In April 1969, one in all America's most appropriate universities used to be celebrating mom and dad' weekend-and the coed union was once an armed camp, occupied through over 80 defiant individuals of the campus's Afro-American Society. Marching out Sunday evening, the protesters brandished rifles, their maxim: "If we die, you'll die." Cornell '69 is an electrifying account of that weekend which probes the origins of the drama and describes the way it was once performed out not just at Cornell yet on campuses around the state in the course of the heyday of yank liberalism.Donald Alexander Downs tells the tale of ways Cornell college grew to become the battleground for the clashing forces of racial justice, highbrow freedom, and the guideline of law.

Eyewitness bills and retrospective interviews depict the explosive occasions of the day and convey the main contributors into sharp concentration: the Afro-American Society, outraged at a cross-burning incident on campus and important amnesty for its participants implicated in different protests; collage President James A. Perkins, lengthy devoted to addressing the legacies of racism, seeing his guidelines backfire and his profession cave in; the college, angry on the university's hand over, rejecting the administration's concessions, then reversing itself because the quandary wore on. The weekend's annoying flip of occasions is proven via Downs to be a harbinger of the debates raging this day over the which means of the collage in American society. He explores the basic questions it posed, questions americans off and on campus are nonetheless suffering to respond to: what's the dating among racial justice and highbrow freedom? What are the boundaries in instructing identification politics? and what's the right kind which means of the college in a democratic polity?