Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.
Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.
Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75
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Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75
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Overview
Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095801 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Black Power on Campus
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 1965â?"75
By JOY ANN WILLIAMSON
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09580-1
CHAPTER 1
Black Youth Forcing Change
African Americans at white universities in the first half of the twentieth century, though few in number, protested the treatment they received on their campuses. Their grievances often were individual and arose in response to particular acts, but various African American students did not idly accept the abuse they received. As the Black freedom struggle gained momentum in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, so, too, did Black student struggles at white higher educational institutions. African Americans more aggressively attacked racism and segregation with coordinated protest. African Americans students, like African Americans in general, manifested the spectrum of opinion on how best to achieve their goals. Some activists chose the courts as their battleground. Others employed more immediate methods of protest, such as direct-action tactics, to further the cause of liberation and educational equality. Still others did not participate at all. In this way, African American students varied in the manner in which they reconciled being Black at a white institution.
The 1950s and 1960s became a defining moment in Black liberation efforts. The birth and growth of the nationwide civil rights movement invigorated African Americans. Backed by legal victories and federal legislation, the civil rights movement barreled forward and created lasting reforms in society in general and education in particular. Its power lay in its being a mass movement with coordinated protest, media attention, sustained momentum, and unwavering adherents. Black students were an important part of the movement. Black and white college students worked to rid their campus towns of segregation and discrimination (seldom did they look at their institutions at this time). When the tide of the Black freedom struggle shifted from integration to Black autonomy, Black students again played a large role. Many Black students became the ideological leaders of the Black Power movement. As the civil rights movement and Black Power movement became watershed moments in societal reform, so, too, did the 1960s Black student movement precipitate widespread reform in higher education. Black students learned from the movements of which they were a part and brought the protest strategies, ideologies, and goals to their immediate context: the university. Their participation enlarged the role of youth in the fight for racial advancement, societal reform, and equal education.
The History of African American Students at Predominantly White Institutions
African American attendance at white institutions can be traced to the early nineteenth century, though their enrollment remained extremely sparse. The first African American to receive a degree from such an institution was John Russwurm, who received a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1826. For the next several decades, white institutions in the North remained, for all intents and purposes, closed to African Americans. In a few cases, African Americans enrolled in white northern institutions with little fanfare. In others, college administrators, faculty, and students actively discouraged African American attendance. In still others, town residents, however welcoming the local college, forced institutions to close their doors or refuse enrollment. These northern white attitudes revealed the tensions surrounding race relations before and after the Civil War. Accepting African American applicants terrified many northerners. Nat Turner's 1831 insurrection, increasingly aggressive abolitionists, the end of the Civil War, and fear of newly emancipated African Americans swarming to northern cities completely unnerved many northern whites. Such hostility, compounded with the fact that most Black secondary schools in the North remained inferior, meant that very few African Americans attended white postsecondary institutions. From 1826 to 1890, only thirty African Americans graduated from these institutions. By 1910, the number remained under seven hundred. Enrollment nationwide was approximately fifteen hundred by the late 1920s. The 1930s and 1940s exhibited a continuing pattern of almost complete segregation of the races in higher education.
African American students met intense resistance and hostility when they attempted to enroll in all-white southern institutions until the late 1960s. Historically Black colleges and universities were founded later in the nineteenth century through the mandates of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 and remained under white administrative and philanthropic control for decades. On the heels of the Civil War and African American emancipation, the federal acts provided each state with land and funds for establishing public universities to serve the state's residents. Southern states used the land and funds to set up a dual system of college education to preserve racial segregation, as state laws and customs demanded. In the 1920s, African Americans returned from World War I with a renewed fervor for egalitarian education. The New Negro was born. The New Negro of the 1920s more aggressively agitated for equal rights, exalted African American culture, and demanded self-determination. Such sentiment evidenced itself in both attitude and organization through Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the Harlem Renaissance, the growth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Carter G. Woodson's Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and the waves of rebellion on Black campuses. The New Negro continued to place a high value on education, including college, and the number of students enrolled in Black colleges increased sixfold, from 2,132 in 1917 to 13,580 in 1927. At such Black institutions as Fisk, Howard, Tuskegee, Hampton, and Wilberforce, African Americans resolved to determine the path of African American education for themselves.
Fisk University provides a good example of the ways students took the reigns of the struggle for equal rights and a proper education, though at most Black institutions students were not so aggressive. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, and established after the Civil War, Fisk was considered the premier liberal arts institution for African Americans. Like most Black institutions, Fisk depended largely on white philanthropy, most of which determined that the proper form of African American education was vocational training rather than the classical liberal curriculum. According to the historian Raymond Wolters, to solicit funds, Fisk's white president endeavored to prove that Fisk had not strayed too far from the vocational model of education and that its students "were not radical egalitarians but young men and women who had learned to make peace with the reality of the caste system." This infuriated students and alumni, including W. E. B. Du Bois. In protest, Du Bois collected depositions from alumni regarding how the shifted mission of the institution sought to undermine initiative and self-respect and persuade elite Black youth to forget egalitarian principles and adjust to the system. In 1924, students staged a demonstration against the president and issued a list of demands, including reinstatement of the newspaper, track, football, and the student council; these demands were not irrational because most schools (especially white schools) had everything Fisk students demanded. In February 1925, the conflict came to a head. Approximately one hundred Black male students defied the lights-out curfew and instead yelled, sang, smashed windows, and chanted "Du Bois! Du Bois!" The president called in the local (white) police to arrest the students. Protesting the arrests, the student body went on strike for ten weeks. In April, the president submitted his resignation, and later that year many of the student demands were met. Such actions would have been considered unthinkable twenty years earlier, but the pervasive New Negro sentiment meant that African Americans more aggressively confronted power-holders and forced change. For their part, Black students fought against paternalism and industrial education and demanded more control over their own institutions. They left a mark on undergraduate education and paved a way for future generations of Black college students.
World War II veterans, like their World War I predecessors, returned from the war with reinvigorated hopes for equality of opportunity, including access to a quality education. This time, however, veterans had a powerful tool to enable them to take advantage of higher education: the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the GI Bill, a federal incentive enabling veterans to go to college. According to David Sansing, "To blacks in postwar Mississippi higher education was the avenue of upward mobility, the 'yellow brick road' to the American dream." The same can be said of African Americans in other states as well. African American veterans, in particular, attempted to take advantage of the possibility of increased access to higher education. They found closed doors. White institutions denied Black veterans attendance because of segregationist practices; Black institutions had to turn many away because they could not accommodate such an influx of students. Such realities frustrated veterans who had fought for their country in the name of democracy and freedom only to return to segregation, racism, and Jim Crow. Many joined local NAACP chapters to fight for equal opportunity and became indispensable to the civil rights movement in the South.
African Americans interested in graduate or professional programs beyond the bachelor's degree were limited in their options because most Black institutions did not have graduate programs and because they were not allowed to attend white institutions. African Americans seeking advanced study had to leave the South. This continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century but came under heavy attack beginning in the 1930s. By the 1930s, the NAACP, the most visible African American rights group, had gained power, financial backing, and dedicated recruits from the few law schools that admitted African Americans. Desegregating graduate and professional programs became a major initiative for the organization's Legal Defense Fund. The fund helped many African Americans, qualified in every capacity except race to attend predominantly white southern institutions, file lawsuits against segregated institutions.
In the late 1930s, an African American student in Missouri who received a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University (a Black institution in Missouri) attempted to enroll at the University of Missouri School of Law; a law school for African Americans did not exist in the state. Rather than accept his application, the state of Missouri offered to pay his tuition and fees at a law school in one of the surrounding states that admitted African Americans, a policy similar to that of many southern white institutions. He declined, filed suit, and took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1938, the Court found in Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada that the university violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the state had not provided a "separate but equal" law school for Negroes as mandated by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Hence, the Court ordered the African American student admitted to the University of Missouri School of Law.
Other suits soon followed. The Supreme Court heard three more important cases that began to open the door to African Americans interested in advanced degrees in the South. In 1948, the Court affirmed its Gaines v. Canada decision by finding similarly in Sipuel v. Board of Regents. The University of Oklahoma School of Law had barred an African American student's attendance even though the state did not provide a separate law school for educating African Americans. Again, the Court based its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment. Two years later, African Americans brought two other cases to the Supreme Court. Both exhibited the South's rabid resistance to desegregation. Oklahoma State University, following the mandates of the Sipuel decision, admitted an African American student pursuing a doctorate in education in 1950; however, the university kept the African American student separate from the other white students, as the laws of the state required. He had his own desk in a row reserved for African American students—he was the only African American student at the time—and was assigned a specific table in the library and cafeteria. Providing more fodder for the dissolution of segregationist education policies, the Court found in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents that the "restrictions imposed upon appellant impair and inhibit his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." That white students might refuse to associate with him was irrelevant. His admission to the university and subsequent segregation flew in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment and previous Court decisions because the university effectively denied him an equal education.
