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Before igniting the current wave of Israel-Hamas war protests, New York played an outsized role in shaping national movements that spanned from abolishing slavery and fights for women's suffrage to myriad antiwar efforts across the past century.
From an 1848 Finger Lakes tea party that inspired women to push for the 19th Amendment and their right to vote to Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and '70s to today's pro-Palestinian demonstrations at colleges, scenes of protest and activism have touched communities across New York.
Columbia , the university at the center of the current wave of protests, has even seen similar protests before, including during the Vietnam War in 1968. Demonstrations led the university to end classified war research and stop military recruitment, among other changes, wrote Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at Barnard College, for Barnard Magazine .
And as a growing list of recent protests involve arrests of students , USA TODAY Network revisited four milestone protests on campuses in New York during the Vietnam era to explore how universities repeatedly emerged as epicenters for American activism.
University at Buffalo: Vietnam draft protests in 1968, the 'Buffalo nine'
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As opposition to the Vietnam War mounted, groups of University at Buffalo students came to the support of activist Bruce Beyer, whose draft opposition attracted national attention in 1968.
After publicly burning their draft cards, Beyer and a second man entered the Unitarian Universalist church on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo to claim symbolic sanctuary against arrest for draft evasion, according to the university's archives .
FBI, U.S. marshals and Buffalo police entered the church and arrest Beyer, as well as eight of his supporters after a brief fistfight with the police and federal agents. This group, later known as the Buffalo Nine, would be charged with assault, and Breyer's trial, which ended with his conviction and three-year prison sentence, sparked months of chaotic and, at times, violent protests at the public university in Buffalo.
The handling of protests on the campus in Buffalo marked a milestone moment in New York and the nation's debate about academic free speech protections at public universities , which continue today.
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University of Rochester: Vietnam protests against napalm maker, Kent State shootings in 1960s, 1970
Students at the University of Rochester became one of the early college groups to stage protests of Dow Chemical Corporation — the makers of napalm for the Vietnam War — in the late 1960s, according to the university's archives .
That movement followed prior anti-napalm research and demonstrations that began in 1966 at Midwest colleges, including the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, the then-home state for Dow Chemical, according to those colleges' archives.
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Then, in 1970, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester played host to a pair of concerts mounted in the Eastman Theatre with a special purpose: to raise funds for the national circulation of an antiwar petition written by two faculty members, according to the school's archives .
The two concerts represented the climax of anti-war activity at the college — that is, in protest of American involvement in Vietnam — mounted by Eastman School students in the weeks following the tragedy that would become known simply as Kent State, in which authorities open fired into protesting students, killing four young people.
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Cornell University: A 1968 campus building takeover by armed students
At 3 a.m. on a spring night in 1968, a burning cross was discovered outside Wari House, a cooperative for black women students at Cornell University.
The following morning, members of the Afro-American Society occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest Cornell's perceived racism, its judicial system and its slow progress in establishing a black studies program, George Lowery wrote in the Cornell Chronicle .
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Law enforcement from Rochester, Syracuse and other upstate locales promptly responded to the Ivy-league campus in Ithaca.
Following negotiations with Cornell officials over the next 36 hours, the students emerged from the building carrying rifles and wearing bandoleers. Their image, captured by Associated Press photographer Steve Starr, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, appeared in newspapers across the country and on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the headline, "Universities Under the Gun," Lowery added, noting the episode came to symbolize an era of social change.
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Syracuse University: Student strikes in 1970
Beginning on May 4, 1970, Syracuse University students participating in the National Student Strike held teach-ins and sit-ins, according to the university's library website .
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The SU students marched, erected barricades and caused damage to campus, negotiated with the university administration, and made their voices heard. Although the strike ended at the close of the 1970 spring semester, the impact of this student-led protest was felt for years to come.
Some of those ripples of change affected the way decisions are made on the campus today, the library exhibit noted, and the educational opportunities available, in many ways, have been fundamentally informed by the activism and engagement of the student strike and other student movements of that period.
Kayla Jimenez of USA TODAY contributed to this report
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY college protests helped shape anti-Vietnam War movement: Here's how it happened
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