Case Western Reserve University and Kent State (1968)
As student activism and community organizing became one of his passions, Robbins traveled to other surrounding campuses to help other students establish their own SDS chapters. While traveling back to the Cleveland area, Ohio SDS Regional staff member Lisa Meisel and several other students passed out leaflets that drew about a hundred people to Case Western Reserve University to hear Robbins and Ayers talk about the possibility of a revolution. They addressed the issues of the draft, university complicity, women’s liberation, and the protest of the upcoming presidential election. The following day, Robbins and Ayers led sixty students in a “shout-down” demonstration disrupting presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey’s speech.
During a 1968 spring semester visit to Kent State, one of Ohio’s most radical chapters, Robbins was able to convince a small group of activists in using a more forceful approach in their demonstration methods. In a statement from Robbins and Meisel titled The War At Kent State, both claimed that a war was on at Kent State and demanded the university “abolish ROTC because it protected imperialism by suppressing popular movements at home and abroad, end the Project Themis Grant and the universities involvement in developing sophisticated weaponry used against people’s struggles for freedom, abolish the Law Enforcement School and abolish the Northeast Ohio Crime Lab because both institutions defended the American status quo and protected the interests of the ruling class.” The first of such action against the university began on April 8, 1968. The SDS held a rally that attracted about 400 people in support of their demands and led 200 of them to march on to the administration buildings and use force to get past the police that were blocking their way. The university responded by suspending seven Kent State students and ended up pressing charges against five other people. Several other rallies were conducted over the next few days while the university continued to ignore the SDS’s demands. Robbins and the remainder of the SDS members reaffirmed their demands and added a fifth demand that called for open and collective hearings of the suspended students. On April 16, 1968 fellow SDS member Colin Nieberger’s university trial was to be held on campus, 2,000 supporters came to support the rally and approximately 700 of them marched to the Music and Speech building where Nieberger’s trial was being conducted. The passage from author Dan Berger’s book Outlaws of America describes how Robbins and a few other SDS members "moved past an army of athletes and policemen to successfully disrupt a university hearing on disciplinary and student-power issues." After an hour of struggle the trials were canceled and Robbins was ultimately given credit for being the leader of the first student rebellions at Kent State. Robbins was arrested for his involvement during the demonstrations and was sentenced to serve a three-month prison term for his actions. In December 1969, Robbins served six weeks of his three-month jail sentence in a Cleveland area prison.
Read more about this topic: Terry Robbins
Famous quotes containing the words case, western, reserve, university, kent and/or state:
“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“Fowls in the frith,
Fishes in the flood,
And I must wax wod:
Much sorrow I walk with
For best of bone and blood.”
—Unknown. Fowls in the Frith. . .
Oxford Book of Short Poems, The. P. J. Kavanagh and James Michie, eds. Oxford University Press.
“Main Street was never the same. I read Gide and tried to
translate Proust. Now nothing is real except French wine.
For absurdity is reality, my loneliness unreal, my mind tired.
And I shall die an old Parisian.”
—Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968)
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)