Episode Details

The late 1960s and 1970s was a seminal period for college and university student protests. Stunned by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and enraged by the escalation of the Vietnam War, students all over the country staged protests to demand an end to the war, the admission of more black and Latino students, the creation of ethnic studies programs, and a war on poverty and inequality.

While they didn’t receive the kind of national exposure that Columbia University students got for their campus takeover in 1968, Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York staged a campus revolt in the spring of 1969 that would change the complexion of that campus and other City University campuses forever.

Host Sheryl McCarthy talks with Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, Emmy-winning filmmakers and co-directors of “The Five Demands,” a documentary about that fateful Spring, and Charles Powell, a civil rights attorney who was a leader of the student protest.

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