Copyright 2008

Craig Collisson

The Fight to Legitimize Blackness: How Black Students Changed the University

Craig Collisson

A dissertation
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Doctor of Philosophy

University of Washington
2008

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Department of History

University of Washington
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Craig Collisson

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and that any and all revisions required by the final
examining committee have been made.
Chair of the Supervisory Committee:

Quintard Taylor
Reading Committee:

Quintard Taylor

James Gregory

Linda Nash

UMI Number: 3328385

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Collisson, Craig

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University of Washington
Abstract
The Fight to Legitimize Blackness: How Black Students Changed the University
Craig Collisson
Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Professor Quintard Taylor
History
My dissertation examines the black student protest movement at white
universities in the late 1960s, with a specific focus on the University of California at
Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and the University of Texas at Austin. I
argue that these protests marked a new relationship between black students and white
institutions. Blacks demanded that the university provide space, resources, and tools
where blacks could gain the skills and knowledge needed to improve the impoverished
conditions of black communities. Using confrontational and theatrical protest tactics,
Black Student Unions were successful in creating new institutional structures,
ideologies, and bureaucracies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Page
1

Chapter One: Recasting Blackness: Black Student Unions, Black Protest, and Black
Identity
19
Chapter Two: Conditional Coalitions: BSUs and Their Relationship with Black
Athletes, Leftists, and Minority Student Groups

62

Chapter Three: The Making of Black Studies: Black Activists, University

Administrators, and the Rise of Multiculturalism on College Campuses

Ill

Chapter Four: Scholars in Struggle: The Faculty Development Program

at UCLA

172

Chapter Five: The Strange Career of Affirmative Action at the University of Texas
at Austin

218

Conclusion

271

Bibliography

282

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Every dissertation contains the contributions of dozens of individuals outside of

the author and this project is no exception. I am grateful for financial contributions
from the Department of History at the University of Washington, in particular, the
Rondeau Evans Dissertation Fellowship. I would like to thank the archivists at the
University of Washington and the University of Texas' Center for American History for
their support of this project. At UCLA, Charlotte Brown spent hours making certain I
had not missed any important collections or folders. My committee, Quintard Taylor,
Jim Gregory, and Linda Nash provided insightful comments and criticism and
encouraged my work throughout my entire graduate career.
A number of fellow history graduate students supported me in and out of the
classroom. Thanks to Jen Price, Brian Schefke, Juli Zurovec, Matt Sneddon, Mike
Quinn, and all those who made Smith Ten parties, College Inn trivia nights, and Sunset
Bowl excursions so memorable. Brian Casserly helped sustain me with his sarcasm and
willingness to discuss teaching philosophies and Susan Bragg willingly shared her
expertise on African American history. Betsy Crouch, Vjeran Pavlakovic, and Rory
Barnes were both housemates and friends who broadened my life by introducing me to
new activities and ideas.
When I married Elizabeth Escobedo during graduate school I gained a new
family. Margaret Cochran and Joe and Nancy Escobedo remained supportive of this
project, even as it extended longer than anticipated. Chris, Karin, and Clay Collisson
provided a welcome diversion while visiting Seattle where I endured my brother's notso-subtle teasing of my permanent graduate student status. Pets are part of one's
family, and Baxter and Sophie provided companionship during long days of writing.
My parents, Roger and Linda Collisson, have steadfastly supported me through all my
life's journeys and I love them very much.
ii

I would also like to thank all the men and women who allowed me to interview
them about their role in changing the university. Without their courage there would be
no story to tell.
Finally, this work might never have come to fruition without the support of my
wife and my love Liz Escobedo. She read countless drafts, remained positive in the
face of adversity, and listened to me try to explain exactly what I was arguing. She is
my companion through the good times and the difficult times and I am grateful for her
support and love.

iii

1
Introduction
During the summer of 1968, Daniel Johnson, a Black Students' Union (BSU)
leader at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), recruited students for the
High Potential Program (HPP), a project designed to increase minority enrollment at
UCLA. Johnson believed that the black community leaders who emerged in post-Watts
Los Angeles needed the legitimacy and skills provided by a college degree to maintain
their leadership status. To that end he convinced key Black Panther leaders, including
Elaine Brown, Bunchy Carter, and John Huggins, to attend UCLA as a part of the High
Potential Program. As a place where "elites could meet the elites of other cultures," the
HPP included fifty black and fifty Latino students in its first year.1 Further up the West
Coast, at the University of Washington (UW), Black Student Union leaders, including
Larry Gossett, also spent the summer recruiting minority students for a program similar
to the HPP. The Special Education Program (SEP) was one of the many concessions
won by the BSU during a confrontation with the UW's administration at the end of the
1967-68 school year. With high school classes no longer in session, BSU members
spent the summer recruiting minority students at community centers, pool halls, Indian
reservations, and agricultural fields.
Black Panther leaders enrolling at UCLA and student activists walking fields to
recruit minorities represent pieces of the story of black student protest. Between 1967
and 1972, a major black student protest movement erupted at numerous colleges and
universities around the nation. The often tense confrontations between black students
and administrators followed a fairly typical pattern. Black students, working within
recently organized Black Student Unions, presented the administration with a list of
demands. They urged the university to increase black enrollment, create black studies
programs, hire black faculty, and provide minority students with additional financial
and cultural resources. Administrators typically responded by creating committees to
consider the demands. Frustrated by this plodding bureaucratic response, the BSU

Daniel Johnson, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, July 16, 2006.

2
frequently resorted to more public and theatrical tactics, including class disruptions,
building occupations, and public rallies. After a period of negotiations, blacks almost
always won at least token concessions and, in many cases, substantive demands were
met.
My dissertation argues that the late 1960s black student protest movement
marked a new relationship between black students and white institutions. African
Americans demanded that the university provide space, resources, and tools where they
could gain the skills and knowledge needed to improve the impoverished conditions of
their communities. They also wanted to utilize the university's prestige to legitimize
black history and culture. Using confrontational and theatrical protest tactics, Black
Student Unions were successful in creating new institutional structures, ideologies, and
bureaucracies. These new structures and ideologies played an essential role in the
formation of a new multicultural ethic at the university. Administrators and faculty
were often sympathetic to many of the black students' claims. They were profoundly
moved by the spirit and rhetoric of the civil rights movement and acknowledged that
universities had a moral obligation to provide educational opportunities to minorities.
While sympathetic to black demands, administrators were also cautious about creating
any program that left them open to charges of black separatism or reverse
discrimination. They understood universities had numerous stakeholders, including
regents, alumni, and the general community, many of whom were conservative and very
skeptical about black student demands. To appear more moderate to these stakeholders,
while at the same time acknowledging the validity of black culture, the university
argued that all cultures had their own inherent value and worth. To that end, the
majority of black studies programs were institutionalized within ethnic studies programs
that also housed a combination of Chicano, Asian, and Native American studies.
Black student protest at white universities marked a break from earlier civil
rights struggles. In the early 1960s, SNCC and SCLC had to demonstrate that they

3
were respectable in order to gain sympathy from a national audience. Students
conducted sit-ins wearing suits and ties, refused to respond aggressively to provocation
by white threats or violence and, in general, presented themselves as exemplifying the
values of mainstream middle-class white society. Less than a decade later, black
students wore afros and sunglasses, threatened administrators and, in general,
exaggerated their difference from middle-class whites. This was emblematic of the
broader shift to black power in the civil rights movement. James Brown, Aretha
Franklin, the Black Panthers and numerous others made being black a proud and
respectful identity. What differentiates black student groups from the general black
power movement was the context of the university. Black students understood that
Malcolm X's autobiography, when taught in a university classroom, as opposed to a
black community center, was more apt to be recognized as a legitimate and important
book by scholars and society in general. The university provided institutional
structures, such as funding for black cultural speakers and black studies classes, where
black history, culture, and identity could be explored and produced. By forcing
universities to recognize and institutionalize the inherent worth of black identity, an
identity based not on notions of uplift or respectability, Black Student Unions were
making blackness itself respectable.
If asked what they remember about black student protest, the average reader
might recall the well-publicized protests at Cornell, Columbia, and San Francisco State.
Many may remember the powerful image of black students leaving a Cornell dorm
armed with rifles and shotguns.3 These vivid, well-known events obscure the breadth
and depth of black student protest. Black student protest, in some form, erupted on
nearly every college campus across the nation in the late 1960s. Students protested at
small liberal arts schools, large research universities, community colleges, and
historically black colleges and universities. A study conducted in 1970 revealed that "in
2

SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was founded to harness the energy of the
college student sit-ins in 1960. SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was founded in
1957 and led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
3
"Campus Guns" won photographer Steven Starr the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for "Spot News Photography."
See Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999), 202.

4
the first half of 1969 alone, black students, who then were less than 6 percent of the
total college population, were involved in 51 percent of all protest incidents."4 Black
student protest in this period was not limited to colleges and universities. In Seattle,
UW students led the Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions that included over twenty
local junior high and high schools. In California, black students demanded increased
educational access at Los Angeles City College, the College of San Mateo, El Camino
College, Fresno City College, Merritt College, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego.5 The
nationally publicized protests were just the tip of the iceberg of black student unrest.
Many people, including some scholars, also mistakenly point to the fall 1968
San Francisco State strike as the spark "that set the black studies movement in
motion."6 The suspension of instructor and Black Panther Party Minister of Education
George Murray served as the catalyst for one of longest and most disruptive university
strikes in U.S. history. Besides rehiring Murray, the BSU demanded the creation of and
control over a department of black studies.7 While the strike garnered tremendous
publicity for black student concerns, including black studies, successful protests at the
University of Washington and UCLA both predate the strike. By May of 1968,
administrators at both schools had already agreed to create a black studies program, hire
minority faculty, and implement minority recruitment programs. As mentioned above,
black students at UCLA and the UW spent the summer recruiting minority students.
Over 350 new minority students were admitted to the two schools that fall.
This is not to say that the Bay Area did not play an important, perhaps even
indispensible, role in the development of black student protest. In the early 1960s, a
number of important Black Nationalist organizations emerged in the Bay Area. The
Afro-American Association, formed by Donald Warden, a law student at UC Berkeley,

William Exum, Paradoxes of Protest: Black Student Activism in a White University (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1985), 3. Taken from Urban Research Corporation, Student Protests 1969
(Chicago: Urban Research Corporation, 1970).
5
John Lombardi, "Black Studies," Junior College Review 4, no. 6 (February 1970): 6-9.
Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an
Academic Discipline (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 20.
7
See William H. Orrick, Jr., College in Crisis: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence (London: Aurora Publishers Inc., 1970), 35-45.

5
celebrated black identity and promoted black studies classes at Merritt College.8 The
organization attracted and inspired dozens, including Leslie and Jim Lacy, Cedric
Robinson, and Ernest Allen, who would become influential movement activists and
intellectuals.9 The Association also served as an important precursor to the Black
Panther Party, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and Ron Karenga's US
organization.
If one individual can be singled out as the father of Black Student Unions,
Jimmy Garrett deserves the title. A SNCC organizer from Los Angeles, Garrett
matriculated to San Francisco State to organize black students in 1966. "The reason I
came to campus was to try to do some organizing," Garrett later told an interviewer.10
He quickly seized leadership of the Negro Student Association, transforming it in name
and purpose into the first BSU in the nation. Riding the wave of education reform
sweeping the country, Garrett used SF State's new Experimental College to offer some
of the first black studies classes in the nation. Garrett also helped launch dozens of
Black Student Unions, primarily on the West coast. The University of Washington
BSU traces its origins to Garrett. UW students attended a Western Regional Black
Youth Conference in Los Angeles in 1967, where Garrett-led conference sessions
inspired them to return to campus to form a Black Student Union.
When black students arrived on white campuses in the 1960s, they entered
institutions undergoing tremendous expansion and growth. For example, between 1958
and 1973 the University of Washington's enrollment more than doubled to 34,000 and
the biannual operating budget increased from 37 million to over 400 million.11 Federal
government support had much to do with this rapid expansion of higher education after
8

For more on Donald Warden, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar
Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 223-34. See also Bobby Seale, Seize the Time:
The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), 21-22.
9
Robin G. Kelley, "Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter)Nationalism in the Cold War Era," in
Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie Glaude, Jr.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 74.
10
Rojas, From Black Power, 52. Taken from James Garrett, 1969 interview with Austin Scott, Records of
the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, RG 283, Box 13, LBJ Library,
Austin, TX, 1-2.
11
"Former President Of UW Dies At 88 - Known As Key Leader In University's History," Seattle
Times, November 17, 1999.

6
World War II. The GI Bill gave returning servicemen an unprecedented opportunity to
attend a public university at little cost, greatly contributing to expanding university
enrollments. The emergence of what is commonly called the military-industrial state in
the wake of the Cold War provided billions of dollars in research funding to the nation's
universities. The Cold War-inspired National Defense Act of 1958 provided reams of
financial aid to college students and funded Area Studies programs that served as
important precedents when black students demanded black studies programs.
The turbulent sixties brought a host of changes that made minority programs at
the university a realistic possibility. The civil rights struggle politicized and trained
many black youth in movement politics who later became active in black student
groups. Even more participated in Great Society programs or utilized the space opened
by the mandate for "maximum feasible" community participation to demand blacks
regain control over their own communities and identity. The civil rights movement,
Vietnam, New Left protests, and urban revolts convinced many university professors
and administrators that society was in need of fundamental reform and that corrective
action was needed to allow minorities full access to American society, thereby making
them a sympathetic audience for black demands. At a national level, by passing the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government
acknowledged that blacks deserved full citizenship. Finally, Great Society legislation
and initiatives, including the Higher Education Act, the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, and the Office of Economic Opportunity's TRIO programs, introduced
the notion of compensatory educationthat schools should make special efforts to
educate students traditionally denied educational accesspaving the way for local
administrators to implement minority educational opportunity programs.
Only recently have historians considered the late 1960s and early 1970s
"history," and begun to produce historical literature on that period. This also holds true
for this period of black student protest. Only a handful of scholarly historical works

7
have been published on the topic.12 All of these books are case studies of a specific
university. Their style tends to be narrative and they focus on the social movement
aspects of black student protest. This project moves beyond the format of a specific
social movement case study by examining the outcomes of black student protest on the
students themselves, as well as the university. To that end, I explore how activism
influenced and produced black student identities. I also ask questions regarding the
context and formula that forced universities to adopt minority student recruitment
programs, minority faculty hiring programs, and black studies programs. Finally, I
explore how these programs were implemented and institutionalized. Therefore, my
project enters into conversation with, and is indebted to, a broad spectrum of literature
encompassing diverse subject areas including black studies, black student identity,
1o

Latina/o student protest, multiculturalism, and the New Left.

Richard McCormick, The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1990); Wayne Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student
Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2002); Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2003); Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69; for an excellent account by a
sociologist see William Exum, Paradoxes of Protest; Peniel E. Joseph, "Black Studies, Student Activism,
and the Black Power Movement," in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black
Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (London: Routledge, 2006); for articles on black student protest see "The
History of Black Student Activism," Journal of African American History 88 (Spring 2003).
13
For black studies, see Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville:
The University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Ram6n A. Gutierrez, "Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in
American Colleges and Universities," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg
(Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1994); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies; for
black power and black nationalism, see William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power
Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Eddie
Glaude, Jr., ed., Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A
Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006); works on
multiculturalism include, David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Old New
York: Basic Books, 1995); Jacob H. Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare (Chicago: Third World Press,
1999); for black student identity, Sarah Susannah Willie, Acting Black: College, Identity, and the
Performance of Race (New York: Routledge, 2003); for the Latino/a student movement, George
Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Carlos Mufioz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The
Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989); New Left literature includes Doug C. Rossinow, The Politics
of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998); Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to
Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

8
While scholars are only beginning to write the history of African American
activism in the late 1960s,14 they have given substantial attention to the early stages of
the black student protest movement, in particular the formation of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its sit-in and voter registration
campaigns.15 In these accounts, early black student protesters are seen as having an
integrationist agenda. They wanted the promise of equal protection under the law to
become a reality. Early SNCC leaders practiced a form of participatory democracy and
believed the United States could overcome its racial prejudices. But starting in the mid1960s, many blacks, including SNCC organizers, rejected integration and began
building black political and economic power. Inspired by calls for Black Nationalism in
Malcolm X's autobiography and the rage expressed by urban blacks, civil rights leaders
came to believe that black freedom could only come through control of their own
community, in particular its institutions and its cultural identity.
This project rethinks traditional historical narratives of the struggle for black
liberation during the 1960s. These narratives tend to juxtapose the civil rights
movement of the early 1960s with the black power movement of the later 1960s. In this
narrative, the early civil rights movement was non-violent and assimilationist; the later
black power movement was violent, separatist, and nationalist. The most recent
scholarship on the civil rights movement has begun to question this integrationistnationalist divide. Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, critiques this "neat typology" for
ignoring the transnational anticolonial aspects of black nationalism, for positing a
"south to north trajectory" that erases the "northern urban political landscape," and for
overlooking those black nationalists active in the 1950s and early 1960s.16 In Radio

For example, perhaps the first scholarly narrative of the black power movement, Waiting 'Til the
Midnight Hour, authored by Peniel Joseph, was published in 2006. Overall, the literature covering this
period pales in comparison to the scholarship written on the civil rights period of 1955-1965.
15
See, for example, John Ditrmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1994); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the
1960's (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom:
The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1995); William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black
Struggle for Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
16
Kelley, "Stormy Weather," 68.

9
Free Dixie, Timothy Tyson argues the civil rights and black power movements
"emerged from the same soil" and historians should emphasize the common ground and
continuities between these movements rather than discontinuity.
Black students at white universities do not fit neatly within the integrationistnationalist narrative. On one hand, Black Student Unions adhered to a separatist black
power philosophy that viewed white institutions as inherently racist. At the same time,
black student activists integrated within universities by serving on committees, acting as
recruiters, and even working as administrators. Wayne Glasker, writing about black
student activists at the University of Pennsylvania, explains this seeming contradiction
by arguing that the students were bicultural. "They sought to preserve their own
distinctive ethnic culture, identity, and heritage while pursuing economic upward
mobility," he writes.

The problem with Glasker's argument is it implies that a

university education is at odds with black culture. Only by embracing two cultures, by
becoming bicultural, he argues, can a student pursue upward mobility alongside black
identity.
Scholar Perry Hall provides a similar, but more satisfactory, explanation for this
separatist-integrationist contradiction. He makes a careful distinction between
structural integration and cultural assimilation.19 Structural integration refers to the
desire for equal access to opportunity. Cultural assimilation means shedding traditional
black cultural practices by adopting mainstream cultural practices. One can desire
structural integration, Hall argues, without becoming culturally assimilated. That is, an
African American can demand open access to education and jobs without wanting to
live in a predominantly white neighborhood or adopt white middle-class value systems.
In other words, the separatist-integrationist divide is really a false dichotomy. It is
possible to want to fully structurally integrate in society without erasing one's cultural

Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3.
18
Glasker, Black Students, xii. Glasker acknowledges that most of U Penn's black students came from
middle-class backgrounds, which may explain, in part, this divergence.
19
Hall, In the Vineyard, 197-98.

10
or racial identity. A black student can desire an elite university education without
sacrificing their cultural identity.
In the context of the university, I argue, the relationship between structural
integration and cultural assimilation includes another dimension. Black students
demanded full access to the resources and benefits of a university education, but they
sought this access not to "become white," but to force universities to celebrate and
institutionalize the unique cultural achievements of African Americans. For black
students the relationship between structural and cultural integration was not a passive
one where a black student could become a lawyer while maintaining his/her black
identity. It was an active relationship where structural integration became a tool to
legitimize blackness. Universitiesby offering black studies classes, sponsoring
research on black history, and funding black cultural activitiesbecame a place where
blacks could pursue educational opportunity while celebrating their cultural identity.
This turned traditional notions of assimilation and integration upside down. In a sense,
black students were assimilating within the dominant culture not by becoming white,
but by demanding universities recognize their racial identity as legitimate.
My dissertation redefines the black power period of 1966-75 from mere
aberration to a crucial period in the reshaping of African American and general societal
values about race and equality. Scholars have struggled to define the long-term effects
of the black power era. Civil rights scholars can point to very concrete achievements, in
particular, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black
power scholars point to more amorphous achievements, including the FBI-aided
disintegration of black power groups and the white backlash against "reverse
discrimination," as the legacy of the black power era. These narratives ignore how
black student protest fundamentally changed universities and black identity. As part of
the black power movement, black student protest implemented new programs that
reshaped the university, resituated black student identity, influenced the emerging
narrative of multiculturalism, and helped make blackness itself respectable.
This dissertation also tells a story that has yet to be toldthe story of how black
student protest changed three universities, the University of Texas at Austin, the

11
University of Washington, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Locating
my study in three separate institutions allows me to explore how place shaped black
student protest. For instance, at UCLA and UW, black students had close ties to the
black power movement on the West Coast. Both schools' faculty and administrators
were, for the most part, racially liberal. Their belief that universities should open their
doors to minorities who had been denied equal access to education allowed these
schools to rapidly implement black studies and minority recruitment programs.
UCLA's Los Angeles setting makes it unique because of the explosion of black
community organizing that occurred in the wake of the Watts uprising. These new
community organizations served as movement training grounds for many black student
activists. UT Austin offers an interesting contrast to UW and UCLA, as it is located on
the cultural, social, and political border between the West and the South. At the end of
Reconstruction, Texas designed a separate but unequal system of higher education. UT
did not admit black undergraduates until 1956, when it succumbed to the pressure
applied by local black activists and by the Supreme Court decisions of Sweatt v. Painter
and Brown v. Board of Education.20 At UT, administrators and, in particular, the Board
of Regents, were much less sympathetic to the claims and tactics of protesting black
students in the late 1960s than at either UW or UCLA.
However, my dissertation is not primarily comparative in nature. Doing
extensive research at three schools allows me to make broader generalizations about the
new relationship being forged between blacks and white universities. As mentioned
above, the few monographs written on the topic are all centered on a specific university.
Including three schools in the narrative allows me to move beyond the narrow focus of
much of the current literature. At the same time, history is almost always a collective
enterprise. Telling three separate and unexplored narratives contributes to the
historiography on black student protest at universities in the late 1960s.

For an account of the battle to desegregate higher education in Texas, see Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing
Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

12
Black students were part of a broader political movement, represented most
famously by the Black Panther Party, an organization that embraced black power and
black nationalism. Sociologists, when writing about black student identity, often
overlook that black students belonged to a historically specific political movement.
They explore black student identity as a response to being a minority on a white campus
without acknowledging how black students' participation in the black power movement
also shaped their identity. The first chapter of my study seeks to address this oversight
by exploring how black student protest influenced the identity of black students. These
students, to employ a term used by scholar Eddie Glaude Jr., embraced the "politics of
transvaluation." Glaude defines transvaluation as a reassessment of blackness "aimed
to recast and revise 'blackness' in a manner necessary for black individual and
communal flourishing in a racist culture."21 Black student protest is frequently viewed
as primarily a social movement, but it was also an active intellectual movement. At
BSU meetings, at impromptu jam sessions, while planning protests, and while writing
course syllabi for black studies classes, black students explored what it meant to be
black and the obligations of black students to their community. Instead of simply
parroting the ideas of Harold Cruse, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Huey Newton,
black students were part of a vibrant grassroots intellectual community that aimed to,
using Glaude's words, "recast and revise" its values, thereby shaping a new black
student identity. The identity they crafted, in part, was an oppositional identity, one in
which actively fighting the practices of white racist universities served to differentiate
between Uncle Tom negroes and true blacks. Participation in BSU activities thus
became a key marker of blackness. For these students, black identity also included a
performative aspect. By wearing sunglasses, Afros, and dashikis, by making nonnegotiable demands, and by engaging in disruptive public protests, black students
crafted an identity that also served as a political strategy designed to create change at
the university and in American society.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., "Introduction: Black Power Revisited," in Is It Nation Time?, 5. Glaude adapts
the term "transvaluation" from Friedrich Nietzsche.

13
The straggle to open the doors of white universities to minorities is often framed
in black and white terms. In my second chapter, I complicate the traditional blackwhite narrative by exploring the BSU's relationship with black athletes, New Left
groups, and other student minority organizations. In 1970, UW BSU members
demanded the university sever all athletic relations with Brigham Young University.
The students were not protesting BYU itself, but BYU's religious sponsor, the Mormon
Church, for a religious doctrine that viewed blacks as spiritually inferior. I utilize the
story of this protest as a window to explore the BSU's relationship with other student
groups.
Black athletes and BSUs, to generalize, operated as separate groups with very
different issues and goals. BSU demands for black studies and increased minority
enrollments were only one set of concerns held by black students on white universities
in the late 1960s. Black athletes were more concerned with issues that directly affected
them including low graduation rates, informal prohibitions against interracial dating,
limited playing time, being excluded from team social events, and restrictive dress
codes. While their concerns were grounded in a campus culture of racial intolerance,
only periodically did the two groups participate in each other's protests.
Philosophically, BSUs and New Left groups had much in common. Both groups
believed that the United States was a racist, imperialist nation in need of major, possibly
revolutionary, housekeeping. Yet, this similar world view did not always translate into
close collaborations between the two groups. At the UW, the New Left worked closely
with the BSU during its BYU protest, but a more typical relationship was that of
conditional allies. Black students understood whites could easily leave the movement
and join mainstream society, while blacks could never walk away from racism. Black
students collaborated more frequently with students from other minority groups. The
black nationalist idea that the black community functioned as a de facto internal colony
easily applied to other minority groups. On campus, minority students also frequently
shared a set of common goals including ethnic studies, minority recruitment, and
funding for cultural programming. On all three campuses in this study, black students
were the first to make demands and win concessions from administrators. These

14
concessions opened space for other minority groups, including women. However,
relations between minority groups were not always congenial. Once programs were
initiated, they often competed over limited resources.
Black students successfully forced universities to adopt many of their demands,
including the creation of black studies centers. But the creation of these centers was by
no means inevitable. In my third chapter I explore how BSU leadership combined with
the efforts of numerous faculty, students, and administrators to create black studies at
UCLA. I also examine how the university institutionalized black studies, which rarely
matched black students' original vision. In the fall of 1967, Virgil Roberts, a UCLA
student, returned to campus determined to transform UCLA into an institution that met
the needs of black students and the black community. To that end, he organized an
experimental class that brought in weekly guest lecturers to discuss different aspects of
the black experience. The class was enormously successful with lecture attendance
often topping 500 students. As leader of the BSU's education committee, Roberts spent
the spring of 1968 writing a detailed and nuanced blueprint for a black studies center.
Over the summer, UCLA created three task forces that institutionalized black studies as
part of the Institute of American Cultures (IAC), an umbrella organization with four
ethnic studies centersAfro-American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American
Studies and Native American Studies. Perhaps surprisingly, Roberts wholeheartedly
supported the inclusion of all four centers at UCLA. He believed four centers would be
an easier political sell to UCLA faculty, students, administration, and the community.
What started as an initiative by black students for the inclusion of a black studies
center ultimately became an ethnic studies center embracing four distinct groups.
Through the institutionalization of ethnic studies centers, universities helped to create
what David Hollinger labels the "ethno-racial pentagon," where the United States is
divided into five ethnic categoriesAfrican, Asian, European, Indigenous, and Latin
99

American.

Universities embraced this multicultural narrative, in part, to avoid the

charge that they were creating racially separate programs on campus. The values,
Hollinger, Postethnic America, 8.

15
achievements, and world-views of America's ethnic groups, according to this narrative,
did not stand in opposition to mainstream "white" America; instead they represented
threads in the nation's rich cultural tapestry.
In creating ethnic studies centers, universities sought to moderate the most
radical claims made by black students, enabling black studies programs to exist without
undermining the university. Black students' most radical claim, for example, that
knowledge and knowledge production was racialized, could not be accepted by the
university. To accept such a claim would be to admit that much of what the university
taught had little value. To counter these claims, universities crafted a narrative where
black studies curriculums were needed to overcome the narrow, white-centered
curriculums they currently offered. But they were careful not to replace one
particularism with another. A black studies curriculum, universities posited, would not
create radical black revolutionaries, but well-rounded students with a broad
understanding of the world.
Black students also demanded that universities hire black faculty. How UCLA
met this demand is the subject of my fourth chapter. Starting in 1969, UCLA
implemented the Faculty Development Program (FDP), an initiative designed to attract
minority professors to teach at UCLA and aid in their development as scholars. But
hiring minority faculty was easier said than done. The historical exclusion of African
Americans from the academy meant that in 1969 there were very few blacks with
PLD.s available for universities to hire. Black students did not believe this shortage of
Ph.D.s should impede minority-hiring efforts. They argued that universities needed to
alter their definition of "qualified." There were plenty of blacks with real-world
experience more than qualified to teach black studies classes. The FDP was a
compromise of sorts. It hired blacks who lacked traditional qualifications as acting
assistant professors and gave them resources to earn their Ph.D.s, thus increasing the
pool of black doctorates.
The FDP was a controversial program. Administrators and politicians argued
that the program, by seeking to hire minority candidates, practiced reverse racism and
violated the Civil Rights Act's vision of a color-blind society. Supporters of the

16
program, while embracing the idea of a color-blind society in principle, argued that
since minorities had been systematically excluded from the ivory tower, some sort of
compensatory efforts were needed. This reveals a key tension in racial liberalism in the
1960sthe dream of a color-blind society clashed markedly with the reality of a society
imbued with racial prejudice. Controversy aside, efforts to hire minority faculty were
highly successful in transforming, in only a few years, the overall racial composition of
academia. Traditionally white universities had, as late as 1966, as few as none and at
most a handful of black tenure track professors. A decade later, African Americans
comprised 2.5 percent of predominantly white universities' faculties.
When Clayborne Carson, today an eminent African American historian, was
hired under the FDP in 1971, he navigated immensely challenging and vastly rewarding
waters. The second half of chapter four explores the challenges faced by minority
faculty in this period. Carson struggled to meet the difficult demands all young
professors facedesigning and teaching new courses, while facing pressure to publish.
Unlike other new hires, as an African American, Carson faced a second set of demands.
He was expected to mentor and advise black students and support the Center for AfroAmerican Studies. Many minority scholars continue to face this double burden in the
academy.24
Alongside calls for black faculty, BSUs also demanded increased black student
recruitment. The goal of my fifth and final chapter is to chart the strange career of
affirmative action at the University of Texas between 1960-1980. At UT, the regents
and top administrators avoided implementing programs that would have fully integrated
the University. Instead, it was small-scale efforts initiated by faculty and students in the
late 1960s that began to open the school to minority students. For example, the UT
student government created Project Info, where current students visited high schools
with high minority populations to encourage the student body to attend UT. When the
regents learned of these efforts, they eliminated, at an August 1,1969 meeting, all
23

Robin Wilson, The Chronicle ofHigher Education 48, no. 44 (July 12, 2002): All.
"A Scholar in Struggle," Clayborne Carson, in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of
Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 296-303.

24

17
programs that might open- the university to minorities. They claimed such programs
violated the University's non-discrimination policies. Regent chairman Frank Erwin,
the primary architect of this policy, believed such programs might bring troublemakers
to UT, leading to more student unrest. After this decision, minority students constantly
demanded the restoration of these programs. Their pleas fell on deaf ears until 1974
when black members of the Texas legislature convinced the Department of Heath,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) to investigate, thoroughly and seriously, discrimination
at UT. After a lengthy investigation, HEW ruled that UT "must take affirmative action
to overcome the effects of prior discrimination."25 This ruling finally forced UT to
adopt affirmative action policies.
The era of aggressive affirmative action at universities was short-lived. At the
university, proponents of affirmative action argued that because past discrimination had
excluded blacks and other minorities from the academy, special compensatory efforts
were needed to open the university's doors to minority students and accomplishments.
Yet this use of prior discrimination to justify affirmative action, I argue, vastly
understated the need and justification for corrective action. Jim Crow cannot accurately
be described as "prior discrimination." It was a systemic legal, social, economic effort
to create and maintain a racial caste system. But even the idea that past discrimination
justifies affirmative action was too much for the nation to handle. The 1978 Supreme
Court Bakke decision made diversity, as opposed to compensation for past
discrimination, the only appropriate justification for affirmative action. Affirmative
action was also short-lived because many whites were determined to defend white
privilege. At UT, where blacks were excluded entirely for almost a century, before
even one white student had perhaps been excluded by a "less qualified" black student,
cries of reverse discrimination were raised.
The United States is still unwilling to confront its racist past. The current
national narrative on race argues that while blacks did face past discrimination, the civil
rights movement erased most racial inequalities and today the nation is close to living
25

Dorothy D. Stuck to Dr. Lorene Rogers, February 21, 1974, "Minority Groups," vertical file, Center for
American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

18
King's dream of a color-blind society. Yet the fact that today one in nine African
American men are in jail signals that race is not a thing of the past. Until the United
States is willing to truly confront its racist legacy, race will continue to plague the
nation.

19
Chapter One: Recasting Blackness: Black Student Unions, Black Protest,
and Black Identity

The incident that sparked the Seattle high school sit-in is still disputed.
Contemporary newspapers wrote that the conflict started when two black students
fought with a white student in a Franklin High School hallway. The black students
were suspended; the white student was not.1 Other observers remember the sit-in began
when two girls were suspended by the administration for wearing Afros. Regardless of
the cause, members of the recently formed Franklin High School Black Student Union
(BSU) gathered students in a school hallway and demanded that, "our black brothers be
put back in school."3 Demonstrating the defiant attitude of black students influenced by
black power, Franklin students refused to accept any other settlement.
When Aaron Dixon, Carl Miller, and Larry Gossett, three leaders of the
University of Washington's BSU, learned of the sit-in, they quickly drove to Franklin
High School. These older students, as leaders of both the UW BSU and the Seattle
Alliance of Black Student Unions (S ABSU), provided leadership for the dozens of
recently formed BSUs at Seattle-area high schools and junior high schools. Entering
Franklin, the UW students found the protestors' anger had reached a boiling point.
Some students even wanted to burn down the school. Dixon, Miller, and Gossett
calmed the students and worked with them to create a list of demands to present to the
administration. The demands included the reinstatement of the suspended students, the
hiring of a black administrator at the post-elementary level, a black history class, and
pictures of black heroes on the school walls. The Franklin students proceeded to
occupy the principal's office. While Seattle police gathered across the street in the

"Franklin Sit-in Protests School Suspensions," Seattle P-I, March 30, 1968, 3.
"The Times They Have-A-Changed," The Seattle Times, January 22, 2002, B5.
3
"Non-Franklin Students Led Negro Sit-In, Says Principal," The Seattle Times, March 30, 1968, A13.
2

Sicks' Stadium parking lot, Seattle superintendent Forbes Bottomry met with the
students and agreed to meet their demands.4
The Seattle police, to show that disruptive protest would not be tolerated,
arrested Carl Miller, Aaron Dixon, Larry Gossett and high school student Trolice
Flavors. Seattle school officials also suspended nine Franklin students. Seattle Mayor
Dorm Braman, defending the arrests, stated that officials must "take whatever steps are
necessary to indicate that such disorderly conduct will not be tolerated." Using an
argument recycled from Southern law enforcement in the early 1960s, Bottomly added
that charges would be pressed against all "outsiders" who participated in the protest.5
Arrested four days after the protest, Gossett, Miller, and Dixon were in the King
County Jail when they learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed. The night
after King's death, blacks rioted in dozens of cities across the nation, their anger and
sorrow overflowing onto the streets. That night Seattle's Central District erupted with
violence, looting and arson. It was Seattle's first major racial disturbance of the 1960s.
One day after King's death, the UW students were arraigned. At least two
hundred and perhaps over one thousand blacks packed the courtroom and overflowed
into the halls in support of the students.6 This number is even more impressive
considering there were only 30,000 blacks living in Seattle at the time. While a restless
crowd watched the proceedings, a number of UW faculty and administrators vouched
for the character of the arrested students. Eventually, to loud audience applause, the
judge ordered the men released without bail.
This incident demonstrates the new type of black student who was emerging in
the late 1960s. This new student understood that the result of decades of white racism
meant blacks were not represented in schools. As the Franklin demands showed,
schools lacked black administrators and celebrated white, not black, history and culture.
4

"The Times They Have-A-Changed," The Seattle Times, January 22,2002, B5; Larry Gossett, interview
by Trevor Griffey and Brooke Clark, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, March 16 and
June 3, 2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu.
5
"Braman Backs Legal Action at Franklin," Seattle P-I, April 5, 1968, Al.
6
Like most mass demonstrations, there is naturally no accurate count of how many blacks were at the
courthouse. The Seattle P-I estimated "more than 200" in attendance; Gossett remembers almost 1,500
blacks showing their support.

21
Numerous similar protests erupted where black students demanded and won
concessions, changing educational institutions. But black student participation in the
struggle for black liberation, and in particular their struggle to transform the University,
also changed the students.
For BSU members, the struggle to define blackness and what it meant to be a
black student at a white university was not just an individual struggle, but part of a
broader political movement. The new identity forged by black students was multifaceted. One facet of this new militant black identitywearing sunglasses and Afros,
making non-negotiable demands, and taking over classrooms or buildingswas a
tactical decision designed to wrestle concessions from administrators. But black student
protest was as much an intellectual movement as it was a political and social movement.
Meeting in small groups, writing editorials and position papers, and attending
conferences, BSU members defined a new role for black students that centered on using
education to serve the black community by providing leadership and professional
expertise and by educating the community on the richness of black culture and history.
A new, purportedly more authentic, black identity came to be defined through active
participation in the struggle for black liberation. Through the process of creating course
syllabi, inviting speakers and musicians to campus, and participating in campus
dialogues on race, black students explored what it meant to be black. Ultimately, the
institutionalization of these programs in the university helped to make these emerging
definitions of blackness respectable.
Traditional narratives of the struggle for black liberation during the 1960s tend
to contrast the civil rights movement of the early 1960s with the black power movement
of the later 1960s.7 Black students at white universities present a seemingly irresolvable
quandary for this narrative. These students adhered to the separatist black power
philosophy that all white institutions were inherently racist, while at the same time
integrating within these universities by serving on committees, acting as recruiters, and
even working as administrators. Recent scholars, writing in a slightly different context,
7

See, for example, Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1993).

22
have noted that the separatist-integrationist dichotomy really is a false dichotomy. It is
possible for an African American to desire structural integration in all aspects of
American society without wanting to culturally assimilate.8 In this chapter, I take this
argument one step further. Black students wanted to fully participate in white
universities. They also wanted those universities to celebrate and institutionalize the
unique cultural achievements of African Americans.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, a hard-fought victory of the civil rights
movement, gave blacks the legal right to vote, but it was not a complete
acknowledgement that they were worthy of being citizens. If white society continued to
portray black culture as inferior and under-developed, blacks may have won the legal
right to vote, but their status as full citizens would remain circumspect. For blacks to
truly be considered capable of citizenship, their accomplishments needed to be
recognized and celebrated by white culture and institutions. Universities, in their
traditional role of setting the standards for knowledge and culture, were the perfect
institutions to legitimize the accomplishments of African Americans. Knowledge,
citizenship, civil rights, and identity all converged at the university.

The start of black student protest in the 1960s is usually traced to the decision of
four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College to hold a sit-in
at the lunch counter of a Greensboro Woolworth's on February 1,1960. The second
day they were joined by twenty-three students and by the end of the week over one
hundred students protested lunch counter segregation. The sit-ins quickly spread. By
April 1960, this tactic had reached over seventy-eight Southern towns and some two
thousand students had been arrested.9
In general, these student protestors were models of middle-class decorum
nonviolent, polite, well dressed, and studious. They appealed to middle-class notions of
respectability and stood in stark contrast to the white mobs that often formed to harass,

See Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1999), 197-98.
9
Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 61-71.

23
heckle, and incite the black student protestors. For example, in February 1960, a
segregationist paper, the Richmond New Leader, offered this editorial opinion on the sitins: "Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties and one of them was
reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the
sidewalk, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble fit to kill, and some
of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern
states in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! It gives one pause."10 By wearing
suits and reading Goethe, blacks subverted traditional southern racist tropes where
whites played the role of gentlemen, defending their pure women from savage and
uncivilized black men. The incivility of the white mobs made it difficult for
Southerners to claim Jim Crow was necessary to maintain civil race relations in the
South.
In April of 1960, under the auspices of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), students met at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to
harness the energy released by the sit-ins. Out of these meetings, they created the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Adhering to the values of
Martin Luther King, Jr., SNCC believed that blacks and whites could work together,
using nonviolent tactics, to overcome racial prejudice. They believed in the promise of
Americathat the United States could change and live up to its democratic ideals.
Their early targets were Southern laws and social customs that endorsed segregation
and prevented blacks from exercising their full rights as citizens.11
By 1964, these beliefs had steadily eroded. Frustrated at the government's
refusal to protect them from Southern violence and disillusioned by the Democratic
Party's refusal to seat legally elected delegates from the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, SNCC decided that the liberal establishment would never grant
African Americans full rights as citizens. SNCC began to argue that the only way to
achieve its goals was through black political power. While SNCC's goals remained
10

Anthony M. Oram, Black Students in Protest: A Study of the Origins of the Black Student Movement
(Washington: American Sociological Society, 1972), 4.
11
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981).

24
very similarthey still believed in the right to participate in the democratic process, the
right to a basic education, and the right to economic opportunitythey no longer
believed they could achieve those goals through nonviolent appeals for justice to a
white racist nation.
As SNCC and other national civil rights organizations shifted their outlook from
one of cooperation with white institutions to that of black power, so did local Seattle
organizations. The origins of the University of Washington Black Student Union can be
traced to the emergence of black power across the nation and in Seattle's Central
District. Quintard Taylor, in his seminal book on the history of Seattle's black
community, writes that the spark that ignited the formation of dozens of black power
organizations was Stokely Carmichael's speech at Garfield High School, located in the
heart of the Central District. Addressing an overflow crowd estimated at four thousand,
Carmichael emphasized that white America could not set black people free. "What
must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent, colonial status forced
upon i t . . . . White people assume they can give freedom, but nobody gives freedom."
For Aaron Dixon, who would become a BSU member and the first captain of Seattle's
BPP, listening to Carmichael's speech gave his life a new purpose. "For the first time I
heard a black person speaking very defiantly against white Americans and racism.... It
was very powerful and very electrifying and it totally changed me."

Carmichael's

speech inspired activists to form a SNCC chapter in Seattle. This group would play a
small but indispensable part in the formation of the BSU at UW.14
In the fall of 1967, the newly formed Seattle SNCC office received a flyer
announcing a Western Regional Black Youth Conference scheduled over Thanksgiving
weekend in Los Angeles. Encouraged by other SNCC chapters to attend, thirty-three
black youth boarded a greyhound bus and headed to Los Angeles. When these activists

12

Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the
Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 220.
13
Aaron Dixon, interview by Janet Jones, Trevor Griffey, and Alex Morrow, the Seattle Civil Rights and
Labor History Project, August 25,2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu.
14
Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 220; Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.

25
returned to Seattle, they were committed to using black student power to transform local
colleges and high schools.
The importance of this conference in the political education of the young Seattle
activists who attended cannot be overestimated. The participants at the conference read
like a who's who in black power and civil rights organizing. Angela Davis, Stokely
Carmichael, Harry Edwards, James Forman, and Jimmy Garrett were all in attendance.
According to Larry Gossett, this was the first time these Seattle activists learned about
the Black Panther Party and about Maulana Karenga's organization US. These "strong
and articulate" leaders served as role models in the burgeoning political identities of the
Seattle contingent. Gossett remembered James Forman's keynote address on grassroots
community organizing as strengthening his commitment to a life of activism.15
Conference leaders transformed the Second Avenue Baptist Church from a
house of worship to a politicized space filled with Black Nationalist decor. Angela
Davis remembered the church as glowing "with colorful African patterns and fabrics,"
with many participants wearing traditional African clothing. The meeting was filled
with good will and purpose; a sense of optimism about the possibility of transforming
black communities permeated the church. "I walked around calling everyone sister and
brother, smiling and elated, high on love," remembered Davis.16
Conference workshop topics, as described by Harry Edwards, included "the
rights of black people under the provisions of the Selective Service Act, the role of
black women in the black liberation struggle, the organization of communications
networks between black political organizations, and so forth."17 The most publicized
sessions were those led by Edwards which discussed the possibility of an Olympic
Games boycott. The Olympic boycott brought mainstream press coverage of the
weekend's events. "Olympic Boycott to be Discussed in Talks Here," read the Los
Angeles Times headline announcing the conference. The LA Times was particularly
Larry Gossett, author interview, Seattle, WA, December 22, 2006.
Keith A. Mayes, "Rituals of Race, Ceremonies of Culture: Kwanzaa and the Making of a Black Power
Holiday in the United States, 1966-2000" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2002), 24; Larry Gossett,
Seattle Civil Rights interview.
17
Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 51.
16

interested in whether UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor would decide to boycott the
games. When Alcindor voted with other black athletes to boycott the Olympics,
columnist Charles Maher lectured the athletes that the decision "would bring their
people less good than grief."18
A number of sessions were held on the role of students in the black liberation
struggle. Jimmy Garrett, a national figure in the black student movement, led a session
on how to organize a BSU. Garrett, who earned his activist credentials as a SNCC
organizer in Watts and the South, entered San Francisco State to organize politically the
black student body. "I went to the campus for two reasons," Garrett later remembered,
"to avoid being called in the military and to organize."19 Following national trends
where major civil rights organizations were embracing a more militant black power
philosophy, he founded the first Black Student Union in the nation. In 1966, he took
what had been primarily a social organization, the Negro Student Association, and
transformed it in both name and spirit to a political Black Nationalist organization. He
was later thrust into the national spotlight during the strike over black studies at San
Francisco State beginning in the fall of 1968. The Garrett-led sessions at the conference
became the fountainhead for dozens of West Coast Black Student Unions. It was at
these sessions that Gossett and others pledged to return to Seattle to organize a Black
Student Union at the University of Washington.20
The black students returned from the Los Angeles conference energized and
ready to challenge institutional racism at the University of Washington. About a week
after the conference, flyers appeared around campus announcing a new student group.
"Black is beautiful!!" proclaimed the placard next to an illustration of a black panther.
The Black Student Union, "formerly: Afro-American Student Society," would hold a
rally "to inform people about the racist practices at San Francisco State." Larry Gossett,
promoted as the "Coordinator of Wash. Ore. Sector of Black Student Unions," Carl
18

"Olympic Boycott to be Discussed in Talks Here," Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1967, B2;
"Boycott Would Bring More Grief Than Good," Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1967, 21.
19
Ibram Rogers, "Celebrating 40 Years of Activism," Diverse Issues in Higher Education 10 (June 29,
2006): 18.
20
Larry Gossett, author interview; William H. Orrick, Jr., College in Crisis: A Report to the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (London: Aurora Publishers Inc., 1970), 85-87.

27
Miller as "Chairman of Seattle SNCC," and two BSU members Ernie Rodgers and
Eddie Walker, would speak at the rally. "Are You Ready?" asked the flyer. Ready or
not, black power politics had arrived at the University of Washington.
Five months after the Los Angeles conference, black UW students headed to a
BSU conference at San Francisco State. At the conference, students attended sessions
on how to pressure the administration to meet student demands and held intellectual
discussions on the role of black students in the black power movement. But the real
impact of the conference took place outside of the formal sessions. A few days before
the conference was to begin, the Black Panther Party and Oakland police engaged in a
bloody shootout that left Bobby Hutton dead and Huey Newton arrested. Hutton's
funeral transformed the lives of many of the Seattle delegation and led to the founding
of the BPP in Seattle. Elmer Dixon later remembered a feeling of "awe and pride" as he
witnessed mile after mile of black people wearing leather jackets and berets walking in
solemn silence. After walking past Hutton's casket, Dixon committed to fighting for
black liberation. "I was seventeen at the time, and I think for me, and I know for
several others, that the commitment to be involved in the Party was cast at that
moment." After the funeral, Bobby Seale gave the keynote address at the San Francisco
State Conference. That speech, remembered Aaron Dixon, was the "most electrifying,
powerful speech that I have ever heard." The BPP impressed the UW students with its
discipline, solidarity, and youthfulness. A week after the conference, Bobby Seale
visited Seattle and stayed at Aaron and Elmer Dixon's house. Before leaving, he named
Aaron Dixon, just nineteen years old, the first captain of the Seattle chapter of the BPP.
The Seattle chapter was the first non-California chapter and began the rapid expansion
of the party following the arrest of Huey Newton.22
For some UW BSU students, Carmichael's Garfield High School speech and the
Los Angeles and San Francisco State conferences served as their first direct exposure to
black power and Black Nationalism. Other students had already experienced a form of
21

"Are You Ready?" BSU Papers, 71-69, University of Washington Archives (hereafter cited as UW
BSU Papers).
22
Elmer Dixon, Seattle Civil Rights interview; Aaron Dixon, Seattle Civil Rights interview; Larry
Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.

28
political awakening before attending these events. Great Society programs were
particularly important in shaping this new black power activist identity. For example,
Black Panther founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton used Great Society programs to
exercise political power and shape their identity as blacks. The summer before they
founded the Black Panther Party, Seale took a job at an Oakland Neighborhood AntiPoverty Center, recently opened as part of the Great Society. Seale used the position to
politically educate the youth at the center. At first, when he read them the poem "Burn,
Baby, Burn," by Marvin Jackson, he felt they were not able to understand the poem in
terms "of the political, social, and economic repression of black people." However,
with time, they were able to understand its true meaning.23 Seale used the anti-poverty
program to teach youths what he believed it meant to be black.
At the University of Washington, a Great Society program shaped BSU leader
Larry Gossett's political identity. Gossett's year of service through the Volunteers to
Service in America program (VISTA) politicized him and provided him with life
experiences where he could discover his blackness. Growing up in Seattle, Gossett
believed that "black people did not work hard and were basically lazy." After
graduating from high school, Gossett joined VISTA, a domestic Peace Corps, to avoid
the Vietnam draft. Moving from Seattle to West Harlem opened his eyes to racial
inequality. Working in Harlem, Gossett met "young men with bachelor's degrees who
were janitors and hustlers because of discrimination in employment or lack of
opportunity for advancement." As part of his work in Harlem, he tutored a young
student he found "bright and receptive even though his teacher said he was not able to
learn." This demonstrated the way schools dehumanized students, "making them nonentities, making them hate themselves."24 Calling his time in VISTA "the signature
experience of my life," Gossett returned to Seattle as an advocate of Black Nationalism
and black power.25

Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York:
Random House, 1970), 37.
24
The Seattle Times, July 17, 1969.
25
Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.

Many other black student activists tell similar stories of how their involvement
in Great Society programs politicized them. Bonnie Thornton and future husband John
Dill met as graduate students in the Black Student Association at New York University.
Thornton had spent the years prior to entering NYU working for various anti-poverty
programs. As a program analyst in the Northeast Regional Office of Economic
Opportunity, the idea of "maximum feasible participation" strongly resonated with her.
She sought to implement that ideal in "every proposal I reviewed." Her experience in
Great Society programs influenced her to matriculate to NYU and to seek a master's
degree in human relations.26 Dill, as a graduate student at Columbia University, worked
at Martin Deutsch's Institute for Developmental Studies, a key developer of Head Start.
For both Dill and Thornton, the Great Society provided them with new ways of thinking
about poverty and race.
When Virgil Roberts entered UCLA in 1966 he viewed himself as one student
among thousands trying to survive and graduate. In the summer of 1967, he attended a
Foreign Affairs Scholars Program at Howard University funded by the Ford
Foundation. Roberts spent the summer discussing with the other black program
participants what it meant to be black in America. These students read Malcolm X's
autobiography, read news accounts of that summer's numerous race riots, and came
away with a new understanding of what role blacks should play in American society,
one where blacks should not seek to assimilate into white society, but should instead
create institutions that study and celebrate black culture. "So I came back to UCLA
with my own internal commitment that I was going to try and redirect my life, and try
and impact all the institutions I was involved with to try and make the black experience
better," Roberts remembered.
A political awakening was almost a universal experience for black students at
white universities. Given the national context of race riots and the rise of black power,
Bonnie Thornton Dill and John R. Dill, "To be Mature, Tenured, and Black: Reflections on 20 Years of
Academic Partnership," Change 22, no. 2 (1990): 31.
27
Ibid., 32.
28
Virgil Roberts, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral History
Program (University of California, 1998), 26.

30
coupled with the local university context of frequent protests by the New Left and black
student groups against Vietnam and racism, most black students either became political
or had to purposefully avoid political activity.
After the Los Angeles conference, participants returned to their various
campuses to establish Black Student Unions that were united in a loose confederation.
By the end of 1968, the Western Region Alliance of Black Student Unions, headed by
Jimmy Garrett, had grown to include over sixty BSUs. Individual BSUs, however,
remained completely autonomous. Unlike, for example, local NAACP chapters, there
was no central leadership influencing or critiquing local campus decisions. Instead the
Alliance acted primarily as a support and communication network. Local BSUs wrote
letters to support the struggles of the other Unions in the confederacy, shared local
campus newsletters and newspapers, and occasionally traveled to other BSU chapters to
provide additional leadership or to participate as protestors. President Odegaard
frequently received letters from other BSUs urging him to support the goals of UW's
black students. The Alliance also served a psychological purposeblack students knew
they were not acting alone and were part of a larger movement.
In Seattle, the SNCC and BSU activists returning from Los Angeles organized a
Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions (SABSU). Utilizing younger siblings still in
the public school system, this Alliance eventually included over twenty local high
schools and junior high schools. Many of these chapters were modeled on the UW's
BSU. For example, black students at Shoreline High School "formed the B.S.U. after
observing the U.W." Alliance members, including a representative from the local
Black Panther Party, met as frequently as once a week to discuss how to confront the
problems facing Seattle's black students. The well publicized Franklin High School
protest, followed by the arrest and hearing of BSU leaders, served as a great recruitment
tool for the Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions. Hundreds of blacks converging
on the downtown courthouse made a sensational news story that garnered extensive
press coverage and increased public awareness of the arrests. In the weeks following

Larry Gossett, author interview.

31
the protest, Gossett fielded scores of inquiries from black students who wanted to join
or start a BSU at their school. The number of schools in the Alliance increased from
about eight to about twenty in the months following the Franklin protest.
At many area schools, administrators worked to prevent these groups from
forming. Elmer Dixon, the younger brother of then UW BSU member Aaron Dixon,
helped found the BSU at Garfield High School. He later remembered that only after
leading a strike where Garfield students refused to enter classrooms, did the school
administration agree to recognize the BSU as an official student group.

Sharon

Gossett, the younger sister of Larry Gossett, encountered similar difficulties from
administrators while organizing the BSU at John Marshall Junior High School. At John
Marshall, black students presented the administration with a petition calling for the
creation of the BSU. The administration rejected the petition, telling students they did
not need a BSU on campus. "We made several attempts by going to their offices and
trying to talk," wrote Gossett. "Every time they acted like they couldn't hear."32
The goals of these BSUs included official recognition as a student group by the
administration, the inclusion of black history in the curriculum, and the firing of racist
administrators. SABSU mobilized its members to defend any black student suspended
from school or facing disciplinary action. In an attempt to gain control over curriculum
and personnel issues at schools with predominantly black enrollment, an ad hoc
committee worked with Superintendent Bottomry and the Seattle School Board to create
a Central Area Sub-School Council. This group included representatives from BSUs
and exercised some control over curriculum and personnel in Seattle's Central
District.33
These local BSUs also served as a way for blacks to come together and talk
about the issues affecting their lives. Sharon Gossett described a typical BSU meeting:
30

The Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions, September 22, 1968 Meeting Minutes, UW BSU Papers.
Elmer Dixon, interview by Janet Jones and Trevor Griffey, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History
Project, May 17,2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu; Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.
32
Deborah Jimeson and Sharon Gossett, "History of BSU at John Marshall Jr. High School," UW BSU
Papers.
33
"The Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions Meeting Minutes," December 8,1968, UW BSU
Papers.
31

32
"Brothers and sisters were rapping about Malcolm, Rap Brown, our history and other
things . . . We all read the speech called the 'ballot or the bullet.' We broke it down and
discussed how relevant it was to us." No whites were allowed at these meetings.
Earlier meetings where the administration had insisted on white participation resulted in
a question and answer session on how black students experienced life. "All these white
kids looking at you like they were hungry for finding out more about 'Nigguhs,'"
described Gossett of the experience. "And the only people getting anything out of these
meetings were the white kids."34
The University of Washington BSU provided key leadership for these high
school and junior high groups. As mentioned above, Gossett, Miller, and Brisker
helped students during the Franklin sit-in to transform a relatively spontaneous and
unorganized response to the suspension of two black students, into a more focused
protest with a list of demands. In return, the Seattle Alliance provided the UW with
much-needed bodies. When the UW BSU occupied President Odegaard's office in
May, 1968, to demand funding for minority recruitment and black studies, more than
sixty black students participated; an impressive feat considering there were fewer than
150 black students attending the UW at the time and fewer than twenty were active in
the BSU. Two years later, when the BSU demanded the UW sever ties with Brigham
Young University, an estimated two hundred students from the Seattle Alliance
attended the demonstration. SABSU also provided the BSU with a network of potential
future UW students. Black College Weekend, an event sponsored by SABSU, brought
dozens of black high school students throughout the state to experience a weekend of
college life. The weekend included educational workshops, rap sessions, a soul dinner
and a dance. This event operated, in part, as a de facto recruiting event for future BSU
members.
Black Student Unions operated as a cross between a campus student group and a
black power community organization. At the UW, the BSU, like most student groups,

The Seattle Alliance of Black Student Unions meeting minutes for November 10, 1968 lists the goals of
the Cleveland BSU as "1. getting the B.S.U. recognized. 2. Afro-American history classes. (3. some
change in the administration at Cleveland.)," UW BSU Papers.

33
had a written constitution and an office in the Husky Union Building. Like many black
power groups, the BSU was dedicated to using direct-action tactics to make society
more responsive to the needs of blacks and to transform the black community. Many
BSU members were fiercely dedicated to the struggle for black liberation.
Yet BSUs also often struggled to define their organizational tactics and goals.
For instance, in the fall of 1968, having already won major concessions from the
administration, including a minority recruitment program and black studies, the UW
BSU was split on whether to focus on campus issues or to become a more communityoriented organization. To overcome this organizational impasse, the BSU produced a
document titled simply, "The Black Student Union," outlining their governing
organizational philosophy.35
Like many campus groups, the UW BSU frequently struggled to find students
dedicated to the cause. When asked in a fall 1968 interview, how many members the
BSU could claim, leader Carl Miller answered, "Very few.... we can only count as
members those students who work."36 Not surprisingly, the actual number of BSU
members widely varied. In the spring of 1968, the UW BSU had about fifteen active
members. That fall, when the Special Education Program (SEP) brought an additional
two hundred black students to campus, attendance at BSU meetings increased rapidly
from around eighty in 1969 to well over one hundred in 1970.37 UCLA's BSU typically
had around thirty active members, although attendance at meetings could, particularly
after the establishment of the High Potential Program, top one hundred/ 8
BSUs had their share of internal conflicts. These conflicts frequently centered
on issues of ideological purity. During the summer of 1968, the UCLA BSU
experienced tense confrontations within its membership. The more radical members
accused the more moderate members of selling out to the university administration.
That summer, a number of members perceived as too moderate, including Mike
Downing and Virgil Roberts, left the organization. Roberts later remembered that he
35

"The Black Student Union," A 1969 Position Paper, UW BSU Papers.

"Carl Miller Interview," Black Voice, November 15, 1968,4, UW BSU Papers.
37
Larry Gossett, author interview.
38
Daniel Johnson, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, July 16, 2006.
36

was "excommunicated" for his perceived selling out and he had begun to occasionally
wear a coat and tie to differentiate himself from the dashiki-wearing BSU members.
Almost two years later, the editors and staff of Nommo, UCLA's black student
newspaper, including its editor-in-chief and past BSU president Eddie Maddox,
resigned over conflicts with BSU leadership. The chair of the BSU's leadership
committee, Webster Moore, critiqued Maddox for "throwing articles into the paper
without regard to relevance or what's going on in the community."

At the UW, a

1968 article in the BSU paper acknowledged that "personality conflicts, ideological
differences, internal problems and ego conflicts," had plagued the organization.
The time commitment and high stakes of black student protest also took their
toll on BSU members. Many members left the organization or became less active
because they felt burnt-out or wanted to focus on their studies. Marriages, graduations,
and other life-altering events also caused leaders to resign. Sometimes BSUs
disappeared entirely. At UT, the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation faded away as
an organization after only two years. Eventually, another black student group was
organized in its place, but this group also did not last.
While some BSUs struggled to survive, the UW BSU struggled to define the
goals and purpose of their new organization. "Are you ready?" queried one of the UW
BSU's first campus placards, but the question remained, for what are you ready? While
the San Francisco State BSU and the BPP provided the BSU with an intellectual and
programmatic foundation, these groups did not provide a how-to kit for running a BSU.
While part of a loose confederation, the chapter was completely autonomous. To chart a
course for the organization, the BSU grappled with a number of intricate questions.
What goals should the BSU pursue and what tactics should they use to achieve them?
What role should black students play in transforming the black community? How could
they change white racist institutions into places that served the black community?

Roberts, UCLA interview, 54.

"Black Newspaper Staff Quits After BSU Dispute," Daily Bruin, January 28, 1970, 1.
41
Black Voice, November 15, 1968, UW BSU Papers.
40

35
One way to understand the black student protest that grew out of the fertile soil
of the black power movement is as an intellectual movement. Black students at the
University of Washington met in small groups, attended regional conferences, and
wrote numerous position papers, laying an intellectual framework for their protests.
They were not alone in struggling over the role of black students and the purpose of the
BSU. In Seattle, the local Black Panther Party, SNCC, and Black Student Unions met
to discuss the struggle for black liberation. Nationally they were joined by hundreds of
other college and high school campus groups and black power organizations. The last
years of the 1960s saw a flourishing of black thoughtthousands of blacks around the
nation, many with little prior educational background, met and discussed the nature of
the problems facing black America. This grassroots discourse helped redefine black
identity, the nature of the black community, and the role of the black student.
Two seminal African American intellectuals in particular, W.E.B. Du Bois and
Carter G. Woodson, set the stage for this 1960s intellectual dialogue on the relationship
between black students, education, and the black community. Du Bois influenced how
generations of people understood the relationship between educated black elites and the
entire black community. Responding to Booker T. Washington's claim that the black
community should focus on technical and industrial occupations as a means to achieve
greater prosperity, Du Bois instead argued that only a "talented tenth" of African
Americans, an educated and professional class of blacks, could uplift the black
community. Du Bois began his 1903 essay, The Talented Tenth, by boldly proclaiming,
"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." This
enormously prominent concept influenced BSU leaders when examining their own
obligations to the black community.42
Carter Woodson, the second African American after Du Bois to receive a
doctorate in history, "was virtually single-handedly responsible for establishing Afro-

W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Negro Problem: A Series ofArticles by Representative
American Negroes of Today (Amherst: Humanity Books, [1903] 2003), 33.

American history as a historical specialty."

His impressive curriculum vitae included

founding and editing The Journal of Negro History, organizing the Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), creating Negro History Week in 1926,
which later became Black History Month, and publishing the seminal book The Miseducation of the Negro.44 In promoting black history, Woodson, in his own words,
aimed to "inculcate in the mind of the youth of African blood an appreciation of what
their race has thought and felt and done" and to publicize the black past among whites
so the Negro "may enjoy a larger share of the privileges of democracy as a result of the
recognition of his worth."45 Given these views, it is not surprising that The Miseducation of the Negro was on the reading list of almost all BSUs. An early BSU
organizer at San Francisco State University used the book to "reeducate black students
who were identifying with the white community."46
Woodson, unlike BSUs, chose not to emphasize racial injustice. Perhaps
because white foundations provided Woodson with much of his funding, his works
tended to celebrate the accomplishments of black individuals without mentioning how
white racism hindered or shaped those accomplishments. In a press release celebrating
the twentieth anniversary of the ASNLH, Woodson opined that the Association should
only "set forth facts in scientific form, for facts properly set forth will tell their own
story." Highlighting racial injustice, continued Woodson, should be avoided since, "No
advantage can be gained by merely inflaming the Negros's mind against his
traducers."47 While BSUs came to believe precisely the opposite, Woodson's
pioneering research on black history, the institutional legacies of The Journal of Negro
History and the ASNLH, and his belief that the celebration of black history could help
to liberate the black community provided an indispensable foundation for later BSU
struggles.

August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1986), 1.
44
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Trenton, Africa World Press, [1933] 1990).
45
Meier and Rudwick, Black History, 9.
46
Orrick, Jr., College In Crisis, 91.
47
Meier and Rudwick, Black History, 11-12.

37
For the UW BSU two contemporary groups, the Black Panther Party and the San
Francisco State BSU, profoundly influenced its thinking about a new role for black
students. The founders of the BPP, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, met in 1965 in
Oakland at Merritt College where they were exposed to a burgeoning wave of Black
Nationalism. At Merritt, they briefly joined the Afro-American Association,
established by Don Warden at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. Warden
was a key figure in the rebirth and reformulation of black cultural nationalism in the
Bay Area and on the West Coast. Warden, a charismatic speaker, preached his gospel
of cultural nationalism at local colleges and through a weekly radio program. Warden's
group "began to circulate an eclectic set of texts," by authors such as Frantz Fanon, Che
Guevara, Mao Zedong, E. Franklin Frazier, and James Baldwin.48 Warden also
influenced the political development of Ron Karenga, who, in the wake of Watts riot,
founded the cultural nationalist group US. Karenga met Warden as a graduate student
at UCLA and became head of the Afro-American Association's Los Angeles branch.

The Afro-American Association, Karenga later recalled, is where both US and the BPP
got their "fundamental orientation about Blackness and about the need to organize the
community and let the masses decide."50
Caught up in this vibrant political atmosphere, Newton and Seale adopted an
intellectual orientation that viewed the black community as a colony exploited by white
businessmen, the government, and the police. Eventually, Newton became fed up with
Oakland activists spending all their time talking and philosophizing without taking
action. Newton and Seale founded the BPP to transform this new political
consciousness into action. Newton adopted a more Marxist perspective where the
liberation of oppressed peoples depended upon their gaining control of their own
communities. The founding document of the Black Panther Party, the Ten-Point

Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 222.
49
Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural
Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 27-28.
50
Maulana Karenga, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral
History Program, (University of California, 2002), 45.

38
program, reflected this philosophical outlook, and addressed the major issues facing
urban black communities with demands for full employment and adequate housing.
The BPP, however, did not focus on how black students should transform the
black community. San Francisco State's BSU greatly influenced how the UW's BSU
thought about their role as black students. At the two West Coast conferences attended
by the BSU, the students read and discussed a number of position papers that
established the philosophical foundations, as well as the more practical goals, of the
Black Student Union movement. In particular, the essays circulated at these
conferences critiqued how colleges had primarily served as a way for blacks to enter
white society and leave the black community behind. "Historically black students in the
United States have been separated from the black community, if not physically,
mentally," began one essay. An education, while often being couched in terms of a way
to uplift the black community, was really a ticket to whiteness, continued the essay.
"The educated 'Negro' was the closest to a white man as a black man could get." He
would use his education to prove to the whites that he was just another white man,
argued the essay. When the educated Negro returned to his own community, he saw
himself as superior to the uneducated blacks. Instead of working in the interest of the
black community, he really "worked in interest of the white power structure." This
ultimately divided the black community by class and prevented economic and political
progress, the essay concluded.51
Members of the UW BSU did not rely only on past and contemporary black
intellectuals and activists to shape their identity. They also shaped their identity
through protest and active participation in reshaping the university. By working as
university recruiters, tutors, and counselors and by sitting on university committees,
BSU activists shaped what it meant to be a minority student attending the university. In
particular, the institutionalization of black culture through the creation of black studies
programs greatly shaped black identity. By acknowledging that a wide range of black
experience was legitimate, that black authors and intellectuals contributed to the
51

"To Black Students: Notes on Internal Struggle and Direction to the National Struggle," October 1966,
UW BSU Papers.

kaleidoscope of American society, and by hiring black faculty to run and teach in the
program, black studies programs allowed definitions of blackness that deviated from
white norms and values to be seen as legitimate and acceptable.
At the University of Washington, the BSU was never entirely satisfied with how
the Black Studies program was run. The BSU continued to press for a completely
autonomous Black Studies program where they could determine the wages and pay of
the teachers and control the curriculum. "It is not possible nor practical for our
oppressor to control it," opined a BSU newsletter.52 In a 1973 interview, Gossett
conceded that while many gains had been made at the University, black studies
continued to be a major problem. "The middle class values and orientation of most
departments are not preparing black students with a clear set of developed skills that
will enable them to provide leadership to their poor colonized communities."53
While never fully realizing the goal of an autonomous Black Studies program,
three BSU leaders, Gossett, Carl Miller and E.J. Brisker, did teach a black history class
as part of the UW's Experimental College. According to the syllabus, the course was
"designed to provide the student with factual accounts of the critical role Blacks have
played in the American experience . . . The student will develop the roots and base he
needs to survive and progress in this society."54 This dual purpose is exceedingly
revealing. First, Gossett, Miller and Brisker assumed that while much of history
especially that taught at white institutionswas almost purely ideological in nature, it
was possible for a black person to teach a factual account of black history. Second, they
assumed that these facts would translate into developing the roots of a black identity
and a black community that could both survive and thrive.
The BSU's claim to possessing unique insight into the true nature of blackness
was dependent upon the university. The books on the experimental college class'
reading list were ostensibly assigned to build a sense of black pride and to teach the
facts about black culture. The list included Stokely Carmichaers Black Power, George

Rap Sheet, March 14, 1969, UW BSU Papers.

University of Washington Daily, May 24, 1973.
"Afro-American History Course Outline," UW BSU Papers.

Breitmen's Malcolm X, the Evolution of a Revolutionary, and Frantz Fanon's The

Wretched of the Earth. Yet, how were students taking this class to know that these
books represented a genuine black canon? In part, the legitimacy of such a list was
supported by the fact that the class was being taught, indirectly, under the auspices of
the university. At the same time, the act of teaching this class further developed the
black identities of the instructors.
Early black studies curricula developed at San Francisco State demonstrated
how black studies used the legitimizing nature of the university to promote the aims of
the black community. The formula for developing a set of core black studies classes
was rather simple. Traditional university classes were used as a foundation, but given a
black emphasis. The list of core classes included: black history, black math, black
psychology, black science, black philosophy, and black arts and humanities. The
organizers of this curriculum believed that even science and math were racialized to the
degree that they could be taught as black courses. Yet, all these classes were using the
university's current curriculum as a model, a curriculum they argued was inherently
racist. The primary difference between black math and math seemed to depend upon
the applicability of the knowledge to the black community, not the knowledge itself.
The black math course description read: "Presentation of mathematics as a way of
thinking, a means of communication and an instrument of problem solving, with special
reference to the black community."55 Blacks were using the university as both a tool
and a model to improve the condition of the black community.
Teaching a black history class was one of many of the UW BSU's intellectual
activities. Drawing on the precedent set by Don Warden's Afro-American society, they
met frequently to discuss what was rapidly becoming a canon of black power texts. In
its first two years as an organization, BSU leaders wrote no fewer than six position
papers. In these papers, the black students puzzled out the nature of black struggle and
explored the role of black students in the black power revolution. In producing these

Nathan Hare, "Questions and Answers about Black Studies," in Modern Black Nationalism: From
Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L. Van Deburg (New York: New York University Press,
1997), 161.

41
papers, the BSU was part of a vibrant intellectual community, which helped transform
commonly held assumptions.
Black Student Unions were only one group among many engaging in this
intellectual discourse. In the late 1960s, independent black bookstores opened in
Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and eventually Seattle. Founded in 1968
by SNCC activists Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, and Jimmy Garrett, the Drum and
Spear bookstore served as a gathering place in Washington, D.C. for Black Nationalist
intellectuals. Affiliated with the bookstore was the Center for Black Education, which
offered classes in black history and culture.56 The bookstore also operated the Drum
and Spear press, which published a number of Black Nationalist books, including a
series of essays originally published in the Pan-African, a bi-monthly newspaper of the
Center for Black Education. In one essay Garrett explored the relationship between
education and the black community. "An education which uplifts the individual at the
expense of, or in spite of, our people, and which suits the aims and priorities of the
europeans who control us, is a useless and destructive waste of time and energy," he
opined.57
In Seattle, black activists opened the Muntu Book Shop in the University of
Washington shopping district. The store sold African art and carving, jazz posters and
music, alongside books on American Indian, African, Chicano, and black history and
culture. Muntu represented the opening of Black Nationalist discourse to include a
broader, third world consciousness.58 The Afro American Journal, a Seattle Black
Nationalist paper published from 1967-1972, printed dozens of articles and cartoons on
the relationship between Seattle schools and the black community. One cartoon
depicted a white educator teaching a black history class. "His version of soul food will
probably mean cannibalism," remarked one black student in the cartoon to another,

Peniel E. Joseph, "Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power
Movement," The Journal ofAfrican American History 88 (Spring, 2003): 193.
57
James Garrett, The Struggle for Black Education: 1968-1971 (Washington, D.C: Drum and Spear
Press, 1972), 3. Taken from Garrett's essay, "Why Educate Ourselves," November 7, 1969.
58
"Advertisement for Muntu Book Shop," It's Time, May 10, 1971, 3.

calling into question the ability of a white to teach black history.

The Drum and Spear

bookstore, the Muntu Book Shop, the Center for Black Education, and the Afro
American Journal all represented black institutions created to facilitate and implement
Black Nationalist discourse.
Black Student Unions facilitated similar discussions on the nature of black
power and the black community. Virgil Roberts, a BSU leader at UCLA, remembers
having conversations about black power with his roommates that often ended in the
early morning hours. The books that provided the substance for many of the
conversations were very similar to those read by students at the UW and across the
nation. "There was a kind of reading list of stuff that I think that most people who were
dealing with the black consciousness of the time [read]," remembered Roberts.
"Everybody read kind of the same things, you know. Everybody read Frantz Fanon,
everybody read E. Franklin Frazier, you read W.E.B. Du Bois, you read Stokely
Carmichael and Charles Hamilton."60
In Seattle, some of these efforts at political education for young blacks were less
than successful. Bobby White, a member of Seattle's BPP, remembers how discussions
about Marxism and Colonialism were often incomprehensible to younger BPP
members. "What was required reading in those days was not understandable by sixteen
and seventeen-year-old kids," he noted. E.J. Brisker, as president of the BSU, was a
"really intelligent guy" who could speak to faculty at the UW. As leader of the BPP
political education efforts, however, he was unsuccessful in communicating with black
youth. According to White, the more subtle points of Marx or Fanon were lost on these
younger kids. "All they understood was kill Whitey."61
Even if the reading level was too difficult for many black youth, the process of
thinking about what it meant to be black was perhaps just as important as the
59

"Black History Cartoon," Afro American Journal, November 28,1968. For more on this paper see
Doug Blair, "Black Power and Education in the Afro American Journal, 1968-1969," A Seattle Civil
Rights and Labor History Project Ethnic Press Report, www.civilrights.washington.edu.
60
Virgil Roberts, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral History
Program, (University of California, 1998), 38.
51
Bobby White, interview by Janet Jones, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, August 25,
2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu.

43
conclusions. Charles Hamilton, writing in Ebony, argued that while Black Nationalism
was certainly not a new concept, millions of blacks thinking about what it meant to be
black was new. "In recent yearsespecially since 1966 and the emphasis on black
powerthere has been considerable attention focused on the word 'black.' . . . Some
people are quick to point out, and rightly so, that this concern is not new, that we've
been this way before. But whether this is all old stuff or an entirely new phenomenon
(and to many younger people it is new), the important point is that millions of people
are thinking about what it means to be 'black' or Negro or colored or AfroAmerican."

Regardless of the conclusions reached, Black Student Unions, operating

in a college environment, in formal and informal settings, got black students thinking
about what it meant to be black.
These discussions were not always limited to black students. The BSU
exchanged ideas and produced texts with New Left whites, Chicanos, Asians, and
Native Americans. In 1968, UW minority students created an interracial study group
called Solidarity for Latin African Asian Peoples (SLAAP). This group studied
together what they called Third World revolutionary thought. They read works by
Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Lenin, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong, among
others. These vibrant intellectual conversations broadened the worldview of all the
participants. In particular, Larry Gossett recalls how discussions with New Left
students helped him to better understand the relationship between the Vietnam War and
domestic racism.63
University of Washington programs also facilitated a racial dialogue. In 1968,
the University sponsored a weekly Soul Search program, designed to foster
communication between students about race in America. Members of the Black
Student Union used these sessions as a forum to explain and promote their political
views. Soul Search programs included discussions of urban poverty, the education
system, and black art. Student government fees provided funding to bring a number of

Charles V. Hamilton, "How Black is Black," in The Black Revolution (Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co.,
1970), 23.
63
Larry Gossett, author interview.

prominent speakers to campus. In the spring of 1968, campus speakers included Floyd
Mckissick, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Jimmy Garrett,
and Floyd McCree, the first black mayor of Flint, Michigan. The student newspaper,
the University of Washington Daily, provided extensive coverage of racial issues, and
frequently published editorials written by the BSU. The school also indirectly funded
the BSU newspaper It's Time.64
These position papers and political tracts produced by the BSU were also aimed
at reaching Seattle's entire minority community. In 1969, a BSU-led Third World
Coalition produced an untitled pamphlet written "in order to clarify points of a political
and ideological nature with a view towards bringing the people of the Third World
together." The other members of the coalition were the Seattle Black Panther Party and
the Movimiento Estudiantil De Chicanos de Aztlan (MEChA). This pamphlet was an
attempt to educate and mobilize Seattle's black and broader minority community about
what they believed would be a watershed moment in the struggle of oppressed peoples.
The authors appealed to local residents who were affected by poverty to join them in
fighting the racist and imperialist state. They realized that an intellectual appeal might
not be the best means of swaying the opinion of Seattle's poor, but had faith that "when
the indisputable facts of life turn up, no amount of sugarcoating can effectively hide the
bitter truth." They proposed to "demonstrate that 'underdevelopment' is a local
consequence of the world capitalist order," and that modern imperialism "has a vested
interest in maintaining the lucrative status-quo."65
Writing and producing this pamphlet was no easy endeavor. The finished
product was over forty, single-spaced pages, and discussed diverse topics including
slavery, imperialism, and Black Nationalism. The breadth and depth of the authors'
knowledge of history was impressivethe paper explored the historical relationship
between slavery and capitalism, the importance of securing cheap raw materials in the
64

For an example of a BSU editorial in the University of Washington Daily see "Philosophy of a Militant
Black Leader, 'FreedomPower to Decide Own Affairs,'" University of Washington Daily, April 23,
1968, 6. "McKissick Hits Johnson For Increasing Tensions," University of Washington Daily, April 18,
1968, 1. "'Racist' School System Viewed at Soul Search," University of Washington Daily, December
11,1968,1.
65
A pamphlet prepared by the Third World Coalition, October 1969, UW BSU Papers.

45
expanding post-World War II economy, and how black urban migration provided
corporations with a cheap and disposable labor force. This paper was not written for
propaganda purposes alone. The BSU could have simply distributed any number of
position papers written by the Black Panthers or other Black Nationalist groups. The
intellectual exercise of producing such a document was one key to sustaining the energy
and creativity of the movement. Across the nation, hundreds of other black student
groups produced similar documents, linking them through this shared activity. Black
students understood that part of their role in the revolution was to produce a
philosophical foundation that would sustain the movement.66
The majority of the writing produced by the BSU explored the role that black
college students and Black Student Unions should play in the black liberation struggle.
This new role was in many ways a break from the past. They strongly critiqued black
intellectuals of the past as viewing themselves as better than the rest of the black
community. They also believed they could turn white institutions into a place where
blacks could learn about their true heritage, instead of simply learning how to be white.
At the same time, they still saw black students as playing key leadership roles in
improving the black community, a view that is very similar to Du Bois' notion of the
talented tenth.
Discussions of the proper role for black students at the UW invariably began
with a critique of the traditional relationship between educated blacks and the black
community. In the past, when black students attended college, even black colleges,
they learned white middle-class values and norms. While this education allowed them
to be seen as more respectable by the white community, it served to alienate them from
black culture. When they returned to work in the black community, they often looked
upon working-class black culture with disdain.
These arguments were not new. They drew heavily on ideas found in Harold
Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and the position papers written by the BSU
at San Francisco State. Cruse's Crisis was perhaps the most influential text in shaping

Ibid.

46
this new understanding of the role of black students. James Turner, the eventual
director of the black studies program at Cornell, later remembered Cruse's influence:
"Then The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was published, and I don't think there is any
other book that had the kind of single impact on my generation as that book d i d . . . .
Professor Harold Cruse's book created a raging debate within our circles . . . [about] the
role and the responsibility of the black educated class, of the black intellectual. And
then by extension, that debate was taken up in the black arts movement. What is the
role of the black artist? . . . And these were all very pregnant discussions."67 Virgil
Roberts, a UCLA BSU leader, remembers discussing Cruse with friends and BSU
members in numerous settings. "We thought Harold Cruse was absolutely brilliant and
right on target." Finally, at the UW, Larry Gossett remembered that Cruse's book
provided him with a whole new set of concepts. Cruse exposed Gossett to concepts
including colonialism and imperialism which helped to shape Gossett's view of the
world.
The BSU leveled a similar criticism at the civil rights movement of the early
1960s. The civil rights struggle for integration, according to the BSU, only mimicked
blacks' desire to become white. While blacks may have gained the right to drink out of
the same drinking fountain and to sit in the same classroom, society still treated them
disdainfully and called them '"niggers."' White domination of leadership positions
revealed that the movement did not truly value blacks. The experiences of SNCC
demonstrated "that white participation and leadership reminded black people of their
inferior status."68 This only reinforced the notion that white culture was the standard by
which to measure the value of all cultures. According to the BSU, much of the struggle
for integration was nothing more than black people pleading and scrapping to become
part of the white racist establishment's training and indoctrination process.
Instead of trying to become white, the new generation of black college students
realized that they must center their education on serving the black community. In a
67

Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999), 64.
68
"To Black Students: Notes on Internal Struggle and Direction to the National Struggle," October 1966,
UW BSU Papers.

document titled "The Black Student Union," BSU leaders charted a governing
philosophy for the organization. The first assumption of the new BSU at the University
of Washington was "that every black student has some talent or skill... and that black
students must use their skills to help themselves and their people."69 For example, "A
black person Who works for I.B.M. is not helping the black people by doing his job.
However, he does help by taxing himself and putting that money in a communityoperated day care center

A Black doctor would seek only to make a living and not

accumulate great amounts of wealth and in turn the Black community would support
him and he would serve that Black community."70 The opening of hundreds of
universities to blacks provided a unique opportunity for thousands of African
Americans, many of whom were the first in their family to attend college. But this
opportunity would be squandered if these students used their degree to become middleclass whites. Instead, the BSU expected these new students to use their education to
serve the black community.
According to the BSU, this new generation of black students should first use
education to recapture the achievements of blacks. The white establishment, through
slavery and Jim Crow laws, had stolen black culture and led blacks to think that they
were inferior. To address this whitewashing of American history, BSUs called for
academic research and classroom curriculums to reveal the remarkable
accomplishments of black heroes and the unique values of the black community.
Research by black students could discover "many of the lies and omissions that nonblacks have told." This bricks and mortar research allowed the black community to
understand and celebrate the fruits of black culture. Early efforts had already revealed
previously hidden African cultural achievements. "We now know more about the
achievements of our African forefathers as they offered cultural gifts from their homes

"The Black Student Union," UW BSU Papers.

San Francisco State College, "Aims and Objectives of the Black Studies Program: A Position Paper,"
October 1966, UW BSU Papers.
70

48
in Ghana and Songhay." In the BSU's vision of the new black student, education
uncovered and reclaimed the values and achievements of black people.71
This represented a radical departure from traditional notions of racial uplift. In
the new narrative being crafted by BSUs, black students did not need to become more
middle-class, more white, in order to provide leadership for the community. Instead,
black students needed to become more black. Research and education could provide the
newly discovered cultural knowledge needed to unite and empower the black
community. Ideally, this work would be done in institutions funded and administered
by the black community. Unfortunately, the black community did not have adequate
resources to fund or legitimize this newly uncovered black culture. For a while, blacks
would have to rely on the resources of white institutions, in particular universities and
federal money. Only white universities had the resources to support this project.
This new black nation, the BSU believed, needed leaders to run its institutions
and professionals to build its economy. In the summer of 1968, anticipating an entering
UW class of black students that exceeded two hundred, E.J. Brisker and the BSU drew
up a list of important majors for these incoming freshmen. Black students, the BSU
advised, should seriously consider studying communications, economics, or politics.
These fields were seen as the "most important for black people and future leaders to
have knowledge of for the advancement of black people."72 If these fields were
uninteresting to the black student, s/he should consider a field, such as engineering, that
could help literally rebuild the black community. "We must learn to: read blue prints,
design, construct, etc."

Science was viewed as another tool of liberation for blacks.

"Science is a cornerstone to our eventual liberation. We must reclaim our facility in

mathematics and science which were, in fact, originally creations of our people."74
This new black student must remain constantly vigilant if blacks were to achieve
true liberation. Only through confrontation and political action could black students

E.J. Brisker, "Projected Programs of Endeavor for the University of Washington Black Student Union,"
1969, UW BSU Papers.
73
"The Black Student Union," UW BSU Papers.
74
San Francisco State College, UW BSU Papers.

alter white institutions to meet their needs. Power concedes nothing without a demand,
and universities were no exception. A BSU position paper emphasized a black
student's double burden: "to study and organize, to think and act." Black students had
to balance their studies with political action. The challenge of fighting institutional
racism demanded that, "At some point black students have to be for real, they have to
work, and work in a positive manner."75 Unlike white students, blacks did not have the
luxury of focusing entirely on their studies.
The activist side of the BSU's philosophy was highly gendered. The metaphors
and examples of blacks exerting power were invariably masculine. "Every Black
person," wrote the BSU, "in the time of struggle, must become a warrior."

The only

examples of powerful blacks were also both men: preachers and pimps. Nowhere were
strong black women used as examples of black power. Overall, the BSU vision of the
black community involved traditionally masculine values. Black students were shown
as using their talents to lead and rebuild the black community. Nowhere were they
77

described as healing and nurturing the community.

This new generation of black students believed that they must dedicate
themselves to the cause of black liberation. Those that refused were not black at all, but
Negroes seeking to become white. In newsletters and other publications, the BSU
condemned black students who did not dedicate enough time to the cause. "There are a
lot of excuses black students give for not working (i.e. 'I don't have time'), but the BSU
doesn't buy them. If black students have time to talk and get high, they have time to
work."78 A true black was known by his works. Active dedication to black liberation
defined black identity. Only those students willing to work could claim the legitimacy
of being an authentic black.
75

"The Black Student Union," UW BSU Papers.

Ibid.
77
For more on black power and gender see, for example, Robyn Ceanne Spencer, "Engendering the
Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area,
California," Journal of Women's History 20, no. 1 (2008): 90-113; see also Stephen Ward, "The Third
World Women's Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics," in The Black Power
Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (London: Routledge,
2006), 119-144.
78
"The Black Student Union," UW BSU Papers.
76

50
These ideas were often put into practice. Members of the BSU would police the
blackness of other students, calling those who failed to live up to their vision of the new
black student Uncle Tom Negroes. The policing of blackness united black students and
furthered the BSU's political agenda. The story of Ernie Smith and Willie Turner,
African American students disciplined by the BSU for demonstrating a lack of loyalty
to the cause, exemplifies this policing. This incident is worth examining in detail.
At the UW BSU's first meeting of spring quarter in 1969, a black transfer
student, Richard Harr, asked to be given a place on the agenda. After listening to
discussions about an upcoming summer festival and black college weekend, Harr took
the floor. Harr, who had attended Oregon State University the previous quarter, told the
group that there was a crisis at OSU involving the administration, the athletic
department, and the Black Student Union. The events that precipitated the crisis had
begun in the fall when Oregon State's BSU informed the University that blacks suffered
from systematic discrimination and that proper action must be taken. The
administration responded by forming a committee to consider the BSU's grievances.
While the committee was preparing a report on the state of black life at OSU, another
conflict exploded in the athletic department. The football coach Dee Andros held what
he called "traditional values" and expected his athletes to maintain certain standards of
appearance. He demanded that his players must have short, well-kept hair, and be
clean-shaven.

These standards were necessary, according to Andros, "to produce a

team that the students, alumni, and ourselves can be proud of."80
These demands clashed with the spirit and the fashion of the late 1960s.
Students wore their hair long and denied schools the right to regulate their dress. Black
students, inspired by black power and cultural nationalism, grew huge Afros and thick
beards. As an article in UCLA's black student newspaper, Nommo, put it, "The
moustache and beard are historical and valid external signs of . . . black manhood and

"Black Student Union Meeting Minutes," April 4, 1969, UW BSU Papers.

David Wiggins, '"The Future of College Athletics is at Stake:' Black Athletes and Racial Turmoil on
Three Predominantly White University Campuses, 1968-1972," Journal of Sport History 15 (Winter
1988): 316.
80

51
black culture."81 One black athlete at Oregon State, Fred Milton, decided to challenge
the coach's standards by growing a moustache. He and other black athletes believed
that when white coaches set certain grooming standards for their players, they were not
promoting discipline and respect for authority, as the coaches liked to think, but were
trying to force blacks to act white. "Coaches are trying to mold black athletes into
thinking white," commented Rafael Stone, a UW basketball player, when asked about
the OSU situation.82 This view fit into the larger BSU and Black Power philosophy that
white institutions, in particular universities, celebrated the accomplishments of white
culture and history while ignoring and devaluing the contributions of heroic African
Americans. Many black athletes, in potent acts of defiance, refused to abide by the
standards of respectability drawn by their coaches. They instead celebrated their
identity according to what they perceived to be the standards of the black community.
These black community standards were unacceptable to OSU's football coach.
While walking across campus in February, Andros, in a chance encounter, saw Fred
Milton sporting his newly grown moustache. Even though it was the off-season,
Andros demanded Milton shave his moustache. When Milton refused to comply, he
lost his athletic scholarship for the following year and was suspended from the football
team. White alumni, along with the administration, backed Andros' standards of
physical appearance and supported the suspension. White athletes also rallied behind
their coach by circulating a petition in support of Andros' decision. They eventually
gathered the signatures of 173 athletes who supported the suspension. The OSU BSU
supported Milton's refusal to shave his moustache and held a meeting to decide the
appropriate response to Milton's suspension. At this meeting, in an impressive display
of solidarity, black students voted to boycott classes and athletic events until Milton was
reinstated. After the boycott proved unsuccessful, a significant number of black

"Black Students Protest Dismissal of OSU Grid Star," Nommo, March 12, 1969, 8.
"Confrontation in Corvallis," University of'Washington Daily, March 4, 1969, 12.

52
students, including black athletes, pledged to forfeit their scholarships and leave the

83

university.
After the meeting, a few students had second thoughts and decided to remain at
OSU. Two of those who decided to stay, Ernie Smith and Willie Turner, were members
of OSU's track team, which was scheduled to compete at the University of Washington
later that month.84 Harr asked the BSU to place Smith and Turner on a "White List"
and take action to prevent them from running in the meet. He argued that Smith and
Turner were traitors who had sold the other black students down the river. Inspired by
Harr's story, the UW BSU decided to send letters to Smith and Turner, letting them
know they were not welcome in Seattle. They also sent letters to seven West Coast
BSUs, informing these groups of the traitorous tale of Turner and Smith.85
As the track meet approached, a newly formed BSU committee brainstormed a
strategy to prevent Turner and Smith from running in the track meet. First, they lobbied
the black track athletes at the UW to convince them not to participate in the meet. The
UW athletes decided to participate in the meet, but issued a statement condemning
Andros' policies at OSU. Second, they confronted Turner and Smith at their hotel when
they arrived in Seattle on Friday. Outside the Seattle hotel where the OSU track team
was staying, Larry Gossett and Richard Harr convinced the OSU coach to allow them to
meet with Smith and Turner. While there is no record of what was said at this meeting,
given the vitriolic and threatening rhetoric the BSU used to publicly attack Smith and
Turner, the meeting was presumably not amiable. Most likely Harr and Gossett bullied,
threatened, and intimidated Smith and Turner into agreeing not to compete. The next

The number of blacks who pledged to leave campus is unclear. One article places the total number at
forty-seven, with seventeen of those students black athletes. Those that actually left was a smaller
number. David Wiggins argues that of the athletes "only two of them who figured to get any playing
time in their respective sports withdrew from school." Four students ended up transferring to the UW, so
the overall total of students who left is perhaps as high as twenty. See "BSU Denounces Turner and
Smith," University of Washington Daily, April 29, 1969, 12. See also Wiggins, "The Future of College
Athletics," 320.
84
Ernie Smith was the younger brother of sprinter Tommie Smith, who became immortalized when he
gave the black power salute with John Carlos while on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics.
85
"Black Student Union Meeting Minutes," April 4,1969, UW BSU Papers.

53
day, OSU trounced the UW track team, 96-85, but without the participation of Turner
and Smith.86
Black masculinity stood at the center of the initial conflict between Andros and
OSU's BSU. Dee Andros' demand that football players maintain certain standards of
appearance attacked not only black culture and identity in general, but more
specifically, the new militant masculine black identity shaped by the black power
movement. The shaving of facial hair, when demanded by a white authority, was a very
emasculating act. In this view, Andros' standards were another example of how white
racism prevented black males from being black men.
Black masculine identity was also a central battleground in the war of words that
ensued between the BSU and black students who refused to censor Andros. The
difference between being an authentic black and being an Uncle Tom Negro was
described in strongly gendered terms. Real black men were determined warriors
fighting the good fight of black liberation, the black students argued. Negroes were
weaklings who ingratiated themselves before the white power structure. The BSU's
barbed attacks utilized this gendered trope by specifically attacking the manhood of
those blacks who continued to participate in athletics at OSU. Turner and Smith had
"deposited their dignity and manhood with the OSU Athletic department."87
Turner responded to these attacks on his manhood by attacking the manhood of
the black students who had left OSU, in particular Richard Harr. These students, they
argued, were running away from racism instead of directly confronting it. "So, if Mr.
Harr had been a man, instead of a boy, and had remained at OSU to contribute more to
his black people and himself, he wouldn't have had to run from a problem that he will
always run into."88 Turner believed running away would not solve racism at Oregon
State. Oregon State needed strong black men willing to confront the administration and
athletic department.

"Spikers Win 5 Events, But Lose Meet to OSU," University of Washington Daily, April 29, 1969, 11.
"BSU's Statement to the Press," April 28, 1969, UW BSU Papers.
"OSU Blacks Lash Back," Seattle P-I, April 28, 1969,44.

54
Harr's decision to leave OSU, Turner argued, would also harm his ability to
provide leadership for the black community. By leaving Oregon State, Harr would lack
the educational background needed to serve the black community. In a press release,
Turner reminded Harr that, "Black people have always preached that Black Power is
getting an education and that no one has the right to infringe on another's human
rights." Education was a key element of the black liberation struggle, since "you can't
deal with the educated without being educated yourself."89 According to Turner, blacks
needed education to confront racism at white universities. By running away from
Oregon State, Harr would lack the leadership skills to serve the black community.
Turner and Smith and the UW's BSU were not fighting over what it meant to be
a black man. Both concurred a black man must militantly confront racism in all its
forms and contribute to the leadership and betterment of the black people. Both
accepted this new definition of what it meant to be a black man as defined by the black
power movement. Their argument, instead, was over how to best confront racism and
serve the black community.
Harr responded to Turner's barbed attacks by emphasizing another characteristic
key to the struggle for black liberationrace loyalty. Turner and Smith had promised
to leave OSU in support of brother Milton's conflict with a racist football coach, Hannoted. Like soldiers who flee during a battle, Turner and Smith's lack of resolve
weakened the BSU's chance of winning concessions from a racist athletic department
and administration.
More importantly, by reneging on their promise to leave OSU, the BSU argued,
Turner and Smith were traitors to the black race. "The reason we're moving against the
OSU brothers is because they gave their word that they would leave and convinced
others that they were sincere," announced the UW BSU in a press release.90 By
breaking their promise and returning to OSU, with the situation in the athletic
department unresolved, Turner and Smith had become "enemies of the people and

1U1U.

"BSU's Statement to the Press," UW BSU Papers.

traitors to their race."

The UW BSU believed that loyalty to the struggle trumped any

considerations of getting an education. As one BSU member stated when discussing the
situation at OSU, "When we're at war with the system we must remember that we have
to suspend some individual rights in favor of efforts to further the Black Revolution."
Without race loyalty, the chances of victory in confrontations with white
administrations were minimal. The BSU understood the importance of disciplining
Turner and Harr to prevent possible future defections.
The BSU disciplined Turner and Harr by preventing them from participating in
the track meet and labeling them as Uncle Tom Negroes. In a series of public
announcements, the BSU repeatedly pronounced that the blacks who returned to OSU
for spring quarter were no longer black. The real black students were those who had
chosen to leave. The BSU at OSU was described as being in exile. At an interview
after the track meet, a reporter asked Gossett what the BSU at Oregon State thought
about the protest. "Understand that there is no BSU at Oregon State," replied Gossett.
"The Black Student Union there is in exile. If there are some there they are
masquerading as Black People. Maybe some Negroes have started a Negro Student
Union."93 According to Gossett, black skin did not make one black. By reneging on
their promise to leave Oregon State, Turner and Smith were no longer black and could
not speak for the black community. If they had formed a new BSU at Oregon State, it
was not a real Black Student Union since it supported white institutional racism.
Gossett and the BSU policed who got to claim status as a black. Those who supported
white institutional racism, especially after promising to support their fellow brothers
who left Oregon State, were no longer black.
At other universities, black student groups played a similar role in policing what
it meant to be black. William Exum, in his study of the black student group Katara at
NYU's University College, finds Katara leaders were the guardians of "the ideological

92

-LIS1U.

"Black Student Union Meeting Minutes," April 4, 1969, UW BSU Papers.

93
"Black Student Union Press Conference on Oregon State BSU Situation," April 28, 1969, UW BSU
Papers.

purity of black students on campus."

Moreover, this guardianship of blackness united

and gave purpose to black student groups. "The importance of black unity and
solidarity" in waging the fight against racial policies "in the university and the larger
world," Exum argues, held the group Katara together.95
Many of the sociological works on blackness note this political side to identity
formation, but do not sufficiently place it in its historical context. For example, Sarah
Susannah Willie observes that blackness is not merely a negative marker, "but a
complex and often positive characteristic around which individuals and groups bolster
identity, nurture dignity, induce political action, and mobilize for change."96 In
particular, she argues college campuses represent unique locations of identity formation
"in that the authority for declaring authenticity and measuring racial identity within the
black student community is in the hands of black students."97 On college campuses,
peer groups, such as Black Student Unions, were powerful gatekeepers of black
identity. Sociologists also draw attention to how black students, in response to being a
minority in sea of white faces, as well as facing the pressures of subtle and overt racism,
tended to emphasize their blackness. In their 1972 study of Black Students at White
Colleges, Charles Willie and Arline McCord discovered that adaptation to a hostile
environment was the main challenge for black students. Associating primarily with
other black students, wearing culturally distinctive clothing, and joining black student
groups were all ways blacks coped with attending white institutions.98
In discussing black identity on white college campuses in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, these arguments need to be historicized. It was not merely a psychological
response to presumed racism at white campuses that caused the BSU to police racial
identity, but a specific political agenda. The BSU sought to publicly discipline Turner

William Exum, Paradoxes of Protest: Black Student Activism in a White University (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1985), 144.
95
Ibid., 164.
96
Sarah Susannah Willie, Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 8.
97
Ibid., 52.
98
Charles V. Willie and Arline S. McCord, Black Students at White Colleges (New York: Praeger Press,
1972).

57
and Smith because they represented a threat to the racial solidarity seen as necessary to
implement their agenda. When special recruitment efforts brought unprecedented
numbers of minority students to the UW in the fall of 1968, most of these students
joined the BSU because, to paraphrase Larry Gossett, they knew why they were there.
The students were there to use political action to achieve specific goals: the creation of
black studies programs, increased minority enrollment, and the implementation of black
cultural programs.
If you spend only a few hours reading BSU primary sources, it is impossible not
to notice that the students' rhetoric frequently seems to contradict their actions. As
mentioned above, black students believed that white universities were inherently racist.
As late as 1971, on the front page of the UW BSU's newspaper It's Time, BSU member
Edward Ridgill argued the quickest route to freedom for blacks is through "separation,
politically and economically from white society."99 Yet, these same students fought to
have these same racist institutions hire black faculty, create black studies programs, and
recruit black students. If racist white universities were unredeemable, why were black
students so willing to work within traditional power structures to reform these
institutions? Put differently, how could black students be both separatists and
integrationists at the same time?
This seeming contradiction is related to how both academics and the general
public understand the shift from civil rights to black power. In this common and
powerful narrative, the civil rights movement was tactically nonviolent and
ideologically integrationist; the black power movement was tactically violent and
ideologically separatist. This narrative was, in part, a creation of black power advocates
who sought to differentiate themselves from the civil rights movement of the early
1960s. In the Meredith March for Freedom, where the black power slogan first
emerged, Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC organizers purposefully directed
protestors to chant "black power," instead of "freedom now," to symbolize the new
direction they wanted to take the movement. Other important black thinkers, including

"Separation or Integration: The Black Dilemma," It's Time, May 10, 1971, UW BSU Papers.

58
Harold Cruse, saw the struggle in similar terms. In Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
Cruse defined the divide in the black community as between "integrationism (civil
rights, racial equality, freedom) versus nationalism (separatism, accomodationist, selfsegregation, economic nationalism, group solidarity and self-help)." "American history
is basically a history of the conflict between integrationist and nationalist forces in
politics, economics, and culture," continued Cruse, "no matter what leaders are
involved and what slogans are used."100 Black students adapted this rhetoric in
developing their own critique of universities.
BSU leaders viewed white universities as inherently racist institutions and
emphasized that the black community needed to develop its own institutions of higher
learning. But black leaders understood that the development of these institutions were
years away. One explanation as to why blacks were willing to work with white
universities was that these universities were the only institutions with the power and the
resources to implement black studies programs and provide blacks with a top-rate
education, particularly in many graduate fields. Since the government was not going to
give black students millions of dollars to fund their own universities, as one position
paper written by the UW BSU demanded, black students had no choice but to work with
white universities.
Black power advocates, including the BPP, faced a similar dilemma.
Philosophically, the Panthers believed the federal government was inherently racist.
Therefore, working with or through the federal or state and local governments would
inevitably result in a failure to improve the living conditions in black communities. At
the same time, they understood that the government was one of the few institutions with
enough power and resources to improve black communities. Often, the Panthers used
their aggressive tactics as a way to lobby the government. For example, the BPP
learned of an intersection in Oakland that had a high number of accidents, including a
number of pedestrian fatalities. The black community had asked the city to put a
stoplight at the intersection, but the city had taken no action. Instead of attending city

Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), 564.

59
council meetings to lobby for a traffic signal, the Black Panther Party took over the
intersection, with members acting as traffic police. They then informed the city council
they would continue to control the intersection during peak hours until the city installed
a stoplight. These bold tactics worked; the city almost immediately put in a stoplight.
Some of the theatrical tactics utilized by black students served a similar purpose.
As part of their campaign for a black studies program on campus, the UW BSU visited
classrooms and enacted a form of political theater. They entered classrooms
unannounced and told the teacher that they were taking over the lesson. For example, if
it were a class on colonial history, they asked students if they had heard of Sally
Hemmings or Crispus Attucks. Most classes responded with silence. The black
students would then throw textbooks on the floor, proclaiming that a white racist
version of history was being taught in the class. Black student confrontations with the
university were, in part, a tactic designed to garner press coverage, intimidate the
faculty, and spur the administration to action. Their aggressive tactics, viewed by some
as promoting radical Black Nationalism, were really a way to open access to the
102

university.
That black activists needed the power and resources of white universities is
clear. But if black students truly believed these institutions were irrevocably racist, the
relationship between the BSU and the administration would have been tenuous and
instrumental. Instead, black students were integrated into the university on numerous
levels. Black students served on university committees and advisory boards, on payroll
as recruiters, and after graduation worked in black studies programs and offices of
minority affairs. If there were a separatist agenda lurking in this integration into all
levels of university bureaucracy and administration, it was well hidden.
Black student activists intertwined the goal of structural integration within the
university with their quest for cultural recognition. African Americans demanded
access to universities, but not if the cost meant teaching blacks to become white. By
calling for integration on their own terms, they forged a new covenant with universities:
Seale, Seize the Time, 101-102.
Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.

institutions of higher learning would open their doors to minorities in a manner that
promoted minority cultural achievements. Black students wanted access to the top
schools and graduate programs in the nation. They also wanted these schools to create
new institutional structures that celebrated and studied the unique contributions of
African Americans. In other words, black students demanded structural changes in the
university which facilitated the acceptance of black culture without cultural
assimilation.
For Larry Gossett, the identity he forged in the struggle for black liberation
shaped the rest of his life. After working in the Office of Minority Affairs at the
University of Washington, he became an urban planning coordinator. Beginning in
1979, he served for fourteen years as the Executive Director for the Central Area
Motivation Program (CAMP). CAMP traces its roots to Seattle's civil rights struggles.
In 1964, black community activists, including the Seattle Urban League and the Central
Area Community Council, created the Central Area Citizens Committee. When
Congress passed War on Poverty legislation in 1965, this group led the campaign to
secure grants for Seattle. After securing federal dollars, activists formed CAMP as an
umbrella organization to administer dozens of nascent War on Poverty programs.
CAMP indirectly laid the groundwork for the UW's transformation as an institution in
regards to minorities. CAMP's volunteer training program served as a model for the
UW's Soul Search racial forum. Today, in 2008, CAMP continues to operate food
banks and homeless shelters, provide job training and placement, and offer assistance to
families who cannot afford their energy bills.103 Gossett's time as CAMP's Executive
Director represents the legacy of 1960s activism being paid forward. In 1993 Gossett
won election to the King County Council where he represents Seattle's urban minority
neighborhoods to this day. The values inculcated as a leader of the BSU continue to
influence his decisions as a policymaker.

"Soul Search Dialogue Begins," University of Washington Daily, February 15, 1968, 7; Taylor, The
Forging of a Black Community, 288-89. See also http://www.campseattle.org/default.aspx.

61
The majority of black students who entered the University of Washington in the
late 1960s emerged as fundamentally changed individuals. Black students, realizing
their communities lacked the resources to promote a new definition of blackness, turned
to the university to provide resources and legitimacy in their efforts to revitalize black
culture and black communities. They understood the high stakes involved. If blacks
were to escape the reality and legacy of 350 years of racism, they must remain
dedicated to the cause of black liberation. Through struggle against the university,
black students forged a new identity.
Black Student Unions were not the only group fighting to change the university
in this period. New Left whites, black athletes, and other minority student organizations
all protested for their own sets of demands, at times both competing and collaborating
with their black student activist counterparts. The next chapter focuses on the BSU's
relationship to the New Left, black athletes, and other "Third World" minority students.

Chapter Two: Conditional Coalitions: BSUs and Their Relationship with

Black Athletes, Leftists, and Minority Student Groups
On a chilly Saturday afternoon in January 1970, twenty Black Student Union
(BSU) members entered Hec Edmundson pavilion where the University of Washington
(UW) gymnastics team was finishing their final round of warm-ups before a scheduled
meet against Brigham Young University (BYU). In a partly comic, partly frightening
scene, the protestors dumped garbage, threw eggs, poured catsup and oil on the
gymnastics mats and knocked over chalk trays and tables.1 The UW gymnastics coach,
infuriated by these acts of vandalism, screamed at the students to leave the gym. As a
parting gesture, the protestors threw two buckets of water at his face. The message of
the protest was clear: the BSU would act to prevent any athletic contests with BYU.
This short but confrontational protest marked the beginning of what were
perhaps the largest and most disruptive demonstrations the UW ever experienced. In
March, after the administration failed to meet their demands, the BSU kicked off ten
days of massive protests. The BSU utilized hit-and-run tactics, occupying campus
buildings for only a short period of time before leaving to occupy a different building.
These tactics were designed to maximize disruptions while avoiding targeted police
crackdowns. Unlike earlier BSU protests, the administration utilized Seattle Police
Department tactical squads to restore order and considered calling in the National
Guard. The courts issued a temporary restraining order against the BSU, prohibiting
their use of "force or violence in such a way as to interfere with the normal activity of
the university."2 When the protests ended, the official report estimated the campus had
sustained over $11,000 in property damage and fifteen students had suffered injuries.
The story of the BYU protests, however, cannot be told by focusing solely on
the actions of the BSU. During the tense, disruptive protests of March, the BSU
collaborated with numerous groups, including other student minority groups and a
recently formed New Left group, the Seattle Liberation Front. The Human Rights
1
2

"Blacks Fling Garbage, Delay Gymnastics Meet," The Seattle Times, February 1, 1970, H4.
"Restraining Order Issued," The Seattle Times, March 7, 1970.

63
Commission, created by the administration, in part, to craft the UW's official position
on B YU, quickly transformed into a forum where other minority groups could air their
grievances.
Traditionally, the story of black student protest at white universities has been
told within the framework of a black-white dichotomy. Telling the story as a battle or
contest between black students and white administrators in many ways makes sense.
Many administrators and BSU members did view the struggle in black and white terms.
Black students saw themselves as fighting to change a white racist institution. But this
framework tends to ignore the contributions of other groups unless these groups directly
collaborated with the BSU in a major public protest. It also says little about how BSUs
both competed against, and collaborated with, other student groups.
In this chapter, I move away from a strictly black-white framework by utilizing
the narrative of the BYU protests as a window to explore the relationship between the
BSU and other student groups. I focus, in particular, on the BSU's relationship with
black athletes, New Left groups, and other student minority organizations.
Concentrating on these relationships complicates the story of black student protest at
white universities. The independent protests waged by black athletes, for a set of goals
very different from BSUs, demonstrates that not all black students thought of activism
or crafted an identity in the same way. The New Left provided manpower and even
leadership during BSU protests, but often acted as a foil that made black protest more
respectable. At some universities, sympathetic administrators contrasted what they
considered the very reasonable demands of black students with the unreasonable
demands of the New Left. BSUs also served as a model and opened political space for
other minority groups.
Coalition building was a savvy political strategy. By providing more students
for protests, coalitions created bigger headlines and made it more difficult for
administrators to ignore their demands. The university setting helped facilitate the
formation of student coalitions. Universities, as physically and personally tight-knit
communities, made it easy for student groups to interact. For example, at the UW, both
the BSU and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) had offices in

the Husky Union Building. At UCLA, the majority of campus protests occurred in a
tight geographical space that included Meyerhoff Park, Bruin Walk, and the
administration building. Universities also provided student groups with a shared
context and antagonist. Student protest groups aimed their protests at faculty and
administrators, with the ultimate goal of reforming the university. BSU protests thus
operated within a complex web of student protest in the late 1960s.
To many outside observers, the UW BSU's decision to target athletic contests
with Brigham Young University seemed puzzling. The UW competed against BYU no
more than a handful of times each year. BYU, distantly located in Provo, Utah, seemed
to have no direct influence on the lives of black students in Seattle. In a barrage of
press statements and public interviews in early February 1970, the BSU explained its
case against BYU. Black students targeted BYU in part because of that institution's
lily-white student body. In 1970, only four blacks had ever graduated from BYU. The
school also discouraged blacks from attending by sending letters to black applicants
warning them that there were "no families of your race" living in Provo.3 But the
BSU's main reason for the boycott was BYU's affiliation with the Mormon Church.4
At the time of the protests, the Mormon Church did not allow blacks to join its
priesthood. Unlike the Catholic Church, the priesthood was not a professional order; all
males who were not black entered the priesthood at age twelve. Without the priesthood
blacks could not marry in the temple, hold important leadership positions in the church,
or, when they died, enter the highest level of heaven. In short, the Mormon Church
viewed blacks as spiritually inferior human beings who could not reach full salvation
regardless of their actions on earth.5

Clifford Bullock, "Fired by Conscience: The 'Black 14' Incident at the University of Wyoming and
Black Protest in the Western Athletic Conference, 1968-1970," Wyoming History Journal 68, no. 1
(1996): 5-6; the admissions letter quote is from Bullock, nl3; Gary Bergera and Ronald Priddis, Brigham
Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1985), 298.
4
The Mormon Church's official name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
5
For a lengthy exploration of the relationship between blacks and the Mormon Church see Lester E. Bush
Jr. and Armand L. Mauss, eds., Neither White Nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a
Universal Church (Midvale UT: Signature Books, 1984).

