Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION IN MAY 1970, Jerry Rubin, the infamous Yippie activist, delivered a speech at the University of Alabama. By then, Rubin was a national figure, admired by some, reviled by others. The University of Alabama also had claims on the national consciousness—as the scene of the segregationist Governor George C. Wallace’s audacious 1963 attempt to block the school’s integration and as the home of the Crimson Tide, Bear Bryant’s football powerhouse. Neither, however , meant much to campus progressives who rejected hidebound traditions and sought to move the university and the state toward their vision of racial progress —those, in short, who envisioned the emergence of a new ’Bama. To activist students, the fact that someone of Rubin’s renown had come to Tuscaloosa symbolized the dawning of a new era. “Just his presence meant something,” recalled Mike O’Bannon, at the time an undergraduate psychology major and campus activist. “To a lot of people it meant that we had, in a lot of ways, arrived .” Alabama activists, according to O’Bannon, believed Rubin’s Tuscaloosa appearance said to the rest of the country, “Look, the University of Alabama is part of this whole thing.” In May 1970, a reporter for Time magazine wrote, “Consider the University of Alabama, which has long been a bastion of idolized athletes and lionized coaches, pretty coeds, fervent fraternity men and racism. Today, Alabama is aroused—and politicized.”1 The Time reporter’s assessment of ’Bama’s student culture was true as far as it went. Football, frats, and belles had long dominated student life. And, in fact, the campus political culture had undergone a significant transformation, making space for new forms of dissent. But the university’s politicization—its status as a battleground for conflict over serious political ideas—was nothing new. Since at least 1956, when rioting by segregationist students and community members blocked the attempted entrance of an African American student, the campus had been politicized, though in ways that varied from the examples set by “Berkeley, say, or Cornell, or Columbia”2 —schools that seemed to provide the model the Time reporter used to understand the emergence of “aggressive moderates” at the University of Alabama and similar places. 2 INTRODUCTION To the extent that white students on southern campuses now vigorously debated the full range of issues—from American policy in Southeast Asia to racism at home—that development could be attributed to the activism of black students on other southern campuses a decade earlier. In 1960, students on the region’s historically black campuses organized nonviolent direct-action campaigns against segregated public establishments. The resulting crusade, as much as any other phenomenon, generated a student movement that was more commonly represented by images from the University of California’s Berkeley campus in 1964 and Columbia University in 1968. By the late 1960s, American students had become a force in politics and American society, engaged in national and international issues as well as in an effort to remake their campuses. Southern students were a part of this phenomenon—part of the “sixties generation ”—but were no longer helping to set the tone for student political mobilization . Time’s treatment of student activism at ’Bama in 1970 indicated a prevailing sense of what student activism meant and where it was expected. And as O’Bannon’s comments suggested, even southern student activists sometimes had difficulty seeing themselves as “part of this whole thing.” Where do the South and its students fit in the story of the 1960s student movement? Sitting In and Speaking Out studies a dramatic decade that began with a student-led assault on segregation and ended with demonstrations over the war in Southeast Asia. It tells the story of southern black and white kids confronting social, political, and cultural issues and participating in a movement that redefined southern and American society. It is also the story of limits, of a region whose hostility to dissent presented fundamental obstacles to student political mobilization and of students’ efforts not only to mobilize despite those obstacles but also to destroy the obstacles themselves. Student activism during the 1960s has continued to generate controversy. Politicians and commentators have labeled 1960s student protest a source of everything from “political correctness” and “illiberal education” to the destruction of an American Left that formerly united labor and the academy. The images that inform these interpretations, however, are often drawn from a few highly publicized campuses and national organizations. Though television relayed...