- Great Depression
- Student Rebels
- CCNY Rebels
- Protest ROTC
- Protest Fascism
- Protest War
- President Robinson
- Students Fight Back
- Spain
- Faculty Activists
- Teacher & Worker
- Bertrand Russell
- Rapp-Coudert Committee
- Rapp-Coudert & CCNY
- Firing Dr. Yergan
- Imprisoning Schappes
- Protests
protest fascism
Student activists are as troubled about the spread of fascism in Europe
as they are about growing militarism at home. President Frederick B. Robinson
invites an official delegation of students representing Benito Mussolini’s
fascist regime in Italy to be honored on October 9, 1934 at a special assembly
in CCNY’s Great Hall. A fight breaks out at this event when campus
authorities seek to halt the anti-fascist remarks of the CCNY student body
president.
The Robinson administration expels twenty-one anti-fascist student leaders
for disrupting this college event and dissolves the Student Council. Over
one hundred students are called before a college disciplinary committee.
This is the most extensive political interrogation of students on any American
college campus during the Depression years.
“City College, dubbed ‘the little red school house’ by
the Hearst press, was now recognized as perhaps the most radical school
in the country.”
-- Dorman, Arguing the World, 2000
The Student News, a metropolitan student newspaper, prints a special edition
on November 19, 1934 to publicize the strike at City College.
Two- thousand students strike on November 20 to protest the expulsion of
the twenty-one anti-fascist students and to demand the removal of President
Robinson.
Flyer advertising the November 20, 1934, student strike, with a two-headed
figure representing President Robinson (left) wearing academic cap and clutching
his umbrella, and Italian fascist premier Benito Mussolini (right) holding
an ax. Both wear swastikas on their lapels.
President Robinson shouts to the anti-fascist students that they are “guttersnipes”
at the assembly in Great Hall. At the November 20 demonstration called to
protest the expulsion of the anti-fascist students over two thousand students
wear buttons that read “I am a guttersnipe-I fight fascism”.
A
seven-foot cardboard twin effigy of President Robinson and Premier Mussolini
is carried by the demonstrators, and later burned in protest. The students
chant “Smoke Robby out.”
