'Gym Crow': Looking back on the 1968 Morningside Gym protests

Upper West Side NY

16 February, 2022

5:52 PM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY JORGE HERNANDEZ • FEBRUARY 15, 2022, 6:50 PM After Columbia proposed and began to construct a segregated gym in Morningside Park in the 1960s, students and members of the West Harlem community came together in fierce opposition of the gym and the ongoing gentrification of the local neighborhood that it represented. The protests were empowered by the Civil Rights movement and other countercultural movements that many students subscribed to. These movements were prevalent in both the Columbia community and the surrounding West Harlem community. Students in several groups, such as Students for a Democratic Society and Congress of Racial Equality, organized protests in opposition to the Morningside gym—protests that eventually came to a dramatic halt, leading Columbia to cancel its construction plans. When it was proposed in 1959, the University advertised the gym as one that would serve two purposes. Not only would the Columbia community have new, updated athletic facilities, but the Harlem community would also be allowed to access the new gym. However, Harlem residents' access to the gym would be limited. Columbia stated that residents would have to enter the multi-story facility through a back entrance on the east side of the building, while Columbia affiliates would enter through the main entrance on Morningside Drive. Moreover, local residents would only have access to the single floor in the building accessible from their entrance, while most floors of the building were reserved for the Columbia community. The space's segregation led to the proposed gym's informal name among Black students at Columbia: "Gym Crow." While both Columbia and Harlem residents were ostensibly in agreement to build the gymnasium, Stefan Bradley, a professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of "Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s," says the agreement did not account for popular sentiments among local residents during the 1960s. According to Bradley, while the University had originally met with a small group of Harlem residents to discuss its plans, those people did not represent Harlem residents' views as a whole. "In order for the University to have been able to use the park land, they would have needed the support of a renewal plan. … So as part of the renewal plan, University officials met with several people from the Morningside Heights and within Harlem areas to talk about the creation of this gymnasium, [but] they hadn't quite taken the temperature of people in the neighborhood, especially during the late 1960s." Bradley added that cultural movements, like counterculturalism and the Black Freedom Movement, also changed the way the community viewed the park from when it was originally proposed. "Over those 10 years, say, you know, '58 to '68, so much happened in terms of the Black Freedom Movement that people were looking at white institutions differently than they had in previous times. People felt that they could mobilize against white institutions or that they had better mobilized against white institutions in a way that maybe wasn't the same 10 years earlier," he said. Community concerns were present well before tensions between West Harlem residents and Columbia came to a head during the onset of construction, as residents and some students stressed that community needs should be prioritized in Columbia's gym planning. "I don't believe that Morningside Park is the proper place for the gym, but if the park land must be used, the community should be given a majority of the benefit," Jeffrey Nichols, CC '67, the president of the Columbia's Congress of Racial Equality, said in an interview with Spectator in 1966. While the protests peaked during construction, Suki Terada Ports, a Harlem resident present during the 1968 protests, said that residents' distrust toward Columbia arose when the University announced its plans to store guns for its ROTC program in the gym. As a member of the Urban Renewal Council, a group in negotiations with the University during the time, Ports said that when they asked why community members were not allowed to access other floors of the gym. They were told by a Columbia lawyer that "the real reason" they wouldn't let the community use the gym was because they were planning to hold ROTC training and guns there. With anti-war protests already prevalent as part of the counterculture movement, the idea of the ROTC bringing guns into an already vulnerable area deeply upset many members of the community. "They are absolutely not going to bring guns into our community park, and they are not going to have community students have access to guns in our parks. It's just not going to happen," Ports said. With tensions at their peak, Ports described the experience of local residents coming together to object against the proposed gym. "I see the bulldozers going by and the trucks going with the loads of big rocks that they blasted out in the park and they went past our house on Morningside Drive, and so I said, 'I can't let that happen,'" Ports said. "Next morning as we went at 6 o'clock and sat in front of the bulldozers, when the construction people came, they said, 'Hey, folks, you got to move. We've got to get to work.' And we said, 'No, that's precisely the reason why we're not moving. You're not going to work here today.'" Later that day, Ports was arrested for trespassing along with others who protested with her. While West Harlem residents were demonstrating in protest of Columbia, so were students. Less than 20 days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., more than 300 students marched toward the construction site of the gym, led by Columbia's Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Afro-American Society. Police arrived shortly after protestors tore down the wire fencing of the site. Upon the police's arrival, the protest turned violent, and a student was arrested. After the student was arrested, the remaining protesters marched to Hamilton Hall to stage another demonstration. In that protest, 86 Black Columbia students occupied the space in Hamilton for a sit-in that lasted over a week. Amid the occupation, they renamed the space the "Malcolm X Liberation College." During the week of occupation, the University was apparently hesitant to bring in law enforcement in fear of creating another riot, not just among its students but across Harlem and the nation as well. However, after a week, Columbia brought in over 1,000 New York Police Department officers. While the 86 students in Hamilton Hall surrendered immediately to the police, protests associated with the Students for a Democratic Society, a mostly white organization, ended violently, with 700 students arrested and over 100 injured. In fact, the spring 1968 semester ended early due to the chaos. In the aftermath, the University created a student senate as a forum for student voices. Currently, the University Senate includes 24 seats held by student representatives, serving as a way for students to communicate their concerns to administration. Finally, in March 1969, after the protests had garnered national attention, the University officially scrapped its plans for the gym. While the gym was never built, Bradley cautions about the University's current gentrification of Manhattanville, West Harlem, and Morningside Heights. "Here again, we have a predominantly white institution having its way with Black and brown working class and [low-income] people moving them out from their homes and from their businesses," he said. From December 2020 to December 2021, the median net-effective rent soared 21 percent, reaching a peak at $3,400. Moreover, the Black population within Morningside Heights since 2000 has fallen dramatically. In 2000, 29.1 percent of the community identified as Black and 20.3 percent identified as white, while in 2019, only 15.2 percent of the population identified as Black compared to 35.7 percent identifying as white. "Gentrification looks like when you go into Morningside Park, now you see police driving around. You can go to Morningside Park and not see Black people," Bradley explained. "You can see the apartments that are being constructed right next to Morningside Park, that are obviously not built for the working class and poverty class people, who originally stayed in West Harlem next to the park." After a lower court ruled that the University's proposed use of eminent domain in West Harlem was illegal, the New York State Court of Appeals overturned the ruling in 2010, allowing Columbia to proceed with the construction of the Manhattanville Campus, which now hosts the business school. "Gentrification looks like an institution that works with the state government to ensure that businesses have to be forfeited and other entities have to have to vacate their properties so that the institution could build out," Bradley said. For him, this issue can be viewed as an issue of how space is allocated among different groups of inhabitants. "Should the future leaders of America and the world, that is, Columbia students, … should they be able to occupy the space? Or should people who need residential areas, who need business areas, who may never have the opportunity to attend Columbia University—do they deserve the space without housing prices and mortgage prices and real estate prices going through the roof?" Deputy Sports Editor Jorge Hernandez can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @jhernandez2001. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.