Title: Behind the Protests Against the Vietnam War in 1968 | Time
Headings: Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968
Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968
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Content: At Harvard Law School, professor Alan Dershowitz taught a class on legal ways to resist the draft. Students there, as well as at Radcliffe and Boston University, took part in a four-day hunger strike against the war. And at Columbia, 3,500 students and 1,000 faculty members boycotted classes in protest. SDS members led by undergraduate Mark Rudd voiced their opposition to the school’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis and weapons research for the military, while also fighting the school over the construction of a new gym that they complained offered discriminatory access to Harlem neighborhood residents. They also took over school buildings and occupied the president’s office. When 1,000 New York policemen descended on Columbia’s campus to clear out the protesters, that response resulted in many injuries and 700 arrests. Agitation spread to hundreds of schools. A Milwaukee Journal survey found that 75 percent of students supported organized protest as a “legitimate means of expressing student grievances.” And some abandoned the Gandhian principles of nonviolence championed by Martin Luther King Jr. There were three arson attacks at Southern Illinois University by those opposing the war. Students at many universities also opposed recruitment by firms profiting from the war and protested their universities’ investments in companies such as Dow Chemical, which made napalm, a jelly gasoline that was used in Vietnam in firebombs and flamethrowers.