From coast to coast, university students across the United States are protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, despite threats of suspension and arrest.
With Columbia University at the center of the movement, institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Tufts, Northwestern and several campuses in the University of Texas system have seen students set up camps and demand their institutions divest from companies they say that they enabled the brutal war against Gaza.
More than 34,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israeli forces since the war began on October 7.
This is not the first time that university students in the US have protested on campus. But demonstrators and observers say the crackdown on the student camps has been particularly violent this time.
Helga Tawil-Souri, an associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at NYU, told Al Jazeera that the NYU protest in Gaza was peaceful as she stood outside a police station waiting for several students and faculty members to be released. “I have been at NYU for almost 20 years and have witnessed a number of protests. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an action of this nature.”
Here are some of the key protests that US university students have led on campus and what they have achieved:
1954-60: Brown v. Board of Education and the Greensboro sit-ins
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state-sanctioned racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. From 1896 until this ruling, there were racially segregated public spaces.
On February 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, dubbed the “Greensboro Four,” initiated peaceful sit-ins at “whites-only” lunch counters, starting at Woolworth’s in Greensboro. The students refused to stand up when they were refused service. By February 5th, the number of students had increased to 300. The movement quickly spread to other college towns and public spaces, with both blacks and whites joining in.
The sit-down strike movement was successful and the reintegration of the restaurants began in July 1960. These protests marked the early success of the civil rights movement. They also led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which began in 1960 as an interracial group committed to peaceful protest.
1968–69: Protests against the Vietnam War
In April 1968, students at Columbia University and its affiliate, Barnard College, protested the Vietnam War, which had begun in 1954 and would last until 1975. The protests led to students seizing five campus buildings and briefly even taking the dean hostage.
About a week after the protests began on April 30, about 1,000 officers from Columbia President Grayson L. Kirk’s New York City Tactical Patrol Force were called in. Police arrested nearly 700 people for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Police used force in some buildings, injuring 148 people.
In the end, the protests forced Colombia to cut ties with a Pentagon institute that researched the Vietnam War and secured an amnesty for demonstrators who took part in the protests. They also managed to stop the construction of a gym on public land in nearby Morningside Park, to which Black Harlem residents would have been granted only partial access. Colombia’s president and its provost, David B. Truman, both resigned as a result of the protests.
Harvard students also protested against the Vietnam War. On the night of April 9, 1969, a national student activist organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), posted a list of demands on the door of the Harvard president’s home. The group particularly objected to Harvard’s involvement in military politics – Dow Chemicals, which supplied the military with napalm, had been invited to Harvard on a recruiting visit in 1967 – as well as the presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). ) on the campus. The next day, student protesters occupied University Hall and were arrested, leading to major protests and an eight-day strike, according to Harvard magazine.
As a result of the protest, ROTC left the university campus.
A year later, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four Kent University college students and injured nine others during a 300-student protest against the Vietnam War and its expansion into Cambodia. They also protested the presence of the National Guard on campus.
The shootings sparked outrage and led to more than 4 million students taking part in protests and walkouts at hundreds more colleges and high schools across the country.
1985: Disinvestment of apartheid South Africa
In the 1970s and 1980s, public school students in Soweto, South Africa, protested against compulsory teaching in Afrikaans and overcrowding in schools.
This grew into a global movement, and in 1985 American universities such as Columbia and the University of California called on their administrators to withdraw investments from companies linked to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In Colombia, this action was organized by the Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), which blocked the entrance to the Colombian administration building, Hamilton Hall, on April 4, 1985.
A state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan ordered protesters to be allowed into the hall and instead to stage their protest at a designated location on the steps of Hamilton Hall and in the adjacent quadrangle.
Immediately after the end of the blockade on April 25, a six-member board of trustees was formed to consider divestment – that is, returning its investments to companies linked to the apartheid regime. At the end of August, the panel concluded that divestment was not only the morally right but also financially viable option. Eventually, the university’s investments associated with apartheid in South Africa were withdrawn.
1991: Protests against the Gulf War
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. A week later, the first US forces arrived in Saudi Arabia. At the request of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, a U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, bombing targets in Iraq and Kuwait during a 43-day operation.
In late February 1991, students at several US universities – including the University of Michigan, Columbia University, George Washington University and Georgetown University – protested against US military involvement in the Gulf War. Police made 20 arrests at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported The Washington Post, which called the protests relatively “small and uneventful.”
to march in protest against the US-led war in Iraq [Ellen Ozier/Reuters]
2003: Protests against the Iraq War
In March 2003, a US-led coalition began bombing Iraq, followed by a ground invasion. The US claimed the move was part of its “war on terror”, relying on allegations that the Iraqi leader possessed weapons of mass destruction. Although Hussein was hanged in 2006, these weapons were never found. The Iraq war left the country with numerous internal displacements, conflicts and economic instability.
American high school and university students walked out of their classes to protest the Iraq War.
2018: Black Lives Matter protests
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, in the state of Minnesota. Floyd’s death was captured on video, which showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about eight minutes.
Floyd’s killing sparked protests across the United States against systemic racism and police brutality as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 when George Zimmerman was acquitted of fatally shooting an unarmed young black man, Trayvon Martin .
Several of these protests were staged by US university students. Before 2018, student protests also occurred as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example in 2014 after the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown.