They saw themselves as representatives of the Harlem community. Local political leaders, black activists and revolutionaries, and elders bearing hot food all trekked to Hamilton in support. Their occupation, much more than anything we white students did, was “the pivotal act” of the Columbia protest, as Raymond M. Brown, a leader of the Student Afro-American Society, aptly termed it in a recent essay.

Because of their stand, hundreds and then thousands of students and local residents rallied to the cause, and within two days three more buildings were occupied. Thousands of other people stood vigil outside. “We can’t abandon the black students in Hamilton Hall!” was the universal battlecry.

The Columbia administration was terrified of what Harlem might do if the police were called. Administrators waited a week as the occupations and support demonstrations grew, and Columbia became worldwide news. Eventually, the police moved in, arresting the black students without violence. But at the other buildings they indiscriminately and brutally attacked not only the occupiers, but students, professors and even journalists who were outside protesting the police busts. In response most of the student body went out on strike, closing the university for the rest of the semester.

The central role played by the Student Afro-American Society has never been acknowledged in accounts of Columbia ’68. The story has been about the white kids of the New Left, the S.D.S. and myself, as a singular protest leader. Ray Brown called the media’s erasure of the black students’ role “strategic blindness.”

Ten years ago, about 50 former students who had occupied Hamilton Hall joined with 250 other strike veterans for a 40th reunion at Columbia. Alford J. Dempsey Jr., now a judge in Atlanta, stunned the white people in the audience when he said, “The time I spent here just about destroyed me.” The only thing worse than the alienation he felt as a black student on the overwhelmingly white campus “was watching my wife die of breast cancer.” The tears in our eyes attested to how little we had understood the lives of our black classmates.