On the American Black Campus

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On the American Black CampusIBRAM ROGERS

In the last forty years, scholars and activists have consistently argued

and reported on the centrality of college students in the global struggles

of 1968. Almost everywhere there were colleges, students were

protesting in Ethiopia, Congo, Senegal, Jamaica, Pakistan, WestGermany, Poland, Japan, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, France, Mexico,

Venezuela, and the United States. Mark Edelman Boren euphemisti-

cally referred to this moment as the ‘‘year of the student.’’ In the United

States, the 1968 student movement has been compartmentalized into

two struggles: one black, one white. Of all of the student struggles that

gripped the global order, it can be argued that the black student

struggle in America in 1968 was one of the more successful in achieving

its aims—diversifying the academy. There is not, however, a single

study on the activities of American black students in the mass of studies

on student struggles in 1968. This essay, a topical and narrativeoverview of the Black Campus Movement in 1968, fills that void in the

literature.

The Black Campus Movement was the protracted struggle of black

students who demanded, and sometimes demonstrated for, a series

of reforms on campuses across America, beginning in the spring of 1965

and ending in the fall of 1972. It was the most significant racial reform

movement in American higher education history. Many of the present

concepts and manifestations of diversity and multiculturalism in

American higher education—from the discipline of African-American

Studies to the legions of black students, administrators, and profes-

sors—emerged from this effort. It is not an overstatement to say that

nearly every element of blackness—from people to programs to

courses—in American higher education in the twenty-first century

owes its existence to thousands of black students who were suspended,

expelled, arrested, imprisoned, exiled, injured, and/or killed waging the

Black Campus Movement.

In the mid-1960s, a newly increased crop of black students at

traditionally white institutions (TWIs) and historically black colleges

Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 21:464–473

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online

DOI: 10.1080/10402650903323504

464



and universities (HBCUs) turned its attention away from off-campus

issues like segregation, and increasingly toward on-campus matters,

specifically the absence of black people, programs, facilities, and

courses. These black student nationalists, who were over studentgovernments at HBCUs and organized Black Student Unions (BSUs)

at TWIs, first started advocating reforms through traditional avenues.

But when those became congested, black students launched a series of

protests. The height of these protests was the spring of 1969, when more

than 290 protests disrupted over 200 American institutions. But like a

mountain climber, a social movement cannot reach its peak unless the

conditions are ripe. The events of the Black Campus Movement in 1968

were decisive in creating those conditions.

Black students organized BSUs and assumed control of student

governments at an unprecedented rate in 1968. Their major demandthat year (as it would be for the entire Black Campus Movement) was

the establishment of Black Studies—in the form of courses, inter-

departmental programs, or autonomous departments. The BSU at

California’s San Francisco State College (SF State) first conceived of

the need for Black Studies, the study of people of African descent from

their perspective for their advancement, in the fall of 1966. By the

spring of 1968, the SF State BSU was one of several groups urging

colleges to institutionalize it. On April 16, 1968, Nathan Hare, the

director of the SF State Black Studies program, submitted ‘‘A

Conceptual Proposal for a Department of Black Studies,’’ the first of many proposals that circulated among black campus activists. Some SF

State professors and administrators, fearful of its nationalistic and

revolutionary sentiments, purposefully stalled the institutionalization of

Black Studies. This stalling emerged on a national level, which caused

legions of black students to end their use of traditional channels, by the

fall of 1968, and particularly the spring of 1969, protests were their chief

mode of producing change.

In the spring of 1968, the attention of most black students was on

reforming the college campus. Yet, at historically black South CarolinaState College, the students continued their now two-year crusade to

desegregate a nearby bowling alley. In a demonstration on February 8,

1968, students had built a huge bonfire on campus, separating

themselves from hundreds of police officers. As Henry Smith, a tall

sophomore, standing in front of the crowd attempted to put something

into the fire, the cops began shooting their shotguns. Three students—

Smith and Samuel Hammond, both SC State students, and Delano

Middleton, a local high school student—were killed and at least thirty-

four were wounded. Upon hearing of the Orangeburg Massacre, as it

was called, a black volcano of furor erupted across America. No group

THE AMERICAN BLACK CAMPUS 465



was more perturbed than black students. Demanding revenge, H. Rap

Brown, a Black Power leader, declared, ‘‘If it takes twenty to thirty

million Blacks to tear up the country, we’ll do it.’’

