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 and/or state:
“Of all my prosecutors ... not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which it is destined to receive thence.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Mutual repect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one’s own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)
“It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)