This is the first story in a three-part series that looks back on the events of the spring of 1970 at UB.
When he first unpacked his bags at UB in the fall of 1968, Ian DeWaal was flush with high hopes, just like the university that would become his home. He studied anthropology, learned to play hockey and started a co-op in Tower Dorm.
Months later, blood streamed down the side of DeWaal's head as he knelt in a Hayes Hall office, struck on the temple by a Buffalo cop amid the chaos of a night protest.
"The police just charged at us, and they were swinging their clubs," said DeWaal, who is now senior counsel in the Justice Department's criminal division. "I remember bleeding on someone's desk, and seeing stars."
Thirty-five years ago, DeWaal's vibrant university was broken by the events of a violent spring. On Feb. 25, 1970, a clash with police at the student union sent 27 students to the hospital. A few days later the police arrived for good, and stayed for three tense weeks, until spring break began on March 16.
A strike by students and faculty ground classes to a halt. Several people were arrested, and several more were hurt. The campus erupted again in May after four students were shot dead at Kent State.
Those are the facts, carved in history. Yet everyone who was at UB during the spring of 1970 tells their own story.
The stories they tell are not just chronicles of arrests, beatings, or demonstrations. They are also questions, yet unanswered, about American life: When does fear take over for reason in communities under siege? Where do you draw the line, past which protest goes too far? Who are the citizens of a university? What is violence? When is it justified? What is non-violence? Can it, as well, go too far?
The truth of the events of the spring of 1970 - why they happened, what they mean, and what their legacy is - remains elusive. The story remains fresh because so many people are still trying to sort it out.
And with so many big ideas at stake, particularly in our own time of war, it's a story worth telling again.
Seeds of unrest
After UB joined the SUNY system in 1962, the school's rapid growth attracted some of the state's best students and some of the nation's brightest young teachers, including history professor Michael Frisch, who turned down a job at Princeton to come here in the late 1960s.
New faculty and students got engaged in campus issues, Frisch said, because they felt like they were stakeholders in a great experiment.
"It was an incredible moment when students felt like they were citizens, not consumers," he said. "And all these new faculty felt like they were immediately a part of something."
Young students and faculty cared the most about one issue: the Vietnam War. By 1969, most UB students were against the war. Many feared the draft.
"The war had gone on long enough that you had friends who were killed, and your friends had friends who were killed," said Bob Culver, who was then a junior history major.
As frustration and fear over Vietnam grew, students began to express dissent on campus more and more, sometimes by destroying property.
When local draft resister Bruce Beyer was sentenced to three years in prison in March 1969, a group of people wrecked a construction site for Themis, a Navy-sponsored nuclear research center on campus.
A small group of people at UB were interested in overthrowing major institutions, even the federal government. But they made up only one or two percent of the population, and they were generally ignored, students said.
"Some people were looking to spark a revolution, and if that spark was throwing a rock through the window of a bank, then they were going to do it," said Marty Teitelbaum, a sophomore political science major that spring. "But that was a small, isolated group of people. They were loud, but not significant in numbers or power."
However, their tactics confused and angered many administrators, residents of Buffalo, and the more established faculty, who thought their dissent crossed the line.
"Administrators were feeling disrespected, like they were under assault for no good reason," said William R. Greiner, a law school professor in the spring of 1970, and later UB's 13th president. "They were outraged and disappointed that our students would behave in such a fashion."
In the spring of 1970, the tension between the administration and the radical students would explode into violence across campus as a result of a decision that most reports call a colossal mistake - a phone call from the UB administration to the Tactical Patrol Unit of the Buffalo police.
Riot at Norton
Ten days after the events of Feb. 25, 1970, William Greiner and two other professors wrote a minute-by-minute account of that violent night.
According to the Greiner report, a group of about 50 students tried to interrupt a meeting in Acting President Peter Regan's Hayes Hall office on the night of Feb. 25, 1970. On their way out, one of the students threw a rock at a Hayes window.