Most of the black campus activists did not tear up the country. The

Orangeburg Massacre did, however, tear up many passive minds,

and activist ones were formed in their stead. It was the first of two

tragic events that spring of 1968 that pushed throngs of black students

to the left and set the stage for the momentous spring of 1969. Howard

University in Washington, D.C. became the epicenter for protest in

reaction to the killings at South Carolina State. Participating students

created and distributed a pamphlet entitled the ‘‘Orangeburg

Ultimatum.’’ It was the first major effort of HBCU campus activists

to insist on a Black University—geared openly to the promotion andadvancement of African-American culture and their communities,

which would replace what the students’ referred to as Negro

Universities that were oriented clandestinely toward the furthering of

white society and culture. The reactions like those students at Howard

University did not halt or deter the advance of state-sanctioned

violence. Two weeks after the Orangeburg Massacre, Mississippi police

wounded six black students at Alcorn A&M College when they fired

into a crowd of protesters. The officers in Mississippi and South

Carolina never had to pay for the killing and wounding of students in

criminal or civil court. American higher education would, however,through the might of black campus activism.

In March 1968, at Connecticut’s Yale University and Indiana

University, black students staged a two-day boycott and marched on

the president’s office, respectively, while Howard students intensified

their struggle to build a Black University. On March 20, some twelve

hundred students took over Howard’s administration building. A few

days later, the administration and trustees yielded to most of their

demands, resulting in the students exiting the building. Campus

activists at other HBCUs were inspired to activate themselves by the

Orangeburg Massacre and the nationally publicized Howard demon-

stration. Students demonstrated in March and April 1968 for their

‘‘Negro’’ universities to be reformed into ‘‘Black’’ universities at

Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute,

Tennessee’s Fisk University, Maryland’s Morgan State College and

Bowie State College, Virginia State College, and Virginia Union

University.

Not even two months after the massive jolt from the Orangeburg

Massacre, another colossal ram smashed into the Black Campus

Movement when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of

466 IBRAM ROGERS



1968. The violent murder of a nonviolent king of social justice hastened

and intensified the global rebellion in 1968—but probably nowhere as

fiercely as the black student revolt against the American academy. The

death of King was like a magnet that drew black students together,according to James Palcic. Black students held memorial services on

many campuses, like at Cornell, where one black student exclaimed,

‘‘When Martin Luther King died, nonviolence died, baby!’’ They

organized BSUs and/or issued demands at dozens of colleges. Some of

these institutions quickly gave in. Others rejected some or all of the

demands, resulting in black students across America turning to protests

in the fall of 1968, and more so in the spring of 1969.

Some did not wait until the fall to protest. Black campus activists

in the first week after King’s death struck the academy with the first

concerted and widespread blow for diversity in American highereducation history. During the middle two weeks, activism slowed, as

black students gave liberal college officials a chance to satiate the

students and their own guilt. Indiana’s Notre Dame University,

University of Arizona, University of San Francisco, University

Southern California, New York’s Colgate University and St. John’s

University, University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin,

Morehouse College in Georgia, Saint Joseph’s College in

Pennsylvania, Massachusetts’ Bowdoin College, University of Rhode

Island, University of Minnesota, and New York University all

established scholarships and fellowships for black students in memoryof King. The academy tried to make amends for a hundred years of

exclusion. But it was too little too late. In late April, the Black Campus

Movement picked up speed with a protest at one of the academy’s

sentinels, Columbia University in New York.

To compel Columbia to stop the construction of a university

gymnasium in the nearby black community, black and white students

seized Hamilton Hall. Early the next morning of April 24, 1968, black

students told the white students to vacate the hall. The black students

wanted to make it clear they were taking up for the black community inHarlem, notes Stefan Bradley. The hundreds of white students filed out

of Hamilton Hall and in the coming days, groups of white students

took over four other campus buildings to protest against the

gymnasium or other issues. Columbia suspended the construction of

the gym, but the black students wanted it terminated. On April 30, after

seven days of negotiations, the administration brought in one thousand

officers who cleared out the buildings. The internationally reported

actions of these students galvanized the 1968 global student rebellion,

and the Columbia protest has since been championed as one of the

year’s signature protests. The centrality of the widely reported efforts of




Columbia’s black students roused black campus activists across

America. After Columbia, black students knew the time to change

the academy was upon them.

