Icarus Films
The April 1969 campus takeover that was expected to last only hours continued for more than two weeks and turned into an encampment that included workshops and tutoring for the community.
In the 1960s, The City College of New York was an educational gated community that sealed itself off from Harlem, the vibrant neighborhood that encircled the campus. In the years following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the school was predominantly white, composed largely of immigrant and working-class students. The neighboring areas were mostly Black and Latino. In 1967, New York public and private high schools sent fewer than 6,000 Black and Latino young people to four-year City University of New York (CUNY) institutions. Ten times more white students were admitted in the same year.
“Harvard on the Hudson,” as this founding college of the CUNY system was known, proudly offered free tuition to New York’s best students. But many promising students of color could not get into The City College of New York (CCNY). Producer-directors Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss’s new documentary The Five Demands explores the origin stories of Black and Latino students’ fight to integrate City College that culminated in a 1969 student strike and campus takeover.
Weiss and Schiller use archival footage—young people playing on stoops, members of the Black Panthers distributing breakfast to children—to illustrate the rich contours of life just outside the ornate iron gates. “The first thing that struck me was coming through Harlem on the 101 bus, getting off and being surrounded by Harlemites, my folks—and then entering the college and finding there weren’t any of my folks,” Henry Arce, a CCNY graduate and former president of PRISA (Puerto Ricans Involved in Student Action), recalls.
The film chronicles the revolution in wraparound college academic services designed to offer low-income Black and Latino students the opportunity to attend college. The college’s challenge was to provide the academic and social supports students coming out of poorly resourced public schools needed to succeed. “CCNY was an elite school academically. These students were outstanding,” Allen Ballard, a Black CCNY professor emeritus of history and Africana studies, told the filmmakers. “It was a privilege for the students to be there, and it was a privilege for us to be teaching there—and I was happy. Except for this one problem, which was, it was all white.”
Ballard explained that young professors rarely proposed new undertakings directly to the top administrators, but he approached Buell Gallagher, the CCNY president who endorsed SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge), a program launched in 1966 that would admit promising Black and Latino students. Of Gallagher, Ballard noted, “He was a pioneer in African American education, although white.” Gallagher had been president of Talladega College, a historically Black institution, before taking the job at CCNY.
As the numbers of students of color at CCNY increased, they set up new student organizations. Black students founded the Onyx Society; Puerto Rican students set up PRISA. The professors who taught in the SEEK program—among them acclaimed writers June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich—helped students develop critical reading and writing skills and nurtured their understandings of social justice. “If the people who are teaching us are totally brilliant and they’re listening to what we have to say, then our opinions matter,” said CCNY graduate Francee Covington.
Weiss and Schiller both have deep ties to the college. Schiller earned a bachelor’s degree in film and video production and a master’s in education. The women co-founded a film company, Jezebel Productions, and have long collaborated on documentaries that unearth and celebrate gay, lesbian, and Black experiences. Weiss taught film and video production at CCNY for nearly a decade before she heard about the campus takeover from another professor who asked her if she’d consider making a film about it.
Some of the incidents they discovered revealed the patterns of harm that Black and Latino students encountered in the New York City schools. In one archival film clip, a white elementary school teacher gets physically aggressive, grabbing and pushing her very young Black male students into their seats, echoing the experiences shared by some CCNY graduates. Covington revealed that one of her white professors made callous remarks during one class that indicated that she felt the SEEK students hadn’t truly earned their place at CCNY. These kinds of experiences reminded Covington and others of the negative encounters they had with other white teachers in their earlier school years.
CCNY’s racial gatekeeping also pained them. “It’s actually quite un-American,” Covington noted. “You have people who have been here for 400 years. They are paying the same taxes, they’re riding the same subway, and they have the same dreams for their children, which is to be well educated.” James Small, a student and lead organizer, recalled, “You weren’t left out of college because you were dumb or because you couldn’t learn. You were left out because the way society is structured—and you weren’t structured into that process.”
Icarus Films
In a scene from ‘The Five Demands,’ white students are seen demonstrating in support of strikers.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in the spring of 1968 had a searing impact on the students who’d grown impatient with school administrators who weren’t responding to the concerns they’d brought to them. The Onyx Society and PRISA joined together to form the “Committee of Ten” and issued five demands to the administration in early 1969. Their key demand was a new admissions policy that would ensure that CCNY mirrored New York high schools’ racial demographics. They also wanted CCNY’s education department to add Spanish courses and Black and Puerto Rican history to the graduation requirements for students majoring in education. The students also wanted a freshman orientation for Blacks and Puerto Ricans, student participation in SEEK decision-making, and the creation of a school of Black and Puerto Rican studies.
On an early April morning, students chain-locked the gates of the campus and the takeover began. Archival clips of the demonstration feature students speaking about their fears of becoming victims of police violence. But the campus security officers, who were all Black, refused to remove them, and Gallagher didn’t call the New York police.
The campus takeover that the students expected to last only hours turned into an encampment that included workshops and tutoring for the community. The students briefly renamed the school the “University of Harlem,” modeling the ways CCNY could become a partner and resource to Harlem’s residents.
The local community was immensely supportive. “My parents were furious, of course. This is not what we came to America for, but … my mother, after screaming at us, showed up at the gate … with food,” Rosalind Kilkenny McLymont, another CCNY student, remembered.
On May 5, 1969, a little over two weeks after the takeover began, it ended. Not long afterward, City University of New York Chancellor Albert Bowker announced that the entire CUNY system would move to an open admissions policy: Any New York City high school graduate could attend.
Now 53 percent Black and Latino, CCNY marked the 50th anniversary of the takeover with a celebration in 2019. At the event, Francee Covington commented on a quotation made famous by Martin Luther King. “I’m sure you’ve all heard,” she said, “that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ The arc does not bend itself. We do that, people of conscience do that.”
Released shortly before the Supreme Court struck down college affirmative action programs, The Five Demands offers a timely blueprint for people of conscience to step up to protect the many hard-won rights that are now under assault.
This fall, Weiss, Schiller, and some of the CCNY graduates featured in the film plan to host screenings in a number of the states that have passed parents’ rights bills that silence and, in some cases, criminalize teachings about racial injustices and discrimination.