65
The UW BSU's protest was not the first against BYU and the Mormon Church.
At the time of the UW demonstrations, students had led protests for over two years
against BYU at dozens of Western universities. The first protest occurred in 1968, at
the University of Texas El-Paso (UTEP). The origins of this protest began in February
1968, when Harry Edwards' Olympic Committee for Human Rights led a boycott
against the racially discriminatory New York Athletic Club at Madison Square Garden.
Eight black members of the UTEP track team, eager to compete at the prestigious meet,
crossed Edwards' picket line.
When the UTEP athletes returned to El Paso, the predominantly white campus
treated the black runners as heroes who had stood up to black militants.6 This reception
inspired the athletes to think about the discrimination they experienced at UTEP. The
New York Athletic Club boycott, coupled with the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr., spurred the black athletes into action. They decided to boycott their upcoming track
meet against Utah State and BYU. Dave Morgan, a UTEP runner, when asked about
the athletes' motivation, responded, "There were about a dozen reasons. The Mormons
teach that Negroes are descended from the devil. As a reason for the track team's
boycott it may sound like a small thing to a white person, but who the hell wants to go
up there and run your tail off in front of a bunch of spectators who think you've got
horns."7 Seeped in the rhetoric and culture of black power, the UTEP athletes no longer
wanted to perform for the benefit of a white racist institution.
The UTEP protest against BYU led to other protests. In the fall of 1969,
fourteen black football players at Wyoming were suspended from the team for planning
to wear black armbands during a game against BYU.8 At a BYU-Arizona State
basketball game, police were called to stop the violence and at the University of New
Mexico, the student senate demanded that the college end all relations with BYU.9 In
early November, Stanford announced that it would schedule no new athletic events or
competitions of any nature with BYU. Kenneth Pitzer, Stanford's president, defended
6

Jack Olsen, The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), 66.
Ibid., 70.
8
"The Fifth Horseman," The New York Times, November 15, 1969, 47.
9
Ibid., 9.
7

66
the decision by stating: "It is a policy of Stanford University not to schedule events with
institutions which practice discrimination on a basis of race or national origin, or which
are affiliated with or sponsored by institutions which do so."10 Outraged alumni and
community members, as well as BYU officials, immediately criticized Stanford's new
policy by arguing that it violated the Mormon Church's right to freedom of religion.
Only if BYU itself discriminated, critics argued, could Stanford justify not scheduling
events with BYU. Later, when the BSU at the University of Washington demanded a
similar statement, administrators would remember the virulent attacks against
Stanford's policy.
When black students entered Hec Edmundson pavilion to disrupt the gymnastics
meet in January 1970, they were part of a protest movement that had begun on other
campuses. The week following the gymnastics protest, the BSU presented a letter to
Athletic Director Joe Kearney explaining why the UW should end all athletic
competitions with BYU. "The University of Washington, by allowing its athletes to
participate in any events against a university [BYU] that openly professes white
supremacy, is in fact, condoning racism," stated the BSU. If the UW refused to end all
further athletic contests against BYU, threatened the letter, the BSU would. "We have
already decided that BYU will not participate in any athletic events against the
University of Washington." The letter continued by attacking the power structure of the
Athletic Department. "If the Athletic Department doesn't like i t . . . RIGHT ON . . . she
can shove it because her rule of conduct and behavior, her disciplinary courts, and her
force and power will be dealt with accordingly, by the Black Student Union and the
black community."11 The BSU would decisively act to enforce their ban on contests
with BYU.
Meanwhile, on his own initiative, gymnast Lynn Hall, used a different method
to send a similar message. He circulated a petition that requested the University end all
future athletic competitions with BYU. Hall eventually gathered over 1,500 signatures
before submitting the petition to the administration. In a UW student newspaper article
10
11

"Stanford to Bar Contests with Mormon Institutions," The New York Times, November 13, 1969, 35.
"BSU Letter to Kearney," University of Washington Daily, February 6, 1970, 1.

67
covering the petition drive, Hall made it clear that he was not working with the BSU. "I
have no group affiliationsexcept the gymnastics team," Hall told the reporter. The
only group Hall represented was his athletic team, not blacks on campus and not the
BSU.
These separate but parallel efforts exemplify the complicated relationship
between black athletes and the BSU at the University of Washington and across the
nation. Black athletes and BSUs, with some exceptions, were typically separate groups
that worked together only sporadically. Both groups had very different goals. BSUs
typically demanded black studies programs, increased minority recruitment, and
institutional support of black cultural activities. Protests by black athletes tended to
focus on their treatment as athletes. Low graduation rates, informal prohibitions against
interracial dating, limited playing time, being excluded from team social events, and
restrictive dress codes were a few of the primary complaints lodged by black athletes.
On the surface, the goals of the BSU and black athletes were at best tangentially related,
but at their base, both groups' problems stemmed from a similar culture of racial
intolerance on campus.
BSUs and black athletes also had very different allegiances. As discussed in
Chapter One, the BSU believed black students should use their access to education to
serve the cause of black liberation and transform the black community. Black athletes
were caught between the demands of being black on a white campus and being a
scholarship athlete. To keep their scholarships, black athletes had to follow the dictates
of their coaches. They also operated in very different social circles than BSU members.
They tended to befriend other athletes and their teams served as their most important
peer group. However, any discussion of black athletes and BSUs must keep in mind
that these groups were comprised of individuals. Black athletes were frequently active
members of BSUs. Individual black athletes also refused to honor protests organized by
their fellow athletes, choosing instead to side with their coaches and white teammates.
The mistreatment of black collegiate athletes generated significant press
coverage in the late 1960s. In 1968, Sports Illustrated printed a five-part story on the
prejudice and discrimination experienced by black athletes. At the time the article was

written, many people believed black athletes only benefited from their participation in
collegiate athletics. It gave them a chance to escape the ghetto, win the admiration of
the student body, and possibly achieve the riches of professional sports. The author of
the Sports Illustrated story, Jack Olsen, painted a very different picture of the black
athlete. He discovered that "almost to a man," black athletes "are dissatisfied,
disgruntled and disillusioned."12
A main reason for their dissatisfaction was that many blacks were not getting an
education while at college. At the University of Washington, between 1957 and 1967,
only seven of twenty black football players graduated. Athletic departments believed
that black athletes came to college to compete, not get a degree. As a result many
blacks found themselves with their athletic eligibility used up, their scholarship dried
up, and without a degree.13 Unlike whites, black athletes could not use their gridiron
glory as a springboard for a career in business or politics. Harry Edwards, the lead
organizer of the 1968 Olympic Boycott, summarized the treatment black athletes faced:
"The black athlete on the white-dominated college campus, then, is typically exploited,
abused, dehumanized, and cast aside in much the same manner as a worn basketball."14
Complaints by black athletes abounded. White coaches limited the number of
black athletes on the team by "stacking" positions. While the starting position was
reserved for the best player, the back-up spot was frequently reserved for a white, even
if a black athlete was a more qualified backup. Jack Olsen, drawing on interviews of
black alumni, noted that at "the University of Washington, stacking and quotas have
been almost a tradition."15 This allowed coaches to minimize the number of blacks on
the team without sacrificing competitiveness. Black athletes frequently complained that
athletic trainers rarely took their injuries seriously; they were often told their injury was
only a case of hypochondria and told to play anyway. Blacks were also excluded from

Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete," Sports Illustrated, July 1, 1968, 15.
Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 11.
Ibid., 20.
Olsen, The Black Athlete, 156.

team social events such as golf trips and dances, were not allowed to date whites, and
were degraded and called racial epitaphs by their coaches.16
These grievances formed the basis of demands made by black athletes in
protests against their athletic departments and schools. At Syracuse University, nine
black players walked out of a 1970 spring football practice to protest Coach Ben
Schwartzwalder's refusal to hire a full-time black assistant. In a complaint later lodged
against Schwartzwalder and Syracuse University, athletes charged the university with
"A double standard in discipline; discrimination in placing players on the first, second
and third teams; a lack of academic advising, tutoring and 'lobbying' for them; racist
language used by coaches;" and "cutting black players from the list of team members
making trips."17 Black athletes' demands were based on the dozens of subtle and
blatant forms of racism they experienced on an everyday basis.
These grievances stood in stark contrast to the typical demand made by Black
Student Unions. At the UW, UCLA, and UT Austin, black student groups' demands
included the creation of a black studies program, increased black student recruitment,
the hiring of black faculty and administration, and funding for black cultural activities.
None of these demands directly affected the racism experienced by black athletes.
Since black athletes lodged radically different grievances compared to BSUs, it is not
surprising that black athletes were typically not involved in BSU protests. At UCLA,
BSU leader Virgil Roberts remembered that "athletes were generally not involved" in
campus protests. They were under pressure to maintain their scholarships and their
relationships with their coaches. Their first job was to be an athlete, recalled Roberts,
and if they acted militantly, they sat on the bench.18
Prior to the late 1960s, many viewed sports as the great racial leveler. The
integration of sports created an arena where blacks could compete with whites on a
16

Olsen, The Black Athlete, 121; David Wiggins, '"The Future of College Athletics is at Stake:' Black
Athletes and Racial Turmoil on Three Predominantly White University Campuses, 1968-1972," Journal
ofSport History 15, no. 3 (Winter 1988): 316.
17
"8 Black Syracuse Football Players Continue Boycott," The New York Times, September 28, 1970, 61;
for more on the protests see Wiggins, "College Athletics."
18
Virgil Roberts, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral History
Program (University of California, 1998), 94.

level playing field and foster interracial communication and understanding. Jesse
Owens, who symbolized a repudiation of Hitler's racial doctrines by winning four gold
medals at the 1936 Olympics, represented this way of thinking. Owens publicly
critiqued the planned boycott of the 1968 Olympics by arguing that "There is no place
in the athletic world for politics." He continued, "It is my personal experience that the
Olympic Games have been one of the greatest areas in which personal achievement is
rewarded culturally, and eventually, financially and economically."19
University administrators and coaches seconded this view. The common
viewpoint was, without sports scholarships, few black athletes would attend college.
One university president argued that the university helped black athletes at least as
much as the athletes benefited the school. "Sure, the Negroes helped our image, but
don't forget, they got built up too. Every one of them that's been here got out of the
ghetto."20 Without sports, the story went, black athletes would be hustling on the streets
or in jail.
While not a black athlete, Eldridge Cleaver, the influential Black Panther Party
Minister of Information, expressed a more cynical view on sports in America. Writing
in Soul on Ice, one of the most powerful books of the black power movement, Cleaver
argued that black athletes, like black entertainers, were exploited by the dominant white
culture. Athletes and entertainers exemplified the proper role blacks should play in the
public sphere, contrasted with outspoken civil rights activists as examples of improper
public activity. "The tradition is whenever a crisis with racial overtones arises," wrote
Cleaver, "an athlete or entertainer is trotted out" to lodge a plea of interracial
understanding.21
A new generation of black athletes rejected this model of sports as a venue that
promoted racial understanding. Black athletes were "dissatisfied, disgruntled and
disillusioned," but they were also taking action to alleviate the endemic culture of
racism in athletic departments. Following a pattern similar to BSUs, in the late 1960s
19

"Negroes Disagree on Games Boycott," Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1967,21.
Olsen, The Black Athlete, 7.
21
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1968), 89; see also Wiggins, "College
Athletics," 202.
20

71
black athletes staged hundreds of protests. In 1968 alone, black athletes engaged in
thirty-seven formal and informal protests against their coaches, schools, and athletic
departments.22 At the UW, Lynn Hall's petition against BYU was one of a series of
public conflicts between black athletes at the UW and the athletic department.
One of the first conflicts began in the spring of 1968. Inspired by a visit from
Harry Edwards, thirteen UW black athletes issued a statement charging that "there are
grave problems of racism and discrimination in the athletic department."

Dave

DuPree, a football player acting as the spokesman for the athletes, demanded four
modest changes to the athletic department. These demands included hiring a black
coach and firing a trainer they believed to be racist. Demonstrating their team loyalty,
the athletes had decided to wait until the end of the athletic season to lodge their
complaints. "We didn't want to do anything during the season," DuPree told a Daily
reporter. "We're on good terms with the white athletes and we felt that we could stand
unjust treatment until after the season was over." The black athletes did not want their
protest to sabotage their team's chances of winning, partly out of respect for their white
teammates.24
UW President Charles Odegaard took these allegations seriously and formed a
faculty committee to investigate the charges. The committee substantiated the charges
of discrimination and recommended that the football team hire a black assistant coach,
the trainer be placed on probation, and formed a student-athlete advisory committee to
facilitate more open communication between athletes and coaches. The athletic director
and football coach, Jim Owens, while refusing to admit the athletic department ever
intentionally discriminated, adopted the committee's recommendations. A few months
later the athletic department hired Carver Gayton as the first black assistant football
coach at the UW.25

Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 88.

"Black Athletes: 'Racism in the Athletic Dept.,'" University of Washington Daily, March 6, 1968, 1.
24
"Owens Plans Statement Later of Negro Demand," University of Washington Daily, March 26, 1968,
10.
25
"Black Athletes Accept Report," University of Washington Daily, April 17, 1968, 1.
23

Racial tensions took a turn for the worse the following football season. Black
athletes complained Owens continued to "stack" positions in favor of white players,
punish black players for dating whites, and utilize an unequal disciplinary structure,
where blacks were given harsher punishments for similar offenses. When Owens
learned black players were considering a boycott to protest these conditions, he called
every player into his office, one by one, and demanded they swear to give 100 percent
loyalty to him, the program, and the University. Four players, all black, fell short of
Owens' loyalty standards, and were suspended from the team.
The suspensions ignited a month of tense, rancorous, and in some cases violent
incidents. All but a handful of black athletes decided to boycott the UW's next game at
UCLA, and the few who tried to make the trip to Los Angeles were prevented from
boarding team buses by hundreds of protestors, including members of the BSU. A
climate of suspicion and fear prevailed during the conflict. Carver Gayton resigned as
assistant coach, the suspended players received death threats, Owens' daughter was
assaulted, and Owens received a long standing ovation at the Husky's next home game.
After the regents held a secret emergency meeting to solve the crisis, Owens reinstated
all of the suspended players save one. 27
The BSU, while supporting the black athletes' protest, was scornful of the
athletes' traditional lack of political action. Remembering these protests against
Owens, BSU leader Gossett commented: the "Black consciousness bug hit black
athletes, which is saying something."28 In both of these protests against Coach Owens
and the athletic department, black athletes acted on their own initiative. They also
utilized a tactic not available to the BSUrefusing to participate in athletic contests.
Given the importance placed on winning at the University of Washington, these
boycotts often served as a potent weapon.

"Inaccuracies, Omissions Hit by Gayton in Resignation," The Seattle Times, November 10, 1969, 43;
Carver Gayton, "Carver Gayton reflects on the Jim Owens statue at Husky Stadium, University of
Washington," Historylink.org, Essay 5745.
27
Larry Gossett, interview by Trevor Griffey and Brooke Clark, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor
History Project, March 16 and June 3, 2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu; Gayton, Essay 5745.
28
Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.

73
This history of distrust and demonstrations served as a backdrop when blacks
demanded the athletic department sever all relations with BYU. The week following
the demonstration at Hec Edmundson pavilion, Joe Kearney, Director of Sports,
investigated the possibility of the UW scheduling no further athletic contests with BYU.
Kearney meticulously conducted his investigation by meeting with numerous groups
that would have a stake in his decision. The groups included black athletes, Mormon
leaders, student-athletes of the Mormon faith, and the Alumni Board of Directors. He
even met with a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Protestant minister, all of whom
were active in the black community. Kearney asked each group if they felt that the
Mormon religious belief that denied blacks the priesthood was objectionable, and what
steps, if any, the University should take against BYU. All of the non-Mormon groups
he initially interviewed "felt the religious tenet to be repugnant," but disagreed on what
shape the University's policy should take.29 Kearney conducted the investigation
without a sense of urgencythe next athletic event with BYU was not scheduled until
January of the following year.
Kearney was not impressed by his meeting with the Black Student Union. In his
notes on the meeting under the heading, "Suggestions from the B.S.U.," he tersely
wrote, "First, there were no suggestions." Instead, the BSU made a pronouncement:
"the position was simple and directthat I really didn't need to make any decisions
and/or further recommendations as the B.S.U. had decreed there shall be no further
competition with B.Y.U. and they would see to it that it was impossible to hold any
competition."

This message was consistent with the actions taken by the BSU during

the gymnastics meet.

This militant attitude was not held by the black athletes Kearney interviewed.
While they wanted the UW to cancel all contests with BYU, they expressed concern
about "being pressured by outside groups regarding their competing."31 The athletes
Alvin Ulbrickson, "Two Interdepartmental CorrespondencesfromKearney to the Vice President for
Student Affairs," February 1970, WU Vice President for Student Affairs, 84-39, Box 1, University of
Washington Archives (hereafter cited as Student Affairs, 84-39).
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.

believed the controversy caused by the protests impaired the performance of their
teams. So while the black athletes Kearney interviewed were concerned about racism
within the Mormon Church, they also felt allegiance to their teams. They also clearly
resented the BSU defining the decision to compete in athletic events as a racist action.
By defining the BSU as an "outside group," the athletes were directly attacking the
solidarity among black students that the BSU saw as key to a successful battle against
racism. In essence, the black athletes were making a distinct counter-claim: that group
solidarity, particularly as defined by the BSU, was not needed to combat racism.
Blacks could decide on an individual basis how and what they want to protest. The
athletes did not want their decision to compete, which they considered to be a matter of
individual conscience, to be subject to the BSU's approbations.
UW athletes also expressed this attitude during the earlier BSU protests against
the Oregon State University (OSU) track runners as described in Chapter One. To
briefly recount, the BSU wanted to prevent two OSU athletes, because of their betrayal
of the OSU Black Student Union, from participating in a track meet against the UW in
Seattle. Initially, the BSU believed they had the full cooperation of the UW athletes.
The minutes of a BSU meeting claimed that the UW athletes "will support what ever
the BSU decides to do." It turned out the BSU miscalculated. The minutes were later
amended to read, "The Black Athletes will make their own decisions and stage their
own form of protest."32 In other words, black athletes were willing to cooperate with
the BSU, but wanted to make their own decisions on how, what, and when to protest.
This pattern of limited cooperation between black athletes and Black Student
Unions held true at dozens of universities across the nation, with a few notable
exceptions. The books written on black student protest at Rutgers, New York
University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois make no
mention of collaborative efforts between black athletes and BSUs. This silence is most
likely because at these schools black athletes either avoided public protests or, when
they did protest, black athletes represented themselves, without direct support from
32

"Black Student Union Meeting Minutes," April 25, 1969, BSU Papers, 71-69, University of
Washington Archives (hereafter cited as UW BSU Papers).

75
BSUs. At a typical protest waged by black athletes, the athletes spoke for themselves
I T

and addressed issues that only directly affected black athletes.

Two protests where BSUs and black athletes collaborated more extensively
occurred at the University of Wyoming and Oregon State University. At Wyoming, the
protest that led to the suspension of fourteen athletes originated when the Black Student
Alliance (BSA) presented a letter to university officials that drew attention to the racial
practices of BYU and the Mormon Church. The letter also suggested students use the
upcoming football game between BYU and Wyoming as a chance to protest these racist
beliefs. The initiative taken by the BSA inspired the Wyoming black athletes to
consider how they might protest. Eventually they decided wearing black armbands
during the game might be an appropriate gesture. When they approached their coach
with this idea, he suspended them from the team, igniting a protest that united the entire
black student body at the University of Wyoming.34 At Oregon State University, when
Fred Milton was suspended for growing a moustache during the off-season, the OSU
BSU immediately leapt to Milton's defense by announcing that BSU members would
boycott all classes and athletic events until Milton was reinstated on the team.
Eventually, as many as three dozen black students left OSU in support of Milton.
Understandably, narratives of black student protest tend to focus on the black
student groups who engaged in successful public demonstrations. But this obscures the
fact that not all black students thought of activism in the same way or had the same
goals for transforming the university. Black athletes, in their own way, altered
university structures, and, in the process, limited the amount of overt racism they
experienced on a daily basis.
Joe Kearney's investigation continued throughout the month of February. What
Kearney believed to be a reasonable pace for the investigation was viewed as stalling
33

"Cal Negro Athletes Demand Coaches' Firing," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1968, B.l; in Wiggins,
'"The Future of College Athletics is at Stake,'" Wiggins argues that at Berkeley the athletes were "ably
assisted by their respective black student organizations." While this may be true, the article makes no
mention of the support of any black student group and the press coverage in the Los Angeles Times also
makes no mention of this support.
34
Bullock, "Fired by Conscious," 8.
35
Wiggins, "College Athletics," 308-316.

tactics by the BSU. The BSU demanded that the administration make a definite
decision on the future scheduling of athletic contests with BYU within ten daysno
later than March 4th. If the administration failed to act, the BSU promised it "will then
act accordingly."36
March came and the BSU demanded that Kearney make a decision regarding
BYU and announced plans to hold a rally the next day at noon. Kearney responded to
this announcement by stating he had finished his report and had submitted it to the
administration. The power to sever relations with BYU now fell to Executive VicePresident Dr. John Hogness, who was acting president while President Odegaard
traveled in Europe. Hogness released a statement that the administration would make a
decision no later than April first. He argued that the administration still needed to
consult with additional faculty, student groups, and the Board of Regents.
The BSU responded to this call for more time by issuing a statement that
questioned, "what's behind the perpetual motion machine of 'fact-finding'?" The
statement also accused the "inordinate economic and political influence in the
Northwest of the Mormon Church" as perhaps the real reason the University refused to
concede to the BSU's demands. In 1970, the Mormon Church owned in Seattle a
number of retail stores, a radio station, and TV station. This fear that Mormon
economic and political power could force the UW into taking a racist stance naturally
followed from the BSU's belief that all white institutions contributed to racism in
America.37
In that same statement the BSU addressed a major issue that had emerged during
Kearney's investigation. Did the University have the right to condemn the Mormon
Church as racist, when their anti-black doctrine was protected by the first amendment
clause guaranteeing freedom of religion? The BSU argued that they were not disputing
the right of any individual Mormon to believe anything he/she wished. They were
protesting because "when such an idea becomes institutionalized and seeks
respectability by aligning with institutions like the UW . . . then the question is no
36
37

"BSU Asks BYU Decision," University of Washington Daily, February 20, 1970, 1.
BSU statement, "To the Faculty and Students of UW," March 1970, Student Affairs 84-39, Box 1.

longer that of religious freedom."

This quote reveals what the BSU thought was at

stake in the BYU protest. To many observers it seemed ridiculous for the BSU to
protest against the UW for a racist doctrine held by the Mormon Church. But the BSU
understood that the power of universities lay in their legitimizing power. The BSU
argued, for example, that white universities were racist because they had taught and
thus legitimized a view of history that ignored the contribution of blacks and celebrated
the supremacy of Western civilization. The BSU wanted to turn this legitimizing power
on its head. If the UW and similar institutions refused to participate in athletic contests
with BYU, the Mormon doctrine of black inferiority might be viewed as less valid. On
a more practical level, the BSU understood the importance of collegiate athletics in
providing legitimacy to universities. An old joke begins, "what is the difference
between a cult and a religion?" The punch line: "a religion has a university with a
Division I football program." A successful sports program increases the prestige of a
university and a religion that runs a respected university is rarely viewed as a cult.
The administration also understood that any condemnation of BYU might
infringe on the free practice of religion. They consulted with the state Assistant
Attorney General, James Wilson, to ascertain the legality of breaking athletic contracts
with BYU. Wilson, in an internal memo to Hogness, argued the UW was trapped
between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, the University could not determine its
relationships on the basis of creed, but, at the same time, could not knowingly
participate in events with an institution that had a policy of racial discrimination. The
BYU protests placed two fundamental rights in competition: the right to freedom of
religion and the right not to face discrimination based on race. Fortunately, Wilson
found a way to escape this dilemma. He argued that "since the only evidence the
University has concerning Brigham Young University's racial practices is that it does
not discriminate on the basis of race, the University cannot declare a policy of refusal to
engage in activities with BYU solely because of a creed of its religious sponsor,

38

Ibid.

78
regardless of how strongly we may disagree with that religious creed."

BYU had, in

fact, been inspected by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Office for
Civil Rights in 1968. The conclusion reached was that BYU was in complete
compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The finding that BYU itself
did not practice discrimination led the Assistant Attorney General to conclude that the
UW could not legally declare a policy of refusal to participate with BYU because of the
creed of its religious sponsor. The UW took the conclusions of this report very
seriously and, during the ten days of protest in March, the administration believed that
they could not legally make a statement condemning the Mormon Church for its racist
doctrine as the BSU demanded.
The March 4th deadline passed without a statement from the administration. The
first protest began, exactly as promised, at noon on Thursday, March 5. Almost one
thousand students met at the Husky Union Building (HUB) to hear speakers from the
black community along with speakers from New Left organizations on campus. After
the speakers finished, the crowd marched across campus to the administration building
where ten BSU representatives met with Hogness. He reiterated that the University did
not support racism in any form, but that he could not move up the April 1st decision
date. The crowd then moved across campus and entered and occupied Thomson Hall,
an academic building near the HUB. The BSU chose not to occupy the administration
building because they believed the building to be protected by policemen in riot gear.
The demonstrators quickly hung two banners from Thomson Hallone read
"Occupied," the other "Marx Hall." The demonstrators were planning on staying in the
building until, according to Larry Gossett, "the University reevaluates its position on the
BYU issue."40 The occupation only lasted until 3:30 p.m. when the BSU decided to
give the University one more day to make a decision.
The next day, again at noon, an even larger group of protesters met at the HUB.
A heavy rain drove the protest indoors where more speeches were made. After the rally

James B. Wilson to Hogness, March 10, 1970, WU Provost, 81-89, Box 18, University of Washington
Archives (hereafter cited as WU Provost 81-89).
40
"Thomson Occupation Avoids Violence," University of Washington Daily, March 6, 1970, 1.

79
the BSU led students on a march around campus. This time the protesters used what the
administration would later characterize as "hit-and-run" tactics. Students ran into a
building on campus, entered classrooms and ordered the students there to leave the
building. After occupying the building for approximately ten minutes, the students
moved on to another building. During this second day of protests, Hogness called upon
the Seattle police to restore order to campus. He also obtained a temporary restraining
order from the Superior Court of King County that enjoined the Seattle Liberation Front
(SLF)a radical New Left protest groupthe BSU, and "all others acting in concert"
from "employing force or violence, or the threat of force or violence, against persons or
property on plaintiffs premises," along with four other edicts. The BSU welcomed this
escalation because it brought heightened publicity and provided rhetorical fodder. In
subsequent rallies, the BSU used the police presence as evidence of the administration's
support of racism. One BSU statement noted that "Seattle Riot Police have already
been on campus and the University had announced its willingness to call for the
National Guard to enforce its racist decision." The SLF went even further and saw
Hogness' use of police as "a declaration of war against all oppressed peoples in
revolution."41
After consulting with the Board of Regents over the weekend, Hogness
developed an official University position on BYU. The University would honor all
current contracts with BYU, but make no plans to enter into any further contracts. The
BSU rejected this compromise. "The BSU will not accept a 'pat on the head' and the
advice to 'run along and be good boys and girls,'" proclaimed one BSU flyer.42 Instead
of running along, on Monday the BSU held another massive protest. The protest
attracted an estimated 3,500 students who marched from the HUB to the administration
building where BSU leaders again met with Hogness. The BSU had originally "planned
to go to the library and do a little research on racism, but it's been closed down. Now
we're going to the Ad building to ask Hogness why it's closed."43 The administration

Aflyerto a BSU at Cleveland High School, Student Affairs 84-89, Box 1.

Ibid.
University of Washington Daily, March 10, 1970, 1.

building was also locked, and had its doors protected by policemen in riot gear. After
twenty minutes Hogness addressed the crowd and repeated the administration's Sunday
statement. He also reiterated his pledge to work to eradicate racism from campus.44
The BYU protests reached a climax on Wednesday when sporadic violence
erupted, leaving twelve students injured. The rally again began at the HUB with the
usual speeches berating the administration "for turning its face on racism while
promising to end it." About 750 demonstrators then briefly occupied over eight
buildings on campus. Inside the buildings, protestors entered classrooms and demanded
that everyone leave. In a few classrooms students refused to leave and angrily
confronted the protesters. At least two such confrontations erupted into violence. For
example, in Smith Hall, Professor Carol Thomas was in the middle of her class on
Ancient Greek History when several protesters entered the room and demanded that
everyone leave. Immediately two students ran forward to confront the protesters. The
confrontation between protesters and students turned violent. Wielding small wooden
clubs, several protesters beat one student.45 Some fourteen students were injured in
similar incidents. The protesters eventually marched to the administration building
where Hogness ordered them to cease their demonstration under threat of arrest and
citation for contempt of court. The demonstrators agreed to disperse and the police
arrived too late to make any arrests.
The Seattle Liberation Front closely collaborated with the BSU during these
protests. Organized only a few months earlier by a recent Berkeley hire, Professor
Michael Lerner, the SLF brought together a wide assortment of New Left groups and
activists. The group gained local prominence in February, after a protest against the
arrest and probable conviction of the Chicago Seven defendants at the Federal
Courthouse in downtown Seattle turned violent. On charges very similar to those of the
Chicago Seven, a grand jury indicted leaders of the SLF conspiracy for conspiracy to

Carol Thomas's Sworn Deposition, WU Provost 81-89, Box 18.

81
incite a riot, prompting those involved to become known as the Seattle Seven.46 SLF
members spoke during campus rallies, attended planning meetings, and occupied
buildings alongside BSU members. The SLF believed the BSU's struggle against
racism was part of a larger struggle for human liberation. "The university must be made
relevant to the needs of blacks, the Third world, working people, women and young
people searching for humane values and vocations," read one SLF flyer advertising the
March 5, 1970 rally.47
The UW BSU had an excellent relationship with New Left groups, including the
SLF and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Larry Gossett remembered the BSU
viewed the N,ew Left as the "good" whites. Students belonging to New Left groups and
the BSU had remarkably similar views about capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam
War. In particular, both groups viewed Vietnam as inextricably linked to racism. They
believed that minority populations shouldered an inordinate proportion of the burden of
fighting the war and that the United States' callous indifference to civilian casualties in
Vietnam was grounded in racism. Given these similar world views, an important
intellectual exchange developed between the two groups. SDS members were regular
participants at Soul Search sessions beginning in January of 1968, and helped refine the
BSU's critique of American institutions.48
In the late 1960s, the New Left and the UW BSU consistently worked together.
In April 1968, BSU members sat on the committee in charge of organizing the April
Days of Protest.49 Part of a nationwide campaign to protest the war in Vietnam and the
military industrial state, the week of protest included a three-day symposium on the
black struggle. The list of demands presented to President Odegaard at the end of the
April Days of Protest incorporated the BSU's concerns in a list of mainly New Left
demands. Included among the usual New Left demands that the UW abolish the ROTC
and end classified research, was a demand that Odegaard waive admission requirements
46

Walt Crowley, Rites ofPassage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1995), 168-70.
47
SLF flyer, Student Affairs 84-89, Box 1.
48
Larry Gossett, author interview, Seattle, WA, December 22,2006.
49
Dianne Louise Walker, The University of Washington Establishment and the Black Student Union Sitin of 1968 (Unpublished Thesis, University of Washington, 1980), 50.

82
for black students "until the proportion of black students in the general student
population is the same as the proportion of black casualties in Vietnam."50 This close
collaboration continued into May. During the BSU's confrontation with Odegaard,
SDS cosponsored demonstrations with the BSU and Robbie Stern, a second-year law
student and SDS leader, was one of the main negotiators during that conflict.51
The tight-knit relationship between the BSU and New Left groups at the
University of Washington was not representative. The more typical relationship was
one of conditional allies who worked together on a limited basis. Often this included
each group holding separate protests on the same issue. While both groups shared a
similar world view, they had different goals. New Left students were primarily
interested in a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and increasing student control at the
university; BSUs wanted increased minority enrollment, black studies programs, and
black cultural centers. Finally, race created a fundamental divide between the two
groups. Many black students understood that white students could, at any time, choose
to enter mainstream society, while black students could not.
This complicated relationship patterned itself on the association other civil rights
groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had forged
with whites as they embraced a more militant black power philosophy. In 1966, SNCC,
once the model of interracial cooperation, decided to exclude whites as members in a
controversial vote. Most black power protest groups, including black student unions,
excluded whites from membership. Black power advocates, including SNCC, still
believed whites should continue the struggle against racism, but should do so on their
own initiative and within their own communities. The Black Panther Party's
relationship with the New Left also served as a model for BSUs. While the BPP, for the
most part, limited membership to African Americans and promoted a powerful Black
Nationalist identity, the Party collaborated with New Left groups, most famously the
Peace and Freedom Party.

51

"President Odegaard Replies," University of Washington Daily, May 1, 1968, 4.

"4-Hour Sit-in at UW; New Talks Set," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 21, 1968, A8.

83
The tumultuous student protests at Columbia University exemplify the
complicated relationship between the New Left and black power advocates. In the
spring of 1968, the black student group, Student Afro-American Society (SAS),
demanded the administration halt construction on a new athletic center to be built in
Harlem's Morningside Park. Columbia had been slowly expanding into Morningside
Heights for about twelve years, dislocating black residents in the process. In an attempt
to expand the University without further displacing minority residents, Columbia
reached an agreement to lease the property from the city and to build a separate but less
expensive gym for Harlem residents. The idea of Columbia bribing local residents with
a separate and unequal facility understandably outraged many Harlem residents and
Columbia students.52
When administrators failed to respond to requests to halt construction on the
gym, SAS planned to occupy Columbia's main library until the administration met their
demands.

Columbia's SDS supported efforts to halt gym construction, and offered to

occupy the library with SAS. SAS leader Cicero Wilson politely declined SDS's offer;
he envisioned SDS playing a supporting role in the upcoming protest. "SDS can stand
on the side and support us . . . but the black students and the Harlem community will be
the ones in the vanguard."54 Many black students believed that while white students
could sympathize with the plight of the black community, they could never completely
understand what it meant to be black in America. As one black protestor noted, "A
white student can say all he wants against the system. He can always shave his beard
and join the system. Black students can't."55
Cicero Wilson's objections notwithstanding, a broad coalition of student groups
eventually occupied Hamilton Hall, where the administrative offices of the
undergraduate school of Columbia College were located. Having secured the building,
the students formed a steering committee with two members from SAS, two from SDS,
New Columbia Gym is Opposed," The New York Times, April 16, 1968,40.
Stefan Bradley, "Gym Crow Must Go!" Black Student Activism at Columbia University, 1967-1968,"
Journal ofAfrican American History 88, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 163.
54
Ibid., 170.
55
Robert Liebert, Radical and Militant Youth: A Psychological Inquiry (New York: Praeger, 1971), 77.
53

84
and a few students representing other organizations. Their demands represented this
broad coalition of student groups and included a halt to construction of the gym, the
termination of affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), and a demand
that students and faculty jointly decide all campus judicial matters.56 These demands
exemplify the overlapping but very distinct goals of the two groups. Of the eight
demands, only one originated with SAS. The rest were New Left issues dealing
primarily with increasing student power.
This show of cooperation between the SAS and SDS was short-lived. SDS
wanted the demonstration to be a sit-in; SAS wanted to take over the entire building,
controlling who entered and who left the building. The tentative cooperation between
the two groups ended when SNCC leader H. Rap Brown, who SAS had invited to
provide additional protest leadership, arrived at Hamilton Hall and announced, "The
black community is taking over." At five in the morning, SAS leadership asked white
students to leave the building. They wanted the narrative of the protest to be about
blacks fighting for the rights of blacks, not an interracial coalition fighting the
administration for a broad spectrum of reasons.57 Many SDS supporters agreed with the
decision to remove whites. "It's very important for blacks to have their own thing, to
develop solidarity," commented a SDS member.58
White students, honoring Brown's request, left Hamilton Hall and proceeded to
occupy the offices of Columbia President Grayson Kirk. By kicking whites out of
Hamilton Hall, blacks changed the nature of the protest and raised the stakes. President
Kirk worried that the all-black composition of the occupiers transformed the
demonstration from a student protest to a racial protest. Given Columbia's proximity to
Harlem, Kirk believed the demonstration might cross into Harlem and become a fullfledged race riot. After occupying the building for almost a full week, Kirk removed
the protestors without violence by cutting water to the building and sending in the

Bradley, "Gym Crow Must Go!" 171.

Ibid., 172.
"Columbia Closes Campus after Disorders," The New York Times, April 25, 1968,41.

85
police. Although Kirk successfully removed the students from the building, in the long
run the protest achieved its aimthe gym was not built.
The press noticed the lack of coordination between SAS and SDS and began
writing stories that there was a "split" between the two groups. Both sides denied these
charges, noting that there cannot be a split when the groups had never closely
coordinated their efforts. "We each use different tactics," explained a member of SAS.
"We cooperate mutually when it's to our benefit. We act autonomously when it's to our
benefit."59 Beyond this instrumental relationship, a profound mutual distrust existed
between the groups. In 1969, SDS demanded Columbia accept all applicants from four
local high schools with predominantly black and Puerto Rican student bodies. SDS
visited these schools asking students to participate in campus demonstrations. SAS
believed this open-admittance plan was ill advised and believed SDS was exploiting the
black high school students. One black student commented, "We know where SDS is at.
They wouldn't think twice about using black kids for their own purposes." SAS needs
to "hip the brothers in the high school to a lot of things about their cooperating with
whites," added another.60 In other words, black students needed to take leadership on
all racial issues and should only cooperate with whites when it furthered their goals.
At New York University a similar story of limited cooperation between SDS and
black students unfolded. In the fall of 1968, at the urging of black students, the school
hired James Stone, a public school teacher, as director of the newly formed AfroAmerican Student Center. His hiring started an avalanche of criticism from many
alumni, students, and faculty members accusing Stone of being anti-Semitic and
demanding he be fired. After Stone gave a speech where he called Richard Nixon and
Hubert Humphrey "racist bastards," the administration relented and fired Stone.61
At the College at University Heights, SDS and the black student group Katara
met to plan their reaction to Stone's dismissal. SDS, understanding Stone's firing more
"2 Factions Define Aims at Columbia," The New York Times, May 31, 1968, 60.
"Militant Negroes at Columbia Face a Dilemma Over Demands," The New York Times, April 20, 1969,
75.
61
William Exum, Paradoxes of Protest: Black Student Activism in a White University (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1985), 65.
60

86
directly affected black students, pledged their support to whatever course of action
Katara decided to take. Katara rejected this support and told SDS they wanted to act
separately, without SDS members joining their protest. Katara members wanted to
demonstrate black solidarity on Stone's firing and believed the presence of white
students would transform what they saw as a racial issue into a student issue. However,
if SDS wanted to hold a separate demonstration to protest the firing, that support would
be welcomed. Katara's rejection of direct assistance from SDS resulted in each group
occupying a different building the next day.62 At both Columbia and NYU black
students and the New Left were reluctant allies engaging in parallel protests.
At San Francisco State, one leftist student group opportunistically transformed
black grievances to advance their own agenda. In the fall of 1968, the Black Student
Union at San Francisco State had successfully lobbied for a number of new educational
initiatives, including a special admittance program and black studies classes. George
Murray, the Black Panther Party Minister of Education, taught an introductory English
class for minorities admitted that fall under the special admittance program. A popular
public speaker, Murray frequently spoke at rallies and before student groups.
Addressing a crowd at Fresno State College, Murray made what many considered
inflammatory comments. "We are slaves, and the only way to become free is to kill all
the slave masters," was the comment most frequently cited as inappropriate.63 He also
encouraged black students to carry guns on campus to use in self-defense. The Board of
Trustees, citing Murray's support of violence, demanded that San Francisco State's
Chancellor Robert Smith fire Murray. Murray's firing served as the catalyst for the
BSU to call a strike that would snowball into the largest and most disruptive university
conflict of the 1960s.64
When activist John Levin learned of Murray's firing and the impending strike,
Levin called a meeting of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a communist organization
founded in 1961. At the meeting the group decided to support the strike, but use
62

Ibid., 68.
"Seize College Control by Force, Panther-Teacher Tells Students," Los Angeles Times, October 25,
1968, 3.
64
"New Row on Panther-Teacher," Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1968, 1.
63

Murray's firing to promote their own agenda. A flyer distributed by Levin and SDS in
the early days of the strike demonstrates how the firing was easily transformed into a
typical leftist critique of the insidiousness of state and corporate power. "Corporation
wizards who sit on the Board of Trustees are not there for their health, but to insure that
the State Colleges meet their quotas of technicians and apologists to be the cogs in a
system designed to serve the narrow interests of the corporate wealth," began the flyer.
"When George Murray says that students should not serve the oppressors, but fight
them, he is a real threat to the role of higher educationthat is, the role defined by the
corporate interests of the Board of Trustees."65 According to one contemporary
account, the BSU became angry when they learned of the PLP's decision to support the
strike without first consulting them. Levin reportedly retorted, "I don't give a flying
fuck whether they want our support or not."66 This less than amicable relationship was
based, in a large part, on issues of ego and control. The BSU naturally wanted the strike
to center on their demands, not on the broader issues being raised by Levin and the New
Left. They were upset that leftist groups were exploiting the strike to promote their own
agenda.
Even at the University of Washington, the BSU guarded against aligning
themselves too closely with New Left groups. At a meeting in 1969, the BSU voted in
favor of issuing a statement in support of SDS's demonstration against three companies,
Weyerhaeuser, Aetna, and TWA, who were recruiting on campus. "The BSU fully
supports," began the statement, "all our brothers and sisters who are being singled out
by this university for their part in the struggle against the racist imperialist American
power structure."67 After lending its support to SDS, some BSU members had second
thoughts about their indirect participation in an SDS protest. According to meeting
minutes, the group decided "that the BSU should take the initiative in raising pertinent
issues concerning Black people. It is up to us to be in the leadership." Alliances with

Dikran Karagueuzian, Blow it Up! The Black Student Revolt at San Francisco State College and the
Emergence ofDr. Hayakawa (Boston: Gambit, Incorporated, 1971), 43.
66
Ibid., 46.
67
"Statements of Support," WU President, 82-23, Box 5, University of Washington Archives.

88
the New Left were acceptable, but should be closely scrutinized to ensure they did not
usurp BSU leadership on racial issues.68
The public in general, and college administrators and the media in particular,
had a difficult time making sense of the relationship between black students and the
New Left and often used dual standards in judging the groups.69 In interviews after the
protests at Columbia ended, school administrators praised the actions of black students
while scornfully dismissing the New Left protestors. "My respect for them [SAS] is
quite high and . . . the other group [white protestors], I have no respect for," noted
Columbia's Vice President.70 President Kirk echoed these thoughts commenting, "the
blacks handled themselves very well in Hamilton." Some of these radically divergent
views were based in how the two groups handled themselves during the building
takeovers. According to President Kirk, the white students who occupied his office
smoked his cigars, read confidential files, and urinated on the floor. Black students, on
the other hand, did not damage Hamilton Hall and were described as models of
decorum and courtesy. However, these accounts of respectful, well-behaved black
protestors overlook that SAS illegally occupied a building for almost a week, held a
dean hostage for part of that time, and physically removed five white counterdemonstrators from the building. If administrators had wanted to tell a narrative about
disrespectful, law-breaking, hostage-taking black protestors, the material was there.
Why did administrators craft a narrative about out-of-control white protestors contrasted
with black protestors who "handled themselves well?" Part of the answer lies in the
fact that administrators believed the civil rights movement was a moral struggle to make
America live up to its promises and that the goals of SAS were legitimate. In conceding
a degree of moral legitimacy to the goal of obstructing gym construction, administrators
helped expand the boundaries of respectable action. As long as students did not damage
68

"Black Student Union Meeting Minutes," April 25, 1969, UW BSU Papers.
Rossinow, in The Politics of Authenticity, notes that some administrators believed black student
demands were more practical than those made by the New Left. He cites one administrator who likened
"the difference between black and white student activists to the gulf between the American Federation of
Labor and the Knights of Labor." Doug Rossinow, The Politics ofAuthenticity: Liberalism, Christianity,
and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 201.
70
Bradley, "Gym Crow Must Go!" 176.
69

89
property or harm students and administrators, the occupation could be crafted as a
narrative of serious students taking a principled stance.
In Seattle, the unique collaboration between the SLF and the BSU perplexed the
media. In editorials condemning the violence and vandalism of the demonstrations,
Seattle's two major newspapers, The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
blamed the disruptions on the Seattle Liberation Front. The P-Ts front-page editorial
opined that "the Black Student Union, which previously had provided some responsible
leadership in good causes at the University of Washington, demonstrated that it has
become the dupe of the revolutionary Seattle Liberation Front. On two successive days
the BSU, with the prodding of the Seattle Liberation Front very much in evidence, lost
its reason and took over buildings on campus."71 In a similar editorial, The Seattle
Times wrote, "The intrusion of the Seattle Liberation Front onto the scene of trouble is
an affront to the blacks as well as to the university community. This revolutionary
group has seized upon the blacks' grievance only as a means to its completely
destructive objective of 'destroying the system."
The interpretation that the BSU was somehow the "dupes" of the SLF is
completely false. The first demonstration against BYU did not involve the SLF and the
BSU promised to use more disruptive tactics if the administration failed to meet its
demands. The SLF itself mocked the P-I editorial in a circular for ignoring that the
primary leaders of the protests were black.73 If all evidence pointed to the BSU being
the main leaders of the protests, why were the newspapers blaming what they
considered unconscionable tactics on the SLF? Perhaps the explanation begins with the
low standing of the SLF in the community at the time. The UW demonstrations began
only two weeks after the violent courthouse protests against the incarceration of the
Chicago Seven. If looking for a scapegoat, the SLF made a very convenient target.
A second explanation is that the papers believed blacks lacked agency and
needed white leadership to engage in any action, and that the newspapers' view was
71

"It's Time for UW to Get Tough," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 1970, 1.

"Strife on the U.W. Campus," The Seattle Times, March 6, 1970.
73
"Seattle Liberation Front Flyer," Student Affairs 84-39, Box 1.

72

inspired by racism. The narrative that black students were the sacrificial pawns in the
New Left's revolution was not an uncommon one. Testifying before a Senate
committee, S.I. Hayakawa, acting President of San Francisco State College, argued
"white revolutionaries by their largesse are making 'house niggers' of their black
allies." White students were largely responsible for the actions of black student groups,
Hayakawa testified, since they "taught them their Marxism and egged them on."74
While this narrative of blacks as dupes of the New Left might explain the editorials, it
is, at best, a partial explanation. Unlike Hayakawa, both editorials ascribed to black
protestors the positive aspects of the demonstrations and acknowledge their leadership
in earlier protests. Only when discussing what the papers view as the negative aspects
of the protest, vandalizing buildings and threatening students, did the editorials attribute
agency to the SLF.
The narrative that blacks were simply pawns of the New Left also does not
explain why the papers were BSU apologists. The answer to this question lies perhaps
in the editorials' support of the goals of the BSU. The Seattle Times wrote that "the
grievance being pursued by the Black Student Union is understandable."75 In a similar
vein the P-I argued that "BSU members had a right to protest the University's
relationship with Brigham Young University over racial policies, but it was a protest
that belonged to the conference table, or, at most, to peaceful demonstrations."76 Both
editorials supported the grievances of the BSU while questioning their tactics. Here
both papers represented a mainstream liberal narrative about race in the late 1960s
that racism had played and still played a major role in American society, and that the
nation should work to alleviate historical inequality. However, unlike the BSU or the
SLF, the newspapers believed these goals must be achieved through reforming
American institutions, not destroying them. They also believed protests must play by
certain ground rules, including not using violence or damaging property. As the P-I
wrote, the violent building takeovers meant the BSU had "lost its reason" in two senses:

74

"Hayakawa Sees Plot on Negroes," The New York Times, May 14, 1969, 30.
"Strife on the U.W. Campus," The Seattle Times, March 6, 1970.
76
"It's Time for UW to Get Tough," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 1970, 1.
75

91
lost the ability to appear reasonable and lost the chance to reason with (un)sympathetic
liberals.
When the BSU failed to play by these ground rules, it lost the support of many
mainstream liberals and provided ammunition to more conservative critics. During the
last week of the BSU's demonstrations against BYU, dozens of letters criticizing
Hogness for not taking a stronger stand against the protesters poured into the
University. The letters came from primarily four sources: faculty, staff, alumni, and
taxpayers. After one BSU demonstration where protestors disrupted classes and, in
some cases, vandalized classrooms, twenty-three members of the history department
approved and sent a statement to Hogness that lambasted the administration for failing
to take any countermeasures against demonstrations that exposed "our students, the
staff, ourselves, our books, manuscripts, and papers to serious jeopardy."77 A letter
written by Edward Alexander, an English professor, suggests how the actions of the
BSU reinforced the world-view of these conservative critics. Alexander believed the
protests symbolized a reign of terror where "a mob has been allowed, during a period of
several days, to roam unhindered from building to building, disrupting classes,
destroying books and manuscripts in offices and libraries, and brutally beating students
who attempted to resist."78 The University, by taking no action against the protesters,
opened "the floodgates to anarchy and to its natural sequel, tyranny."79 For these
critics, the protests were the unlawful actions of a minority trying to impose its
tyrannical will on society.
In blaming the violent chaotic demonstrations on the SLF instead of the BSU,
The Seattle Times and P-I were perhaps cautioning the BSU that if they operated
outside liberal boundaries of acceptable behavior, they would lose credibility that would
hinder their ability to change the UW. Exhibiting more than a dash of liberal
paternalism, the editors seem to have wanted the BSU to operate within acceptable
liberal parameters of respectabilityblack students could occupy buildings, but not

Memo to the History Department, WU Provost 81-89, Box 18.

Letter Addressed to Odegaard, March 18, 1970, WU Provost 81-89, Box 18.

92
wantonly damage property or threaten students. The warning that by using certain
tactics the BSU would lose the sympathy of faculty, students, and the public was wellfounded. At Rutgers' Newark campus, when the Black Organization of Students (BOS)
presented their demands to the administration, the Student Council and student
newspaper publicly supported the BOS and its demands. This support waned after
black students lit a bonfire on campus and promised to shut down the school if their
demands were not met. An informal poll showed most students opposed the possibility
of the BOS shutting down the college and the Student Council issued a statement that
the takeover endangered "the existence of our University."80 There were limits to what
was viewed as respectable action by black student groups. Violence, vandalism, and
building occupations often crossed the line.
At the same time, these editorials demonstrated how traditional boundaries of
respectable protest expanded during the 1960s. In the early 1960s, student protestors
wore suits, refused to be provoked by white violence, and believed that grassroots
action could transform America into a nation that delivered on the promise of equal
opportunity. At the UW, in the May of 1968 showdown with Odegaard, the BSU
celebrated their blackness by wearing Afros and attacked the university as an inherently
racist institution. They also gave Odegaard a list of non-negotiable demands, and when
these demands were not met, occupied his office. Two years later the Seattle P-I called
this protest an example of "responsible leadership for a good cause."81 At Columbia,
the Vice-President expressed his utmost respect for black protestors who utilized similar
tactics. It is nothing short of amazing that blacks could transform the notion of
respectable action in such a short period of time. They could celebrate a militant black
identity and still be respected by many school administrators and the mainstream press.
Of equal importance, blacks could celebrate their militant identity with
significantly less fear of violent reprisals than civil rights workers faced in the early
1960s. When Freedom Summer volunteers headed south in 1964, they understood they

Richard McCormick, The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), 45.
81
"It's Time for UW to Get Tough," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 1970, 1.

93
might not survive the summer. The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner proved these fears legitimate. During the BYU protests, the BSU
interrupted classes, made non-negotiable demands, and occupied and vandalized
buildings. Across the nation, hundreds of black student groups used similar tactics to
wrestle concessions from college administrators. While BSU activities were monitored
by the police and the FBI, there were few recorded incidents of violence against black
student protestors.82 At the UW, there were no stories of BSU members being beaten or
killed while walking home at night; no stories of blacks being beaten by police and then
arrested on charges of disturbing the peace.
Black power brought with it a rise of Black Nationalism and a celebration of
blackness. The Black Arts Movement, late-night jam sessions between black students
discussing the works of Harold Cruse and Malcolm X, and the emergence of black
studies programs exemplified a black awakening. But what made this awakening
possible? What had changed by the late 1960s was not just a new celebration of
blackness, but an environment where blacks could express their identity with far less
fear of violent retaliation from whites. One observer of black student protest at the
University of Texas argued that the real progress in race relations over the last twentyfive years was the ability of "blacks to feel confident enough to publicly shout their
distinctiveness and to emphasize the facts that they are different and proud of it."83
New expressions of Black Nationalism were thus facilitated by a more permissive
climate. Black students may not have radically changed; rather, white institutions had
changed, allowing these conversations to take place in a new setting.
Throughout the BYU protests, Hogness acted in good faith to meet the BSU's
demands. He spent the weekend after the protests meeting virtually non-stop with the
Board of Regents and members of the Faculty Senate. Documents show that the
administration decided it could not meet the BSU's demands. They believed the UW
This does not hold true when discussing the Black Panther Party. The FBI utilized fear and violence in
their campaign against the BPP.
83
The Daily Texan, March 5,1969, 5.

94
could not legally break signed contracts with BYU or make a statement condemning the
Mormon Church for a religious doctrine. In an official statement issued the morning of
Monday, March 9th, Hogness announced that the University would honor all current
contracts with BYU, but make no plans to enter into any further contracts. He
emphasized, however, "no student is required to participate in any event with any
institution if he objects to participation as a matter of conscience."
This stance stands in stark contrast to the position taken at the University of
Wyoming. At Wyoming, fourteen black football players were suspended from the team
for simply mentioning to their coach that they were interested in wearing black
armbands during their game against BYU. The fervor that erupted to protest the
suspensions failed to force the administration to reinstate the players. Adding insult to
injury, the athletes also lost a lawsuit filed against the University of Wyoming.
Eventually all but one of the fourteen athletes left the school.85 The stance taken by the
University of Wyomingthat students could be suspended from a team for simply
considering a peaceful protestserves as a reminder that not every school was
amenable to giving careful consideration to black student demands. Not surprisingly,
racism governed the suspension of the Wyoming players. Before dismissing the players
from the team, Coach Lloyd Eaton launched into a racist tirade about blacks who relied
on white taxpayer money and how without their scholarships the players "would be out
on the streets hustling."

At the University of Washington, UCLA, and even at the

University of Texas, such blatant displays of racism were not tolerated by the respective
administrations. The case of black activists athletes at the University of Wyoming
demonstrates that place matters. The sympathetic climate found at ULCA and UW was
far from universal.
While the UW administration refused to repudiate BYU, it offered a second
concession to the BSU. Two days after promising to enter into no further contracts with
BYU, Hogness, functioning as acting President with Odegaard still in Europe,

"Hogness' Report to Alumni and Others," March 1969, Student Affairs 84-39, Box 1.
Bullock, "Fired by Conscious," 9-10.

95
announced the formation of a Human Rights Commission. The commission would act
with broad powers to "root out racism wherever it is found on campus," and draw its
membership "from concerned student groups including the BSU, faculty, staff and
administration."87 The committee spent the first two weeks debating the legal, moral,
and practical issues surrounding the BYU controversy. Eventually a sub-committee
wrote a statement, adopted by the entire commission that was "in favor of terminating
present athletic contracts and not entering into any future contracts with Brigham
Young University." Realizing that breaking current contracts might not be legally
feasible, the report urged President Odegaard to "consider all possible means of
complying with the sentiment of the campus."88 Odegaard adopted this statement as the
official policy of the University, and turned to the courts to decide whether current
contracts could be legally broken.
With the most pressing issue before the commission quickly settled, the group
turned its eye to the broader issue of racism on campus. This new institutional structure
became a forum where minorities could raise their concerns and advocate for change.
While this commission was neither a part of the BSU's demands, nor initially endorsed
by the BSU, it became an unexpected legacy of the protests. The Human Rights
Commission met for the first time on April 22,1970. Carl Miller, a BSU leader who
initially called the commission a "bullshit trick," served on the commission along with
Lynn Hall, the gymnast who had circulated the petition against BYU. The commission
strove for a balance of representation based on race, gender, and age. One motion,
passed at the committee's second meeting, called for the "appointment of an Oriental,
female student."89
At their meeting on May 21, the commission heard reports on topics ranging
from Chicano graduate student admissions to campus minority employment. One
commission member, Eloy Apodaca, noted that out of almost 8,000 UW graduate
students, only nine were Chicano. He claimed that newly admitted Chicano students,
87

"Joint Statement," University of Washington Daily, March 11, 1970,2.

"Proposed Resolution to Dr. Charles Odegaard," May 7, 1970, Affirmative Action Papers, 78-15, Box
8, University of Washington Archives (hereafter cited as UW Affirmative Action Papers).
89
"Minutes," Human Rights Commission, April 30 1970, UW Affirmative Action Papers, Box 8.
88

like blacks, felt out of place on the UW's majority white campus. Yet, he argued, the
Chicano student was forced to address his problems to black administrators, since they
held almost all of the positions in minority programs. An American Indian student
agreed with Eloy's comments and took them even further, arguing that there was a need
for Indian Studies at the University. Adding another perspective to the conversation, a
female student asked how many of the Chicano applicants were women? According to
the meeting minutes, "She stressed the point that women also do not receive the full
benefits of the University."90
It is clear that the BSU's protest against a discriminatory religious doctrine had
the unintended result of a creating a commission where all those who felt the effects of
discrimination and racism could air their concerns. In fact, one of those concerns was
that while black students had bureaucracies and administrators in place to respond to
their problems, other minorities lacked similar networks. The struggle for black
liberation quite literally provided a forum where other minorities could advocate for the
group they represented and develop "procedures for an improved environment of
tolerance and understanding at the University."91
In historical scholarship, the relationship between African American activism
and the activism of other minority groups can be a sensitive subject. Much of the early
literature on the struggle for black liberation either ignored or regarded the activism of
other minority groups as merely an offshoot of black agency. When scholars began
writing the history of the Chicano Movement and the history of Asian American and
Native American activism, they often, quite naturally, emphasized "the original and
singular nature of their respective struggles." Now, according to Laura Pulido, writing
in Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left, the pendulum has perhaps swung too far, discounting
the influence of black power activists on other struggles. She argues that "there is no

"Minutes," Human Rights Commission, May 21, 1970, UW Affirmative Action Papers, Box 8.
Ibid.

97
denying that non-Black people of color were greatly inspired by, and in some cases
emulated, Black Power."92
At a minimum, a lengthy monograph would be needed to adequately explore the
relationships between minority struggles for liberation in the late 1960s. The more
modest goal of the following pages is to explore, in broad strokes, the relationship
between BSUs and other minority student groups. Following Pulido's lead, I argue that
black students typically initiated the demands that forced universities to become more
responsive to the needs of minorities. Not discounting the agency of other minority
groups, BSUs served as a model for other minority student organizations. They also
opened space within the university that helped politicize and empower other minorities.
At the same time, minority groups frequently supported each other's protests and
formed interracial coalitions. Minority student groups shared a similar intellectual
foundation that viewed minority groups as internal U.S. colonies and inter-group
alliances often coalesced around common sets of grievances. Minority students
understood that multiracial coalitions frequently made their demands more legitimate
and their campus demonstrations more powerful. Relations between minority groups
were not always harmonious. Conflicts usually arose over how to divide limited
resources between various minority groups.
In creating multiracial third world coalitions, BSUs were, to a degree, following
the lead of other Black Power groups, including the Black Panther Party. To generalize,
while the BPP emphasized nationalism as a way for African American communities to
overcome their colonial status, the Panther's also emphasized coalition building with
other oppressed groups, including poor whites, Chicanos, and Native Americans. David
Hilliard, the BPP Chief of Staff, speaking at San Francisco State in 1969, emphasized
the need for interracial alliances. "But I think it would be proper to put an organization
together on this campus," began Hilliard, "that represents White people, that represents
the oppressed Latin American people, that represents the Black People, that represents
the Red man, that represents all the oppressed people in this country." He continued by
92

Laura Pulido, Black Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006), 60.

98
offering a critique of Black Student Unions as too narrow an organization. "Let's have
an organization that we call the Afro-American, Asian, Latin Alliance. Motherfuck the
B.S.U., because the B.S.U. is too narrow. We recognize nationalism, because we know
that our struggle is one of national salvation. But this doesn't hinder our struggle, to
make alliances with other people that's moving in a common direction, but rather it
strengthens our struggle."93
At the UW, the BSU closely collaborated with other minority student groups. In
the BSU's first full quarter as an active group, the BSU invited Latinos and Native
Americans into their organization. They were invited, in part, because there were so
few minorities on campusonly a handful of Native Americans and Chicanosthat the
BSU understood the impossibility of these students forming their own groups.
According to Larry Gossett, in spring of 1968 the BSU's membership included two
American Indian sisters and one Mexican American brother.94
The minority groups gained the critical mass needed to form their own student
organizations in the fall of 1968, largely due to the efforts of the BSU. One of the
major concessions won during the BSU's occupation of President Odegaard's office in
May of 1968 was the expansion of the Special Education Program (SEP). That
summer, BSU recruiters spoke to over 1,000 students about attending the University of
Washington. In June, the University hired Bill Hilliard, a local African American with
experience as a youth director, to head summer recruiting efforts. Working with a staff
of eight BSU students, six African Americans, and two Indians, Hilliard and his
recruiters covered the entire state looking for minority students who had graduated from
high school interested in attending the UW.95
Since these efforts got underway after the public school year had ended, the
recruiters could not utilize high schools to contact graduating seniors. Instead, BSU
members utilized War on Poverty programs, black churches, and crisscrossed the state
visiting Indian Reservations and Latino farm labor communities to recruit students.

Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1970), 126.
Gossett, author interview.
"Bill Hilliard Communicating with Young," University of Washington Daily, July 18, 1968, 1.

Gossett recalled recruiters put a notice in church bulletins announcing the program and
ministers at some churches such as Mt. Zion Baptist Church personally announced the
program from the pulpit. Pool halls and youth and recreation centers were also prime
recruiting venues. The recruiters crossed the Cascade Mountains to recruit in Spokane,
the Yakima Valley, and on Indian Reservations. In Yakima, the students walked
through fields of hops and grapes looking for "Latino Brothers and Sisters" with a high
school diploma. This grass-roots recruitment effort paid off; sixty Mexican Americans
from the Yakima Valley applied under the SEP.96
Understanding the power this new minority entering class represented, the BSU
recruiters sent a letter to all entering SEP minority students, urging them to become
active in the struggle to change the University. "We the recruiters of the Black Student
Union welcome you to the University of Washington," began the letter. "The Black
Student Union is composed of non-white (Mexican, Indian and Afro-American)
students," the letter continued, "interested in making the university educational program
one that is responsible to the needs of 'Black' (non-white) students." The recruiters
signed the letter, "Yours in Blackness."97 This letter demonstrated the willingness of
the recruiters to welcome other students of color to the BSU. The letter was remarkable
in that it both reproduced a traditional black-white dichotomy while acknowledging the
inadequacy of this framework for other minority students.
The approximately thirty Mexican American students who entered the UW in
the fall of 1968 under the SEP provided Latinos the critical mass needed to form their
own student group, United Mexican American Students (UMAS). UMAS specifically
modeled itself after the BSU. Erasmo Gamboa, an early UMAS leader, later recalled
being impressed with the way "the black students asked [for something] and when they
didn't get it they did something about it." Soon, however, UMAS found its own voice
and pursued its own issues. By the spring of 1969, "We were beginning to go in very

Larry Gossett, author interview; "Several Groups Assist," University of Washington Daily, August 8,
1968, B-14.
97
"Letter signed by Black Student Union Recruiters," August 22, 1968, WU ASUW, 85-35, Box 20,
University of Washington Archives.

different directions from the BSU," remembered Gamboa.

Still, the two groups

continued to support each other's increasingly separate agendas. Larry Gossett

remembered spending over a dozen Saturday afternoons picketing grocery stores with
UMAS in support of the United Farm Workers grape boycott.
At UCLAj Asian American and Native American student groups modeled
themselves on the BSU. One UCLA administrator, Mary Jane Hewitt, remembered
being called to an emergency meeting at the administration building. "So I got there
and here's this big conference table surrounded by Native Americans and Asians,
primarily, who all looked like they were ready to go to war." At the meeting Hewitt
experienced a sense of deja vu. "And they were making non-negotiable demands, a la
the way blacks used to. They had picked it all up, they had picked up all the language,
all the body posturing, all the everything."99 The BSU had clearly provided a blueprint
and a roadmap for these student groups.
BSUs shared an intellectual foundation with other minority students. In 1968,
the UW BSU organized an interracial campus study group called Solidarity for Latin,
African, and Asian People (SLAAP). This group met to discuss third world
revolutionary writers including Malcolm X, Franz Fanon and Che Guevara.100 The
black power belief that blacks lived in an exploited internal colony was a concept that
easily transferred to other minority groups. At San Francisco State, the Asian American
Political Alliance (AAPA) read the Black Panther Party newspaper to help form the
intellectual scaffolding for their activism. The BPP newspaper, along with the typical
reading list of Mao, Malcolm and Fanon, provided one AAPA leader "with a conceptual
framework within which I could look at how my involvement fit in with other events:
the Vietnam war in particular and the connections between the strike, domestic issues,
property, and international issues."101
98

Erasmo Gamboa, interview by Angelita Chavez and Trevor Griffey, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor
History Project, November 1,2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu.
99
Mary Jane C. Hewitt, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral
History Program (University of California, 2001), 65.
100
Larry Gossett, author interview; Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights interview.
101
Karen Umemoto, '"On Strike!' San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-69: The Role of Asian
American Students," Ameraisa Journal, 15:1(1989): 18.

101
The struggles against colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America provided
black power activists with a vibrant international perspective. The fact that black power
activists already held as role models a diverse group of international leaders, from Mao
Zedong to Che Guevara, had obvious appeal to minority students. The Chicano
movement, for example, drew upon Emilio Zapata, Che Guevara, and women of the
Mexican Revolution to inform their own nationalism.102 At UCLA, Asian American
activists quoted from their Little Red Books when making non-negotiable demands.
Minority student coalitions frequently shared common sets of grievances.
Interracial coalitions often coalesced around these shared grievances, such as cuts to
minority financial aid, a lack of funding for ethnic studies programs, or poor
administrative commitment to the expansion of minority recruitment programs. At New
York University, a substantial interracial protest began when the University announced
cuts to minority financial aid. After a meeting with the Chancellor and the director of
financial aid failed to assuage the fear of black and Puerto Rican students that they
might be priced out of college, "a large number of black and Puerto Rican students
occupied Vanderbilt Hall, the main administration building at Washington Square."
The protestors' demands that scholarships and financial aid were to remain at present
levels were made on behalf of all "Third World students." The strike ended poorly,
when NYU officials called in the police to clear the building and arrested forty-six
protestors on charges of criminal trespass.104
In some cases, Black Student Unions used third world coalitions to increase the
legitimacy of their demands. According to one first-hand account, at San Francisco
State, the Third World Liberation Front was initially created by the BSU to lend support
and legitimacy to the BSU's agenda. On March 5, 1968, the BSU's Jimmy Garrett,
with the assistance of Mexican American professor Juan Martinez, invited
representatives of Latin, Chinese and Filipino American student groups to a meeting.
At the time, none of these groups were particularly political organizations. For
102

George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 10.
103
Hewitt, UCLA interview, 65.
104
Exum, Paradoxes ofProtest, 118-121.

example, the Intercollegiate Chinese Student Association (ICSA) had 50 members, but
the students were mainly interested in social and cultural activities.105 The Latin
American student group had only three representatives at the meeting and represented
primarily foreign nationals.
Garrett had called the meeting to form a minority coalition group to support the
BSUs interests. For his purposes, actual minority student interest in forming such a
group was superfluous. Thus, instead of starting the meeting by gauging student
interest in a minority coalition, Garrett began by asking what they should name the
group. When some students proposed the name Minority Student Alliance, Garrett
lectured the students on why that was a poor choice. "We've got to stop calling
ourselves the minority." He continued, "We are not the minority. He [whitey] is the
minority."106 Frustrated that the students were not suggesting the name Garrett had
already decided upon, he finally proposed the name Third World Liberation Front
(TWLF). Comprised of six minority student groups including the BSU, the TWLF was
eventually governed by a twelve-member central committee composed of two delegates
elected from each ethnic group.107
While initially conceived by BSU leader Jimmy Garrett as an organization that
would support the BSU's agenda, the TWLF politicized minority students and created a
space where already militant minorities could pursue their own agenda. Described, in
one account, as a "vague, fumbling organization," the TWLF was initially comprised of
a few Mexican American activists led by Dr. Juan Martinez. In May 1968, the group
waged a nine-hour sit-in in the administration building to demand the special admission
of four hundred Third World Students and the retention of Dr. Juan Martinez, whose
one-year contract was not being renewed by the history department. The TWLF also
"liberated" campus office space occupied by the YMCA for its own use.

^ Umemoto, "'On Strike!'" 11.

106
Karagueuzian, Blow It Up! 115.
107
William H. Orrick, Jr., College in Crisis: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence (London: Aurora Publishers Inc., 1970), 105.
108
Robert Smith, Richard Axen, and DeVere Pentony, By Any Means Necessary: The Revolutionary
Struggle at San Francisco State (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 1970), 42.

From these inauspicious origins, the TWLF inspired minority student leaders to
become more militant. As mentioned above, the Chinese student group at San
Francisco State was created in October 1967 by students "who were mainly interested
in social, cultural, and community activities." In the summer of 1968, two rival
factions, one militant and the other moderate, fought over group leadership. "One
faction wanted to get more involved in the Third World group," an ICSO leader
recalled, "because we figured that's where the power was." The other group wanted to
avoid interracial coalitions and remain focused on Chinese student issues. The students
that supported working closely with the TWLF eventually won and the ICSO "became
very active in the strike . . . which was radical for a lot of people at the time. They
thought we were crazy."109 Conceived by Jimmy Garrett as a front group for the BSU,
the TWLF quickly transformed into a vehicle for political action by minority students,
in particular Asians and Mexican Americans.
At most universities, black student groups were the first to demand
administrators became more responsive to their needs. Even at the University of Texas
at Austin, where Mexican American students far outnumbered black students, the black
student group made the initial set of demands that created the bureaucratic momentum
needed to change the University. On February 27, 1969, the group Afro-Americans for
Black Liberation (AABL) presented President Norman Hackerman with a list of eleven
demands. The list ranged from the typical demand for black studies and a dramatic
increase in minority student enrollment to the more unusual demand that half the
regents be minorities and that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library be renamed the
Malcolm X Library. The university, the students argued, must develop the "potentials
of all individuals" but instead it had "excluded Black students from full participation in
campus affairs, exposed them to racist attitudes and situations, and has completely
ignored their essential needs."110 These demands initiated a whirlwind of press

109

Umemoto, '"On Strike!'" 12.

"Afro-Americans for Black Liberation Eleven Demands," UT President's Office, 80-50, Box 51,
Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
110

conferences, newspaper editorials, and faculty meetings. Eventually the administration

formed a number of committees to give careful consideration to each demand.
The AABL's demands ignited a period of competition between black and
Mexican American students at UT Austin. In the midst of this debate and deliberation,
on April 11, Mexican American students added their voices to the mix when leaders of
the Mexican-American Student Organization (MASO) presented ten proposals to
Hackerman. Trying to position themselves as reasonable students, MASO presented
Hackerman not with ten demands, but ten proposals, all carefully crafted to avoid being
seen as extreme. There were no calls, for example, to rename the LBJ Library after a
Mexican American figure. The student newspaper lavished praise on this reasonable
approach opining, "The manner in which these proposals have been given seems to
indicate an honest and serious concern for not only Mexican-American students, but
those of other minority students."111
Mexican American students were worried that all of the attention the black
demands garnered meant that the needs of Mexican Americans might go ignored.
MASO leader Rafael Quintanilla explained that the group had written the ten proposals
out of fear that the action taken on the AABL's demands might "exclude other cultural
minorities and economically deprived persons."112 MASO also wanted to ensure
Mexican Americans were at least equally represented in any ethnic studies program.
MASO believed the case for Mexican American studies was even stronger than the
African American case. "In a state where Mexican Americans comprise nearly 20
percent of the population our achievements and contributions are either forgotten or
ignored." Unlike blacks, Mexican ancestors had established ancient civilizations in the
New World long before Europeans 'discovered' them.113 Mexican American students
at UT, worried that blacks had beaten them to the punch, went on the offensive to
advocate for their needs. Part of that offensive included the implication that, given the

111

"MASO 'Ten' Commendable," The Daily Texan, April 13, 1969,4.

"MASO Spokesman Describes 10 Proposals as 'Suggestions,'" The Daily Texan, April 18, 1969, 9.
113
"Mexican-American Students' Ten Proposals," The Daily Texan, April 15, 1969, 4.
112

105
importance of Mexican Americans in Texas, their demands were more justified than
black demands.
At other schools, relationships between minority groups were also less than
harmonious. Conflicts most frequently arose over to how to divide the limited
resources universities provided to minority students. In particular, Mexican American
students and faculty guarded frequently against the typically higher-profile black
students garnering an unfair share of the limited financial pie. The rise and fall of a
coalition between African American and Chicano/a students at the University of
California at San Diego demonstrates both the potential power of interracial coalitions
and how quickly these coalitions can deteriorate.
When Angela Davis arrived at UCSD to study philosophy under Herbert
Marcuse, she immediately noticed there were almost no black students on campus.
According to scholar George Mariscal, she realized this lack of black students meant
that any political action on behalf of minorities would have to involve a multiracial
collation. After helping to establish the Black Student Council (BSC), she approached
the Mexican American Youth Association (MAYA) about a possible alliance.114
In the late 1960s UCSD was in the midst of planning to open a third college with
a focus on the liberal arts. When the provost-designate of the planned third college,
Armin Rappaport, solicited the opinion of minority students on the development of
possible ethnic studies courses, the BSC seized the opening. They drafted a plan where
the entire new college would operate, in effect, as an ethnic studies program on a grand
scale. The new college would be named in honor of African anti-colonial leader Patrice
Lumumba. According to Davis, the school would provide minority students "with the
knowledge and skills we needed in order to more effectively wage our liberation
struggles."115 MAYA soon joined the black students who had drafted the original plan,
and worked together on a new draft. The final draft tilted, "Lumumba-Zapata College,
BSC-MAYA demands for the Third College, USCD," was handed to administrators on
March 14,1969.
114
115

Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children, 220.

Ibid., 221-222

106
The proposed Lumumba-Zapata college would admit a student body of roughly
1/3 black, 1/3 Chicano and 1/3 "Other." The curriculum would cover the range of
issues needed to assist minority groups in their straggle for liberation. Suggested class
topics included revolutions, urban and rural development, analysis of economic
systems, science and technology, and white studies. In a 1969 student newspaper
editorial, the Triton Times heralded the new college for "being constructed to serve the
specific needs of a particular communitythe Black and Brown."116 As noted by
Mariscal, the conflation of African Americans and Mexican Americans belonging to a
single community was quite remarkable. It demonstrated how the BSC-MAYA Third
College proposal helped to create the belief that, at least on a college campus, black and
brown students could function as a single community. If a curriculum could be crafted
to appeal to both groups equally, certainly the common ground shared by both groups
far outweighed the differences. This student editorial, unfortunately, marked the zenith
of the BSC-MAYA coalition.
The disintegration of the interracial coalition at UCSD began when Joseph
Watson, an African American professor of chemistry at UCSD, was hired as Provost of
Third College. Marginally conservative, Watson's race and his policies on minority
student recruitment, minority faculty hiring, and student governance began to draw the
ire of many student activists. As African American activist Percy Myers later
recounted, some Chicana/os "felt that Third College was going to be predominantly
black in terms of the student body and faculty because of Dr. Watson's thrust."

As

scholar and activist Carlos Munoz, Jr. writes, the perception that black administrators
would ignore the needs of Mexican American students was quite common. The
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) "engaged in power struggles with
white liberal and Black administrators, whose overriding emphasis on the recruitment of
Black students was perceived as slighting Mexican Americans."118 Battle lines were
drawn when Chicano/a activists demanded Watson resign. While many black students
116

Ibid., 230-32. Quoted from "Third CollegeThe Quiet Revolution," Triton Times, November 25,
1969, 8.
117
Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children, 236.
118
Carlos Munoz Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989), 84.

107
believed Watson was too conservative, black students and faculty closed ranks to
support him. At Third College, the Watson controversy shattered the fragile Chicana/o
and black coalition.
A similar-story of Mexican American students worrying about the appointment
of an African American administrator unfolded at the University of Texas at Austin.
After a student protest waged initially by black students, followed by a parallel battle
fought by Mexican Americans, the UT Regents approved the formation of an Ethnic
Studies Department. The administration hired Henry Bullock, an African American
sociologist whose 1968 book, A History of Negro Education in the South, had won the
Bancroft Prize, to oversee the program. Bullock came to UT from Texas Southern
University, where he had taught for eighteen years. Ironically, Texas Southern was an
African American institution created in the 1940s by the state legislature as a last ditch
effort to prevent integration at UT.
In the fall of 1970, a Bullock-chaired Ethnic Studies Committee met for the first
time. The first item raised at this meeting was the "possibility of establishing a separate
Mexican American Studies Program."119 There seemed to be some confusion as to the
actual governance structure of the nascent department. The regents had approved a
single Ethnic Studies Department with separate disciplines in Afro-American, MexicanAmerican, and African Studies. At this meeting "Mexican-American students wanted
to know if 2/3 of the budget would go to Black studies and 1/3 to Mexican-American
Studies."

In other words, Mexican American students wanted to know exactly how

these newly appropriated funds would be divided. Complicating the matter was that UT
Austin already had a Latin American Research Institute, roughly the equivalent of the
proposed African studies program. The committee had to decide if the money and
resources appropriated to this department should count toward the total money being
given Mexican Americans as opposed to blacks.

"Ethnic Studies Committee Minutes," October 15, 1970, UT President's Office, 086-247, Box 13,
Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
120
Ibid.

With the budgets and organization of the Ethnic Studies Program still up in the
air, Mexican-American students and faculty jockeyed for as large a slice of the pie as
possible. They believed that Mexican Americans were a larger and more important
ethnic group in Texas and did not want their interests subordinated to the interests of
black students. These concerns were only heightened by the appointment of a black to
administer the program. As Bullock wrote in a memo to other members of the
committee, "Ever since the organization of the Ethnic Studies Program the chairman
has been aware of the anxieties of Mexican-American students in light of the fact that
the chairman is Black."121 These anxieties were resolved, in part, when Bullock agreed
to split the budget equally between Mexican American Studies and Black Studies and
grant the Mexican American wing of the program complete autonomy. Still, the
division of these programs based on ethnicity, as Munoz notes, often "contributed to
bitter and intense conflicts between Mexican American and Blacks on several
campuses, making viable coalition politics difficult, if not altogether impossible." '

The BSU failed to force the UW to repudiate the Mormon Church's doctrine or
terminate contracts with BYU. On April 10, the Faculty Senate tabled a motion that
would have severed relations with BYU and the motion died. Ignoring the Human
Rights Commission's recommendation that the university pursue all legal avenues of
ending relations with BYU, in the spring of 1971, the UW renewed its contracts with
BYU. Eight years after the university protests against the Mormon Church had
subsided, in 1978, the Mormon Church repudiated their anti-black doctrine when leader
Spencer Kimball revealed, "all worthy male members of the church may be ordained to
the priesthood without regard for race or color." At least on paper, a person's worth
within the Mormon Church would no longer be based on one's race. Upon hearing the

"Chairman's Recommendations for Consideration by the Ethnic Studies Committee," UT President's

Office, 086-247, Box 13.
122
Carlos Mufloz Jr., Youth, Identity, Power, 85.

109
announcement, a black professor commented, "the last major organized public racism in
this country dropped on Friday."123
The one victory of the BYU protests, the Human Rights Commission, continued
to stay active at the University for some years. Perhaps the most important contribution
of the commission came three years after its formation. The committee proposed the
creation of a Human Rights Grievance Committee that would review "individual human
rights complaints."124 A full-time Human Rights Ombudsperson would chair the
committee and would try to mediate the complaints of individual students who felt they
had suffered discrimination. If this process failed, then a hearing committee would
meet and report its findings to the President. This allowed the University to make
"every effort to resolve all charges of discrimination."125
The Human Rights Commission was but one of many new bureaucracies that
made universities more responsive to the needs of minority students. These new
bureaucracies, in particular ethnic studies programs and offices of minority affairs, also
brought staff, faculty, and administrators from different ethnic groups together. These
new structures promoted the idea that all minority groups make unique contributions to
American society and the university. These programs created space where students and
the university could celebrate minority culture and eventually supported the
development of a multicultural framework.
Today, student group coalitions frequently exhibit these multicultural roots. At
UCLA, the African Student Union, the Vietnamese Student Union, the Black Alumni
Association, the American Indian Student Association, MEChA, the Muslim Student
Association, the Asian Pacific Coalition, and the Queer Alliance recently united to
protest UCLA's perceived lack of diversity.126 In the next chapter I will turn to events

Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang,
1984), 154.
124
"University of Washington Grievance Procedure," Affirmative Action Papers, 78-15, Box 8,
University of Washington Archives.
125
Ibid.
126
"Students Upset by Admits' Similarity," Daily Bruin, April 28,2006; "UCLA Admissions Crisis,"
Nommo, July 2006, 12-13.

110
at UCLA to discuss how black studies helped lay the foundation for this
institutionalized multicultural programming.

Ill
Chapter Three: The Making of Black Studies: Black Activists, University
Administrators, and the Rise of Multiculturalism on College Campuses
When Daniel Johnson first heard shots at the end of a contentious BSU meeting
held in UCLA's Campbell Hall on July 17, 1969, he immediately pushed his wife to the
floor and covered her body with his. While on the ground he remembers hearing nine
rounds in quick succession, screaming, and finally silence. Ray Macias was in
Campbell Hall's new Mexican American Studies library when he heard the shots. After
helping to evacuate the building, Macias hurried to the old home economics cafeteria, to
make certain his future wife, Caroline Weber, who was attending the BSU meeting, had
safely left the building. There he saw the dead bodies of Black Panther Party leaders
John Huggins and Alprentice Bunchy Carter.1
The deaths of Huggins and Carter were part of an ongoing conflict between the
Black Panthers and Ron Karenga's US organization, over who would control the
leadership and the resources of Los Angeles' black power movement. The conflict
between the two groups was partly philosophic. Karenga believed the BPP's Marxism
and willingness to form alliances with whites made a mockery of true Black
Nationalism. Conversely, Black Panther leaders famously derided US as a "pork-chop
nationalist" organization, unwilling to fight for revolutionary change. The FBI, which
had recently declared the BPP the "single greatest threat to the internal security of the
United States," sought to heighten the tension between the two groups in an attempt to
weaken both organizations. As part of its COiNTELPRO operations, the FBI wrote and
leaked anonymous letters and memos implying the BPP sought to take over US and vice
versa.2

"African-American Studies: Remembering the Journey," Daily Bruin, January 30, 1995, 6; Daniel
Johnson, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, July 16, 2006; Reynaldo Macias, author interview, Los
Angeles, CA, July 31, 2006.
2
Scot Brown, Fightingfor US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism
(New York: New York University Press, 2003), 94; Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's
Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 156; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A
Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt And Company, 2006), 219.

112
The shootings, however, were more than a community conflict between the BPP
and US that had spilled onto the tranquil grounds of UCLA's Westwood campus. They
were also the climax of a months-long struggle over who would control the resources of
a proposed black studies center at UCLA. Black Power groups in Los Angeles viewed
the Centeroriginally designed to house all institutional programs related to blacks at
UCLA including Black Studies courses, student recruitment programs, and community
involvement programsas a potentially powerful political prize. If US or the BPP
could control the center, they could conceivably have the power to admit blacks to
UCLA, distribute grants, and shape black studies curriculum.3
From our vantage point today, the creation of black studies centers almost seems
inevitable. They were not. The tireless efforts of black students naturally deserve the
most credit for their creation. But these efforts would have most likely fallen short if
the numerous intertwined tumultuous events of the 1960sVietnam, Watts, the
struggle for black liberation, the Great Society, and the rise of the New Lefthad not
first created a climate where people believed America was a nation in crisis and in need
of fundamental change. As part of this fundamental shift, many students, faculty, and
administrators became committed to opening the doors of the university to minority
students, research, and curriculum. In the end, it was the combined efforts of students,
faculty, and administrators that brought ethnic studies to UCLA.
When the University of California, in May 1969, gave official approval to a
black studies center at UCLA, the center's black student architects believed it would
prove to be an indispensible tool in the struggle for black liberation. But how a center
was institutionalized often differed significantly from its original vision. When creating
the centers, universities could not accept many of the black students' most radical
claims, in particular the argument that knowledge and knowledge production was
racialized and that real world experience often produced more qualified individuals than
a university education. Alternatively, faculty and administrators placed the black
studies curriculum in a liberal-educational framework that embraced a diverse

Brown, Fightingfor US, 95-96; Johnson, author interview.

113
curriculum. Black studies classes would not create radical black revolutionaries;
instead they would create, as part of a broad intellectual diet, liberally educated students
who possessed a diverse understanding of the world.
Black students believed that university curriculum in the 1960s privileged
Western values and taught students how to become white. By teaching and celebrating
black culture, these students argued, black studies centers would serve to correct this
curricular bias and act as a place where blacks could become black. Universities
rejected this notion and institutionalized black studies centers alongside other ethnic
studies centers, crafting a narrative of liberal multicultural inclusion. Black studies,
Asian studies, and Latino studies were not separatist programs that celebrated a specific
racial group. Rather, they were inclusive programs that celebrated the rich tapestry of
American diversity.
The origin of black student protest at UCLA in the late 1960s is a complicated
narrative, containing multiple intertwined threads and numerous actors. These threads
include: the nationalist appeal of the Nation of Islam and the rhetoric of their fiery
leader, Malcolm X; the civil rights movement, in particular the inspirational example set
by black students acting as leaders and participants in almost all civil rights
organizations, large and small; the Great Society, which empowered black community
groups to access federal grants; and Vietnam, which reaffirmed the New Left's views of
the United States' imperialism and inspired disruptive protests that convinced many that
America was a nation in crisis and in need of serious reform. Finally, Watts is properly
viewed as a 1960s watershed. The Watts' Uprising inspired the formation of new black
community organizations, the development of a black power political consciousness
among black youth, and influenced the federal government's hesitant promotion of
affirmative action.4

As Gerald Home argues in Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1997), "the Watts Uprising helped to set in motion a nationalism that filled an ideological void in
Black LA.," 132.

114
In the summer of 1965, urban violence was far from the minds of most
observers of the civil rights movement. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had just
signed the Voting Rights Act into law and federal registrars had moved into the South
to enforce the Act. Then, on August 11, the most destructive race riot in more than two
decades began in Watts, a Los Angeles ghetto of 250,000 African Americans. A
routine traffic stop of a suspected drunk driver by a white police officer sparked the riot
and led to five days of looting, arson, and violence. But the broader causes were urban
crowding, housing and workplace discrimination, and a Los Angeles police force that
regarded blacks as criminals. While Los Angeles and the rest of the nation experienced
almost unprecedented economic growth in the post-World War Two period, urban back
residents lost ground economically. African Americans also suffered from blatant
housing discrimination. Although illegal, many suburban neighborhoods had covenants
that forbid African Americans from purchasing homes. In 1964, California voters
upheld their right to discriminate in the housing market by passing Proposition 14,
which overturned the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, a California law that made it
illegal for homeowners or landlords to discriminate on the basis of race. In Watts, onesixth of Los Angeles's half million blacks were crowded into the neighborhood, living
amidst conditions four times as congested as the rest of the city. Unable to purchase a
house or live outside of the ghetto, blacks often paid above average rent to live in slumlike conditions.
Out of the embers of Watts emerged numerous new community organizations.
US, Sons of Watts, SLANT, and Operation Bootstrap were all responses to the Watts
riot. Formed by two members of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), Operation
Bootstrap's motto, "Learn, Baby Learn," was adapted from the militant Watts slogan,
"Burn, Baby Burn." Sons of Watts, founded by members of a loosely configured gang
known as the Sons of the Stronghold, sought to transform Watts into a place "where
anyone would want to live."5 These new organizations represented a major shift in Los

Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 147; "Negroes Launch Their Own Operation 'Bootstrap,'" Los Angeles Times,

115
Angeles black urban neighborhoods from middle-class leadership to younger, urban,
Black Nationalist oriented leadership.
Ron Karenga founded US one month after Watts on September 7,1965. 6 Like
many blacks, Karenga believed Watts represented a struggle to "clear your space, to
build a world you want to live in, to stop people from just trampling on you."7 He
wanted to take the energy of Watts to organize something more permanent. Clayborne
Carson, an undergraduate at UCLA at the time, later remembered the important
leadership US provided in the fragile post-Watts climate. "At a time of uncertainty and
disorganization in the African-American freedom struggle, Karenga's US exhibited
confidence and discipline."8 Modeled in part on the Nation of Islam, US emphasized a
return to African cultural values. Karenga developed the philosophy of Kawaida which
encompassed seven principles including Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (selfdetermination), and Ujamaa (cooperative economics).9
Karenga had a long history and a special affinity with UCLA. After earning his
Associates Degree at Los Angeles City College, Karenga matriculated to UCLA where
he earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees. At UCLA he studied Kiswahili, Arabic,
and African history and culture. Councill Taylor, an anthropologist from Jamaica,
became Karenga's teacher and mentor. Taylor believed in the principles of Negritude, a
Pan-African political and cultural movement. Under Taylor, Karenga learned to
criticize anthropology's view of non-Western cultures as primitive and underdeveloped.
While at UCLA, Karenga also met Don Warden, who had recently formed the AfroAmerican Association in Oakland, a group that celebrated black identity and later
played an important role in the formation of the BPP. Karenga eventually became head

October 1, 1965, Al; "One-Time Youth Gang Takes New Aim on Future as 'Sons of Watt's,'" Los
Angeles Times, September 2, 1966, Al.
6
There is some controversy over the meaning of the name US. Many 1960s observers, including the FBI,
believed US was short for United Slaves. Scot Brown argues that the term was used by outsiders to
ridicule the group. Instead, he claims the name US refers to the pronoun "us," meaning US black folks,
versus "them." See Brown, Fighting for US, 2.
7
Maulana Karenga, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral
History Program (University of California, 2002), 68.
8
Scot Brown, Fightingfor US, from the forward by Clayborne Carson, vii.
9
Scot Brown, Fightingfor US, 163.

116
of the Los Angeles Afro-American Association and briefly headed a branch at UCLA.
During this period Karenga began to address "how white centered the curriculum was,"
at UCLA, critiquing professors for teaching from outdated notes that ignored the
contributions of African Americans.10
After founding US, Karenga's close relationship with UCLA continued, where
he frequently returned as an expert on Black Nationalism, speaking before Experimental
College Classes, Upward Bound students, and at BSU-sponsored events. At one
lecture, Karenga arrived surrounded by four US bodyguards, called Simbas. He
passionately described the Watts riots of 1965 as representing a shift in the civil rights
movement to a focus on black power. "They did it [Watts] and dug it," argued
Karenga, "danced in the streets about itwatched themselves on the colored TV's they
took."11 These lectures, coupled with the press coverage of Karenga in the Daily Bruin,
made Karenga a well-known figure at UCLA. Karenga was also respected and admired
by UCLA's black student community. The first issue of the black student paper,
Nommo, printed a number of Karenga's quotations on the editorial page.
Eventually these new community organizations formed after Watts worked
together with older civil rights groups to create a black umbrella organization, known as
the Black Congress, in 1967. The Black Congress included over twenty organizations
including US, Operation Bootstrap, CORE, the NAACP, and the recently formed Black
Student Unions at California State University at Los Angeles, Compton City College,
and Los Angeles City College.13 Elaine Brown later described the Black Congress as
"the expression of a collective desire to emphasize the common will and serve the
common interests of black people."14 While initial funds for the organization came
from local churches, eventually the Black Congress acted, in part, as a clearinghouse for
10

Karenga, UCLA interview, 132; Robert Singleton, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for
African American Studies, Oral History Program (University of California, 1999), 168; Scot Brown,
Fighting for US, 11-12. For more on Karenga's political development, see the first two chapters of
Brown.
11
"White People are Deciding Blacks' Fate, Karenga Tells Experimental College," Daily Bruin, October
18, 1967, 1; "Upward Bound Widens Students' Outlook," The UCLA Summer Bruin, July 20, 1967, 1.
12
"Quotations from the Maulana," Nommo, December 4, 1968, 4.
13
Scot Brown, Fighting for US, 83.
14
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power, 106.

117
War on Poverty funds. The US organization played a central role in the Black
Congress. Karenga typically chaired Black Congress meetings and US Simbas
provided security at meetings.15
Watts also forged the political consciousness of a generation of black youth.
Daniel Johnson, a future UCLA BSU leader, had just moved to a neighborhood north of
Watts with his parents when the riots began. Driving home, Johnson remembered his
family "could see fires beginning to burn, around the general southeast LA area."16 In
the aftermath of Watts, Johnson was hired by the Los Angeles Riot Study that became
part of the McCone Commission report. Headed by UCLA professor Nathan Cohen
and funded by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the Riot Study interviewed
more than 2,000 people living in Watts on their involvement in and impressions of
Watts. The report challenged police claims that a small percentage of "Bad Negroes"
were responsible for the violence, and discovered that as many as 15% of residents
participated in the riots and 34% of residents viewed the riots favorably.17
Working for the Riot Study, Johnson traveled throughout Watts questioning
blacks on how they viewed and understood the riot. "And that's when I began to really
get a different sense about what the whole struggle was about at an urban level,"
Johnson later remembered. While Johnson had experienced virulent racism growing up
in Alabama, he learned that black urban communities faced a very different set of
issues, including urban crowding, workplace discrimination, and being treated as an
internal colony by the Los Angeles police. Watts became "signal to my involvement in
black student activism," Johnson recalled.18
While Watts inspired the creation of new community groups and helped
politicize black youth, the legislation of the Great Society proved instrumental in
creating a national climate that opened the doors of educational opportunity for
minorities. Great Society legislation introduced the notion of compensatory
educationthat schools should make special efforts to recruit and educate minority and
15

Bruce M. Tyler, "Black Radicalism in Southern California, 1950-1982" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1983), 15.
Johnson, author interview.
17
"Watts Study Shows Riot Causes Misread," Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1967, WS1.
18
Johnson, author interview.
16

118
low-income students who traditionally had been denied equal access to education due to
past discriminationand greatly influenced the admissions policies of hundreds of
universities and colleges. By making the idea of compensatory education acceptable on
a national level, the Great Society paved the way for local schools to adopt programs
that opened their doors to low-income and minority students.
As part of his Great Society, President Johnson pushed four key acts through
Congress that drastically altered the educational landscape. The Elementary and
Secondary Education Act provided a billion dollars to improve the education of poor
children. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ordered a census of all U.S. post-secondary
institutions that identified students by race or ethnicity and warned administrators that
federal monies would be withheld if institutions were found to be in non-compliance
with equal opportunity mandates. In 1965, Congress passed the Higher Education Act
that increased federal funds for universities and funded student scholarships. These
scholarships eventually provided significant funding for the hundreds of educational
opportunity programs that were implemented by universities nationwide in the late
1960s. Finally, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created, most famously, the
Head Start program that provided pre-school education to low-income families. The
OEO also managed what came to be known as the TRIO programs: Upward Bound,
Talent Search, and the Student Support Services Program. Talent Search functioned as
an educational clearinghouse that promoted the idea of community recruitment.
Starting in 1966, Daniel Johnson worked for Talent Search where he directly recruited
in the black community to identify talented individuals who were then referred to
colleges.19 TRIO programs set an important precedent by sending recruiters into urban
communities and providing talented students with a range of support services, including
tutoring and counseling, aimed at easing the transition to college. These recruitment
centers changed the relationship between universities and minority communities.
Instead of ignoring these communities, recruitment centers forged important ties
between minority community leaders and university administrators.
19

Edward J. McElroy and Maria Armesto, "TRIO and Upward Bound: History, Programs, and Issues
Past, Present, and Future," The Journal ofNegro Education 67, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 373.

119
Following the lead of the federal government, the University of California
initiated its own program to increase the access of minority students to its top
universities. Once again, Watts played a central role. "The embers [from Watts] were
still warm when UCLA began integrating," and "led to a massive effort by the
University of California" to take affirmative action on behalf of minority students, later
remembered Henry McGee, one of the first black law professors at UCLA.

One effect

of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, which funneled the top third
of all students to UC schools, was to exclude minorities from attending California's top
universities. Authorized by the Regents in 1965, the Educational Opportunity Programs
(EOP) sought to open UC schools to minority students. Beginning with seventeen
students at Berkeley and an initial $100,000 in funding, the EOP quickly expanded. By
the fall of 1968 EOP programs had grown to include nearly two thousand students on
all nine University campuses.21 The EOP utilized the two percent special admission
rule that stated that two percent of all applicants could be admitted on special action by
the chancellor. These special admits were typically athletes and occasionally included a
precocious artist or musician. Under the EOP, minority and low-income students
gained admission under the two percent rule.22
After the EOP, Upward Bound became the other main minority recruitment tool
utilized by UCLA. In its first year Upward Bound brought seventy black and Mexican
American high school students to UCLA for eight weeks of special classes designed to
prepare them for college. At first, UCLA Chancellor Franklin Murphy was hesitant in
admitting Upward Bound students who failed to meet traditional entrance requirements
to UCLA, but in 1966 he decided to admit some students under the two percent rule.
Operating on over 250 campuses nationwide, including the University of Washington,
20

Henry McGee, author interview, Seattle WA, December 15, 2006; Gerald Home echoes this
assessment in Fire This Time, writing: "The smoke over Westwood in August 1965 opened the eyes of
those who had been blind to many problems in South LA.," 230.
21
"University of California Educational Opportunity Programs," UCLA, Office of the Chancellor,
Administrative Subject Files of Franklin D. Murphy, 1935-1971,401, Box 125, UCLA University
Archives (hereafter cited as Murphy 401).
22
Charles (CZ) Wilson, Notes and Reflections of Boundary Manager (Saving Inner City Black America
from Within) (CZAND Associates, 2005), Chapter 7, 7.
23
"UCLA Admission of 'Upward Bound' Students OKd," Los Angeles Times, November 20,1966, WS1.

120
Upward Bound was moderately successful in encouraging bright minority and lowincome students to attend college. According to Kenneth Washington, hired by UCLA
to run Upward Bound and the EOP, the idea behind the program was "to convey the
idea that education in itself is exciting and of value."24 More importantly, Upward
Bound, the EOP, and other federal efforts signaled the beginning of a liberal
commitment to increasing educational access for minorities and low-income students
students who had traditionally been denied the opportunity to attend elite universities.
Students also took the lead in transforming the relationship between the
university and the community. A 1967 report on student community involvement noted
that before 1963, "University-sanctioned student participation in meaningful
community involvement activities was negligible." This changed with "the advent of
the Civil Rights Movement," the report claimed. "Students began to take note of the
world around them and to do something about it." The first student-led community
involvement program began at UCLA in 1963 with a tutorial project. By the mid-1960s
the Associated Students of UCLA was sponsoring a half dozen community service
projects including Tutorial Project, UCLAmigos, Uni-Camp, and the Teen Opportunity
Program (TOP). 25 The TOP included a black and a Hispanic component, where urban
minority students were brought to campus to visit classes, attend activities, and talk
with professors. The TOP's dual structure helped to form "social as well as, if you will,
political or movement relationships" between black and Mexican American students.26
Eventually, the TOP expanded by opening two community centers. The Emiliano
Zapata Educational and Cultural Center and the Black Awareness and Educational
Center were designed to advise and encourage high school students to attend the
university and forge connections between UCLA and urban neighborhoods.27
The creation of a black studies center at UCLA involved the individual efforts of
dozens of students, faculty, and administrators. But if one had to select a single person,
"Upward Bound Widens Students' Outlook," Daily Bruin, July 20, 1967, 7.
Ronald Javor, "Community Involvement as an Educational Process," March 16, 1967, Murphy 401,
Box 124.
26
Maci'as, author interview.
27
"Opportunity Centers Aid Teens," Daily Bruin, October 4,1968,26.
25

it would not be inaccurate to call Virgil Roberts the father of the center. Born in
California, Roberts' parents moved to Los Angeles from Texas during World War II as
part of the Second Great Migration. His parents found jobs picking lemons and settled
in the white, wealthy, seaside community of Ventura. Coming of age during the early
60s, Roberts felt far removed from national civil rights struggles. "The civil rights
marches and things were something that was at a distance and not something that was
perceived as a problem where we were in that time and space, and that later on we came
to perceive as being a problem," Roberts later commented. Politically moderate, he
supported the Vietnam War, feared big deficits, and supported fair housing.
Roberts matriculated to UCLA in 1966, after spending two years at Ventura
Community College. Once on campus, his great respect for the famous black alumnus
Ralph Bunche influenced his decision to major in political science. Roberts' shift from
a political moderate to a black power advocate occurred in the summer of 1967, when
he participated in the Foreign Affairs Scholar Program. The program, a collaboration
between the Ford Foundation and Howard University, sought to recruit minority
students into the Foreign Service. Staying in the Howard dorms with dozens of other
politically savvy blacks from across the nation, Roberts was introduced to a broad range
of black power literature including Malcolm X's autobiography and Franz Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth. That summer's riots in Newark and Detroit opened Roberts'
eyes to a nation in crisis and on the verge of a real revolution. "So I came back to
UCLA with my own internal commitment that I was going to try and redirect my life,
and try and impact all the institutions I was involved with to try and make the black
experience better," Roberts later remembered. He decided to go to law school after
graduation and become a civil rights lawyer.29
Returning to UCLA, Roberts, along with his roommates Arthur Frazier,
Timothy Ricks, and Mike Downing approached administrators about creating a black
studies program. In particular, Roberts befriended C.Z. Wilson, a black administrator
28

"30th Anniversary Celebration: Panel Discussion," UCLA CAAS Report, 17, no. 1 & 2 (2001): 16-17.
Virgil Roberts, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral History
Program (University of California, 1998), 26.
29

122
who had recently arrived at UCLA as an American Council on Education (ACE) fellow,
a program that prepared faculty members for administrative positions. Mary Jane
Hewitt, who briefly served as director of minority recruitment programs, later
remembered how black students went out of their way to work with Wilson. "They
were very active, very assertive young men. They had made it their business to get to
know him and let him know what their goals and desires were."30 Wilson also credited
black students for initiating the push towards black studies. "We [administrators]
recognized that the students were ahead of the faculty. Virgil Roberts and Art Frazier,
two graduate students in political science, had scoured the country for ideas and
thoughts on the shape and structure of a potential Center for Black Studies."

Another

administrator, Elvin Svenson, echoed these sentiments, remembering the early black
and Mexican American student leaders as "really terrific people. They were bright; they
were young; they were brash; they were smart; and they were concerned."
By 1967, UCLA black students were beginning to embrace a more militant
black power philosophy and demand major changes. In January, black students formed
Harambee, the first post-Watts black student group at UCLA.33 That students chose the
name Harambee, which means "pull together" in Swahilli, demonstrated the influence
of Karenga and US in the Los Angeles black community. In its first year, Harambee
protested the lack of black history taught at UCLA, initiated a black studies class as part
of the Experimental College, and fought for increased admissions of black women.
In January 1968, influenced by San Francisco State's BSU leader Jimmy
Garrett's plan to form a consortium of BSUs along the West Coast, Harambee changed
its name to the Black Students' Union. That winter, Daniel Johnson, recently elected as
BSU chair, created various committees organized along programmatic lines. Roberts
became chair of the Black Students' Union Education Committee. He, together with six
other students, implemented a plan to bring black studies to UCLA. When the
30

Mary Jane C. Hewitt, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral
History Program (University of California, 2001), 58.
31
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, Chapter 7, 48.
32
Elvin Svenson, interview by James V. Mink and Dale E. Treleven, UCLA Oral History Program
(University of California, 2002), 170.
33
'"HarambeePull Together' motto for new Negro group," Daily Bruin, January 30, 1967, 2.

education committee began their work, San Francisco State was the only school in the
country with a black studies program. In researching the planned program, the
education committee drove up to San Francisco to witness what the BSU was doing
there.
Roberts had a serious and all-encompassing vision for a Black Studies Center.
Too many blacks, Roberts believed, "romanticized being poor." The center "wasn't
about giving speeches in Meyerhoff Park, but really was about trying to create an
institution within the institution to change the institution."34 Roberts envisioned a
center where faculty and students would produce new research on issues ranging from
black culture to urban economics. The center would serve as a link between the ivory
tower and the black community. Roberts also wanted the center to house all programs
that related to black students, including minority recruitment programs, tutoring and
counseling, curriculum development, and black studies.
To demonstrate student interest in black studies, Roberts organized a class that
was first taught in spring quarter of 1968. "The Black Man in a Changing American
Context" incorporated a series of guest lecturers on topics including black literature,
social stratification in the black community, and racism in Western civilization.
Enormously popular, over five hundred students attended the course with a special front
section roped off for black students. Student interest and the quality of the guest
lectures ensured the course's success "as a vehicle to establish a black studies
curriculum."36
Student initiative, by itself, is rarely enough to change a university. At UCLA,
the initiative of black students was matched by efforts undertaken by some faculty.
When history professor Gary Nash arrived at UCLA in 1966, he quickly became
involved in a number of community civil rights organizations including Operation
Bootstrap, Westside Fair Housing, and the Pacific Palisades Human Relations Council.
Nash's commitment to race relations extended to his own research where he began

Roberts, UCLA interview, 69.

"BSU Forms New Course on Black Man," Daily Bruin, March 29, 1968.
Roberts, UCLA interview, 28.

exploring how race contributed to the formation of Colonial America. This

commitment also extended to teaching. In 1968, Nash decided to offer a course on
"Racial Attitudes in America." Nash's inspiration for the class came during a Thursday
night rap session in a "garage in south central Los Angeles where these friends of
Operation Bootstrap would meet," Nash later recalled. "We were often told it is well
enough to come down here to south-central Los Angeles and prove that you're not
racist, but it would be a lot better if you went and do something where you live and
where you work."37 Thinking on his own work, Nash decided that he could perhaps
invent a new course. The Kerner Report influenced the specific curriculum of the
course. After reading the report, Nash decided there was "a need for increased public
awareness of the impact of the white man's racial attitudes on our history." Utilizing a
guest lecture format, the course was offered first as a University Extension course and
later for full academic credit.38 For example, Ronald Takaki, the Japanese Hawaiian
American hired by the history department to teach African American history at UCLA,
lectured on "The Black Child Savage in Ante-Bellum America." The lectures for the
class were eventually published in book form. The Great Fear began with a chapter by
Nash that served as the foundation for his seminal work on race in Colonial America,
Red, White and Black?9
Alongside student and faculty initiatives, two institutional structures allowed
black studies centers to be viewed within a narrative of institutional continuity. In the
1960s, under the leadership of Abbott Kaplan, University Extension began offering
classes on race. "He [Kaplan] knew there was a real lack in this community of
awareness and information about the major contributions of African Americans to this
society," Mary Jane Hewitt, who worked under Kaplan in the mid-1960s, later
commented. "So, as an educator, he recognized the importance and fostered it."40
When minority students began demanding a greater relationship between UCLA and
37

Gary Nash, author interview, Westwood, CA, July 6, 2006.

"White Prejudice in America," Daily Bruin, October 28,1968, 10.
39
Gary Nash and Richard Weiss, eds., The Great Fear, Race in the Mind ofAmerica (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1970). The first chapter of the book, written by Gary Nash, is titled, "Red, White
and Black: The Origins of Racism in Colonial America."
40
Hewitt, UCLA interview, 38.
38

minority communities, University Extension was a natural fit to administer these

efforts. By 1970, Extension was running two urban outreach centers in East and South
Central Los Angeles.
The Soviet launch of Sputnik also indirectly paved the way for ethnic studies
centers. Sputnik convinced America that it was losing the space race and spurred
Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act, which authorized funding for
area studies programs at major research universities. At UCLA, the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) funded an African Studies Center, a Latin
American Studies Center, a Russian-East European Studies Center, and a Middle-East
Studies Center. These research driven institutes increased U.S. knowledge of third
world nations that were seen as important Cold War battlegrounds. They also
sponsored language development programs to meet national defense needs. The
African Study Center, for example, held interdisciplinary colloquia, sponsored faculty
research, published the journal African Arts, and even offered an interdisciplinary M. A.
in African Studies. Area studies centers, with their focus on nations and peoples
traditionally ignored by academia, served as an obvious model and precedent for ethnic
studies centers.41
Without the support of top administrators, change at any university is unlikely.
Black students found a particularly supportive administrator at UCLA in Chancellor
Charles E. Young.42 Raised in California, Young earned his Ph.D. in political science
at UCLA. After briefly teaching at UC Davis and working as an administrative analyst
for the UC Office of the President, Young was brought to UCLA as an administrator by
Chancellor Franklin Murphy in I960.43 When Murphy resigned in 1968 to head the
Times Mirror Corporation, Young became, at 36, the youngest Chancellor to head a UC
school.

"Africa Study Center," September 3, 1969, UCLA, Center for Afro-American Studies Center, 512, Box
12, UCLA University Archives (hereafter cited as CAAS, 512.)
42
In California, the head of the entire University of California system is the President. The heads of
individual schools are Chancellors.
43
Charles E. Young, interview by James V. Mink and Dale E. Treleven, UCLA Oral History Program
(University of California, 2002), v. 1, 57.

