack of concern for Black people whether they
be students or workers” and a “general contempt towards the beliefs of
Black students in particular and Black people in general.”
“Black students recognize the necessity of not letting the university
set a dangerous precedent in its dealings with Black people,” the
statement read in part, “that is letting white people direct the
action and forces that affect Black people toward goals they (white
people) feel are correct.”
Among the black professors who publicly supported Holder and the SAAS
during this period was Black history teacher Hollis Lynch, who is one
of four professors Holder later said “shaped my worldview.”
Entering Columbia Law School in September 1973, Holder joined the
Black American Law Students Association. Less than a month later, that
organization joined other minority activist groups in a coalition that
demanded the retraction of a letter to President Gerald Ford, signed
by six Columbia professors, that argued against affirmative action and
racial quotas.
“Merit should be rewarded, without regard to race, sex, creed, or any
other external factor,” the professors wrote to President Ford.
Following a campaign marked by what two of those professors called
“rhetoric and names hurled” at them, they changed their position and
denied they actually opposed affirmative action.
The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page later argued against
affirmative action as a factor in university admissions, touching off
another controversy with the coalition that included the Black
American Law Students Association. “Affirmative action is just a nice
name for a quota, and quotas are just a nice name for racism,” the
editorial board wrote.
In response, the minority students’ coalition responded that
“traditional academic criteria have a built-in bias” that leaves many
minority students “automatically excluded.”
“[A]ffirmative action is neither racist nor sexist,” they wrote.
“Rather it is opposition to it, which fails to provide alternative
means for eradicating bias, that supports the racist and sexist status
quo.”
As attorney general, Holder has defended the affirmative action
policies that are now the status quo. In February 2012, Holder said
during a World Leaders Forum at Columbia University that he “can’t
actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would
ever cease.”
“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,”
Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it
begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they
are entitled?”
Holder has also come under fire for presiding over a Justice
Department that declined to prosecute members of the New Black Panther
Party who allegedly intimidated white voters outside a Philadelphia
polling precinct in 2008.
--
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are you enjoying it? If not, what are you waiting for? It's FREE!
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http://tinyurl.com/8v6w55e
As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of
former Columbia University ROTC office
Published: 11:56 PM 09/30/2012
By Charles C. Johnson and Ryan Girdusky
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General
Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned
Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group
of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’
Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to
questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed
— and if so, with what sort of weapon.
Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society
(SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the
“Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in
honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis
for nationhood.”
Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of Dean of
Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has
publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.
The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim that
the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black
Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the
SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator,
a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.
Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement
official, has given conflicting accounts of this episode during
college commencement addresses at Columbia, but both the BSO’s website
and the Daily Spectator have published facts that conflict with his
version of events.
Holder has bragged about his involvement in the “rise of black
consciousness” protests at Columbia.
“I was among a large group of students who felt strongly about the way
we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our
opinions heard,” he said during Columbia’s 2009 commencement
exercises. “I did not take a final exam until my junior year at
Columbia — we were on strike every time finals seemed to roll around —
but we ran out of issues by that third year.”
Though then-Dean Carl Hovde declared the occupation of the Naval ROTC
office illegal and said it violated university policy, the college
declined to prosecute any of the students involved. This decision may
have been made to avoid a repeat of violent Columbia campus
confrontations between police and members of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in 1968.
The ROTC headquarters was ultimately renamed the Malcolm X lounge as
the SAAS organization demanded. It later became a hang-out spot for
another future U.S. leader, Barack Obama, according to David Maraniss’
best-selling ”Barack Obama: The Story.”
Holder told Columbia University’s graduating law students during a
2010 commencement speech that the 1970 incident happened “during my
senior year,” but Holder was a freshman at the time. “[S]everal of us
took one of our concerns — that black students needed a designated
space to gather on campus — to the Dean [of Freshmen]’office. This
being Columbia, we proceeded to occupy that office.”
Holder also claimed in his 2009 speech that he and his fellow students
decided to “peacefully occupy one of the campus offices.” In contrast,
the BSO’s website recounted its predecessor organization’s activities
by noting that that “in 1970, a group of armed black students [the
SAAS] seized the abandoned ROTC office.”
While that website is no longer online, a snapshot of its content from
September 2010 is part of the archive.org database.
In a December 2010 GQ magazine profile of Holder, one of his Columbia
friends confirmed that he and Holder were both part of the ROTC office
takeover.
Holder particularly “connected with four other African-American
students” at Columbia, correspondent Wil S. Hylton wrote. “We took
over the ROTC lounge in Hartley Hall and created the Malcolm X
Lounge,” said a laughing Steve Sims, one of those students.
Hylton described Sims as “the attorney general’s closest friend” and
“a man Holder describes as his ‘consigliere.’”
------------------------
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/30/as-college-sophomore-eric-holder-participated-in-armed-takeover-of-former-columbia-university-rotc-office/2/
http://tinyurl.com/99py7hy
The SAAS was part of a radicalized portion of the Columbia student
body whose protest roots were hardened in the late 1960s. Its members
collaborated with the SDS to stage a series of protests on the New
York City campus in 1968, the year before Eric Holder arrived on
campus.
