By December of 1987, as a winter chill began to settle over Claremont, global criticisms of South African apartheid reached a fever pitch.
In 1979, students at the Claremont Colleges were made aware of the school’s investments in South Africa, particularly Pomona College Vice Presid
ent Fred Moony’s personal investments in apartheid holdings. Student organizing coalesced around the issue and by 1984, divestment had emerged as the international precedent for combatting apartheid in South Africa.
On Dec. 15, 1987, a group of students with Students Against Apartheid established a “shanty-dorm,” or a collection of small tent buildings and protested outside of the then-president’s house for several days. Students chanted, gave speeches and distributed educational material as they occupied the area, occasionally speaking to the president directly.
In an article published in 2011, celebrated journalist Vijay Prashad PO ’89, a Pomona student at the time, recalled a time the president emerged from his house deep into the night to speak to the students.
“I remember him telling us that our presence was an irritation to his garden and he hoped that we’d let him have at least one unbroken night of sleep,” Prashad said.
At the end of his brief address, Pomona President John Alexander turned and retreated into his home and fell asleep to the chants of his students.
Alexander Hall was christened in John David Alexander’s name in 1992, at the end of his 22-year tenure. In the years since, its function as an administrative building and its location along College Avenue have made it a repeating location in the history of student organizing at Pomona, echoing that encampment outside Alexander’s own home.
In light of Claremont police arresting 20 peaceful protesters at Alexander Hall on April 5, TSL spoke with Prashad to learn more about the history of organizing at Alexander Hall.
Prashad recalled Pomona administration invoking police force to remove students from outside of Alexander’s home at the shanty-dorm protest in 1987. The Claremont Police Department (CPD) was called to extinguish a trashcan fire lit at the demonstration and proceeded to detain multiple students.
“No charges were brought against us,” Prashad said. “This was not the only time we were detained by the CPD, but I do not recall any charges being brought against any of us at that time.”
The shanty-dorm protest was, arguably, successful — Pitzer College and the Claremont University Consortium Board of Trustees agreed to divest from apartheid holdings by the end of the 1980s after repeated student and faculty demonstrations. Aside from Pitzer, however, the other Claremont Colleges did not divest until California Assembly Bill 134 forced them to do so.
Prashad himself regarded the protest as a success.
“Obviously our protests had an impact,” he said. “Pomona did divest.”
As President Alexander’s tenure ended, student activists viewed the new administrative building as a prime location for protest.
In 1993, Pomona faced significant pressure to diversify its student and faculty bodies after multiple incidents, which happened in quick succession and exposed potentially biased hiring practices: Rumors circulated that three Black professors were rejected by the Pomona English department, the Scripps College Chicano studies professor position was left unfilled and a Black female Pomona professor failed to get her contract renewed. These events were compounded by lingering unaddressed concerns following an anti-Asian-American vandalism incident in March of 1992. Student organizers from a variety of backgrounds coalesced to demand revised hiring practices and support for ethnic studies.
From Monday, Feb. 1, to Wednesday, Feb. 3, 1993, around 50 Claremont students affiliated with various activist groups occupied Alexander Hall after following custodians in as they unlocked the building. Administrators were unable to enter and organizers plastered signs in the window reading “Closed due to racism.” Students organized teach-ins, gave speeches from the steps of Alexander Hall and received civil disobedience training from a Claremont Graduate University staff member. Professors in support of the protest taught classes on the lawn outside.
TSL spoke with Karl Halfmann PZ ’94, a lead organizer of the 1993 Alexander Hall occupation, about the organization and events of the takeover.
“We were talking about what kind of action do we want to take?” Halfmann said of the preliminary organizing efforts. “Is it a vigil, is it a march? And [Yusef Omowale PZ ’95, another student] said, ‘I’m sick of this stuff, we need to take it up a notch and do something really bold.’ And that’s when the idea kind of sparked to take over a building.”
Ruth H. Chung, USC professor of clinical education and former Pomona psychology professor, was one of two faculty allowed into Alexander Hall by student organizers to aid with negotiations.
“The 5C student coalition, which were heavily Pitzer students, targeted Alexander Hall due to its prominence, ease of access as a new building and a friendly administration,” Chung told TSL.
