???When Paul Krehbiel walked the grounds of South Campus earlier this month, his boots stomping on the frozen remnants of a first snowfall, he was no doubt drawn back to a winter day in 1970, when he stood in the foyer of what is now Squire Hall, heart racing and fearing for his safety.
???Krehbiel, a 1977 alumnus, returned to UB to give a talk on his memoir Shades of Justice, which chronicles his journey to becoming a social activist and his time spent at UB at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
???One chapter in the book depicts Krehbiel's first-hand account of a student uprising that shaped the future of the university, and one night in particular that is likely one of the most brutal moments in UB's history.
???The years leading up to 1970 were marked by an ever-increasing rift between UB's administration and its students. The President at the time was Peter Regan, a man Krehbiel described as a conservative "knee-jerk" leader, who faced a largely liberal student body.
???"There was kind of a growing critique of the way organizations operated and growing critique of hierarchies," Krehbiel said.
???Anti-war demonstrations were often met with riot police presence on campus, a response that infuriated the activist crowd.
???The evening of Feb. 25, 1970 found a group of around 100 activists from Students for a Democratic Society, an anti-war group that Krehbiel was a part of, at the steps of Regan's office on South Campus, UB's only campus at the time.
???They were demanding an explanation for the riot police that had been called on campus after a sit-in protest at Clark Gym that night.
???A sharp object came flying from somewhere in the crowd, smashing through the president's window and sparking the attention of the looming police, who stood nearby wearing helmets with face-shields and wielding three-foot-long clubs.
???A heart-pounding race ensued as students dashed for the safety of the union with the riot police at their heels.
???"When I saw them starting to get in a slow run towards us...my feeling was, we've got to get out of here because they're going to come and beat us," Krehbiel said. "[They] had a reputation for being brutal and quick to club people."
???The union's tall glass doors were slammed shut and students began barricading the entryway with furniture.
???The police shattered the glass doors and began a violent battle with the crowd, according to Krehbiel, clubbing students left and right, including bystanders who were lounging in the union.
???Students retaliated by throwing rocks and broken pieces of furniture to fight off officers. Krehbiel described seeing one cop drag a girl down a flight of stairs by her hair, and another bashing one of his friends with a club until blood gushed out of a wound on his head.
???The mayhem surged outside the building to a crowd of 500, with students pouring out of the nearby dorms. Some set up makeshift aid stations to treat the wounded. The three-hour battle ended with 17 student arrests and numerous injuries.
???"In one evening, our university education was changed forever," Krehbiel wrote.
???An unprecedented gathering of 4,000 students and teachers the following week in Clark Gym agreed upon a university-wide student strike, calling for a boycott of classes until the administration accepted a list of demands.
???Students wanted to do away with the police presence on campus, to remove the school president and democratically elect a new one in his place, and eliminate the ROTC program and any campus support of the war effort, among other demands.
???The boycott spread from liberal-leaning departments like English and philosophy to some of the natural sciences and engineering programs.
???"Ultimately probably 70 to 90 percent of the university was shut down for the whole semester," Krehbiel said.
???"The civil rights movement opened up a whole new way to look at society," Krehbiel said. "Bottom-up initiatives and creativity were kind of blooming all over the place."
???Courses on organizing labor unions, the history of Vietnam, and community activism were advertised on the student union's walls. The departments of African American and Global Gender studies found their start amid the changes.
???The campus had several more eruptions between students and police on the lawn of the ROTC building, and a professor protest in March against police presence resulted in the arrest of 45 faculty members.
???But as the strike continued, tensions died down and the administration gave in to many of the demands. ROTC was taken off of the campus, Regan eventually resigned and police presence became less of an issue.
???Krehbiel went on to become an activist for labor unions and an advocate of ending the war in Iraq.
???Noting the difference between his generation's passionate anti-war attitudes and the current one's feelings on the wars in the Middle East, Krehbiel avoided placing the blame on apathy.
???"The people who wage these wars have gotten smarter," he said.
???Police aren't quick to pounce on any anti-war protests that do take place, a practice that used to add fuel to fired-up activists, Krehbiel explained.
???Without a draft, young people are less directly affected by the war, and gruesome images of the fighting have all but disappeared on TV, in contrast to the media of the 1970s.
???"[Young people] really don't know about the horrible things that are going on. If they did, most would be upset," Krehbiel said. "Or even if they do know, it's so unpleasant that they don't want to hear about it because they don't think anything can be done."
???Still, he said, upwards of 70 percent of Americans are against the War in Iraq.
???"We never reached those numbers during Vietnam. Even though the movement was much bigger, it took us years just to reach 50 percent," Krehbiel said.
???Putting those sentiments into action has fallen short at UB, where the most recent anti-war group was disbanded last fall when membership numbers dwindled, according to Newton Campbell, a senior computer science major who was a member.
???"It just doesn't seem like there's a war going on," he said.