In late April 1968, black campus activists answered the call of history

across the United States and demanded a more relevant educational

experience at Trinity College in Connecticut, Boston University, New

York’s Long Island University, New York City Technical College, and

Ohio State University. In early May 1968, Illinois’s Northwestern

University received a list ordering it to increase its black student

enrollment and financial aid, erect a black dormitory and Black Studies

department, and institutionalize black student participation in decisions

affecting black students. On May 3, 1968, 105 of the university’s 124

black students strolled into the university’s Finance Building as itopened at 7:45 a.m. and remained for the rest of the day. An agreement

was reached the next day, and the black students left with their

demands met. Like the Columbia protest, the successful Northwestern

affair saturated headlines and gave black students the confidence that

they too could win their demands through activism.

Yale’s black students decided against social combat to win a Black

Studies program, however, and in May 1968, organized the first major

symposium on Black Studies. More than one hundred representatives

from thirty-five colleges heard passionate demands and logically

conceived rationales for Black Studies. And, during the symposium, aYale committee became one of the first in the United States to

recommend a divisional major in Afro-American Studies, ultimately

approved in December 1968. The Yale BSU’s choice to work through

traditional channels proved successful. But in May 1968, other BSUs

chose to change the prevailing racist norms through protests at the

University of Chicago, University of Miami, Wisconsin’s Marquette

University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Washington,

Brooklyn College, Pennsylvania’s Cheyney State College, and Delaware

State College.

Additionally, three hundred black and white students in May 1968

seized the administration building at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison in one of the first major campaigns to force an American

university to divest from apartheid South Africa, which became the

major issue of activism among black students in the United States in

late 1970s and early 1980s. Black student-athletes, according to Harry

Edwards, were facing ‘‘brutally dehumanizing, educational and athletic

environments,’’ and also joined the fray of activism in the spring of

1968 at Oklahoma City University, Washington State University,

University of California, Berkeley, California’s San Fernando Valley

468 IBRAM ROGERS



State, New York’s University of Niagara, University of Texas at El

Paso, Brigham Young University in Utah, Michigan State University,

Western Michigan University, and Iowa State University. In all, the

revolt of the black athlete for better college experiences gripped thirty-five campuses in the spring and summer of 1968. More generally, Black

campus activists disturbed more than 150 campuses during the 1967–

1968 academic year, with the vast majority of protests occurring after

King’s death.

Critics and supporters of the Black Campus Movement voiced their

opinions that summer of 1968. Black students did not have much

time to listen. They were too focused on and politicized by the white

backlash from educators, newspapers, and politicians who were passing

measures to curb their activism, the Black Power Movement in theUnited States, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June, and the

police brutality in August at the American Democratic (Party) National

Convention in Chicago. Black campus activists did engage in a few

reformative acts that summer 1968. In a press conference in

Washington, D.C. in June, HBCU student newspaper editors called

for a continued drive to create Black universities, and in August, Black

students demonstrated at California State University, Los Angeles and

Chicago City College. Those student groups were successful in winning

reforms, but those were small victories.

An even larger victory for the Black Campus Movementshowcased that summer when the New York Times reported that many

educators had finally been forced to conclude that the traditional

American curriculum was not properly preparing ‘‘either black or white

students to live in a pluralistic society.’’ There was also substantial

agreement ‘‘among students and professional educators’’ that higher

education, in order to solve its problems, must introduce black courses,

and materials on the black experience in all areas of the curriculum.

Several colleges opened Black Studies programs in the fall of 1968 and

had a record number of black students, among other relevant changes.

This new critical mass was primed to force even more reforms. As one

black student told the New York Times, ‘‘When there were just a

handful of us here, we felt isolated and defenseless in a white world, so

we just went along. But with more black kids coming in each year,

we’ve started getting together and we have a lot more confidence.’’

