Quiet Riot

For some courses it was midyear examination week at the College of the City of New York; but in class after class only a handful of students showed up. Manhattan newspapers headlined the reason: about 2,500 students were on strike. For three days pickets paraded, hooted at "scabs," skirmished with police, cheered & jeered in mass rallies. They played dirges for the "death of democracy," took collections to "bury the bigots," flaunted signs inscribed NO HATE-MONGERS AT C.C.N.Y. and JOIN OUR QUIET RIOT. A long-simmering old dispute over two teachers, whom the college refused to fire, had boiled over.

One of the two, pince-nezed Professor William E. Knickerbocker, chairman of the Department of Romance Languages, had been in hot water with students for the last four years. He had been accused of anti-Semitic remarks, and of refusing to recommend certain instructors for promotion because they were Jewish. The other teacher, Economics Instructor William C. Davis, had segregated Negroes and whites in the dormitory he supervised. The college had made a full investigation, cleared Knickerbocker, removed Davis from his dormitory job, and declared the matter closed. Last year New York's City Council disagreed: it said Knickerbocker should be fired. That set the students off.

At first there had been demonstrations, then weeks of smoldering discontent. Finally, under Student Council leadership, students voted to strike. Knickerbocker and Davis, they cried, must be suspended pending an "open trial." Nonsense, answered C.C.N.Y. President Harry N. Wright: "It is equivalent to lynch justice."

In the first day of the strike, 18 students were arrested, 17 for disorderly conduct and one for assaulting a policeman, and that seemed to be about all that had been accomplished at C.C.N.Y. When some C.C.N.Y. critics muttered that the whole affair had been inspired by Communists, both the college and Strike Leader William Fortunato, president of the Student Council, denied it. But nobody denied that it was hard to keep the Commies from taking the strike over. For one thing, a representative of the Civil Rights Congress, labeled subversive by Attorney

General Tom Clark, turned up as a volunteer defender of the 18 strikers when they were taken to court. In midweek, the Easter vacation came, and C.C.N.Y.'s strikers stopped picketing the campus. The strike, they promised, would continue after the holiday.

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