The idea of a building occupation was new and not immediately popular with all organizers.
“There was a gender dynamic to it,” said Halfmann. “A lot of the men were like, ‘we need to be level headed, we can’t take over a building.’ And this girl just got up and said ‘I’m sick of this. If you’re not with us you need to leave right now, cause we’re taking over a building.’ And from that point on everyone was heading in the same direction.”
Negotiations with a delegation of administrators from all five colleges began late on Tuesday night, during which then-Pitzer President Marilyn Massey arrived on a flight from out-of-state. At 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 3, organizers emerged from negotiations with administration having reached a deal.
“Victory is ours,” proclaimed Omowale as they emerged. “Those of us on the inside have chosen to leave the building on our own terms. There will be no business as usual. Usually, the administration decides when folks leave buildings by calling the police.”
This time, he said, administration had no excuse “to send in [their] fascist pigs.”
Administration had invoked police presence recently. Halfmann recalled a protest along Sixth Street where the CPD was called to follow students along their march to Pomona. Police were not called, however, to the Alexander Hall occupation.
“None of the students were arrested,” Chung said. “The Pomona president at that time, Peter Stanley, was supportive of [ethnic] studies and despite pressure from trustees, resisted arresting the students.”
Stanley confirmed in a statement that this was due to the protestors’ respect for the building and lack of damages.
Due to amicable negotiations between administrators and student organizers, the protest was successful in many respects. Stanley agreed to finalize the search for a joint Intercollegiate Black Studies position in the Pomona English department, Scripps agreed to prioritize hiring a Chicano studies professor on tenure track and all colleges committed to involving students in the hiring process. Chung believes that the protest also catalyzed the creation of the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies a few years later.
Still, as with any act of civil disobedience, some students voiced disapproval of the protest.
A group of organizers were disappointed that certain demands, such as the reinstatement of the Black Pomona professor whose contract was not renewed, weren’t met.
“I’m not sure what happened in those few minutes from going back from the Coop [at the Smith Campus Center] to Alexander [Hall],” Halfmann said. “It was like, it’s over! We all did a victory lap. But wait, we didn’t get what we wanted. From that perspective, it always felt wrong.”
Additionally, in an interview with student publication The Claremont Colleges Collage, then-sophomore George Revutsky PO ’95 leveraged allegations of antisemitism against organizers, pointing out that Jewish student group Hillel had not been extended an invitation to the demonstration.
Further, one of the speakers who organizers brought to the steps of Alexander Hall was Kwame Ture, who had spoken at the Claremont McKenna College Athenaeum earlier that day about the occupation of Palestine. Revutsky protested the platforming of Ture, who he called a “known antisemite.”
“There were some progressive Jewish students with us and they said no to Hillel coming in,” Halfmann said. “They were like, ‘you’re very conservative.’ At the time I didn’t understand the dynamic. But they were very clear: ‘[Hillel was] not attaching themselves to us.’”
Pomona students circulated a petition expressing disagreement with the protestors that garnered around 100 signatures, some anonymous. In the archival memory of Pomona, the 1993 Alexander Hall occupation was the catalyst for many of the college’s diversity hiring practices.
Alongside student organizers fighting for protections for racially marginalized students and faculty, there has been a strong labor organizing presence in Claremont since the 1970s. It is around this issue that much of the latter half of Alexander Hall’s history as a site of protest is concentrated.
In 2000, there was a spike in student organizing on campus following a series of demonstrations in Seattle protesting the construction of the World Trade Organization in 1999. Pomona Professor Emeritus Victor Silverman noted that students returned to campus energized and equipped with new tactics to “[bring] their point home in campus political debate.”
Silverman said that on-campus organizing often follows larger national social movements.
“Each one of these events occurs because there’s a huge national upheaval and the Claremont Colleges are part of that,” Silverman said. “At the same time, the response of the colleges also follows the national pattern.”
This momentum culminated in the May 1, 2000 occupation of Alexander Hall by students who protested the colleges’ partnership with Aramark, the firm that ran the colleges’ dining services. The action was incited by allegations that Aramark had intimidated workers to deter them from voting to unionize.
