Student Voices of Protest (1968)

College campuses were hotbeds of social activism during the 1960s, and they exploded into action with unprecedented force in the spring of 1968. The year was beset with tragedies, from the mounting number of casualties in the Vietnam War to the assassination of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Students from New York to Paris to Berlin rose up in protest, particularly over racial and antiwar issues. They demonstrated, occupied buildings, shut down classes, and went on strike. The following excerpts bring these students to life in their own words, which convey not only frustration and despair but also a desire to bring about lasting change.

From Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 9–12.

My most vivid memory of May ’68? The new-found ability for everyone to speak—to speak of anything with anyone. In that month of talking during May you learnt more than in the whole of your five years of studying. It was really another world—a dream world perhaps—but that’s what I’ll always remember: the need and the right for everyone to speak.—René Bourrigaud, student at the École Supérieure d’Agriculture, Angers, France

People were learning through doing things themselves, learning self-confidence. It was magic, there were all these kids from nice middle-class homes who’d never done or said anything and were now suddenly speaking. It was democracy of the public space in the market place, a discourse where nobody was privileged. If anything encapsulated what we were trying to do and why, it was that. . . .—Pete Latarche, leader of the university occupation at Hull, England, 1968

It’s a moment I shall never forget. Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades were being thrown up in the streets. People were building up the cobblestones because they wanted—many of them for the first time—to throw themselves into a collective, spontaneous activity. People were releasing all their repressed feelings, expressing them in a festive spirit. Thousands felt the need to communicate with each other, to love one another. That night has forever made me optimistic about history. Having lived through it, I can’t ever say, “It will never happen.” . . .—Dany Cohn-Bendit, student leader at Nanterre University, on the night of the Paris barricades, 10–11 May 1968

The unthinkable happened! Everything I had ever dreamt of since childhood, knowing that it would never happen, now began to become real. People were saying, fuck hierarchy, authority, this society with its cold rational elitist logic! Fuck all the petty bosses and the mandarins at the top! Fuck this immutable society that refuses to consider the misery, poverty, inequality and injustice it creates, that divides people according to their origins and skills! Suddenly, the French were showing they understood that they had to refuse the state’s authority because it was malevolent, evil, just as I’d always thought as a child. Suddenly they realized that they had to find a new sort of solidarity. And it was happening in front of my eyes. That was what May ’68 meant to me! . . .—Nelly Finkielsztejn, student at Nanterre University, Paris

My world had been very staid, very traditional, very frightened, very middle-class and respectable. And here I was doing these things that six months before I would have thought were just horrible. But I was in the midst of an enormous tide of people. There was so much constant collective reaffirmation of it. The ecstasy was stepping out of time, out of traditional personal time. The usual rules of the game in capitalist society had been set aside. It was phenomenally liberating. . . . At the same time it was a political struggle. It wasn’t just Columbia. There was a fucking war on in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. These were profound forces that transcend that moment. 1968 just cracked the universe open for me. And the fact of getting involved meant that never again was I going to look at something outside with the kind of reflex condemnation or fear. Yes, it was the making of me—or the unmaking.—Mike Wallace, occupation of Columbia University, New York, April 1968

We’d been brought up to believe in our hearts that America fought on the side of justice. The Second World War was very much ingrained in us, my father had volunteered. So, along with the absolute horror of the war in Vietnam, there was also a feeling of personal betrayal. I remember crying by myself late at night in my room listening to the reports of the war, the first reports of the bombing. Vietnam was the catalyst. . . .—John Levin, student leader at San Francisco State College

I was outraged, what shocked me most was that a highly developed country, the super-modern American army, should fall on these Vietnamese peasants—fall on them like the conquistadores on South America, or the white settlers on the North American Indians. In my mind’s eye, I always saw those bull-necked fat pigs—like in Georg Grosz’s pictures—attacking the small, child-like Vietnamese.—Michael von Engelhardt, German student

The resistance of the Vietnamese people showed that it could be done—a fight back was possible. If poor peasants could do it well why not people in Western Europe? That was the importance of Vietnam, it destroyed the myth that we just had to hold on to what we had because the whole world could be blown up if the Americans were “provoked.” The Vietnamese showed that if you were attacked you fought back, and then it depended on the internal balance of power whether you won or not. . . .—Tariq Ali, a British Vietnam Solidarity Campaign leader

So we started to be political in a totally new way, making the connection between our student condition and the larger international issues. A low mark in mathematics could become the focal point of an occupation by students who linked the professor’s arbitrary and authoritarian behavior to the wider issues, like Vietnam. Acting on your immediate problems made you understand better the bigger issues. If it hadn’t been for that, perhaps the latter would have remained alien, you’d have said “OK, but what can I do?”—Agnese Gatti, student at Trento Institute of Social Sciences, Italy

Creating a confrontation with the university administration you could significantly expose the interlocking network of imperialism as it was played out on the campuses. You could prove that they were working hand-in-hand with the military and the CIA, and that ultimately, when you pushed them, they would call upon all the oppressive apparatus to defend their position from their own students. . . .—Jeff Jones, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), New York regional organizer

Everybody was terribly young and didn’t know what was going on. One had a sort of megalomaniac attitude that by sheer protest and revolt things would be changed. It was true of the music, of the hallucinogenics, of politics, it was true across the board—people threw themselves into activity without experience. The desire to do something became tremendously intense and the capacity to do it diminished by the very way one was rejecting the procedures by which things could be done. It led to all sorts of crazy ideas.—Anthony Barnett, sociology student, Leicester University, England

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