Before classes began that fall, some administrators took precau-

tions against the possibility of protests. Most were surprised about the

relatively low levels of black campus activism in September 1968, but it

picked up in early October at Chicago’s Crane Junior College,

Wesleyan College in Connecticut, and University of California, Santa




Barbara. Meanwhile, some American black athletes were boycotting

the 1968 Olympics Games to dramatize the oppression of black people.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, a star center at the University of California, Los

Angeles (UCLA), headlined the boycotters in stature. In his auto-biography, he notes he ‘‘felt no part of the country and had no desire to

help it look good.’’ Some black athletes attended the games and staged

protests there. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, students at California’s

San Jose State College, after winning the gold and bronze medals,

respectively, on October 16, 1968, stepped barefooted with black socks

representing black poverty onto the medal stand and into history.

Smith wore a black scarf signifying black pride, and Carlos wore a

necklace of beads for blacks who had suffered at the hands of white

supremacy. With the Star Spangled Banner playing, the two sprinters

lowered their heads, balled up their fists covered with black gloves, andshot them up in the air for what became known as the Black Power

salute. ‘‘We are black and we are proud of being black,’’ said Smith at a

press conference after the event. ‘‘Black America will understand what

we did tonight.’’

Black America understood, and no segment more than their peers

in college. Resembling the feelings of thousands of black campus

activists, Abdul-Jabbar ‘‘was fiercely proud’’ of Carlos and Smith

‘‘when they made their black-gloved, victory-stand power salute.’’

Inspired, black college athletes intensified their revolt in the fall of 1968

at Nevada Southern University, and San Jose State, and by thebeginning of November, the movement to diversify the academy in

general had hit its stride. On November 4, the BSU at California’s San

Fernando Valley State took over the fifth floor of the administration

building until Acting President Paul Blomgren signed its list of

demands for a Black Studies department, more black students, and

the disarming of campus police, among others.

T

wo days later, another BSU at a California college began a

demonstration. But it would not end as quickly. The SF State BSU,after two years of unsuccessfully traversing traditional channels for a

Black Studies department, decided that if black students could not

receive a relevant education, then nobody would. On November 6, they

initiated what would become a four-and-a-half month student strike—

the longest in American higher education history. By building

relationships and coalescing with other progressive student groups,

politicizing students, obtaining the backing of the Bay Area black

community, and taking advantage of police repression of student

strikers, the SF State BSU was able to compel the majority of the

college’s 18,000 students to not attend classes for almost five months.

470 IBRAM ROGERS



The SF State student strike dominated news, exhilarating and

politicizing black students across America with its magnitude. If a

couple hundred black students could effectively shut down an almost

20,000-student college for more than four months, then the possibilitiesfor black student activism were endless, Black campus activists

reasoned, as they pulled themselves toward the climax of their

movement.

In late November, when the SF State strike was strengthening,

students at Howard held a ‘‘Towards a Black University’’ conference.

The conference’s participants urged a nationwide effort to make

HBCUs more ‘‘relevant to the Black community.’’ The urging came to

fruition, as in late November and early December 1968; Black campus

activists waged protests for more relevant HBCUs at Tennessee’s

Lemoyne-Owen College, Pennsylvania’s Cheyney State College,Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, Maryland’s Coppin State College,

and at the Atlanta University Center. Many of the HBCU adminis-

trators resisted change, forcing the black students to again step up their

level of protests in the spring of 1969. Black students at traditionally

white colleges also jumped on the wave of the black campus movement

sweeping America in late November and December 1968, which would

crash into the heart of the academy in the spring of 1969. They

demanded reforms and organized and waged demonstrations at the

University of California, San Francisco, Minnesota’s St. Cloud State

College, Ohio’s Kent State University, West Virginia’s Bluefield StateCollege, Arizona State University, California State University—

Hayward, New York’s Fordham University, Rhode Island’s Brown

University, Northern Michigan University, Massachusetts’ Radcliffe

College, Portland’s Reed College, San Mateo College and Monterey

Peninsula College in California, Boston’s Grahm Junior College,

Cornell University, Washington University in Missouri, and Wisconsin

State University, Oshkosh.

