The Night of Bayonets

On the evening of March 4, about 150 students gathered in the Florida Room of the University Union to listen to SDS National Secretary Fred Gordon. Earlier that day, President Marshall had obtained a temporary injunction that made it unlawful for SDS to occupy that room. Only a few minutes into the meeting, Leon County Sheriff Raymond Hamlin, Campus Security Chief William Tanner, Student Body President Canter Brown, and about ten other police officers entered the room. Chief Tanner read Marshall’s injunction aloud and warned that the students had fifteen minutes to evacuate or face arrest. Some students left but the officers arrested those sixty who remained, including guest speaker Fred Gordon and Australian exchange student Phil Sanford, the founder and leader of FSU’s chapter of SDS.

Authorities led the arrestees outside where a crowd of about 350 to 500 students had gathered and a line of riot police, helmeted and armed with rifles with fixed bayonets, made a path from the building to the police vans. The students yelled and jeered at the police; several stood in front of the trucks and others banged on the sides. After the trucks and the riot police had gone, about 900 students gathered in front of Westcott and called for amnesty for those arrested and a student strike. The next day, the front page of the Flambeau described events as the “Night of Bayonets.”

The "Night of Bayonets” was the most dramatic event at FSU in the sixties and is perhaps how FSU acquired the ill-deserved nickname “Berkeley of the South” despite the clear discrepancy in the level of violence and student participation between the two schools. The spectacle of armed police officers and several hundred jeering students nearly spiraled into chaos.

Climax of Chaos: 1969
The Night of Bayonets