126
Charles Young brought to the office a commitment to transform UCLA into an
institution that celebrated and encouraged the accomplishments of ethnic minorities and
women. "I, like most, rankled at the allegation that there was institutional racism until I
looked and thought and finally concluded there was. And the same thing was true about
sexism," Young later recalled.44 While Young understood you could not change
individuals, he believed you could change institutions. "I have strenuously advocated
maximum participation on the part of UCLA in a variety of programs designed to
overcome a number of basic inequalities in our social system which have mitigated
against full and equal participation in that system by a number of certain ethnic groups,
especially the Black and Mexican-American," explained Young in a 1968 letter to
Lowell Paige, Chairman of the Academic Senate.45 In his first years as Chancellor,
Young remained firmly committed to eradicating institutional racism and sexism from
UCLA's hallowed grounds.
Young's actions won the respect of supporters and critics alike. Maulana
Karenga later remembered Young as a "politically savvy man."46 Another Charles,
Vice-Chancellor C.Z. Wilson, later wrote that Young "was an incredible administrator
whose knowledge of UCLA's campus was unmatched."47 He demonstrated his political
acumen by making students, faculty, and administrators feel their work and opinions
mattered. For example, when people wrote to congratulate him on his inauguration as
Chancellor, Young responded personally. "It was good of you to write such kind words
about the inauguration, particularly asI trust you realizeyour judgment means a lot
to me," began one such response.48
This ability to make others feel important was noticed by BSU leader Daniel
Johnson who later remembered Young as "a phenomenal person." Young did not talk
down to black students and "earned the support and respect of people because he was a
really unique individual." Giving Young the highest praise, Johnson believed that none
44

Young, UCLA interview, 780.

Charles E. Young to Lowell J. Paige, Chairman of Academic Senate, November 11, 1968, Murphy 401,
Box 125.
46
Karenga, UCLA interview, 136.
47
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, Chapter 7, 4.
48
Charles E. Young to Gordon Davidson, June 3, 1969, Murphy 401, Box 108.
45

of the minority initiatives at UCLA "could have happened without his unflagging
support."49 Virgil Roberts also gave Young much of the credit for changing UCLA. "I
have a lot of respect for Chuck Young," Roberts later remembered. "Without him,
there would not have been any of the changes that took place then or take place now.
The majority of kids at UCLA now are minority kids."50
While Young proved to be a particularly energetic advocate of minority
programs, his belief that universities needed to take action to alleviate racism in
America was quite common among administrators nationwide. At Yale, Provost
Charles H. Taylor openly admitted that Yale practiced racism. "The fact is that our
society, our schools, our education, suffer from white racism. This racism is both
conscious and unconsciousmuch of it unconscious, but nevertheless real, as the
Kerner report emphasizes."51 At the University of Washington, President Charles
Odegaard was profoundly moved by the civil rights movement. In a 1965 letter to the
faculty he described racism as a "social tragedy" and acknowledged that if the UW was
serious about providing equal opportunity to students, staff and faculty, it would have to
make special efforts to assist individuals from minority populations.52
Chancellor Young's boss, UC President Charlie Hitch, was also committed to
using the University's financial and human resources to serve urban communities.
Hitch replaced liberal president Clark Kerr, who oversaw the rapid expansion of higher
education in the 1960s and facilitated the adoption of California's 1960 Master Plan for
Higher Education. By the mid-1960s, Kerr increasingly came under fire for what many
viewed as his lenient response to Berkeley's free speech movement.53 When Ronald
Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, he vowed to clean up the mess at
Berkeley. His election brought increasing pressure on Kerr, who many claimed had lost

Johnson, author interview.

Roberts, UCLA interview, 95.
51
Charles H. Taylor, Jr., "Introduction," in Black Studies in the University: A Symposium, eds. Armstead
L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster and Donald H. Ogilvie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 1-2.
52
"Letter to All Members of the Faculty Senate," May 20, 1968, BSU Papers, 71-69, University of
Washington Archives.
53
"Clark Kerr, 1911-2003," San Francisco Chronicle, December 2, 2003, A-l.
50

the support of the regents. When fired in 1967, many observers believed he had been
fired by Reagan.54
As Kerr's replacement, Charlie Hitch moved quickly to pledge the support of
the University to what he termed an "urban crisis." At a May 1968 Board of Regents
meeting, Hitch urged the UC system to levy their resources to solve urban problems.
Our nation is in a crisis, began Hitch. "It is a moral, economic, and racial crisis. It is
also an educational crisis." To solve this crisis the university must acknowledge that
"the trouble of our time is rooted deeply in the past inequalities and injuries . . . [and]
will be with us until every man is allowed his full measure of human dignity." Hitch
proposed the University utilize all three of its missionspublic service, research, and
educationtoward solving the urban crisis. Concrete programs cited by Hitch included
fair employment, minority student recruitment, and additional funding for the EOP. To
oversee these programs, Hitch created a President's Advisory Committee. In its first
year the Regents approved $500,000 for high priority system-wide needs relating to the
urban crisis.55
At UCLA, minority program advocates invariably cited Hitch's commitment to
urban programs to justify their proposals. For example, a faculty resolution in favor of
the Faculty Development Program (FDP), a program designed to increase minority
faculty representation at UCLA, began: "President Hitch has stated: 'Our nation, our
state, and our cities are in the grip of a crisis.'" Chancellor Charles Young also cited
Hitch's plan to involve the university in an "attack on the nation's urban problems," to
support his own agenda at UCLA. While Hitch's "Urban Crisis" speech did not
guarantee the formation of minority programs at UCLA, it certainly lent an additional
level of support.56

Many observers, however, claim that Kerr was notfiredby Reagan. Charles Young and Regent Dewitt
Higgs both subscribed to that view. Dewitt A. Higgs, interview by Dale E. Treleven, California State
Archives (State Government Oral History Program, 1991), 92.
55
"Massive UC Attack on Urban Problems Urged," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1968, B1; "Minutes for
the President's Council of Chancellors," October 9,1968, Murphy 401, Box 125.
56
"Report of UCLA's Response to the Urban Crisis," Charles E. Young, November 25, 1968, Murphy
401, Box 125; Faculty Resolution III, December 10, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 124. For more on the
Faculty Development Program, see Chapter Four.

Before committing resources to new urban programs, Hitch surveyed current

faculty involvement in urban problems. At UCLA, Chancellor Young sent a memo to
all members of the faculty asking them to outline their activities. The response was
overwhelming. Hundreds of faculty members were involved in a broad spectrum of
community activities. Professor George Savage was a founding member of the Inner
City Repertory Company, a theater group that performed for inner-city high school
audiences and the Inner City Cultural Center, which provided space for plays produced
by minority groups. Milton Roemer served as a consultant on a Watts Riots health
survey and John McNeil worked as a consultant for the Economic Opportunities Board.
Eugene Rosenberg taught Upward Bound classes, David Sanchez served as faculty
advisor for United Mexican American Students (UMAS), and Ralph Turner consulted
for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.57
On one hand this high level of service is a reflection of the 1960s. The civil
rights movement, Vietnam, New Left protests, and urban revolts had convinced many
college professors that society was in need of serious reform. The surge of new
community groups that emerged in this period, many with Great Society funding,
provided professors with the opportunity to get involved. Particularly when it came to
race, professors were quick to acknowledge minorities had been excluded from full
participation in American society and corrective action was needed. On the other hand,
a closer examination reveals many of these manifold urban crisis efforts by UCLA
faculty to be only surface deep. Some of the activities listed by professors did not
directly involve minority communities. Charles Senn, a professor in the School of
Public Health, lauded his experience as a consultant at a regional conference on "The
Health Aspects of Regional Economic and Social Planning at Montpellier, France,
where some aspects and many possible solutions of urban problems were discussed."58
Other efforts involved a minimal level of commitment or were transitory in duration.
Professor C. Martin Duke listed his membership on the Board of Consultants on Dam

Faculty Responses to Young's Memo, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 124.

Charles L. Senn to Charles E. Young, July 3, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 124.

Safety as one of his many activities relating to the urban crisis.

While these

professional activities are certainly commendable, their direct contribution toward

solving urban problems seems tenuous at best. Peter Vaill listed his work with the
Westminster Neighborhood Association where he explored "ways in which the
technical expertise of the Business School faculty could be made available to
businessmen in the Watts area," but this relationship failed after a few meetings.60 A
stillborn effort to share expertise could not have possibly led to even a partial solution
for the urban crisis.
Faculty involvement, black student initiative, Hitch's Urban Crisis speech,
Young's ascension to Chancellor, and the hiring of C.Z. Wilson, all contributed to a
growing commitment by UCLA to minority programs in spring 1968. Momentum
increased that summer when the Steering Committee for Urban and Minority Programs
met and created three task forces charged with writing formalized program proposals.
Young announced this initiative with great fanfare in the Los Angeles Times. "This is
the most significant step forward of its kind in the United States," Young stated. The
three task forces focused on urban affairs, curriculum development, and student entry
programs and were chaired by students Virgil Roberts, Ron Lopez, and Ross Munoz
respectively. "Students, in fact, are primarily responsible for the program's existence,"
openly acknowledged the LA Times article, "although it was initiated by enthusiastic
administrators." The task forces involved over seventy-five students, faculty, and
administrators, a cooperative effort that Young claimed was the finest he had ever seen
in his eight years as an administrator.61 C.Z. Wilson was no less effusive in his praise.
"We brought together the campus' brightest and best student and faculty leaders," he
remembered proudly.

C. Martin Duke to Charles E. Young, July 3, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 124.
Peter Vaill to Charles E. Young, July 15, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 124.
61
"Program at UCLA Promises to Assist Minority Students," Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1968, B1. The
Steering Committee included the Chairman of the Academic Senate, Chairman of the Budget Committee,
and the Educational Policies Committee, the Vice Chancellor of Educational Planning, and student
representativesfromUnited Mexican American Students, the BSU, and the Student Leadership Council.
From "Preliminary Report of Summer Activities," September 30, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 125.
62
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, Chapter 7,48.
60

131
At UCLA, departments, administrators, regents, the Academic Senate, and
student groups all had their own competing agendas. "And to make them go one
direction is like herding cats," commented Virgil Roberts.63 If creating change at the
university was like herding cats, the summer task forces included cowboys of
remarkable talent. With near miraculous alacrity, the Munoz-led committee proposed
and implemented a new minority recruitment program over the summer. The High
Potential Program (HPP), based loosely on Peace Corps training programs, was
designed to give gifted minority students an orientation year with a transitional
curriculum to prepare them for the academic rigors of UCLA. At first, the committee
described the program as serving high-risk students. But instead of focusing on the
negative potential of urban students, the committee eventually shifted the focus to their
positive or high potential. While the name HPP placed proper emphasis on the potential
of urban students, nobody foresaw the program would be quickly be called the Hi-Pot
program, a name that did not please administrators.
That summer, in a manner similar to the University of Washington's Equal
Opportunity Program, the HPP relied on black and Mexican American student leaders
as recruiters. The Teen Opportunity Program's community centers served as ideal
locations to recruit high potential students. Daniel Johnson personally recruited many
of the black HPP students. Johnson believed that the young, black power oriented,
post-Watts leaders needed a college education to lead the community in the long-term.
Operating from "the notion that a gang leader was a high achieving person," Johnson
recruited Black Panther Party leaders John Huggins, Bunchy Carter, Geronimo Pratt,
and Elaine Brown to the HPP. Karenga also referred a number of US members for the
program. "The first recruits that we had were mostly gang leaders out of the
community that were very bright people," administer Elvin Svenson later
remembered.64 Envisioned as a place where "elites could meet the elites of other
cultures," in its first year the HPP included fifty black and fifty Mexican American

Roberts, UCLA interview, 97.

Svenson, UCLA interview, 372.

students.

The program later expanded to include an Asian and Indian component.

High Potential students were admitted under the two percent rule, which had recently
been expanded to include an additional two percent exception to the admission
requirements, with the specific purpose of allowing more minorities to attend UC
schools.67
The Virgil Roberts-chaired task force on urban research explored "the concept
of the Afro-American Center as an action group rather than a learning center."
According to the task force report, universities struggled to utilize their expertise to
tackle real-world problems. "The crisis of contemporary education is one of the
tensions between intellectual outlook and social reality, between values and facts,"
argued the report, sounding a theme similar to calls for more relevant education
prevalent in the 1960s.68 "The knowledge is there, the problem is there, and the job is
to get them together," explained Roberts to an LA Times reporter.69 The task force
proposed a campus-wide Board of Urban Research and Development (BURD) to
administer urban efforts. UCLA chose the City of Compton as a test case for using
university expertise in the community. Gary Nash, who served as the official archivist
for the project, later described the UCLA-Compton Project as "the first attempt of
UCLA after the Watts riot to involve itself as a major university in this area in what had
happened."70 The program eventually hired seven graduate students as full-time interns
from the Departments of Anthropology, Architecture, Business Administration,
Engineering, History, Law, and Public Administration to provide direct technical
assistance to Compton. These interns worked with the city of Compton to redevelop the
business district, form a public housing authority, improve police-community relations,
and plan urban beautification projects.71

Johnson, author interview.

"Report on the High Potential Program at UCLA; 1968-69," Murphy 401, Box 125.
67
"Regents to Allow Admission of More 'Disadvantaged,'" Daily Bruin, March 28, 1968, 2.
68
"The University in Urban Society," Murphy 401, Box 124.
69
"Program at UCLA Promises to Assist Minority Students," Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1968, Bl.
70
Nash, author interview.
71
Donald G. Hagman, "Graduate Student Opportunities with Compton Program, 1969-70," March 27,
1969, Murphy 401, Box 124.
66

The Roberts-chaired task force also proposed an Institute for American Cultures
(IAC) to house four ethnic centersBlack, Asian, Mexican American, and Indian. The
report invoked a sense of crisis to justify the centers. "The distress felt by minority
groups has been articulated in a manner which threatens to destroy the fabric of
American society. It is an effort to encourage the university to make a first step in
ameliorating the affects of a modern age." To avert an impending racial crisis, "the
time has come for America to make a concerted effort to fully understand the crucial
role that American minority groups have and will continue to play in American
society."72 Proposed activities for the Institute for American Cultures included research
support, the publication of an academic journal, and a place to house BURD.
With the summer task forces providing the blueprint, in the fall of 1968, black
students sought to make the vision of a black studies center a reality. Finding a
qualified and competent director topped the agenda. Black students already knew who
they wanted to lead the center. They believed Charles V. Hamilton had the knowledge,
experience, and leadership skills to turn the black studies center into a world-class
facility. Hamilton, an activist and an academic, received his Ph.D. in political science
from the University of Chicago. He catapulted onto the national scene when Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, a book he co-authored with Stokely
Carmichael, appeared in 1967.73 Although criticized by the New York Times for not
providing a sufficient intellectual framework for black power, the book served as a
manifesto for black power advocates. Hamilton and Carmichael posited that "Black
people have a colonial relationship to the larger society, a relationship characterized by
institutional racism."74 BSU leaders, including Daniel Johnson and Virgil Roberts, met
Hamilton when he taught political science classes part-time at UCLA beginning in
1966. In the classroom Hamilton taught from a very traditional political science text,
but outside the classroom he sat down with a handful of black students to discuss what

"Urban Research and Problem Solving Report," Murphy 401, Box 125.
"Professor Writes Book on Black Power Movement," Chicago Defender, October 7, 1967,1.
74
"A Slogan, a Chant, a Threat," The New York Times, December 10,1967,3; Charles V. Hamilton and
Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics ofLiberation in America (New York: Random House,
1967), 6.
73

134
was going on in the country and the world. Hamilton taught the students to understand
racism within the broader context of a colonial relationship. The conversations, in part,
inspired the idea that a black studies center could serve as an institution capable of
overcoming this deeply ingrained racism. In 1968, the BSU invited Hamilton to give
the keynote address at a black power colloquium they had organized. At the
colloquium, future Chancellor Young befriended Hamilton and thought he would serve
as an excellent center director.75 Unfortunately, when approached about the position,
Hamilton declined. Back at square one, black students continued to search for a
director with sufficient leadership skills and intellectual ability to create the center they
envisioned.
Since building bridges between UCLA and the black community was a main
priority of the center, the BSU formed a Community Advisory Board. Composed of a
veritable who's who in black Los Angeles, the committee included Ron Karenga,
Walter Bremond, representing the Black Congress; James Hargett, representing SCLC;
and Herbert Carter, the Director of the LA County Department of Human Relations.76
Dr. J. Alfred Cannon, a professor at the UCLA psychiatric institute and director of
Central City Mental Health Center, also served on the committee. Karenga met Cannon
through the Black Congress, where the two men worked together on a number of
community projects. An important power broker in the black community, Karenga later
described Cannon as "one of the most active men in the community, and a brilliant
administrator, and grant writer and a perspective project developer."77 With their ties to
UCLA, both Karenga and Cannon believed that if they could have their choice of
director to head the center, they could indirectly control the center, thereby increasing
their power in the black community.
To that end, Karenga and Cannon lobbied for another member of the Advisory
Committee, Charles Thomas, to head the center. Thomas, a psychologist who worked
at the Watts Health Center, had a close relationship with Cannon. Black students,

Johnson, author interview.

"Black Students' Union Community Advisory Board," Murphy 401, Box 130.
Karenga, UCLA interview, 195.

135
however, thought Thomas lacked both the intelligence and the leadership skills to lead
the center. Although Thomas had earned a Ph.D. from the Western Reserve University,
Virgil Roberts later remembered Thomas as an intellectual lightweight. For example, at
one meeting Thomas presented a paper titled "Boys no More" that those attending
viewed as a joke.78 The objections of black students notwithstanding, Karenga pushed
Thomas through the committee as a unanimous choice to direct the center. Cannon also
sought to transform the BSU's vision of the center from a more academic center to one
that focused on community political action. One UCLA administrator described
Cannon's vision for the center as an '"action base'a sort of combination gathering
70

place, social group, political action unit," with research playing a secondary role.
To fully comprehend the UCLA shootings, one must understand how Karenga
and other black leaders envisioned the center. "What led to the shooting was the
perception of the center's power that the community had," C.Z. Wilson later argued.
If the center were to control student recruitment, faculty research, student support
services, urban outreach programs, and publish an academic journal, its annual budget
might easily exceed a million dollars. In the late 1960s, black community leaders were
adroit at winning Great Society funding and distributing the spoils to their followers.
Access to these outside resources gave them significant power. US and Black Panther
Party leaders did not want the potential spoils of a black studies center to be controlled
by their rivals. "Both the Panthers and US had their own agendas with regards to the
student movement," Reynaldo Macias later remembered. They viewed UCLA as a very
visible and attractive target because of its reputation "as an anchor institution in the LA
area."81
Virgil Roberts, Daniel Johnson, Curtiz Willis, Tim Ricks, Eddie Maddox, and
other black students on campus had a different agenda than Karenga and Cannon. They
wanted a center where black students could learn to "see their own culture made
legitimate, to understand the specific effects of white racism and the black institution on
78

Roberts, UCLA interview, 68; Johnson, author interview.

Paul O. Proehl to Chancellor Charles E. Young, October 2, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 127.
80
C. Z. Wilson, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, August 8, 2006.
81
Macias, author interview.
79

their values and attitudes." They wanted a center that would use its knowledge to serve
the black community and that would legitimize the contributions of blacks. They
wanted a center that would help transform America into a nation that recognized and
valued black accomplishments.82 Without a strong director, black students worried,
such a center would never get past the ground floor.
As fall quarter 1968 drew to a close, these students began to meet in private to
devise a plan to sabotage the selection of Thomas to head the center. They decided to
call meetings where students would question Thomas' credentials in an attempt to slow
the hiring process and eventually get the administration to start the entire search anew.
The students who opposed Thomas met in secret because they feared open dissension
could result in violent retribution. It was a tense and dangerous time in the black
community. Spurred on by the FBI, US and the BPP were one step short of open
warfare. This conflict spilled over into UCLA's Westwood campus, where large
numbers of US and BPP members had been admitted as part of the HPP program. Even
at UCLA, many brothers wore guns to meetings and there were threats of violence
between competing sects within the BSU. At UCLA and in the black community those
with differing visions of the nature of the Black Nationalist revolution competed to lead
the struggle.
When students returned to campus for winter quarter in 1969, the struggle
between Karenga and the BSU quickly accelerated. At a January 15th meeting called by
the BSU to publicly question the choice of Thomas as director, Karenga tried to reassert
his control over the students. According to Elaine Brown, Karenga lectured the
students for failing to submit to his leadership. "Maulana means great teacher. I am the
teacher. You are the students," lectured Karenga. His followers responded with a
Swahili chant of approval.83 In response, many students, including Elaine Brown and
Bunchy Carter, challenged Karenga for hijacking what was a student initiative.84 Mary
Jane Hewitt, director of minority recruitment programs that year, also lectured Karenga
"Proposal for a Center for the Study of Afro-American History and Culture," Murphy 401, Box 130.
Elaine Brown, A Taste ofPower, 162.
Scot Brown, Fighting for US, 96.

for manipulating the process and told him that the choice of director was a UCLA
student decision, not a Community Advisory Group decision.85
After the meeting, the BSU sent Young a memo reasserting their control over
the search for a director. "The Black Students' Union does not recognize Dr. Charles
Thomas as director of the Black Studies Center," declared the memo. "The Community
Advisory Board is to function upon request by the Black Students' Union in an advisory
capacity only." Since Young chose to honor this memo, Karenga's choice of director
was dead in the water, but the conflict between black students over whom to hire
remained unsettled. The next night black students, including two US members, two
BPP members, and two unaffiliated BSU members, met at Mary Jane Hewitt's house.
Hewitt knew tensions between the students had become dangerous since all the students
were carrying weapons, "but didn't realize anyone had murder on their mind."
Over 150 black students flooded Campbell Hall early Friday afternoon.
Campbell Hall, the old home economics building, had become the locus for minority
student activity earlier that year when the administration decided to house the newly
formed minority programs there, including the HPP and the ethnic studies centers. At
the meeting, students engaged in an intense discussion of what characteristics an
acceptable candidate should possess. "Academic: political science; Ph.D. Emotional
(soul): student interest, community commitment." These words were written on the
blackboard during the meeting.87 Having come to some agreement on what kind of
candidate they wanted, the meeting adjourned. While students chatted in small groups,
US member Harold Jones-Tawala began arguing with John Huggins, possibly over how
Jones-Tawala had treated Elaine Brown moments earlier. When Bunchy Carter tried to
break up the impending fight between Huggins and Jones-Tawala, witnesses saw US
member Claude Hubert-Gaidi draw his gun and shoot Carter and Huggins. "Huggins
was shot first," Johnson later remembered. "Bunchy was hit next as he tried to hide

Hewitt, UCLA interview, 82.

Ibid., 78.
"Tension Surrounded Fatal Day," Daily Bruin, January 20, 1969, 1.

138
behind a chair. The bullet went right through the chair and hit him right in the chest."
Screaming, panicked students quickly fled the room, some jumping out windows. Then
SO

silence and only the bodies of Huggins and Carter remained, lifeless on the floor.
Robert Singleton, who would soon become the first director of the Black Studies
Center, was hired as an acting assistant professor by the UCLA Graduate School of
Management in January 1969. His first day on the job, as he sat in the Educational
Opportunities Office in Campbell Hall, he heard gunfire. He watched as a few students
ran into the office to grab guns out of their briefcases. When the shots died down,
Singleton left the office to discover campus police grabbing any black males they could
find and handcuffing them. "It was bedlam," Singleton later recalled. Acting as an
intermediary, Singleton convinced the campus police to release many of the handcuffed
black students.90 In the community, the LA police reacted by raiding the home of
Huggins, which operated as de facto BPP headquarters. The police took seventeen
Panthers into custody. Eventually three US members, brothers George Ali-Stiner and
Larry Watani-Stiner and Donald Hawkins-Stodi were arrested for the murders.
There are three primary explanations for the shootings. First, that Karenga,
influenced by FBI propaganda, ordered the shootings as part of the ongoing conflict
between the BPP and US and in response to losing his grip over the black studies
center. However, a majority of witnesses and participants in the killings have
discounted this theory. A second theory posits the killings were ordered by the FBI and
carried out either directly or indirectly by FBI agents. A final theory is that the killings
were part of a spontaneous gunfight that erupted in a tense environment where almost
everyone was carrying weapons. Even if the shooting were spontaneous, the targets
seem planned. In a room still crowded with students, the only people to die were the
two main leaders of the BPP of Los Angeles. Unless Karenga and other US members
take responsibility for the killings or FBI files are released holding that agency culpable,

"African-American Studies: Remembering the Journey," Daily Bruin, January 30, 1995, 6.
"2 Black Panther Students Slain in UCLA Hall," Los Angeles Times, Jan 18, 1969, Al; Elaine Brown,
A Taste of Power, 164-67; Scot Brown, Fighting for US, 95-97; Johnson, author interview.
90
Singleton, UCLA interview, 155.
89

the truth will probably never be uncovered.

Still, there is little doubt that the tense

armed conflict between US and the BPP, and the FBI's meddling, are both partially
responsible for the deaths of two young leaders who held great promise for the black
community.
Were it not for Watergate, we might never know the FBI's intense involvement
in black power and black student groups. The United States Senate Church Committee,
named after Senator Frank Church from Idaho, capitalized on the post-Watergate
suspicion of executive power to investigate U.S. intelligence-gathering activities.

In

their fourteen published reports, they released a number of documents that opened a
window into FBI and CIA activities. Under J. Edgar Hoover's direction, beginning in
the 1940s, the FBI engaged in a number of counter-intelligence operations designed to
harass and discredit groups with political views deemed dangerous to the nation. These
counter-intelligence programs or COINTELPRO, were originally directed against the
Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, USA. The scope of COINTELPRO
quickly broadened to include the monitoring of groups such as the NAACP, the
women's movement, and even some groups on the right, including the John Birch
Society. The Church hearings discovered that by 1970 the FBI maintained around
500,000 domestic intelligence files and from 1955-75 the Bureau investigated over
740,000 "subversive" matters. This widespread monitoring of law-abiding citizens was
not limited to the FBI. The CIA, as part of Operation Chaos, between 1967-73
maintained an index file on 300,000 Americans seen as domestic dissidents.93
In M. Wesley Swearingen's expose on his life as an FBI agent he writes that "soon after I had been
assigned to the Los Angeles racial squad, I was told by a fellow agent, Joel Ash, that another agent on the
squad, Nick Gait, had arranged for Gait's informers [George and Larry Stiner] in the United Slaves to
assassinate Alprentice Carter, the Panther's Los Angeles minister of defense, and John Huggins, the
deputy minister of information." M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose (Boston: South
End Press, 1995), 82.
92
The full committee name was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
93
"N.A.A.C.P. Checked 25 Years by F.B.I," The New York Times, April 29, 1976, 1; Ward Churchill and
Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the
American Indian Movement 03oston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 29-41. For more on the FBI's
surveillance of African Americans during World War II, see Robert A. Hill, ed., The FBI's RACON:
Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1995).

Soon after the BPP began publicly clashing with Oakland police, the FBI began
to worry about the growing power of the "extremist BPP of Oakland, California." "The
group has a record of violence and connections with foreign revolutionaries," wrote one
FBI agent. By fall 1968, Hoover declared the BPP the "single greatest threat to the
internal security of the United States," and began scheming of ways to create
"dissension within the ranks of the BPP."94 The bureau decided to use fake memos and
letters to create factionalism within the party and suspicion between the BPP and other
black community groups, including US. "In order to fully capitalize upon BPP and US
differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension within the
ranks of the BPP," Hoover directed, "recipient offices are instructed to submit
imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the
BPP."95 After receiving this directive from Hoover, the Los Angeles office sent
Washington a memo reassuring headquarters that they were "currently preparing an
anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black
Panther Party supposedly from a member of the US organization in which it will be
stated that the youth group of the US organization is aware of the BPP 'contract' to kill
Ron Karenga, leader of US, and they, US members, in retaliation, have made plans to
ambush leaders of the BPP in Los Angeles. It is hoped that this counterintelligence
measure will result in an 'US' and BPP vendetta."96 Similar efforts to destroy the
Panthers were made in Chicago where the FBI promoted warfare between the BPP and
the Blackstone Rangers.97 By the summer of 1969, the BPP had become the primary
focus of the COINTELPRO operations against Black Nationalist groups.
When Carter and Huggins were killed at UCLA, the FBI assigned themselves
much of the credit. Local COINTELPRO head Richard Held believed the deaths were
94

Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents ofRepression, 63.

"Counterintelligence program black nationalist hate groups racial intelligence (Black Panther Party),"
MemofromDirector, FBI, November 25, 1968, "Hearings before the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate," NinetyFourth Congress, First Session, Vol. 6, FBI, Nov 18,19, Dec 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 1975, pg. 406, Exhibit 21,
US Government Printing Office Washington, 1976.
96
Jack Olsen, Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph ofGeronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday,
2000), 223.
97
"F.B.I. Sought Doom of Panther Party," The New York Times, May 8, 1976,1.
95

141
go

the result of the FBI's continuing efforts to create a vendetta between US and the BPP.
After the deaths of Carter and Huggins, the FBI drew a particularly disturbing cartoon
depicting Karenga with his feet on his desk. In his hands he holds a "Things to do
today" list. Topping the list are the names John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, both with
check marks next to their names. Below are the names of Bobby Seale and Walter
Wallace, "items" Karenga has yet to "accomplish."99 This cartoon, along with others,
was released in the black community in an attempt to create further warfare between US
and the BPP. Efforts such as these succeeded in convincing the LA Black Panthers that
Karenga and US were behind the killings. Panther leader Sherman Banks called the
action "a political assassination by US organization."100 The assassins were "pork chop
nationalists whose black masks have slipped down from their pig's snouts," continued
Banks. The FBI's efforts, coupled with the natural antagonism between the two groups,
led to a period of open warfare between US and the Panthers that lasted through the
summer of 1969.
COINTELPRO operations against Black Nationalist groups were not limited to
the BPP. By 1970, Black Student Unions had drawn the attention of the FBI as
dangerous extremist organizations. A document prepared by the FBI listed BSUs as a
major internal security threat alongside other black "extremist" groups including the
Nation of Islam, the BPP, and the Republic of New Africa. The FBI's fears concerning
BSUs are worth quoting at length:
Black student extremist activities at colleges and secondary schools have
increased alarmingly. Although currently there is no dominant
leadership, coordination or specific direction between these individuals,
they are in frequent contact with each other. Consequently, should any
type of organization or cohesiveness develop, it would present a grave
potential for future violent activities at United States schools. Increased
informant coverage would be particularly productive in this area. Black
student extremists have frequently engaged in violence and disruptive
98

Swearingen, FBI Secrets, 84.

Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents ofRepression, 43.
100
"Panther Slaying Suspect Voluntarily Surrenders; Brother Sought By LAPD," Daily Bruin, January
21, 1969, 1.
99

activity on campuses. Major universities which made concessions to

nonnegotiable black student demands have not succeeded in calming
extremist activities. During the school year 1969-70, there were 227
college disturbances having racial overtones.101
In November 1970, Hoover decided it was time to take action against BSUs. "Increased
campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation's stability
and security," Hoover warned bureau regional offices, "and indicate need for increase in
both quality and quantity of intelligence information on Black Student Unions (BSU)
and similar groups which are targets for influence and control by violence-prone Black
Panther Party (BPP) and other extremists." To meet this threat, Hoover wrote, "We
must target informants and sources to develop information regarding these groups on a
continuing basis and to develop such coverage where none exists." Each office was to
submit a list of BSUs and similar groups from all area four-year and two-year
1 (Y)

colleges.

Hoover gave similar orders to monitor the activities of Mexican American

students.103 What is perhaps most alarming about the FBI's crusade against Black
Nationalist groups is that the FBI's efforts were not undertaken because of suspected
illegal activity. They were undertaken precisely because of the BSUs' political beliefs
and the threat that those beliefs posed.
Larry Gossett, a leader of the UW BSU, later obtained his FBI file through the
Freedom of Information Act. He discovered from his file that his actions were
constantly monitored between 1968-74 by the FBI and local police.104 In researching
minority student groups at the University of California, San Diego, historian George
"Black Student Extremist Influence," Hearing Exhibits: Special Report Interagency Committee on
Intelligence (Ad Hoc) Chairman J Edgar Hoover, June, 1970, 11. "Hearings before the Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate,"
Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, Vol. 2, Huston Plan, September 28,24, 25, 1975, pg. 156, US
Government Printing Office Washington, 1976.
102
"Black Student Groups on College Campuses Racial Matters," Memo from Director, FBI, November
4,1970. "Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate," Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, Vol. 2,
Huston Plan, September 28,24,25, 1975, pg. 323, Exhibit 42, US Government Printing Office
Washington, 1976.
103
Carlos Mufloz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989), 173.
104
Larry Gossett, interview by Trevor Griffey and Brooke Clark, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor
History Project, March 16 and June 3, 2005, www.civilrights.washington.edu.

Mariscal uncovered evidence of an FBI operation designed to sow dissent and

animosity between third world student groups. In the archives, he discovered an
anonymous placard, supposedly authored by African American nationalist students.
"The mexicans, orientals and whites have banned together in an effort to get rid of all
righteous Brothers on campus," accused the flyer. "In retrospect," notes Mariscal, "the
document displays all the characteristics associated with FBI provocation designed to
destroy radical organizations and multiethnic alliances." At UCSD, these efforts helped
to end the multiethnic coalition that fought for a third college that focused primarily on
ethnic studies.105
Without extensive documentation of specific FBI operations, it is unclear how
much these activities affected BSUs. At UCLA, outside pressure helped promote unity
between black students. The deaths of Carter and Huggins, the BSU wrote, "should
serve to internalize the weight and significance of the struggle to which we are all
committed."106 A year later, in the face of continued attacks on the BPP and after
Angela Davis was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for her role in
the Soledad Brothers case, Nommo, the black student newspaper, urged black students
to stand strong in the face of persecution. "During this year [1970] we have viewed
many occurrences which have caused alarm in the Black community. We witnessed the
murder of Fred Hampton, the systematic persecution of the Black Panther Party, and
more recently the political ramifications surrounding the Angela Davis case," began the
editorial. "Now, in an era when an attempt is being made to discredit as 'militants' and
'separatists,' we must never retreat from the position that we are a great people."
While the FBI's campaign against the BPP was an unequivocal success, it seems their
campaign against BSUs bore significantly less fruit. At UW, the BSU prospered under
Larry Gossett's and other black students' leadership, in spite of FBI scrutiny and, at

George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 240-41. For more information on the interethnic
coalition at UCSD, see Chapter Two.
toe B S U I s s u e s s t a t e m e n t t 0 B l a c k student Body," Daily Bruin, January 31, 1969,2.
107
"1970-1971," Nommo, December 7, 1970,4.

UCLA, outside attacks served to create organizational unity. Perhaps the FBI lacked
either the resources or the will to wage an all-out war on black university students.
The Campbell Hall shootings had the potential to derail black studies and other
minority programs at UCLA. Instead, UCLA emerged remarkably unscathed. In a
successful attempt at damage control, Chancellor Young assured the public in a Los
Angeles Times article that the shootings were not "an extension of internal fighting
within the black students on campus," and that it was "purely accidental" that they
happened at UCLA.108 Thomas Robischon, the HPP's faculty advisor, distanced the
program from the shootings. "From what I hear, it sounds like the killing was related to
off-campus matters. I don't think it is any reflection on the nature of our programs."109
In other words, UCLA was able to successfully paint the shootings as involving rival
black gangs that just happened to take place at UCLA.110
The day after the shootings, Young made it immediately clear they would not
affect the university's commitment to minority programs. In an official statement
issued to the Daily Bruin, Young commented that "We are committed to going forward
with what we know is right and necessary and hope that we will be joined by those of
all races and political leanings in this effort."111 Young also took the opportunity to
announce the official formation of the American Cultures Project. While the timing of
the announcement was clearly to reassure black students of the administration's
commitment to minority programs, publicly the administration claimed "that the
announcement was in no way a response to the fatal shooting," or "the result of any
threats or pressure against the administration."112
That spring, Young worked hard to get approval for the ethnic studies centers
from the Academic Senate and the UC system. After lobbying by Young and
reworking the proposals, on May 27, UC President Hitch formally approved the
establishment of the Institute of American Cultures with two initial centers, the Center
108

All-Points Bulletin Issued," Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1969, A3.
"Campus Reacts to Murders, Blacks Silent, Whites Uneasy," Daily Bruin, January 21, 1969, 1.
110
Svenson, UCLA interview, 393.
111
"Chancellor Charles E. Young Statement," Daily Bruin, January 20,1969,1.
ii2 " U C L A Created Culture Project to Research Minority Problems," Los Angeles Times, January 24,
1969, CI.
109

145
for the Study of Afro-American History and Culture and the Mexican-American Studies
Center.113
The approval of what came to be called the Center for African American Studies
(CAAS) was just the beginning of the story. The rest of this chapter will explore how
the Center was institutionalized. Ultimately, college administrators, staff, and faculty
rejected the more radical claims of black students, in particular the idea that knowledge
and knowledge production were racialized to such an extent that only African
Americans could teach black studies. Universities institutionalized black studies within
ethnic studies centers, which allowed the center to be sold as an inclusive institution
that celebrated the nation's diverse tapestry of cultures. What began as a project
intended to celebrate and explore black culture, history, and identity, eventually
facilitated the rise of a narrative of multicultural inclusion.
Written in the spring of 1968, the BSU's black studies proposal was part of a
broader national debate on the proper role of black studies in the academy. At the same
time UCLA students were crafting their proposal, Yale students were organizing a
major symposium on black studies to convince the school of the relevance and need for
a black studies program. The Yale symposium provides an important window into the
promises and limitations of black studies. A short month after the death of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., a mostly white audience of two hundred administrators, scholars, and
students witnessed Harold Cruse, Maulana Karenga, Nathan Hare, Martin Kilson,
Gerald McWorter, and Boniface Obichere debate the purpose and goals of black
studies. The symposium's broad range of speakers facilitated a conversation that was
fairly representative of the thousands of similar debates occurring on local campuses
across the nation. Published a year later in book form, the details of the symposium
became familiar to those interested in black studies. Many debate participants were, or
later became, important players in the early formation of black studies. Hare had
already been hired by San Francisco State to coordinate its black studies program. Soon
after the symposium Yale developed a strong and respected program, Martin Kilson

John W. Oswald to Chancellor Young, May 27, 1969, Murhpy 401, Box 127.

became the chair of Harvard's Black Studies Program, and Boniface Obichere served
briefly as director of UCLA's Center for Afro-American Studies.114
A close reading of these debates reveals the hopes and expectations black
activists placed on black studies. The university, with its unique power as a
normalizing institution, provided an opportunity to dramatically remake black identity
and citizenship. Some advocates believed black studies might even save America from
its wages of racism and hate. University faculty and administrators accepted a large
part of this vision, but there were aspects of black studies programs that challenged the
very nature of the university. The belief that knowledge and knowledge production was
racialized undermined universities' claim that they were teaching privileged knowledge.
Before black studies programs could be adopted, administrators had to first place
radical claims about racialized knowledge in a more traditional liberal framework.
Participants in the conference understood the unique power possessed by
universities, particularly as key normative institutions. Our educational institutions are
"part of society's structure which is responsible for the development and transmission
of knowledge on which understanding depends," noted Yale Provost Charles E. Taylor,
Jr.

