Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era

2. The Late 1960s and Early 1970s: Coming to Terms with Racial Crisis

21 2 The Late 1960s and Early 1970s COMING TO TERMS WITH RACIAL CRISIS The decade of the 1960s found the Civil Rights Movement turning in an increasingly urgent and confrontational direction. Sociologists and CUNY Open Admissions researchers David E. Lavin and David Hyllegard have argued that this period witnessed “increasing militancy [within] the civil rights movement. Across the country, civil disobedience, strident demonstrations , and riots had riveted national attention on various issues of racial inequality. A developing sense of urgency about equal opportunity was expressed in the enactment of such ‘great society’ programs as Head Start and the ‘war on poverty’” (8).1 Accompanying this larger shift in the intensity and tactics of protest on the part of race-conscious civil rights activists was a focus on college and university campuses as sites of political protests and change: demonstrations and riots on the Columbia campus in 1968 were motivated in large part by dissatisfaction with race relations on the campus and with the surrounding community of Harlem (Boren 36); demonstrations at Cornell University erupted after a long buildup of racial tension punctuated by the burning of a cross in front of a black dormitory (Downs 162); and unrest at South Carolina State College began with dissatisfaction 22 The Late 1960s and Early 1970s over segregation in higher education and the failure of the institution to develop a black-centered curriculum (Boren 172). These protests and demonstrations sparked widespread concern across the nation that a “racial crisis” was brewing within U.S. higher education— a point stressed within accounts of high-risk development from the time period. One especially vivid demonstration of this was the 1970 report of the Nixon-appointed President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, a commission established “in the wake of the great tragedies at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State College in Mississippi” to facilitate “rational discussion of the subject of campus unrest” (i). This report argued that contemporary campus unrest had a number of important causes, including “war, racial injustice, and the [nature of] the university itself” (4). However, it stressed that a root cause of this unrest was racism, “especially against Blacks but in some parts of the country equally cruel in its effect upon Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities” (1/26). It claimed, in fact, that student discontent with this white racism had “no parallel in the history of the nation” (1), as it revealed ugly “divisions in American society as deep as any since the Civil War” (1). The report also warned that, in the midst of this crisis, “militants” (1) of many racial backgrounds were directing their discontent against the mainstream university’s “admissions policies, its ‘white-oriented’ curriculum, and its overwhelmingly white teaching staff” (1), while at the same time “asserting the claims of their communities upon the resources, curriculum, admissions policies, and concern of the university ” (1/37). The report finally concluded that, given the “gravity of the racial crisis” (3/14) evident at the time, the entire higher-educational status quo had been placed in jeopardy: “what is at stake is the stability of our social order, the fulfillment of the American promise, and the realization of American possibility” (3/5). Importantly, however, the President’s Commission report also argued that steps could be taken by the federal government to address this looming racial crisis directly. One of these steps was to support the important work of predominantly black institutions: “Predominantly Black institutions are regarded by the young Blacks and their leaders as the major resource related to their communities and their people, capable of developing and providing the new programs, new research and knowledge, and new kinds of public services that the nation now needs in coming to grips with its historic race 23 The Late 1960s and Early 1970s problem” (3/35). Another crucial step was to support the development of high-risk programs within mainstream predominantly white colleges and universities: “We support the continuing efforts of formerly all-white universities to recruit Black, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and other minority students, and we urge that adequate government-sponsored student aid be made available to them. We recommend that in the process of becoming more representative of the society at large, universities make the adjustments necessary to permit those from minority backgrounds to take maximum advantage of their university experience” (R-7). Support of these kinds would...