Black campus activists were concerned with the total reconstitu-

tion of the Eurocentric American academy. They were up against ageneration of conservative, white, and middle-aged trustees generally

opposed to major adjustments and conceding any academic space

without a fight. Black students were up to the challenge and showed an

intense and passionate determination to reorient higher education. That

intensity, that passion, that determination was raised to an unprece-

dented level in 1968 as the struggle closed in on its climax. Since 1965,

Black campus activists had slowly moved toward that apex in their

groundbreaking trek. Due to the politicizing influences of the

Orangeburg Massacre, the assassination of King, and the Black

Power salute at the Olympics, the models of activism at Howard,




Columbia, Northwestern, and SF State, throughout 1968, Black

students organized, demanded, and protested like never before for a

more relevant college experience. As the year was about to end in early

December 1968, Robert Smith, the former president of SF State, saidAmerican higher education ‘‘is at a serious and crucial turning-point.’’

With the momentum they generated in 1968, black campus activists

forced the American academy to turn the corner toward diversity in the

spring of 1969. And, they compelled it to never look back.

In a larger sense, one can view the global struggle of 1968 as the

launch of a worldwide and protracted campaign that has since sought

to undermine all forms of cultural, economic, political, and social

imperialism. Many of the scholarly participants in the United States

have been ideologically and physically positioned in what Fabio Rojas

termed ‘‘oppositional space’’ in American higher education. Thisideological and physical space was initially erected on a massive scale

by the Black Campus Movement. With the tools and strength they

gained in 1968, black campus activists powerfully carved out some

oppositional space in the subsequent years, and with other groups

joining the fray, more space has continued to be created over the last

four decades for the growing intellectual promotion of peace, equality,

and self-determination.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem and Peter Knobler. 1983. Giant Steps. New York: Bantam Books.

Anthony, Earl. 1971. The Time of the Furnaces: A Case Study of Black Student Revolt . New York:

The Dial Press.

Barlow, William and Peter Shapiro. 1971. An End to Silence: The San Francisco State College

Student Movement in the ’60s. New York: Pegasus.

Bell, Daniel Bell. 1969. ‘‘Columbia and the New Left,’’ in James McEvoy and Abraham Miller

(eds.), Black Power and Student Rebellion. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Boren, Mark Edelman. 2001. Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject . New York:

Routledge.

Bradley, Stefan Bradley. 2008. ‘‘‘This is Harlem Heights’: Black Student Power and the 1968

Columbia University Rebellion.’’ Afro-Americans in New York Life and History. (January): 99–

122.Downs, Donald Alexander. 1999. Cornell’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University .

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Edwards, Harry.1970. Black Students. New York: The Free Press.

Glasker, Wayne. 2002. Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the

University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Karagueuzian, Dikran. 1971. Blow It Up!: The Black Student Revolt at San Francisco State and the

Emergence of Dr. Hayakawa. Boston, MA: Gambit.

McCormick, Richard P. 1990. The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers. New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Nelson, Jackson. 1970. The Orangeburg Massacre. New York: World Publishing Company.

Palcic, James Louis. 1979. ‘‘The History of the Black Student Union at Florida State University’’

(Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University).

472 IBRAM ROGERS



Peterson, Richard E. 1968. The Scope of Organized Student Protest in 1967–1968. Princeton, NJ:

Educational Testing Service.

Robinson, Armstead L., Craig C. Foster, and Donald H. Ogilvie (eds.). 1969. Black Studies in the

University: A Symposium. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rojas, Fabio. 2007. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became

an Academic Discipline. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.

Smith, Tommie and David Steele. 2007. Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith.

Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Turner, Jeffrey Alan. 2000. ‘‘Conscious and Conflict: Patterns in the History of Student Activism

on Southern College Campuses, 1960–1970’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University).

Williamson, Joy Ann. 2003. Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Ibram Rogers is an assistant professor of African American History at SUNY College at Oneonta

in the departments of African & Latino Studies and History. His current research, primarily on the

American mid-century Black Power Movement, has been published in the Journal of Social

History, Phoebe: Gender & Cultural Critiques, the Journal of Pan-African Studies, and the Journal

of Black Studies. E-mail: [email protected]




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