‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

Among the wave of scholar protests that occurred throughout American college campuses within the late Nineteen Sixties, the coed occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a extremely native but pivotal act of civil disobedience. The greater than 200 Black and Puerto Rican college students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for 2 weeks did so in protest of the varsity’s admissions coverage and the dearth of range in its scholar physique. At a time when 40 % of New York City’s highschool graduates have been Black or Latino, the movie stories, solely 9 % of City College attendees have been a part of these communities. “The Five Demands,” a brand new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former college students, now of their late 60s and 70s, who participated within the protests.

In interviews, City College alumni who have been recruited by way of the faculty’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared of their schooling and made to really feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white friends. And certainly, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not solely round making efforts to confess extra college students of colour, but in addition to supply them with sufficient assist as soon as they have been enrolled — a dedication that many elite schools and universities nonetheless wrestle with to this present day.

In the wake of the latest Supreme Court determination that rejected affirmative motion, the movie feels eerily well timed. Schiller and Weiss’s course is utilitarian, reducing collectively talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit score, the dearth of flashiness places the scholars’ struggles for racial justice entrance and middle, and in the end serves to focus on a less-remembered facet of the countercultural scholar motion.

The Five Demands
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters.