SU Students vs. ‘The Deep North’: Syracuse’s Urban Renewal Protests, 60 years later

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This story is the first installment in a two-part series.

On a late summer day in 1963, Edwin Day crouched amid the rubble of Syracuse’s 15th Ward, listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice crackle over a transistor radio.

It was Aug. 28, and King was addressing a crowd of more than 250,000 amassed for the March on Washington. As the civil rights leader shared his vision of racial justice, demolition crews in Syracuse tore building by building, block by block, through the historic Black community whose destruction Day had come to protest.

Day and those gathered with him didn’t know it at the time, but another civil rights battle was looming in the shadow of that ruined neighborhood. In a few weeks, those same demolition sites would swarm with hundreds of protesters who scaled buildings, blocked construction crews and chained themselves to equipment. Police would haul them away by the dozens, even as they forced city officials to the negotiating table.

Day would go to jail for that fight — as would nearly 70 other students and faculty of Syracuse University, located just steps away.

The university became a key player in that clash. SU students, marshaled by the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, filled the ranks of protesters. George Wiley, a young chemistry professor soon to become a pivotal civil rights leader, helped lead them, even as the university administration scrambled to smother the movement.

Sixty years later, as Interstate-81 comes down and Syracuse seeks to undo the harms of urban renewal, the echoes of those protests continue to resonate.

The movement

The timeline of the fall 1963 protests unfolds across hundreds of pages in the SU and Onondaga Historical Association archives — an avalanche of newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, activist publications and first-hand accounts that illustrate how the protest formed and evolved.

It also lives on in the memories of the student protesters who participated in them.

Day was among those demonstrators. Then in his early 20s, he was working toward a doctorate at SU when his wife invited him to a meeting of student activists, then held at Wiley’s house.

This group of students had formed the Syracuse chapter of CORE, a civil rights organization that had become famous for its campaign against segregation in the South. The students tapped Wiley, a nationally renowned chemist, to lead them. Despite his reluctance to get involved, the professor was a clear fit, with experience in student organizing from his recent stint at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also only the third Black professor in the university’s history.

By 1963, the chapter had already led successful campaigns against segregation by the Syracuse City School District and Hotel Syracuse. They repeatedly faced off against the city’s political and business elite, widely viewed as conservative outliers in the urban north.

“In those days, it was extremely segregated and extremely racist,” Day said of the city. “We used to call Syracuse the ‘Deep North.’”

When CORE moved its headquarters out of Wiley’s university-area house and into the city’s Black community, Day said he and his wife followed, living there for more than a year. Still, the organization maintained a strong base of support on campus.

As CORE’s influence in Syracuse grew, William Walsh, the city’s Republican mayor from 1961 to 1969 and grandfather of Syracuse’s current mayor, pursued a program of urban renewal, clear-cutting Black communities to make way for new buildings and infrastructure, namely I-81.

Walsh and other city officials promised the program would bring about a more integrated, more equal city. But Wiley and other civil rights leaders foresaw a different outcome — one in which discrimination by landlords, realtors and bankers would reroute displaced Black residents into segregated neighborhoods and substandard housing.

In June 1963, CORE representatives including Wiley met with Walsh to demand action. The movement presented the mayor with a nine-point program to resolve the issue, which included a city-wide crackdown on housing discrimination.

CORE said it would take “direct action” if the city refused its demands. The mayor, according to CORE publications from the time, didn’t reply.

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The confrontation escalated on Aug. 26 as CORE — along with several other civil rights groups — marched on the county courthouse. The mayor addressed the crowd, mentioning a proposed civil rights commission, but offered no further action.

On Aug. 28, the day of the March on Washington, Syracuse CORE sent a letter to Walsh demanding demolitions stop until the city put forth a solution. A small band of CORE members, Day and Wiley among them, staged a protest at one of the urban renewal sites.

The group gathered around their radio, listening to King’s speech. Then, according to one account from journalists and Wiley biographers Nick and Mary Lynn Kotz, they turned off the radio, entered the demolition site, and climbed onto the construction equipment.

The mayor delayed again. On Sept. 12, he refused CORE’s demands.

“I cannot and will not accept an ultimatum from any group,” Walsh said in a message to CORE.

In his response, he went point-by-point through the demands, rejecting them, promising to consider them or contending they had already been met. He expressed support for the activists’ right to peacefully protest, but warned the city was bound “to maintain law and order.”

“We feel we have made a highly significant break in the pattern of residential segregation and the facts bear this out,” the mayor said. “Your failure to recognize this is unreasonable.”

At a Sept. 12 rally at AME Zion Church — one of several university-area churches that lent support to the Civil Rights Movement — Wiley told attendees that the only solution left was “direct intervention of our physical selves into the urban renewal area.” He warned arrest was possible.

After Wiley’s speech was over, more than 200 people volunteered to picket, according to an account published in the Syracuse Post-Standard.

The city had run out of time.

