Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75

6. A Lasting Influence

134 6 A Lasting Influence By the mid-1970s, Black student attempts to use Black Power ideology and principles to reform the University of Illinois bore fruit and changed the campus permanently. Their efforts had increased Black student enrollment and led to the creation of the Afro-American Studies and Research Program and the Afro-American Cultural Program. Moreover, Black students were able to force the university administration into more aggressive action on other issues, such as creating a commission to hear Black student grievances, hiring Black faculty, reexamining hiring policies for university staff, and devising outreach programs to the Champaign-Urbana community.1 The university was not unconcerned with such issues prior to Black student demands, but the nature of the demands and the manner in which Black students pursued them produced very different results.2 In a matter of a few years, primarily between 1969 and 1971, Black students helped precipitate institutional changes that improved the quality of education and campus life for all students. By 1974, the university administration had firmly entrenched some of the reforms in the university structure. Black students were proud of their accomplishments, but as the decade wore on various factors began to weigh heavily on them and hastened the decline of the Black student movement. In large part, the decline paralleled the demise of the Black Power movement. In both their writings and in oral interviews, Black students at Illinois connected themselves to Black Power and understood their demands and purpose as an integral component of that struggle. By the early 1970s, the Black Power movement and its most visible supporters had come under heavy attack from A Lasting Influence 135 government agencies and programs and faced increasingly violent repression .3 Inside the movement, the loss of a collective purpose, factional disputes , and competition for leadership exacerbated its decline.4 The Black student movement at Illinois—as well as at other campuses—suffered a similar fate. As the Black Power movement gained strength, Black students brought Black Power principles to campus and gained power inside the university. With its decline and dissolution, Black Power’s influence faded, as did student participation in the Black student movement. Black students at Illinois reflected on the decline of their own movement .5 In a 1975 article printed in the Illinois yearbook, Illio, entitled “Black Activism Deactivates,” the author identified group jealousies, internal conflicts, and petty difference as important factors.6 Black students had never been a completely unified group, but multiplying group differences fractured the Black student community. In the late 1960s, BSA was the primary Black organization on campus other than Black fraternities and sororities. By 1975, more than thirty different organizations exclusively serving Black students existed. As graduate and professional students formed their own organizations, BSA became an explicitly undergraduate organization. The Black law students were the first to secede from BSA and form the Black Law Students Association in 1970. Black graduate students followed a short time later by transforming the Black Graduate Committee of BSA into the Black Graduate Student Association . BSA’s undergraduate membership splintered into organizations housed in the different residence halls across campus. In 1973, Black students at the Pennsylvania Avenue Residence Hall formed their own organization , the Black Student Committee at P.A.R., later renamed Salongo (strong in Kiswahili). Other groups of Black students followed and created their own residence hall governments with Kiswahili names.7 The new governments fell under the umbrella of the newly created Central Black Student Union. Though descendants of BSA, the hall governments became much more social than political. The emergence of different residence hall governments was partly a reaction to the reorientation of BSA objectives and style, which further alienated participants and fractionalized the Black student population. In 1972, BSA renamed itself the Coalition of Afrikan People and shifted its focus to include more nonstudent and nonuniversity issues, such as independence movements in Africa and the creation of an educational facility for Black north Champaign residents called the Harambee Institute .8 Explaining the change, members of the Coalition of Afrikan People declared, “The name BSA was felt too restrictive and not encompassing the many facets of Black people.”9 Robert Harris, an assistant professor 136 Black Power on Campus of history at the time, hypothesized that the Coalition of Afrikan People alienated potential members by focusing on Pan-Africanist ideology “at a time...