when the levee breaks.

A 1969 photo shows African-American student Thomas Jones and fellow activists emerging from Willard Straight Hall on the campus of Cornell University. They had occupied the building to protest what they saw as a racist university judicial system that unfairly punished African-American students who had engaged in a demonstration. They demanded amnesty for the accused protesters and the establishment of an African-American studies program. When all was said and done, Jones and company pretty much got what they demanded, not to mention the resignation of Cornell’s president.

On the 40th anniversary of the Straight Takeover, the Cornell Daily Sun spoke to Tom Jones about the incident.

Why?

“Well the goal — let’s sketch the broader social goal and then the narrower campus goal. These dynamics, they don’t occur in isolation. So what happened at Willard Straight Hall was in this historical context. … Martin Luther King had been assassinated [in] April 1968, there were riots in major cities throughout the country. There was a division within the Black community of whether to pursue the kind of non-violent system, the non-violent activism that Dr. King represented and personified, or the more aggressive, more militant activism represented by the Black Panthers, who talked about armed revolution and self-defense. … And Malcolm X who talked about armed revolution and self-defense. And there was a question about what direction America was going to take. … The country was in turmoil over resistance to the Vietnam War. So there was a real question if America was going to erupt, socially, over tensions. That same historical context was reflected on campus.

So on campus, we’d end up with fights over things like an African-American Studies program, because when we came here, none of the curriculum said anything at all about our story. There was nothing … about our history or the fight for freedom that we had undertaken in terms of slave rebellions, there was nothing about the economics of slavery. None of that was in the curriculum of Cornell.”

What was going through his head as they exited the building?

Well, I did not realize it would be a turning point in Cornell’s history because at the moment I was not aware of the dramatic photographs that were being taken, and that’s what really elevated it into a more than a local campus story. … At that moment I did not realize the story was being framed that dramatically and that vividly. … My immediate focus was enormous pride. … It was an enormous act of selflessness … in terms of saying we’re going to fight this fight as part of the larger battle.

I was also aware of the symbolism … and that the cumulative impact of these events, hopefully, would be to shock America and say that we were going to become a different kind of country. But at the moment I did not know that that was how history would unfold. I do think that Cornell did shock the country. For people to see what looked like the specter of armed revolution — because you know it’s never the peasants that lead a revolution, it’s always the intelligentsia. … The takeover was one of the events that made that chain of history that lead directly to Barack Obama being elected.

I will not resent you if you re-blog this without the text. The image stands on its own.

Rightly so because the women played Maryland Polo Club and it was a really close, fast game. When I walked my string after the first chukker, they were literally dripping sweat and lathered in foam. By the end of the game, my favorite pony, Pico, started yawning and half closing his eyes while I was untacking him because he was so tired. We ended losing by two point, 18 - 16, which was sad because it's the first game they've lost this year during regular season. 

Before the game, all the girls got Chipotle and we ate it in the AV room at the barn during video practice.