Lessons From 1949 CCNY Strike

As the City University of New York (CUNY) community gears up to battle the college bosses — against a new contract demand on professors and staff, and a tuition hike for students — it is important to remember that we hail from a long line of fightback. In 1949, a strike shut down the City College of New York (CCNY) campus in Manhattan for a full week—what the New York Times called “the first general strike at a municipal institution of higher learning” in the U.S. The walkout grew out of a demand that the college administration fire two racist professors. One was guilty of anti-Semitism, the other of imposing racist segregation in a college dormitory.
William Knickerbocker, chairman of the Romance Language department, had withheld honors and advancement from deserving Jewish students and professors. He treated Jewish students contemptuously and made anti-Semitic remarks like, “Hitler was right when he attacked the Jews, but when he began attacking the Poles, that was bad.”
William Davis, an economics professor, was a director of the Army Hall dormitory established for students who were World War II veterans. He set up segregated sections for Black and white vets.
The actions of these two professors enraged the mostly Jewish and Black student population, many of whom had fought Hitler’s racism — over 300 students died — in the war against the Nazis.
The CCNY student body of that era had a militant, left-wing character. Two hundred belonged to the college’s YCL (Young Communist League) chapter. Eight hundred had joined the Students for Wallace club in 1948, backing Henry Wallace’s independent run for president against Democratic Party candidate Harry Truman, known for his Cold War policies against the Soviet Union and his genocidal atom bomb attacks against Japan in World War II. (Since then, the old communist movement’s support for lesser-evil candidates has proven to be a losing strategy.)
In the fall of 1948, 2,000 students sat in at the administration building, demanding the firing of the two racist professors. The following April, the CCNY Student Council voted for a general strike for that demand.
On April 11, 1949, two dozen students — many of them YCL’ers as well as veterans in their Army uniforms — picketed the main building. They carried signs demanding, “Fire Kickerbocker and Davis!” and chanted, “Jim Crow Must Go!” As thousands of students emerged from the subway on Broadway and streamed uphill toward the campus, they were greeted with what might have been the most concise leaflet ever created. Chalked across the width of 137th Street, in eight-foot-high letters, was one word—“STRIKE!”
When the students reached Convent Avenue, across from the main building’s picket line, they stopped and watched, holding their books and trying to decide whether to go to class. Suddenly squads of cops under orders  from the college bosses, emerged to attack the picket line. The students fought back but were roughed up and shoved into waiting police vans. Seventeen were arrested.
Witnessing this cop brutality against a peaceful picket line, the students across the street immediately formed a new line, a thousand strong. An anti-racist strike was on. The students cheered as a car drove by with a student holding up the front page of the New York Sun (one of eight daily New York papers at the time) with a headline screaming, “Students Riot At CCNY.” Virtually no one went to class as the campus was shut down. Many in the faculty supported the strike. After it was over, one professor told his students that if they’d attended his class, he would have sent them out to join the walkout.
Davis was removed from his post as director of the Army Hall dorm. Knickerbocker resigned as department chairman, and later retired.
Two decades later, many of the striking students used their militant experience at CCNY in the anti-racist and anti-Vietnam War movements. Today, 66 years after the strike, it would be fitting for the current student and faculty body to call upon this legacy and strike for their demands against the bosses of CUNY and shut it down. It would be even more fitting for them to join Progressive Labor Party and joinf the fight for communist revolution, the only way to destroy the racism that continues to plague the working class.