Watching segregation in graduate and professional schools erode with each Supreme Court decision, Texas created a law school for African Americans to discourage their application to the University of Texas Law School. The Negro law school was separate but far from equal. It had inferior facilities; it had fewer professors, students, and library volumes; and it generally lacked the ability to provide African American students the networks and contacts with other members of the Bar necessary to ensure a successful career. During the same year as the McLaurin decision, the Supreme Court again found in favor of the appellant in Sweatt v. Painter. Though Texas had attempted to provide African Americans with a separate law school, the education they received was not substantially equal to that of the students at the University of Texas Law School. As in previous decisions, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment required he be admitted to the University of Texas.
The Black freedom struggle's momentum continued to build during the first half of the twentieth century as new organizations, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, fought for racial justice, Black enrollment in higher education continued to increase, and African American protest became more organized and collective. African Americans continued to chip away at legalized discrimination. A defining moment came in 1954, when the sweeping Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision struck down the notion of separate but equal education and affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all American citizens. The Court's decision spoke specifically to the unconstitutionality of educational discrimination and segregation, but it also had a wide impact on African American life in general: it rejuvenated Black hopes and invigorated their struggles to gain broader liberation. Though directed at primary and secondary schools, Brown also lent credence and legal support to the attempts of African Americans seeking to enter historically white postsecondary institutions. As a whole, northern white institutions had enrolled few African American students until the 1940s. In the 1950s, white institutions in the border states rescinded many of their exclusionary policies, but not until the 1960s would historically white southern institutions of higher education admit African American students, and then only one by one and after intense resistance. Regardless of region, only four thousand African American college freshmen had entered white institutions nationwide by 1954. African Americans continued to identify education as pivotal in the struggle for equal rights and freedom and considered access to white institutions vital.
African American students at white institutions in the North during the first half of the twentieth century were not quiet accommodationists. However, the tenor of the time and legalized discrimination necessarily restricted the available options for recourse. Also, their low numbers at any given campus would not allow for the types of protest occurring at Black institutions. But many, whether as individuals or groups, did resist racist behavior and policies. Their protests were sparse and often isolated events; nonetheless, the 1960s generation was not the first to resist racist treatment and demand change at white institutions. Their complaints and struggles resembled those of Black students attending white institutions in the early 1960s: numerical isolation and a complete exclusion from the official social life of the campus. During the early part of the century, Black men and women could not attend school dances, were segregated at other campus events, and were excluded from sports teams, literary societies, fraternities and sororities, and other extracurricular activities. Suffering under the same sorts of treatment, Black students in the 1960s devised a parallel and permanent social life for themselves when their numbers would allow.
Again like students of the 1960s, some students in the earlier generation of African Americans at white institutions believed they should match every injustice with resistance. In essence, the spirit of the New Negro came to white college campuses in the 1920s. As a freshman at New York University in 1927 stated, "If New York University knows that for every offense there is a strong organization ready to 'strike back' she will not be so inconsiderate in her actions. She is fully capable of paying the price each time, it is true, but she will not be willing to pay if she knows that it will be exacted every time." Acts of resistance included University of Chicago students' defying the voluntary cafeteria segregation policy and, as one of the participants described it, intentionally "plaguing [white students] by deliberately seating ourselves at a table where some white person had fled to escape eating with Negroes." As a foreshadowing of events at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, African American women at Oberlin College refused to vacate the rooms assigned to them but coveted by white students in 1919. With the help of the NAACP, the most influential rights group at the time, their campaign was successful. Black students at white campuses also focused on segregation in their campus-town communities. One example of many is the University of Michigan's Negro-Caucasian Club's sit-in protest of segregated restaurants in Ann Arbor. Throughout the 1950s, many African American students (as well as white students) followed this path and concentrated their protest efforts on the surrounding communities rather than on the university itself.
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Excerpted from Black Power on Campus by JOY ANN WILLIAMSON. Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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