Naming Our Own and Claiming Black Womanhood: The Spelman College Protest of 1976

The Spelman woman has been stereotyped as the “Southern Belle” too long. She has been portrayed as the middle-class, snobbish woman of the “yard.” Let me say that the majority of the Spelman women are “down-to-earth” and are attempting to deal with their many setbacks and hang-ups from a liberated, Black woman’s view.¹

— Deborah Bolden, Spelman College Student 1976

I believe … the future of Spelman is unpredictable because it is dependent on so many unknown variables. For example, there is the question of Spelman’s next president. Will the next president be man or woman? And will he(she) continue to support Spelman’s somewhat conservative reputation or … be more liberal. However, I feel the future of Spelman also depends … on its students … Observing [participation in] the [full employment] march. Spelman is rapidly becoming a conscious-raising experience for Black women.²

— Joyce Winters, Spelman College Student 1976

From april 22 to april 23, 1976, the young black students, faculty, and staff at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, bravely protested the institution’s failure to hire a Black woman president in its ninety-five years of existence. This courageous act continued the legacy of the national and international Black student movements of the 1960s and 1970s as these young Black women challenged the College’s paternalistic and conservative traditions in order to voice their opinions and initiate structural change. Demonstrating the attributes of “free thinking” Black women, the students allied with campus supporters to thwart traditions that contradicted or silenced/erased their Black womanhood. The struggle of these students, supporting faculty and staff for self-realization as free-thinking black women was inextricably tied to their demand for a Black female president.

The 1976 Spelman student protests are largely unheralded and omitted from the history of student protests of the 1970s, which cannot be considered complete without including this extraordinary narrative. Keepers of historical memory are charged to continually develop and rewrite history as they uncover new information. Therefore, Black history demands the inclusion of holistic narratives for those seeking a medium for political, cultural, and social change. This article contends that the significance of this little-known 1976 protest history at Spelman College is the intrinsic link to the eventual 1987 appointment of Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Spelman’s first Black woman president. Therefore, the arguments guiding this article are threefold: (1) this historic episode of the Black student movement in the 1970s has been largely ignored and forgotten; (2) Black students, staff, and faculty objected to Spelman’s failure to appoint a Black female president; and (3) the failure to have even one Black female president contradicted the Spelman College image and mission of cultivating Black womanhood independent of patriarchal influence.

Spelman College and the legacy of Black women presidents at HBCUs owe a debt of gratitude to the radical activities of proactive students, faculty, and staff who struggled against structural inequity.³ This community of change agents chose to harness their progressive concepts of Black womanhood to mobilize and garner support for Black female leadership in general and, more specifically, at Spelman College. Thus, this account affirms the activities of the 1976 Spelman Family within a historical arc of radical Black women’s activism.⁴ The Spelman College 1976 protest activities reflect and uphold the traditions of Black women activists who were leaders, participants, and supporters of the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, international women’s liberation movements, and the anticolonial struggles in Africa and Latin America.

Preface to Protest: Black Power and Black Students

Black women of the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s were leaders, supporters, organizers, and linchpins in the overall fight to gain full citizenship and human recognition in United States’ political and social systems. Black women such as Ella Baker, Jewel Mazique, Gloria Richardson, Ethel Minor, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Gwen Patton, and countless others gave the Movement their lives in order to advocate for Black folks’ overdue freedom.^5...