It was the photo seen around the world — a group of Black anti-war activists walking down the steps of Willard Straight Hall, rifles in hand and demands met.
Ed Whitfield ’70, leader of the Cornell Afro-American Society — which is now Cornell Black Students United — helped organize the 36-hour occupation of Willard Straight Hall to protest racial injustice and the Vietnam War in 1969.
At the time, tensions at Cornell and across college campuses were at their peak as groups on campus conducted teach-ins, protests and other demonstrations to bring attention to what they saw as an unjust war and lack of racial equality on campus.
In an interview with The Sun, Whitfield said that regardless of what other students thought of the protest, the Vietnam War was “immoral and unreasonable.”
“I didn’t think it was right for us to be killing people across the world,” Whitfield said.
On April 20, 1969, during parent’s weekend, Whitfield and other AAS student activists occupied Willard Straight Hall for 36 hours to protest the slow progress of the establishment of a University Afro-American Studies Center and frustrations with the judicial decision that found previous protestors guilty for breaking the student behavior code. Within days, uprisings also began at Dartmouth, Princeton and several other colleges.
According to Whitfield, the guns in the famous picture were not part of the original plan and instead were a response to white Delta Upsilon fraternity brothers entering Willard Straight and fighting the protesters.
“We decided to throw them back out the windows they broke,” Whitfield added. Influenced by the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, where three civil rights protesters were killed by police in South Carolina, Whitfield explained that the protesters got firearms to protect themselves from a potential other attack from the fraternity.
Whitfield explained that he and fellow activists were motivated to occupy Willard Straight Hall by a number of incidents on campus that harmed Black students.
Weeks before they decided to occupy Willard Straight Hall, the police investigated a Black woman's dorm room over a report of a marijuana odor, but the smell was found to be because of the student’s hot iron. According to Whitfield, the incident was a “real embarrassing situation” for Black students on campus.
After the incident with the hot iron, unidentified students burned a cross in the yard of a Black women’s cooperative house, similar to the Klu Klux Klan’s intimidation and attacks against Black people across America.
“[The takeover] was a principal expression of defiance,” Whitfield said. “We didn’t want people to think we were nice.”
According to Whitfield, the protestors settled on Willard Straight Hall because its kitchens and rooms would allow them to stay longer than any other building on campus.
Within three years of the takeover, the Ujamaa Residential College, Africana Studies and Research Center and Africana Library were created, though Whitfield only saw these steps as “bribes,” and academic solutions to the physical threats Black students faced on campus. Out of protest, Whitfield refused to graduate from Cornell and chose to move back to the South.
Nearly 56 years later, Whitfield still remembers the impact his protest on campus had on his friends fighting in Vietnam.
“[The protests] meant while they were over there doing something, there were some people standing up for the Black community here in the States,” Whitfield said. “If it made them feel good, I’m certainly happy I was able to be a part of it.”
Whitfield’s involvement in civil rights and the anti-war movement was not only at Cornell, but began at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, long before the Willard Straight takeover. In 1957, a few years before he attended Little Rock Central High School, the school had gained international attention when it integrated Black students and a group of federal troops escorted them to their classes amid protests after the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal educational facilities were unconstitutional.
In high school, Whitfield became president of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council. In 1966, he attempted to get a resolution passed at a regional NAACP conference to get civil rights activists exempt from the Vietnam War draft.
“Since [civil rights activists] were already fighting for freedom and democracy, I didn't see any reason they should quit the fight they were engaged in here and go halfway around the world and engage in [war] in the name of freedom and democracy, [which] actually seemed more like it was enslaving and colonizing people,” Whitfield said.
Inspired by his sister, an alumna of Little Rock Central High School, Whitfield said he “wanted to prove that segregationist attitudes of looking down on Black people were ridiculous.” Whitfield said that he joined the AAS as soon as he could in order to find other civil rights activists interested in protesting against the war in Vietnam.
At 75 years old, Whitfield continues to fight economic inequality as a co-founder of Seed Commons, a community wealth cooperative that he said helps people “create self-sustaining, self-reliant [and] democratic structures.” He said the focus of the economic system should be on the needs and quality of life for working people — “labor using capital to enhance labor” – which is what Seed Commons is attempting to do.
Looking toward the future, Whitfield predicted that current students will have opportunities to further social inequality by joining companies that put profit over people, but that they should think twice before doing so.
“[Students at Cornell should] find something that's much more creative, much more collective [and] much more community oriented to do with [their] talents, efforts and opportunities,” Whitfield said.
He said justice has many components, spanning from the occupation in 1969 to pro-Palestinian protests today.
“Freedom isn't an event that takes place sometime in the future,” Whitfield said. “You don't find it — you build it.”
Atticus Johnson ’28 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at aj639@cornell.edu.
Shubha Gautam ’28 Is a Sun contributor and can be reached at sg2563@cornell.edu.
