Police Action Ends S. Africa Sit-in at UCLA

Twenty protesters were cleared out of UCLA’s Murphy Hall by UCLA police early today, ending a four-day sit-in to protest South African apartheid.

Two of the students were arrested, and the other 18 were cited for illegal trespassing, according to a UCLA police spokesman.

The spokesman said, “There were no disturbances, no injuries and the building was cleared without any trouble, and it is now empty and locked.”

Witnesses at the administration building reported that the demonstrators and sympathizers remained outside the building chanting and shouting protests against the University of California’s investments in firms that do business in South Africa.

Declaration Issued

The arrests shortly after midnight followed a declaration by UCLA Police Chief Pat Connolly in which he warned that continued occupation of the building would mean arrest. Sgt. Alan Christopher said there were about 80 to 100 protesters in the hall at the time. Those who did not leave voluntarily were arrested by the 25 members of the UCLA police force and were handcuffed with plastic strips.

Protesters who signed citations after their handcuffs were removed will appear in West Los Angeles Municipal Court, as will the two arrestees who were booked at a sheriff’s facility.

The action to clear Murphy Hall followed the arrests at Berkeley Thursday of six University of California students, including three student body presidents, in what was promised to be a series of acts of civil disobedience at UC system headquarters.

The arrests at Berkeley, which are scheduled to continue each day until the UC Board of Regents meets here May 17, were part of a continuing, loosely coordinated nationwide student movement against investment in U.S. companies doing business in South Africa. The protesters want the regents to discuss the divestiture issue before the school year ends in May, instead of in June, as planned.

The student body presidents arrested at University Hall were Pedro Noguera of Berkeley, Kate Fischer of Santa Cruz and Michael Capriotti of Riverside. Also arrested were Kayleen Kott, chairwoman of the Student Body Presidents Council, and two Berkeley graduate students, Nancy Skinner and Robert Rice.

Cited and Released

They were issued citations and released as more than 40 other protesters picketed nearby. Berkeley faculty members are scheduled to march there today, and union members, clergymen and local elected officials have said they will take their turns sitting-in and being arrested.

“We’re going to do it to show the regents we have strong support for this issue,” said Skinner, who also is a member of the Berkeley City Council.

Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport watched the demonstration, then pledged to join.

“It will keep pressure on the university,” he said, “and I don’t think it’s pressure the university can resist.”

Meanwhile, several hundred students camped out on the steps of Sproul Hall, the Berkeley campus’s administration building, for the 16th day of their sit-in against the university’s $1.7-billion worth of investments in South Africa. In all, there have been 167 arrests.

Elsewhere in California, protests continued at more than a dozen campuses. Protesters occupied buildings at USC and California State University, Northridge, where students still occupied administration buildings.

UC Davis, where 26 students were arrested Wednesday, was quiet Thursday. A few dozen protesters remained camped out on the steps of the administration building, Mrak Hall.

27 Arrested in Florida

There was trouble elsewhere, however. Police arrested 27 students Thursday at the University of Florida in Gainesville, after they chained shut the front door of an administration building. About 150 students have been demonstrating on the steps of the building since Tuesday.

Rutgers University protesters decided to send a contingent from their New Brunswick campus to the state capital in Trenton to lobby for a law requiring the divestiture of more than $2 billion in public employee pension funds.

Georgia State Vote

Students at Georgia State University in Atlanta voted by a margin of 2 to 1 to ask officials to sell investments linked to South Africa, while 25% of the students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore signed a petition making the same request.

Protesters from the University of Wisconsin continued their camp-out in the state capitol just a few blocks from their Madison campus, and one person was arrested at a demonstration at Tufts University near Boston.

More than 1,000 arrests have been made at scores of anti-apartheid protests at universities across the country since Columbia University students sparked the current protest wave April 4.