The former Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, participated in the armed takeover of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters at Columbia University in 1970.
Holder admitted participating in the takeover, according to the Daily Caller.
“I was among a large group of students who felt strongly about the way we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our opinions heard,” Holder said during Columbia’s 2009 commencement exercises. “I did not take a final exam until my junior year at Columbia—we were on strike every time finals seemed to roll around—but we ran out of issues by that third year.
“[S]everal of us took one of our concerns — that black students needed a designated space to gather on campus—to the Dean [of Freshmen]’office. This being Columbia, we proceeded to occupy that office.”
The incident is similar to the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge center by Ammon Bundy and others, but the corporate media has yet to deem Holder a terrorist or, for that matter, even mention it.
Columbia’s Black Students Organization was responsible for the takeover. It lasted five days. Black activists also occupied the office of Dean of Freshman Henry Coleman.
According to the Daily Caller a deleted Web page of the Black Students’ Organization at Columbia, a successor group to the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), the students were armed.
Although then-Dean Carl Hovde said the occupation was illegal and a violation of university policy, members of the group were not prosecuted.
Holder was a leader of the SAAS. The group demanded the ROTC building be renamed “Malcolm X Lounge” in “honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”
The university ultimately relented and agreed to the name change. Future president Obama often visited the lounge when he was a student at Columbia in the early 1980s, according to David Maraniss, author of “Barack Obama: The Story.”
It is doubtful Ammon Bundy and his companions will receive the same treatment as Holder and escape prosecution if they leave the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge center, that is if they are not killed by the federal government in a standoff.
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