My students trickled into class this past Thursday looking flustered. Most were late. Many were absent. Those who made it waited in lines that stretched around the block to pass through the heavy security surrounding Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus. Outside the closed gates at 116th Street and Broadway, NYPD officers amassed in riot gear. We carried on with a lecture about the history of electronic music, occasionally drowned out by student protesters’ chants—a torrent of living music flowing over the polished sighs of ghosts.
About an hour after my class ended, police entered campus at the invitation of the university’s president to arrest 108 anti-war protesters who were occupying the south lawn in front of Butler Library. The last time this type of law enforcement incursion happened was in April 1968 when members of the Student Afro-American Society and Students for a Democratic Society occupied the dean’s offices in Hamilton Hall. They organized to protest “Columbia University’s plan to construct a new gymnasium in Morningside Park, the area that separates the campus from Harlem,” as Richmond musician and activist James “Plunky” Branch puts it in his memoir.
SDS spun off the original protest to expand into demonstrations against Vietnam and the draft. A week later, police entered campus, violently engaged protesters, and made over 700 arrests. Eventually Columbia blinked and, according to the New York Times, “[cut] ties with the Pentagon on Vietnam War research and gaining amnesty for demonstrators.”
Plunky was a Columbia student between 1965 and January of 1968, when he dropped out to begin life as a musical revolutionary. During his sophomore year, he started a mixed-race R&B band on campus called the Soul Syndicate. At the time of the April 1968 protests, even though he was no longer enrolled as a student, Plunky writes, “I was still very actively involved socially, musically, politically”:
When we took over Hamilton Hall, I was assigned to man the telephone switchboard because working with the old-style, plug-in wires to connect calls had been one of my work-study jobs as a freshman. During the early hours and days of the takeover I never left my post, answering and forwarding calls through what was the main switchboard for the school’s administration.
Years later, speaking at the Columbia 1968 + 40 event, Plunky remembered the role Black music had played in the aftermath of the violent crackdown on student demonstrators:
The Sunday morning memorial service at Earl Hall was well attended and moving. We called the names and remembered our fallen comrades. I played “Amazing Grace” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and got two standing ovations. Once again, I brought soul music to Columbia campus proceedings.
In my Music Humanities class here today, we study the spirituals’ Big Bang-level impact on American music, from Burleigh to Beyoncé. And we draw inspiration from the writings of the late Virginia State College music professor and composer Undine Smith Moore, renowned for her choral arrangements of spirituals.
Marian Anderson, by the power of her art, forced the city of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, to reverse its stand on segregation in the Mosque, its concert hall…Every artist need not approach social change in the same way. For Andre Watts, the sheer perfection of his playing is an agent of social change.
—Undine Smith Moore
In a previous post, I described how Moore’s students “exemplify the Decision-Making and Social Action Approach” to multicultural education through the arts.” Her student Billy Taylor started Jazzmobile—a jazz education institution that’s still swinging this neighborhood today—in the wake of the Harlem riots of 1964, initiated by student demonstrators after a police lieutenant shot and killed their classmate, fifteen-year-old James Powell. Taylor, Plunky, and many other Virginia music educators of that era comprehensively mastered their craft from counterpoint to counter-protest, fusing music and message in the tradition of the spirituals.
Plunky would leave Columbia, go AWOL from the Army and end up in a Fort Dix stockade, apprentice to musician and South African political exile Ndikho Xaba, and eventually form his own band Juju before returning to Richmond to co-found the Richmond Jazz Society, teach music in public schools and universities, and help shake up the city’s public arts funding landscape. When protesters graffitied and toppled Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in the summer of 2020, Plunky was there with his saxophone swinging the blues.
After this week’s on-campus arrests, apparently many of the student protesters were singing all the way to the holding cells where they spent Thursday night. Now, most are facing suspension. Plunky’s life story suggests this isn’t the end of their education. In terms of the Social Action approach, they may have just matriculated—in zip ties.
Now is the spring of our discontent. Students, faculty, administrators—we’re all a bit unsure what happens next. Safety should be paramount. In fact, I just now received an email previewing the “Enhanced safety measures at the Morningside campus.” As a career educator whose Pennsylvania public school was shuttered by the governor during Covid, I’m feeling serious spring 2020 déjà vu right now. Then, I spent weeks on backroads delivering violins and cellos in a mask. Now, it’s mostly triage by email. But the sense of social improvisation is the same.
I suppose in the event of civil discontent it’s good to know what number to call. But who’s manning the switchboard now? The Plunkys of the future, or the ghosts of the past?
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
—William Shakespeare, Richard III
Your writing puts current events in a reassuring context, the broad view that sees both irony and dignity in the human experience.