I was still in high school in suburban NYC. It was an integrated high school, roughly half black, half white, and we were socially pretty integrated too. I had a lot of friends of both races. Our music was Motown, indie "underground" radio, and Cousin Brucie was about all we could pick up at the Jersey or Long Island shore in summer. We didn't care much though, because the Young Rascals were our "it" hometown band, and my lifelong love affair with Laura Nyro (another NYC sweetie of the times) was in full bloom.

The realities of the draft and the civil rights movement and the summer of '67 race riots was the biggest thing going on that spring--in our high school, most of the controversies of the day were being viewed through three lenses: inter-racial dating, police brutality, and the first kid to go to Vietnam from our high school (he was a gung ho Marine when he graduated in my sister's class of 1966) coming home without legs.

The Newark riots were still very much on the radar that spring in our school community, because the police brutality against the hippie kids and the black kids was incredibly intense, and the general consensus among us kids was that the summer of 1968 wasn't going to be much better for us, which is why so many of us were planning our escapes to the Jersey and Long Island shore! It was all about the beach and boardwalk & the music, of course.

The kids protesting at Columbia? Nah, we thought they were spoiled rich kids. Because they were. A lot of kids in my high school still had very strong familial ties in Harlem. We used to go cruising down there and in the Village (I was a very naughty teenager), and we went to the discos whenever we could sneak out of the house.

The Columbia takeover wasn't even on our radar, really, despite us being in such close proximity.