met by students protesting the Vietnam War. On March 25, 1968, a presidential campaign speech on campus by Robert F. Kennedy drew an orderly crowd of 10,000 and mainly focused on his opposition to the Vietnam War. Shortly thereafter, his opponent Eugene McCarthy also held a rally at the university which drew a crowd of 7,000 spectators.
However, 1968 would not end quite so peacefully on the campus. The April assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, soon followed by the June assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, then the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, had led to a series of riots throughout the nation. On November 4, the assault of an African American student athlete by his white coach on the CSUN campus led a group of African American students to hold the acting college president and more than 30 staff members hostage in the Administration Building for several hours, pressing demands for greater outreach in minority enrollment and employment and the …