Regan chased after them, shouting, "Arrest those students!" Campus police followed the students to Norton Union, which was the Main Street campus's popular student center (today it is Squire Hall, part of the dental school). Just before 9 p.m., the cops broke through barricades and arrested two or three students on the first floor.
A group of students followed the police out of the building as they left. Some police were pelted with debris. They walked to security headquarters on Winspear Avenue to join Regan, who had left Hayes Hall earlier.
When the police burst onto Winspear after their 15-minute walk across campus, they said they were injured, and that the situation at Norton Union was hostile. At 9:16, the fateful decision was made - administrator Edward Doty called the Buffalo police on campus and told them to cordon off the Union.
What Doty did not know was that the situation at Norton Union had calmed during the cops' 15-minute walk to Winspear. Students went back to their work and play. Almost an hour later, 16 Buffalo police cars pulled up outside of a peaceful union.
Later, the Greiner report stated that the decision to call Buffalo police was poorly considered. "Administrators accepted the risks of police action too readily," the report said. "Scant effort was made to receive continuous, accurate information, either before dispersal of police to the general area of Norton Union or afterward."
To this day no one knows why the police defied Doty's instructions and entered the crowded building. They poured in from both sides, trapping students, then punching and shoving them and struck some of them with nightsticks. The Greiner report later concluded that "injuries and indignities were suffered by persons who afforded little or no resistance or provocation other than their presence in the path of advancing officers."
Room by room, the police beat people from the building. Photographer Gary Friend was with a group of students in the third floor offices of the Spectrum.
"I'd never been afraid of police before," said Friend. "I grew up in a reasonably affluent suburb where the police were our friends. I had heard that certain people had to worry about the police, and now I knew for myself. I smelled tear gas in that building for the next three years."
But things got much worse when the police finished clearing the building. Students in UB's overcrowded dorms had watched the chaos from their windows. Word spread to other parts of the campus, and soon a crowd of 600 students massed outside the doors of Norton Union, waiting for the cops to come out.
When they did, a riot erupted. The crowd threw objects at police and taunted them: "Pigs!" The cops threw their fists and elbows at the students, beat them with nightsticks, and gassed them. Some cops pulled their guns.
One image from the riot outside Norton provoked horror among students, remembers Michael Frisch.
"There was a famous scene of people watching from the Tower as police dragged a female student, by her heels, down the steps of Norton Union, her head bouncing on each step. She suffered kidney damage," Frisch said. "When you see someone get dragged down stone steps by their heels, you become different."
By 12:30 a.m., the crowd dispersed. Norton was damaged. Twenty-seven students were in the hospital. And it was clear to everyone that UB, once a mostly neutral school, now had a mass of students whose eyes bore an angry and fearful gleam.
Campus under siege
The cops would come back to campus that weekend and stay for 17 days.
But the police presence ruined the students' sense of citizenship, according to Michael Frisch; instead, the climate of fear brought out the worst in them.
"The catastrophic decision that put everything in a whole different plane was how unprecedented the police occupation was," he said.
There was support for the police presence in the administration and the City of Buffalo, however, and there was also some support from the faculty. At a meeting of the Faculty Senate, chairman-elect William Baumer called for as many police as the city could give.
"I said 'Bring enough,'" Baumer remembers. "'Bring enough,' so there's no question who's in control. It was the only way we could resume classes."
But violence continued during the police occupation. At the worst battle, on March 13, twenty more students were sent to the hospital. Among them was Ian DeWaal, who attended the demonstration as a legal observer for the ACLU.
Some faculty in the history department felt that a mostly non-violent campus had been pulled into a cycle of violence. The next day Bob Culver, who was president of the undergraduate history council, led a packed meeting of history students and professors.
They talked about trying a non-violent approach, and soon found that many other faculty members on campus felt the same way.
"We thought, 'We've got to do something to put a stop to this careening thing, this spiral of violence,'" Frisch said.
The next day, 45 faculty members entered Hayes Hall for what they intended to be a peaceful sit-in.
Friday's story will present the ordeal of the 45 faculty members who were arrested for a protest at Hayes Hall on March 15, 1970.
