How to read this timeline
Student unrest in 1967 was scattered, not synchronised. The events below are those that are reasonably well documented, listed by month. Some months have little that can be dated with confidence, and the list is not complete. Where exact dates or numbers are uncertain, the text says so. Events of 1968 are left out except as a note at the end, since they are consequences rather than parts of 1967.
January
No student event from January is documented well enough to date with confidence in a general account. Antiwar and campus activity carried on from the previous autumn, but without a single episode that historians single out.
February
- Italy. University occupations were reported at Pisa and Rome during the month. The Pisa students’ paper on the state of the university is often cited as an early statement of Italian student demands; the Italian student occupations of this year later fed into the larger wave of late 1967 and 1968.
- United States. Ramparts magazine and then the major newspapers reported that the CIA had for years secretly funded the National Student Association. The disclosure caused a scandal and led to a national review of covert funding.
March
Activity in the United States was largely organisational: planning for the large April antiwar marches, and, reportedly, a hostile reception for the draft director General Hershey when he spoke at Howard University. Little else from March can be dated with confidence.
April
- 15 April: The Spring Mobilization brought large antiwar marches in New York and San Francisco, with student contingents. Organisers’ crowd figures were far higher than police ones, so only “many tens of thousands” in New York is safe to say.
- 21 April: A military coup took power in Greece. Greek students were among those later targeted, though student opposition became more visible after 1967 than during it.
- Late April: The boxer Muhammad Ali refused induction on 28 April, an event that had a large effect on campus audiences.
May
The Dutch Provo movement, whose happenings in Amsterdam influenced young radicals elsewhere in Europe, dissolved itself in the spring. In the United States, H. Rap Brown became chairman of SNCC, a sign of the movement’s changing direction after Black Power’s rise. Student protest continued at a lower level at the end of the academic year.
June
- 2 June, West Berlin: During demonstrations against a visit by the Shah of Iran, a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead by a police officer. The killing, and the officer’s acquittal at a trial later in the year, radicalised many West German students, and the West Berlin protests that followed are usually seen as a turning point for the movement in West Germany. The officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was revealed in 2009 to have also been an informant for East Germany’s secret police.
- Middle of the month: The Six-Day War (5-10 June) shifted attention in many countries, and it later divided parts of the left.
July and August
The summer is better remembered for the Summer of Love and the American urban riots than for student action, as most universities were out of session. Herbert Marcuse lectured in West Berlin in July, and the Critical University project there began to take shape in the following months. Treat these months as a pause in campus activity rather than as evidence that nothing was happening.
September
Campuses reopened, and in the United States the first weeks were taken up with preparations for the autumn draft protests. No specific student event in September can be named with confidence.
October
October was the busiest month of the year.
- 8 October, Tokyo: Students from rival factions of Zengakuren clashed with riot police near Haneda Airport as Prime Minister Eisaku Sato left on an Asian tour that included South Vietnam. A student, Yamazaki Hiroaki, died; accounts of how he died differed at the time, and his death made the clash a national event.
- 9 October: Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia, and the news added to a romantic image of revolution among student radicals worldwide.
- 16-20 October: The “Stop the Draft Week” protests in the United States, including large demonstrations at the Oakland induction centre.
- Mid-October: At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, police used force against a sit-in aimed at Dow Chemical recruiters.
- 21-22 October: The March on the Pentagon. Tens of thousands marched on the building, and several hundred people were arrested.
- 31 October: In Prague, students from the Strahov dormitories marched to complain about electricity and heating, and police used force against them. The Strahov protest, which was about living conditions rather than politics, is sometimes seen as a prelude to later reform-era student activity in Czechoslovakia.
November
- Mid-November: In Japan, protests followed Sato’s travel to the United States.
- 9 November, Hamburg: Students displayed a banner at a university ceremony reading “Under the gowns, the musty smell of a thousand years”.
- Mid to late November, Milan and Turin: The Catholic University of Milan and the Palazzo Campana at Turin University were occupied. The occupations, which concerned fees, teaching and student representation, were part of the wave of Italian occupations through the 1967-68 academic year.
- Late autumn, United States: Further sit-ins against Dow and other recruiters, including at Harvard and Brown.
December
On 5 December, the paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock and the poet Allen Ginsberg were among those arrested during antiwar protests at a New York induction centre. Student activity elsewhere was reduced by the holidays. Meanwhile, the Berlin and Italian movements prepared for a busy winter.
After 1967
The Tet Offensive of January 1968, the Columbia occupation and the French May events all followed. They are better known than the events above, which is why it is useful to remember that 1967 was a year of preparation, in which many of the groups, slogans and tactics of 1968 were already in place.