Those earlier protests culminated in a separate armed takeover of Dean
Henry Coleman’s office in which students held him hostage and stopped
the construction of a gymnasium in the Morningside Heights
neighborhood, near the campus.
The BSO reported on its website as recently as 2010 that those
students were “armed with guns.”
Emboldened by their successes, SAAS leaders continued to press their
demands, eventually working with local black radicals who were not
college students. A young Eric Holder joined the fray in 1969 as a
college freshman.
The SAAS also actively supported the Black Panthers and the Black
Power movement, according to Stefan Bradley, professor of
African-American studies at Saint Louis University and author of the
2009 book “Harlem vs. Columbia University.” He has described the
Columbia organization as being separatist in nature.
“In 1969, SAAS has taken up a new campaign to establish a Black
Institute on campus that would house a black studies program, an
all-black admissions board, all-black faculty members, administrators
and staff and they wanted the university to pay for it,” Bradley told
an audience in 2009.
Though Columbia never met all of the black militants’ demands, it
brought more black students to campus through its affirmative action
program, introduced Black Studies courses and hired black radical
Charles V. Hamilton — co-author of “Black Power” with Black Panther
Party ”Honorary Prime Minister” Stokely Carmichael (by then renamed
Kwame Ture).
“The university hadn’t thought of all of this by itself,” said
Bradley. “It took black students [in the SAAS] to do this.”
In March 1970 the SAAS released a statement supporting twenty-one
Black Panthers charged with plotting to blow up department stores,
railroad tracks, a police station and the New York Botanical Gardens.
The SAAS, along with the SDS and other radical campus groups, staged a
campus rally on March 12, 1970 featuring Afeni Shakur — one of the
Panthers out on bail and the future mother of rapper Tupac Shakur.
The rally’s purpose, The Columbia Daily Spectator reported, was to
raise bail money for the twenty other Panthers and to call on District
Attorney Frank Hogan to drop the charges. All 21 defendants would
later be acquitted after a lengthy trial.
The April 21, 1970 SAAS raid on the Naval ROTC office and Dean
Coleman’s office came one month after the Black Panther arrests. The
Columbia Daily Spectator released a series of demands from the student
leaders on April 23 in which they claimed to be occupying the ROTC
office for the purpose of “self-determination and dignity.” They
needed the space, they said, because of “the general racist nature of
American society.”
----------------------------------------------------
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/30/as-college-sophomore-eric-holder-participated-in-armed-takeover-of-former-columbia-university-rotc-office/3/
http://tinyurl.com/9ennmy9
In their statement, the SAAS leaders also decried “this racist
university campus” — in particular its alleged “involvement in the
continued political harassment of the Black Panther Party” — along
with what they called a “lack of concern for Black people whether they
be students or workers” and a “general contempt towards the beliefs of
Black students in particular and Black people in general.”
“Black students recognize the necessity of not letting the university
set a dangerous precedent in its dealings with Black people,” the
statement read in part, “that is letting white people direct the
action and forces that affect Black people toward goals they (white
people) feel are correct.”
Among the black professors who publicly supported Holder and the SAAS
during this period was Black history teacher Hollis Lynch, who is one
of four professors Holder later said “shaped my worldview.”
Entering Columbia Law School in September 1973, Holder joined the
Black American Law Students Association. Less than a month later, that
organization joined other minority activist groups in a coalition that
demanded the retraction of a letter to President Gerald Ford, signed
by six Columbia professors, that argued against affirmative action and
racial quotas.
“Merit should be rewarded, without regard to race, sex, creed, or any
other external factor,” the professors wrote to President Ford.
Following a campaign marked by what two of those professors called
“rhetoric and names hurled” at them, they changed their position and
denied they actually opposed affirmative action.
The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page later argued against
affirmative action as a factor in university admissions, touching off
another controversy with the coalition that included the Black
American Law Students Association. “Affirmative action is just a nice
name for a quota, and quotas are just a nice name for racism,” the
editorial board wrote.
In response, the minority students’ coalition responded that
“traditional academic criteria have a built-in bias” that leaves many
minority students “automatically excluded.”
“[A]ffirmative action is neither racist nor sexist,” they wrote.
“Rather it is opposition to it, which fails to provide alternative
means for eradicating bias, that supports the racist and sexist status
quo.”
As attorney general, Holder has defended the affirmative action
policies that are now the status quo. In February 2012, Holder said
during a World Leaders Forum at Columbia University that he “can’t
actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would
ever cease.”
“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,”
Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it
begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they
are entitled?”
Holder has also come under fire for presiding over a Justice
Department that declined to prosecute members of the New Black Panther
Party who allegedly intimidated white voters outside a Philadelphia
polling precinct in 2008.
--
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are you enjoying it? If not, what are you waiting for? It's FREE!
just click
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