The Five Demands

THE FIVE DEMANDS is a riveting story about the student strike that changed the face of higher education. In April 1969, a small group of Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the City College of New York, an elite public university located in the heart of Harlem. Although the late 1960s are known as an era of student activism, this momentous event has been overlooked and forgotten. Far more attention has been paid to white middle-class students in opposition to the Vietnam War, yet this protest had a more significant impact: the CCNY strikers were the vanguard of a national Black student movement that transformed the culture, mission, and curriculum of American higher education. CCNY's strike was homegrown in Harlem, America's most famous Black neighborhood. The Harlem community rallied around the students, and for many, it was the first time they ever stepped foot on the neo-Gothic campus on a hill overlooking their neighborhood. National television news covered the strike, but within a few years, this heroic struggle for educational equity was swept under the proverbial rug. Fueled by the revolutionary fervor sweeping the nation, the strike turned into an uprising, leading to the extended occupation of the campus, the cancelation of classes, the arrest of students, and the resignation of the college president. Told through the participants' point of view, the film follows the students' struggle against the institutional racism that, for over a century, had shut out people of color from this institution and other public universities. THE FIVE DEMANDS proves that a handful of ordinary citizens can band together to take action and effect meaningful change.

Duration: 58 minutes and 4 seconds

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