The students

A year before police arrested them both at the urban renewal sites, Barbara Nellis met Howard Messing in a Marshall Street bookstore.

Nellis found Messing, a politically active upperclassman from New York City, charming and charismatic. The two quickly became friends. Messing, in turn, introduced Nellis to the Civil Rights Movement.

“He took me to a CORE meeting, and I fell in love — and it’s interesting, because I feel this way to this very day — I fell in love with the music,” Nellis said in an interview with The Daily Orange. “The music of the Civil Rights Movement was absolutely wonderful.”

Nellis recalls the 1963 protests drawing support from a tight-knit population of mostly white student activists who were united by their support of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. They overwhelmingly objected to the city’s urban renewal program, she said, and were eager to get involved.

“It was thrilling to be a part of something bigger than yourself,” Nellis said. “To think of yourself as someone who could make a difference in any way.”

When Walsh rejected CORE’s demands, those students were among the first to volunteer. On a cold morning on Friday, Sept. 13, they joined the picketers descending on demolition sites near the intersection of South Townsend and Madison Streets.

The wrecking crew that city officials had contracted to demolish over 100 buildings in the area initially backed down from the protesters, sending its employees home for the day. When the news reached Walsh, he ordered crews to return to the site. He also dispatched a warning to the demonstrators: interfere, and face consequences.

After two warnings from the police, arrests began. Fourteen people went to jail on the first day, including eight students.

The weekend offered a lull in the protests as Wiley and his wife, Wretha — an accomplished organizer in her own right — rallied CORE’s forces. According to the Kotzes’ biography of Wiley, a Sept. 15 meeting in the professor’s backyard was interrupted by news of the church bombing that killed four Black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.

The tragedy reportedly galvanized CORE leadership. The following day, the organization resumed its direct action campaign in force.

Protesters scuffled with police, chained themselves to cranes and crawled into the basement of a half-demolished building. One demonstrator scaled the roof of an unstable house. When the threat of an approaching fire truck convinced him to dismount, another protester — an SU sophomore — took his place, receiving cheers from the crowd.

SU faculty also joined the fray, many of them arrested alongside their students.

Police hauled 22 protesters to jail that Monday. On Tuesday, it was 14. On Thursday and Friday, after tentative talks between activists and the mayor’s office faltered, they grabbed 41.

According to The D.O, which at one point published a day-by-day breakdown of detained students and faculty, 77 people went to jail in the first week of the demonstrations. Students comprised 51 of them. Faculty, nine.

Like many others, Nellis was arrested after she crossed a picket line to sit on a demolition site. Messing was handcuffed after he scaled a crane, possibly chaining himself to it, though he can’t remember for certain.

Police deposited many of the protesters in the Willow Street jail, a facility that the Kotzes described as “a 19th-century dungeon overrun by rats and vermin.”

“It was like being thrown in The Tombs,” Messing said, referring to the nickname for a notorious Manhattan jail. “(It) was a shock to this group of essentially middle-class kids who had never even seen a jail.”

Nellis remembers a sense of camaraderie among the arrested students. Protesters played card games in their cells. They forged friendships with one another that lasted well after the protests ended. Several also picked up staph infections from the unsanitary conditions, she noted.

Some officials grew frustrated, as students seemed to be having too much fun with the whole ordeal. One detained student, noting the police cars on scene came in two different colors, joked that he wanted to ride in the black one. Another bantered with an officer as he was arrested: “I’m not supposed to walk out, you’re supposed to drag me.”

“Okay, we’ll compromise,” the officer replied, according to The D.O. “We’ll carry you.”

Demonstrators packed the arraignments, chanting as judges set bail for their arrested allies.

“They treat the whole thing as a joke, and walk in and out of court like they were stopping for a soda,” said J. Richard Sardino, an assistant district attorney at the time, according to the Post-Standard.

But they were still just college kids, Nellis and Messing said. They had their private fears. Above all, they worried what their parents would think.

Nellis remembers sparring with her father — a “big-deal lawyer in Washington” who had argued before the Supreme Court — about her decision to protest.

“He raised me to be the kind of person that would go to jail, but I don’t think he ever thought I would,” Nellis said. As for her mother: “She wanted to know, when was I going to do my homework?”

Local newspapers often characterized the students as misguided, and their protest as futile. Demolitions continued, journalists pointed out, despite their attempts to stand in the way.

As one Post-Standard reporter jabbed: “Although the groups of chanting protesters … sang continuously throughout the day that ‘we will not be moved’ — they were.”

And even if they could hold firm against the police and the demolition crews, it might not have mattered. By the time protests began, there wasn’t much of a neighborhood left to save.

“It sticks in my mind that there were not a lot of houses left,” Messing said. “They were ripping their way through the neighborhood.”

Behind closed doors, though, the protests’ impact had begun to register. A deal was being struck as the city made a bid for peace. Walsh had come to the negotiating table.