“You will see that you do not need the union,” wrote then-district manager Scott Parry in a letter to employees.
According to Silverman, the Colleges claimed they had no influence over Aramark.
“When the workers started to organize for union election and demanded that the colleges press Aramark to accept a card check vote for unionization, the colleges refused,” Silverman said.
The demonstration was loud, disruptive and organized relatively quickly. Students U-locked themselves to the doors and, as in 1993, prevented administrators from entering the building.
This came after a similar demonstration two days prior in which protestors locked Pitzer President Massey out of her own office in Broad Hall. Massey signed a statement supporting the students’ right to organize and CPD was not called.
According to Silverman, the college terminated their contract with Aramark soon after a union deal was reached with the organization. Silverman noted that a union deal had to be “reached on each campus,” thus delaying the process of unionization across campuses.
The contract was terminated in response to organizers’ allegations of poor worker conditions and anti-union intimidation under Aramark and the decision to hire former workers as Pomona employees was done “after determining the wishes of the former Aramark dining service employees who had served on Pomona’s campus through an arbitrator.”
As Claremont students grew more outspoken, coinciding with rising national tides of protest, the colleges’ protocols tightened to match rising national police repression.
“In 2001, the demonstration policy was revised and made a lot more restrictive,” Silverman said. “It was revised again in the wake of the dining hall workers demonstrations. It progressively became more repressive over the last 20 years, which is just like the United States as a whole.”
Labor organizing tensions bubbled to the surface again in 2011, after Pomona conducted an audit of all of its faculty and staff’s immigration and citizenship records. In late 2011, Pomona fired 17 dining hall workers for failing to resolve discrepancies in their immigration documentation, to the shock and dismay of students and faculty.
“It was right before Christmas,” said Silverman. “It was just a cruel, cruel thing to do. Some of them had worked for Pomona for decades, had grown up working in the dining halls. It was a terrible time and a terrible thing to do.”
In March of 2010, 90 percent of Pomona dining hall workers signed a letter pushing the college to allow them a card-check union vote process free from discrimination in a “stunning show of strength.”
This incident, Silverman argued, was directly connected to the firing of the 17 workers. This was the position taken by student organizers as well.
In response, students held a two-day vigil outside of Alexander Hall protesting the firing of the 17 dining hall workers.
“Given the Board [of Trustees’] apparent unwillingness to open up lines of communication, we decided to hold an extended vigil in hopes that the Board and the administration would respond to us,” organizers said in a statement.
Students spent a week “sleeping, studying, and working outside of Alexander [Hall].” Pomona Dean of Students Miriam Feldblum expressed support for the students’ “rights to express themselves and their presence outside Alexander Hall” and kept in line with their wishes for “limited involvement of Campus Safety or [CPD],” so long as they stayed true to their promises to not obstruct access to Alexander Hall and maintain “a peaceful, nonviolent space.”
The Alexander vigil remained as such until the occurrence of another protest that began at Frary and made its way to Alexander Hall, consisting of both Claremont students and fired dining hall workers. The protestors moved to the intersection in front of Alexander and, in an act of planned civil disobedience, attempted to get 17 protestors arrested. “College officials declined to have them arrested so long as they were peaceful,” said Dean Feldblum in a statement. A few hours later, 15 students were arrested by CPD for blocking the intersection of 4th Avenue and Sixth Street. The 17 dining hall workers were never re-hired.
Since 2011, there has not been a long-term occupation of Alexander Hall or the surrounding area. In 2019, Pomona students protesting hastily imposed limits on work-study allowances staged a four-hour-long sit-in in Alexander Hall on Pomona’s Admitted Students Day, where they were joined by current Pomona President Gabi Starr for discussions on steps forward.
On Dec. 1, 2023, 5C Jewish student group Nishmat organized a sit-in Shabbat celebration in Alexander Hall to express solidarity with Muslim students in the wake of Israel’s escalation of its violence in Gaza.
According to Pomona, students were inside Alexander Hall on Friday, April 5, for about one hour.
Caelan Reeves CM ’24.5 was a member of TSL’s editorial board, once upon a time.
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