In a survey of U.S. college students for the John D. Rockefeller Foundation at the time, 79 percent of respondents strongly or partially agreed that “the war in Vietnam is pure imperialism,” and a full 71 percent of college students surveyed said they “Definitively believe” that Black Panthers “cannot be assured a fair trial.”72 With students across the country feeling betrayed and angered by Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and by his insults, and excited by the successful mobilizations at Yale, the call for a national student strike quickly spread. The Yale students, by targeting their own liberal university and making it take sides on the Panthers, had influenced national political debate. Others students sought to emulate their model. On May 3, editors from the student newspapers at eleven major eastern colleges—including six of the eight Ivy League universities—adopted the demands of the Panther allies in New Haven. Meeting at Columbia University in New York, the editors agreed to run a common editorial the following day calling for “the entire academic community of this country to engage in a nationwide university strike.”

Columbia University administrators attempted to undercut student support for the national strike by declaring a one-day moratorium on classes for Monday, May 4, and by holding a convocation to discuss possible responses to the invasion of Cambodia. At the convocation, Rich Reed, a black leader of the campus’s Third World Coalition, accompanied by a Black Panther member, seized the microphone and declared that talk of peace in Vietnam would be meaningless unless people moved “to build a mass movement against the source of imperialism and racism which is closest to us—Columbia University.”74 Reed criticized the School of International Affairs for assisting in the development of oppressive foreign policy strategies and denounced the consignment of black and Latino workers to the lowest-paying and dirtiest jobs on campus. That afternoon, about three thousand students gathered in Wollman Auditorium and voted overwhelmingly to strike, taking up the three demands issued in New Haven. The following day, thirty-five hundred students and campus workers rallied. Featured speaker William Kunstler—a high-profile lawyer for the Panthers and the Chicago Seven—called for all charges against the New York Panther 21 to be dropped. Protestors marched from Columbia to the City College of New York behind a banner declaring, “No more racist attacks on third world people. US out of Southeast Asia; Free all political prisoners now.” [...]