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

1. Black Youth Forcing Change

7 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 (sel- 8 Black Power on Campus dom 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.1 These northern white attitudes revealed the tensions surrounding race relations before and after the Civil War. Accepting African American applicants terri fied 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.2 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.3 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 Black Youth Forcing Change 9 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...