The New York Post reports that students at Columbia University are being strong-armed by campus “Black Lives Matter” activists, who are pressuring them to take part in protests.
It is unlikely that the threatened students will get help from school officials, given the school’s nearly fifty-year history of radical black and socialist activism, and the administration’s recent decision to hire Kathy Boudin, a former member of the 1970s revolutionary communist group, the Weather Underground.
As the Post reported:
“There’s been a campaign of intimidation, where students are going dorm to dorm, floor to floor and asking students to go back to their dorms and put on black if they’re not wearing black,” the parent said.
“My daughter told me people are uneasy and fearful,” she added. “Her personal politics are left-wing and she shares their sympathies, but she doesn’t like to feel that she can’t wear blue if she wants to wear blue.”
Some students felt caught between their politics and academic responsibilities.
“We support them, but we’re here to learn,” said one senior who declined to give her name. “There’s a divide among students. People who are not willing to walk out are seen as not supporting the movement.”
The current intimidation at Columbia comes as no shock to anyone familiar with Columbia University’s important status in the history of 1960s and 1970s black liberation and communist radicalism. Columbia’s sprawling campus sits just south of Manhattan’s 125th Street, butting up against Harlem, and the school shot to national fame for the 1968 protests that shut down the campus for days.
One of the leaders of those 1968 protests was Eric Mann, who was a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and Weather Underground groups. He was also the later mentor to Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Patrisse Cullors. Mann “recruited” Cullors in 2001 when she was seventeen years old. Cullors spent over ten years learning Mann’s style of revolutionary community organizing before she co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.
Eric Mann has been preaching the “centrality” of the black community to his hopes of an overthrow of the U.S. government for decades.
Last year, a number of members of the Columbia faculty issued a statement of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement, saying, “We are called again—as professionals and citizens—to speak out against systemic racism and oppression in our country overall and our justice system in particular.”
One of the signers of that Black Lives Matter solidarity statement was Columbia professor Kathy Boudin. Boudin was sent to prison for her role in a violent 1981 armed robbery of a Brinks truck. The attack by the communist terrorist cell she was part of killed two guards. As Breitbart News reported in an extensive profile of Boudin after Columbia hired her in 2013:
Katherine Boudin is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and has been named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. She is also a communist, a Weather Underground radical, a terrorist, and a convicted felon.
Whatever you’ve heard about Boudin, the fully detailed reality is far worse.
The story of Kathy Boudin’s crimes and her victims is bloody and ugly. Many details get left out or smoothed over, even by her critics. There’s a wider importance to Boudin’s story: it’s yet another example of how the left uses America’s most respected universities as both a breeding ground and a retirement home for radicals; a way to give violent ideologically driven criminals both legitimacy and a paycheck, often at taxpayers’ expense.
Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder is a Columbia alumnus who has boasted of his participation in black student protests there in the early 1970s. Recently, Holder made public comments dismissing FBI Director James Comey’s concerns about the “the Ferguson Effect” of spiking inner-city violent crime rates caused byBlack Lives Matter inspired anti-police activism.
One interesting detail from the New York Post story about the current protests at Columbia: an agitator led the crowd in a chant that included yelling “I love black people who steal.”
She led the crowd in a progression of chants including “I love black people,” “I love all black people” and “I love queer black people,” before adding “I love black criminals” and “I love black people who steal.”
“Raise your hand if you’re a little bit uncomfortable,” she said as a smattering of hands went up.
“It’s okay if you’re uncomfortable right now. This university was built on stolen land on the backs of my ancestors — and that is uncomfortable.”
Although the chant leader was trying to make a point about her belief white people “stole” America, it’s worth noting that only “a smattering” of people were uncomfortable saying they loved black criminals. The majority of protestors were apparently comfortable saying that they do, in fact, love black criminals.
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