Society recognized the value of a college degree and the validity of the

knowledge it produced. By the late 1960s, universities had become increasingly

important cornerstone institutions in America. The GI Bill allowed millions of
Americans to become the first person in their family to attend college. During the
1950s, as part of the academic-military-industrial complex, the federal government
funneled billions of dollars to universities for weapons research. Cold War fears that
the Soviet Union was winning the science race led to the passage of the National
Defense Education Act, which provided millions of dollars in college loans.
Black studies advocates were also keenly aware of the university's power to
create and reproduce national narratives, teach citizenship, and produce societal
114

Robinson, Foster and Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University; Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard:
Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 22-23;
Noliwe M. Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and
the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 76.
115
Charles H. Taylor, Jr., "Introduction," in Black Studies in the University, 3.

147
daguerreotypes. The United States is a melting pot; Abraham Lincoln was the Great
Emancipator; the nation is a democracy where all citizens have the right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness; all these narratives are, in part, produced by universities.
At the symposium, Karenga noted how universities were also in the business of creating
better citizens. "One learns to be a 'better American,' I assume, by going to an
American university," commented Karenga. "Where else could one learn to be a better
American than in a university?"116 Black sociology professor Gerald McWorter added
his own sophisticated analysis of how the university acted as an agent of socialization.
"The whole question becomes what does it mean to be a man or a women? It seems to
m e , . . . inevitably it comes out that what it means to be a man is basically what it means
to be white and successful."117 Nathan Hare also described the university's power from
a cynical perspective. "So education came to consist of time-consuming procedures and
useless endeavors, such as footnoting, with a certain form you couldn't deviate from; in
order to document your history or what not, you had to put a little number up there and
a little number down here and this seemed somehow to give it more prestige and
profundity than it otherwise would merit."118 These rigorous standards, Hare noted,
ensured people trusted the value of a university education.
Unfortunately, instead of using their power to advance the cause of black
liberation, universities taught the superiority of Western civilization and that blacks had
contributed little of importance to America. "Black people have, until very recently, in
effect gone through a process in the university where they have faced ahistorical
images; that is to say, black people had no meaningful history but simply a reflection of
white people who've had them under their control," argued McWorter.119 UCLA
students echoed these beliefs in their proposal for a black studies center. "Despite the
obvious importance of Afro-Americans, however, neither the public at large nor
116

Maulana Ron Karenga, "The Black Community and the University: A Community Organizer's
Perspective," in Black Studies in the University, 37.
117
Gerald A. McWorter, "Deck the Ivy Racist Halls: The Case of Black Studies," in Black Studies in the
University, 63-64.
118
Nathan Hare, "A Radical Perspective on Social Science Curricula," in Black Studies in the University,
105.
119
McWorter, "Deck the Ivy Racist Halls," 58.

148
scholars know very much about the precise role of Afro-Americans in American life,
past and present.... Through neglect, a vitally important segment of the nation has
been denied a legitimate history and culture."120
UCLA history professor Boniface Obichere agreed scholars had represented the
history of Africa in a similarly ahistorical manner. Until the 1960s, most scholars of
Africa viewed that continent as a primitive land populated by simple people who had
made limited contributions to world history. African history, for most white scholars,
began with European colonialism. These academic views had real-world consequences.
As African independence movements gained momentum after World War II, many
Western observers believed that Africa was not yet civilized enough to rule itself. The
Bandung Conference of 1955, which brought together over two-dozen Asian and
African states, challenged these Eurocentric views. Conference participants declared
the agency of Third World peoples in opposition to continued Western colonial
practices. This conference, according to Obichere, influenced black intellectuals and
activists in the United States in their own calls for black history.121
Conference participants agreed that the university was a powerful institution that
had bolstered racism and Jim Crow by ignoring and trivializing the accomplishments of
blacks. However, if that situation could be reversed, if the power of the university
could be levied in support of the struggle for black liberation, black studies might result
in legitimizing black culture and black citizenship.
Before the 1960s, argued black studies advocates, the few blacks that had access
to higher education used their education to raise their own standard of living by
emulating whites. When asked if there was any way to prevent black students who
attended white institutions from becoming white, Karenga replied that it depended on
the nature of the black history being taught. "For example, if someone argued that we
should put Negro history into every high school and university in this country, I would
say that to teach 'Negro' historywith that wordis really to do us a disservice.
"Proposal for a Center for the Study of Afro-American History and Culture," Murphy 401, Box 130.
Boniface Obichere, "African History and Western Civilization," in Black Studies in the University, 8395.
121

Operating under an old historiography, we are really only concentrating black

inferiority and giving us complexes," continued Karenga. "We would propose that a
new historiography be developed, and that it would be developed along three lines:
change of frame of reference, change of definition, and change of interpretation."

In

other words, only a curriculum that celebrated the accomplishments of black culture and
history would have a liberating effect on black students. Nathan Hare made a similar
argument about the power of black history. "The black student studying his history can
get a sense of pastness as a springboard to a sense of collective destiny with his people,
and, having this new self-image, may want to convey it to others, and accordingly
achieve a higher level of performance."123 By studying the vital accomplishments of
black peoples, a black student would leave the university inspired to serve the black
community.
Not only would black studies courses empower black students, they would also
help black culture gain acceptance by mainstream white society. Harold Cruse, when
asked if black studies courses ought to be taught with an eye to cultural nationalism,
replied in the affirmative. "If you examine this society as a whole, you will notice that
all American groupings and sub-groupings have resorted in the past to the cultivation of
their cultural nationalism in their attempt to adjust and gain recognition in American
society," argued Cruse. "You have to have this as a motivation, or else the whole idea
of the institution of a black studies program becomes very meaningless."124 This
argument was a complete repudiation of older theories of uplift and assimilation.
According to Cruse, even if universities added a few classes on the black experience, if
their impetus and purpose was not to legitimize blackness, these courses would not
matter. The full acceptance of blacks in American society could only be accomplished
through the affirmation of the inherent worth of black culture, and universities provided
a unique location where this could be accomplished. The Upward Bound director at
UCLA, Henry Anderson, writing in the black student newspaper, also commented on
122

Karenga, "The Black Community," 42-43.

Hare, "A Radical Perspective," 113.
124
Cruse, "The Integrationist Ethic as a Basis for Scholarly Endeavors," in Black Studies in the
University, 26-27.
123

150
the power of black studies to legitimize blackness. "The so-called 'black bourgeoisie,'
heretofore engaged in a flight into madness," argued Anderson, "are in a redemption
brought on by the creation of Black Studies Centers."125
If black studies centers could create a body of knowledge that countered what
blacks viewed as the traditional racist canon, they would be a powerful prescription for
an ailing nation. But black activists saw even greater potential in the centerthe power
to allow whites to overcome their racism. "And as Eldridge Cleaver articulated,
dependable knowledge of black people, which is the basis of the newfound black
identity," wrote Anderson, "will afford white people an opportunity to really get
acquainted with black people for the first time in the history of the nation."

Even

Yale Provost Taylor acknowledged that black studies might possess the power to
transform white students. The white majority needed knowledge of black culture "to
overcome unconscious discrimination, that simple lack of awareness, the ignorance
from which we all suffer in white America."127 Or, as Karenga wryly noted, the United
States spent 450 years trying to civilize and uplift African Americans, when perhaps all
along it was the whites in need of civilizing.128
The domestic upheavals of the 1960s left many Americans believing the nation
faced an unprecedented crisis. Those at the symposium envisioned that black studies
programs would offer America new paradigms that might allow the nation to overcome
its problems. "It has been assumed in history," argued Cruse, "that all that was required
to make America attain its ideals was the confirmation and the extension of an AngloAmerican political and economic creed. Today we see that this creed, unfortunately,
has reached the point where it is seemingly unable to deal with the crises that beset the
1 TQ

nation."1^ What was needed to solve the crisis was to embrace what Cruse called
"democratic ethnic pluralism." Black studies programs, with their exploration of a

"Ethnic Studies Center: 'A Psychological Reality,'" Nommo, April 23, 1969, 3.
Ibid.
Taylor, "Introduction," 2.
Karenga, "The Black Community," 40.
Cruse, "The Integrationist Ethic," 9.

151
different set of values, would offer the nation a set of tools or values with which to face
its crisis. White values had failed the nation. Black values just might save it.
Beyond what black studies programs had to offer the university, they directly
attacked the university on two fronts. First, black studies advocates argued that the
knowledge gained at the university must have a practical application to have merit and
that, in some cases, knowledge gained outside the university had more value than book
learning. The day before the symposium, Cruse had met with Harlem community
activists involved, among many efforts, in the Poor People's campaign. These activists
told Cruse that black student protestors "cannot begin to have any impact or meaning at
all until they connect their campus work with community work."130 Knowledge had
little value if it could not be practically applied to the problems facing the black
community, they argued. Symposium participants also argued that knowledge must not
necessarily be constructed within academia. "We want an opportunity to learn about
things that are relevant to our existence and we want to learn in the best possible ways,
experiencing the expertise of all those who have something to offer," opined Yale black
student leader Donald Ogilvie. "This means exposure in the classroom to men of
controversial qualificationon the one hand, eminently qualified to instruct because of
what they know; yet, on the other hand, grossly underqualified because of how they
came to know it." Far too many professors with traditional qualifications had acted as
"purveyors of the traditional white racist perspective." Professors in black studies
programs would be judged by their knowledge of those issues affecting the black
community, concluded Ogilvie.131 If universities were to wholly embrace this concept,
they would be repudiating the inherent validity of a college degree. They would be
undermining their own institution.
Black studies also challenged the notion that knowledge is universal. David
Brion Davis, a slavery scholar and professor at Cornell, noted that black students were
"understandably suspicious of trite claims to universality which have demonstrably
been used to justify slavery, enforced segregation, exploitation and effacement of non130
131

Ibid., 22.
Donald H. Ogilvie, "A Student's Reflections," in Black Studies in the University, 81-82.

white non-western identities."

Black students argued that knowledge and knowledge

production was racializedthat white subjects created knowledge that privileged white
Western values. They believed that only an African American could truly understand
and interpret the black experience. In their black studies proposal, the BSU education
committee at UCLA made a careful distinction between Jewish scholars and African
American scholars. As Jews had successfully assimilated, their scholarship in America
had progressed from Jewish writing to Jewish-American writing, to writing by authors
"who happen to be Jews." In contrast, African American writers "take their blackness
not only as a starting point for literature, thought and a marshalling ground for a
position in the parade of national images and forms, but also as an absolute theme and
necessity." White scholars could not produce black research, because black scholars
embedded race in every paragraph and every page, in every thought and every action.
"They make up philosophies and fantasies out of their color, use it as strategy and
outcry, as weapon and seat of judgment, as a source of possible rebirth, as data for a
future existence and as agency of revolutionary change," wrote UCLA black
students.133 A white professor could never truly understand the struggle for black
liberation.
In implementing black studies programs, universities could not allow these
attacks on knowledge and knowledge production that called the very legitimacy of the
university into question, to go unchallenged. But rather than reject these claims
outright, faculty and administrators sought middle ground between the idea of
knowledge as universal and the idea of knowledge as racially specific. At the Yale
symposium, moderate black and white scholars forged a compromise position that
adopted some of these criticisms, without conceding that the entire mission of the
university might indeed be fraudulent.
During a question and answer period, one conservative audience member tried
to dismiss out-of-hand the attack on universal knowledge. "For those of us who have
devoted our lives to scholarship,... from our point of view, the truth is one whether we
132
133

David Brion Davis, "Reflections," in Black Studies in the University, 222.

"Proposal for a Center for the Study of Afro-American History and Culture," Murphy 401, Box 130.

153
discuss the phenomenon of black nationalism or the phenomenon of Aryan nationalism.
We don't recognize a 'black truth' or a 'white truth' any more than we recognize
'Aryan physics' or 'Bolshevik biology.'"134 For this scholar, the idea that knowledge
was in any way racialized was utter nonsense. Most conference participants took a
different approach in defending the validity of university-taught knowledge. Martin
Kilson, the first African American to earn full tenure at Harvard, proposed that while
blacks may have special insight into oppression, at its core, "black experience is truly
1 3^

nothing more than a variant of human experience."

In studying slavery, Kilson

learned that the Africans who participated in the Atlantic slave trade saw it "as an
economic relationship from which enormous wealth, profit, and political and military
advantage could be derived. When such gain is available, men, I submit, will seek it."
In other words, once you stripped away cultural differences, people were just people
who operated from similar motivations. Kilson's compromise allowed for cultural
differences while preserving the universality of the subject.
Another audience member at the conference argued that black studies was not an
attack on knowledge itself, but rather a call for a wider, more inclusive curriculum that
fit perfectly within the tradition of liberal arts education. "This university has produced
extraordinary alumni, some men of great distinction, who have gone out to do a great
deal of evil in the worldmen like John Calhoun," began the questioner. "We have
had extraordinary men on the Yale faculty who have uttered the most appalling
nonsense in the particular areas that we are now consideringI think of William
Graham Sumner," he continued. Then he posed a question to Kilson and Cruse. "Now,
I wonder if both of you gentlemen wouldn't agree that men like that might have done
more good in the world if their intellectual diets had been a great deal broader?"
Kilson, a bit taken aback, replied, "Now, on this question of whether or not a more
varied intellectual diet for William Graham Sumner and John Calhoun would have
produced different men, I don't really know. We presume this as part of the
134

Robinson, Foster and Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University, 17.
Martin Kilson, Jr., "The Intellectual Validity of Studying the Black Experience," in Black Studies in
the University, 15.
136
Robinson, Foster and Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University, 27-28.
135

154
intellectual, liberal, educational tradition of which we are a part, but I really don't
know." Black studies programs, at least in part, fit squarely within a liberal arts
framework; that is, by exploring a diverse curriculum, students could escape the bonds
of parochialism, prejudice, and dogmatism. Kilson, while not entirely convinced a
liberal arts education had the power to help eradicate racism, held out hope that it
might. Black studies thus had a place within the academy, not because it challenged the
university, but because it fit within the university's mission to educate.
David Brion Davis, reflecting on the range of discussion at the symposium,
emphasized that the higher purpose of a university must be guarded against the most
radical black demands. "Yet the white scholar remains convinced that truth and
objectivity are not white and are something more than a cultural preference," began
Davis. "Indeed, the ability of self-transcendence and detachment, which is nourished
by the university, is precisely what enables us to listen sympathetically to the blacks at
this conference. If the university were as racist and as cultural biased as has been said,
we would be teaching Carleton Putnam's theories of Negro inferiority. Even the most
militant blacks sometimes acknowledge the humanizing function of the university, that
is, its universality," concluded Davis, "otherwise, they would not be here addressing
university scholars and administrators, nor would they choose the university as the most
promising instrument for social change."137 In other words, the university should
embrace black studies, so long as it fit within the framework of free intellectual inquiry.
The Yale symposium was part of a larger discourse where scholars tried to come
to grips with charges of racism leveled at their disciplines and what role black studies
should play at the university. In Black Studies and the Role of the Historian, John
Blassingame, who would later become director of Yale's African American Studies
Program, called upon historians to study the past dispassionately. He began by
acknowledging that "blacks have charged, and rightfully so, that American historians
have either willfully distorted or ignored the role the Negro has played in American

Davis, "Reflections," 219.

155
history."

138

However, he warned against blacks creating their own myths that would be

just as distorted as white racist historical works. He also railed against the argument
that only blacks could write black history. All historians bring their biases and histories
to a project, argued Blassingame, yet historians must do their best to search for truth.
The black liberation cause would best be served if black problems were described
"accurately, realistically and factually."139 Still, black historians had their own special
skills. They were unlikely to be encumbered by the myths of American society and
were more likely to seek to, "obtain a hearing for the have-nots."140
In his book Blassingame was trying to mediate between racism in the academy
and his belief in the discipline of history. Like those at the Yale symposium, he was not
willing to concede that knowledge production was entirely racialized. He believed
historians could write reasonable, more-or-less accurate narratives about the past. At
the same time, he acknowledged that racism had affected how the past was studied and
interpreted and conceded that black historians could bring a unique perspective to the
profession. Blassingame carved out a middle ground that celebrates differing
viewpoints and perspectives, while holding onto the belief that the past could be
reasonably interpreted.
Black students wanted a black studies curriculum that celebrated blackness, not
one that celebrated diverse viewpoints. But an interesting thing happened between the
demands and their implementationblack studies programs were invariably
institutionalized as part of a larger constellation of ethnic studies centers. As mentioned
above, at UCLA, the black studies center became part of the Institute of American
Cultures (IAC). At UT Austin, black studies combined with Mexican American studies
as part of an initially united ethnic studies program. At the University of Washington,
ethnic studies embraced three branches.
Student pressure from the specific ethnic groups had the largest impact on the
creation of multiple ethnic studies centers. But at UCLA, the administration decided
138

John Blassingame, ed., New Perspectives on Black Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1971), 208.
139
Ibid., 222.
140
Ibid., 224.

156
early on to include as many ethnic groups as possible in the Institute of American
Cultures. This was done partly to avoid future student protest and partly out of a
commitment to ethnic studies. But the IAC was also created to avoid charges that black
studies centers were yet another example of reverse discrimination. Ethnic studies
programs were a final compromise on the part of universities. If administrators were to
only institutionalize a black studies curriculum, critics could argue they were creating a
separatist, racist curriculum. Instead, administrators reasoned, if black history was
worth studying, then certainly so were the contributions of other ethnic peoples. Ethnic
studies centers, therefore, were a move away from a black-white paradigm, where black
contributions might be seen as equal to white contributions. They were a way for
administrators to assuage the fears of a white public who worried that the demands
made by radical black nationalists would lead to a separate racist program within the
university. When institutionalized alongside other ethnic studies programs, black
studies became one voice among many. They became not a separatist program, but an
inclusive one that embraced multiculturalism.
When UCLA began offering classes on race through University Extension, those
running Extension viewed race through a black-white lens. "My effort was primarily, if
not almost exclusively, black-white, because that's the way I thought in those days,"
Mary Jane Hewitt, who organized many of Extension's class offerings, later
remembered. "The multi-cultural thinking comes later," she continued. "My concern
was to involve more black people and to educate more white people about black culture,
so that's where my energy went."141
Black students were also the primary force behind the ethnic studies centers. As
related above, the BSU first proposed a black studies center in spring 1968. It was not
until the task forces of that summer that Mexican American students became truly
involved in the process. This lack of early involvement was, in part, because in 196768 most Mexican American students attending UCLA were too involved in the East Los
Angeles blowouts, a series of walkouts to protest the educational disparities between

Hewitt, UCLA interview, 49.

East and West Los Angeles schools.

A lack of campus activism by minority students

did not necessarily mean these students were not involved in social movements.
It was the summer task forces that first came up with the idea of an Institute of
American Cultures. According to administrator Paul Proehl, black students were
initially hesitant to accept the concept. But after Proehl "talked with a number of them
about the desirability of their 'playing it big' with respect to other minority groups,
since they were obviously exercising a leadership role in this area," they warmed to
idea.143 Virgil Roberts believed that realpolitik underlay the decision to support the
Institute. "And then I thought that the reason we could have an American cultures
institute that would include all the ethnic studies was to make it more salable
politically," he later remembered. Daniel Johnson also supported what Roberts termed
"coalition politics." "What's wrong with you having your Asian Americans doing the
exact same thing? Because that only strengthens our claim and reinforces the notion of
what's absent in American history," Johnson recalled.144
By the fall of 1968, UCLA had embraced a multicultural approach to minority
programs. Mary Jane Hewitt later remembered that when the HPP began that fall, the
black-white dichotomy had switched to a Latino-black-white dynamic. "I was going
out into the blackand now here's where we get into the multiculturalLatino
communities primarily." Soon Asians and American Indians were added to the
equation. "So what had been designed by primarily black students for a black thrust,
the pie got divided in two when the Mexican Americanprimarily MEChA
[Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan]was brought in," continued Hewitt.
"Then divided into three, when the Asian groupwhich had many different groups
within itAnd then four when the Native American groups were brought in. So it was
like an organism that just kept growing."145 Another administrator remembered how
politics compelled UCLA to create four centers. "We did four of them," remembered

Muftoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power, xi.

Paul O. Proehl to Chancellor Charles E. Young, October 2, 1968, Murphy 401, Box 127.
Johnson, author interview.
Hewitt, UCLA interview, 60.

158
David Saxon, who later became UC President. "I'm not sure that each one had the
same potential for success. We did four because there was no way not to do four."
Beyond the political necessity of creating four centers, it allowed the university
to sell a potentially divisive black studies center to university stakeholdersfaculty,
students, regents, and the general publicunder the rubric of diversity in a multiethnic
society. In debating minority programs, many faculty spoke as if America was and had
always been a colorblind society. They spoke as if race did not exist. For example, law
professor Wesley J. Liebeler, who worked for the Warren Commission before coming
to UCLA, voiced his opposition to minority programs on the floor of the Academic
Senate. "Favoring or penalizing men according to their racial origin," he said, "opens a
Pandora's box with potentialities for truly radical evil."147 In this comment, Liebeler
was most likely referencing the Holocaust. If Liebeler had argued racial preferences
could, and had in the past, unleashed radical evil, his comment would have made
perfect sense. Instead, Liebeler seemed unaware that the United States had been
favoring and penalizing men and women based on race for over 300 years. The
university met this unwillingness to confront the United States as a race-based caste
society by emphasizing that black studies was not about racial separatism or
preferences, but a celebration of the rich tapestry of American cultures. "We hope that
the project will be representative of America's pluralistic society which is developed
neither by separatism nor by assimilation, but by something that partakes of both at the
same time recognizing the uniqueness of each individual group but admitting the
ultimate goal of a truly integrated society," stated Vice-Chancellor Paul Proehl when
announcing the Institute for American Cultures.148 Ethnic studies served as a way to
transcend the separatist versus assimilationist paradigm prevalent in the late 1960s.
The Institute for American Cultures was also a response to very real fears that an
exclusive black studies program would violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In January
1969, President Hitch sent a letter to all UC Chancellors warning them against
146

Saxon, UCLA interview, 307.

Academic Senate Meeting Minutes, November 25, 1968, Academic Senate, Los Angeles Division,
Agendas, Minutes and Reports, Series 90, UCLA University Archives.
148
"American Cultures Project Announced," Daily Bruin, January 20,1969, 1.
147

approving racially exclusive programs. "With regard to ethnic studies curricula, this
law and our policy have a very clear implication: no program is or can be specifically
reserved for members (faculty or students) of a particular ethnic group or groups."
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's (HEW) Office of Civil Rights also
cautioned universities of the dangers inherent in "initiating special programs for Negro
and other minority group students." Separate housing, separate social activity space,
and separate schools or institutes must be available to all students, continued the memo.
In regards to black studies programs, "every service and benefit offered by the
institution to students must be open and available to all students without regard to race,
color or national origin."150 While creating multiple ethnic centers did not eliminate
these fears, it allowed UCLA to protect the centers from potential legal challenges.
At the University of Texas, after black students demanded black studies, a
professor wrote President Norman Hackerman, suggesting that that label "ethnic
studies" might be easier to sell than "black studies." "It is my understanding that at
Berkeley last year the black students asked for a Black Studies Department and this year
changed their mindsand asked for an Ethnic Studies Center," typed Clifton Grubbs.
He then added, in his own handwriting, "Avoids resegregation stigma. Ethnic Center is
the advanced trend. You might want to put it to the black men that way."151 The trend
of calling black studies ethnic studies allowed UT to avoid the charge that it was
segregating its students and made the idea more palatable to university stakeholders. "I
think the notion of ethnic studies was a misnomer," later recalled Geneva Gay, who
directed UT's center from 1972-74. Since the Mexican American and African
American programs operated in complete autonomy, "to call the program ethnic studies
must have been some sort of political compromise."152 By adopting the term ethnic
studies, UT positioned the programs as embracing diversity.

14S

Charlie Hitch to UC Chancellors, January 27, 1969, Murphy 401, Box 127.
Ruby G. Martin, Director, Office of Civil Rights, "Memorandum to Presidents of Institutions of
Higher Education Participating in Federal Assistance Programs," March, 1969, UT President's Office,
80-50, Box 69, Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
151
Clifton Grubbs to Norman Hackerman, UT President's Office, 80-50, Box 33.
152
Geneva Gay, author interview, Seattle, WA, December 20, 2006.
150

Ethnic studies programs flowed naturally out of black student arguments for
black studies programs. Once administrators accepted the idea that university curricula
presented a primarily white male viewpoint to the exclusion of blacks, they inevitably
asked who else was excluded? If history, sociology, and anthropology failed to
recognize the agency and contributions of blacks, certainly they also ignored the
contributions of Asians, women, and Latinos. At UCLA, administrators wanted an
institute that would embrace "all American Subcultures." Paul Proehl described the
decision to create four centers as follows: "While the students participating in these
deliberations at that time were principally black and brown, we took account of the fact
that the greater Los Angeles area is home of several additional minority groups who, for
one reason or another have not participated fully in American life and particularly as it
is reflected in American higher education."
Regional differences influenced which ethnic groups universities decided to
include in ethnic studies and minority recruitment programs. In its first year, the
Special Education Program (SEP) at the University of Washington initially recruited
African American, Mexican American, and Native American students, with a primary
focus on black recruitment. As the program grew, administrators debated which groups
to incorporate in the SEP. At the UW, administrators eventually decided to include all
groups that "have in the past been under-represented in our student body as compared
with numbers in the general population served by the University." This meant a focus
on African American, Mexican American, Native American, and Filipino American
students. Students who were not underrepresented at the UW, that is, "students of
European, Chinese or Japanese or any other ancestry qualify if they come from a
background of poverty."15 Administrators were making clear distinctions between
different Asian groups based on their access to the university. Which ethnic groups
were included in these programs was not etched in stone and frequently mirrored the
ethnic make-up of the community served by the university.

133

Paul Proehl to Fred Dutton, January 30, 1969, Murphy 401, Box 127.
Charles A. Evans, November 3, 1969, WU President, 18-15, Box 10, University of Washington
Archives.
154

161
A comprehensive history of black studies programshow they were
institutionalized, how they defined a new academic field, their successes and failures
is beyond the scope of this project. For those interested in such questions, there is a
growing field of literature on the history of black studies programs.155 However,
character is destiny, and how the programs were institutionalized had a profound impact
on contemporary black studies programs. In the final pages of this chapter, I will
explore the successes and failures of black studies programs as they became
increasingly institutionalized, and how these programs realized or fell short of the
vision of the original architects, black students such as Virgil Roberts.
Since UCLA had already decided the centers would not be academic
departments, they needed to find an institutional structure to house the centers. They
found the perfect structure in Organized Research Units (ORUs). The ORU structure
was modeled after the international studies area institutes. Other ORUs at UCLA
included the Molecular Biology Institute, the Medieval and Renaissance Study Center,
the African Studies Center, and the Brain Research Institute. Teaching and research
were the primary objectives of ORUs, priorities that were soon adopted by the Center
for Afro-American Studies at UCLA.
Ethnic studies centers were initially not well respected. Many professors,
fearing that the ethnic studies centers would become a campus ghetto, believed black
studies courses should be housed within departments. Henry McGee, an early CAAS
director, bluntly stated that many people felt the "programs were, in the parlance of the
times, niggerships basically."156 At the University of Texas the black studies center
also struggled for legitimacy. "It was true at Texas and generally that many people
around the campus thought that black studies was laughable, that it was something that
was going to go away, that it was not intellectually respectable," Geneva Gay later

See, for example, Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard; Ram6n A. Gutierrez, "Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution
in American Colleges and Universities," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo
Goldberg (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1994); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black
Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007).
156
McGee, author interview.

remembered.

Traditional departments served as the gatekeepers of academic

legitimacy at the university. Black studies programs, centers, and even departments
never commanded the respect given to established departments.
This stigma meant many professors had no desire to work in ethnic studies
departments. When UT Austin hired historian Ricardo Romo in the late 1970s, the
history department did not have a full position open, so the dean put together an
appointment half in history and half in Mexican American Studies. "Romo didn't want
that [offer] andin order to get him to acceptI had to promise him, in the presence of
the departmental chairman, to get him a 100% appointment in the Dept. of History next
year," wrote the dean. "He does not want Center involvement."158 Even though Romo
had willingly accepted funding from the Chicano Studies Center while at UCLA, he had
no desire for even a half-time ethnic studies appointment.159 Romo, along with many
other young professors, believed ethnic studies' appointments were career dead-ends.
This lack of legitimacy stemmed, in part, from a lack of steady leadership.
When Claudia Mitchell-Kernan became official center director in 1977, CAAS had had
only one other permanent director, Arthur Smith, who served from 1971-74. It also had
five interim directors, Douglas Glasgow, Henry McGee, Boniface Obichere, Robert
Singleton, and C.S. Whitaker, who had served solely or as a triumvirate. The Center's
1974 five-year review frankly admitted that "the abrupt changes in directorship have
served to disrupt continuity in Center research policies as well as specific projects."160
UT Austin also struggled to find a permanent director before they hired John Warfield
in 1974.
The biggest failure of the center was its inability to create programs that
connected the black community to UCLA. The goal of CAAS, to "develop and initiate
community action programs through a Bureau of Urban affairs," never came to fruition.
Some of this failure was attributable to the quick demise of UC President Charlie
Gay, author interview.
Robert T. King to Peter T. Flawn, April 17, 1980, UT President's Office, 86-209, Box 50, Center for
American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
159
Ricardo Romo, "Application for Funds for Research," September 1972, CAAS 512, Box 15.
160
"Five Year Summary Report, Center for Afro-American Studies," Fall 1974, CAAS 512, Box 13.
158

163
Hitch's urban crisis program. In 1969, the regents appropriated $600,000 to urban crisis
efforts. But one year later, with a crunch on federal and state education funds, money
for minority programs began to dry up. Ronald Reagan's 1970 UC budget of $333
million, $41 million less than what the regents requested, contained no provisions for
urban crisis programs or Educational Opportunity Programs. Charles Young later
recalled that the cuts were a way of punishing the University for student protest. "We
were confronted with a financial crisis at that point in time," recalled Young.161 While
Hitch publicly expressed his disappointment that Reagan's budget cut the urban crisis
program, he could not get the funds restored.162
Urban outreach programs were never a perfect fit for the university. If UCLA
were to truly focus on utilizing its knowledge to improve urban communities, it would
have constituted a major shift away from its primary functions of teaching and research.
The political will for such a monumental shift, even at the height of student protest,
never really existed. "As long as we called ourselves a research enter, that was
something they supported," Robert Singleton later recalled. "The moment we went
beyond the scholarly and began to get involved in things which they [administrators]
didn't expect the other centers to get involved inthat is, rabble-rousing from their
perspectivethey were unhappy about that, and they made their unhappiness quite
clear."163
UCLA insisted that only academics holding a Ph.D. could serve as director of
the ethnic studies centers. This ensured directors were professionally trained as
researchers and teachers. Even if they were interested in community service, it was not
their area of expertise. Given the directors' academic focus, coupled with the time and
budget constraints of the centers, it was not surprising that the community component
quickly withered. A review of CAAS conducted in 1980 frankly admitted that the
centers had focused attention "on research and teaching, and therefore less effort has
been devoted to cultural activities on campus and to community service." The report
161

Young, UCLA interview, 209.

"Reagan UC Budget Fails to Provide for Growth, Hitch Says," Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970,
3; Wilson, Notes and Reflections, Chapter 7, 58.
163
Singleton, UCLA interview, 411.
162

clearly thought this change was for the better. "Although it is primarily through the
centers that the large and increasing ethnic populations of Los Angeles have any contact
with UCLA, the closer these activities are to core academic programs the better for all
concerned."164 In other words, since community service was tangential to the
University's mission, it should not have been emphasized. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan,
CAAS director from 1976-88, remembered many black students wanted the Center to
be more active in community affairs. Unfortunately, CAAS had neither the time nor the
expertise to excel in community service. "To be community activists and successful on
campus was a pretty hard task for a group of five or six faculty to achieve," she
recalled.165 Instead, as an academic, Mitchell-Kernan focused on training the next
generation of African American scholars and producing quality research.
Being an Organized Research Unit had one major downside. CAAS, as an
ORU, could not hire faculty. This made it very difficult to bring faculty to UCLA
interested in working with the Center. While CAAS diligently tried to work together
with departments to hire minority faculty, the needs of the department invariably took
precedence over the needs of CAAS. In its first year of operation, director Robert
Singleton became increasingly frustrated over the inability of the Center to hire faculty.
"The perennial problem that arises between the Center and the Departments is that the
Center's criteria for hiring of faculty is incompatible and invariably at odds with the
Departments," wrote Singleton in his annual report. "The Center places the ability to
teach Black Studies, and to motivate Black students to excel, at the fore. The
Departments' priority is research and publications."166
The inability of departments and CAAS to work together on faculty
appointments changed little over time. In 1971, a CAAS report protested that
"Departments are reluctant to hire black faculty because of ingrained racist policies and
an absence of pressure. Even when black faculty is hired by a department, it is not with

"Five Year Review," March 7, 1980, CAAS 215, Box 36.

Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, July 11, 2006.
"CAAS Annual Report," December, 1969, Murphy 401, Box 127.

CAAS's needs in mind, but the department's needs."

Eight years later, Claudia

Mitchell-Kernan complained departments still struggled to hire scholars who could

assist the Center. "Over the years, the Center has observed that while many
departments are cooperative, some have little or no commitment to achieving diversity
on their faculty. Departments seem to think there are no qualified minorities 'out
there.'"168 To be fair, many departments wanted to hire faculty that could serve both
departmental and Center needs, but given the tight budgets of the 1970s, they
understandably placed their needs ahead of the ethnic studies centers.
The natural solution to a lack of faculty associated with Center would be to
make CAAS a department with its own faculty appointments. Even if politically
tenable, many Center advocates saw departmental status as a double-edged sword. The
Center worried that if it could hire faculty, the departments would use that as an excuse
not to hire any blacks. Mitchell-Kernan described this dilemma as follows: "So all
Black faculty members would be in the Black Studies Department. Sociology would
not have any, psychology would not have any, philosophy would not have any,
economics would not have any because they'd say, 'Well Black Studies has them.'"
Instead of legitimizing black studies, departmental status might create a black ghetto in
a sea of white faculty.
The faculty hiring dilemma was partially resolved when Vice-Chancellor
William Gerberding, recognizing the inability of the Centers to meet their research and
programming needs without a core of supportive faculty, decided to give them
institutional faculty positions, often referred to as Full Time Equivalents or FTEs.169
"Some progress [in the centers] has been achieved, but it has been uneven and
inadequate," Gerberding explained in a memo announcing his decision. "Earlier
schemes have not been notably successful in strengthening ethnic studies, and I would
like to believeand do believethat a cooperative and constructive spirit will inform

167

"CAAS Annual Report," 1971-72, CAAS 512, Box 20.

"Minutes of the Academic Compliance Committee," March 12, 1979, CAAS 512, Box 31.
169
Gerberding replaced David Saxon when Saxon was hired as UC President. Gerberding later became
President at the University of Washington.
168

our recruitment efforts."

While skeptical the additional FTEs would revitalize the

Centers, Gerberding did not want them to die from a lack of support.
The additional FTEs transformed the Centers. They "formed the basis of what I
would call real revitalization within the center . . . you can't get much done without
faculty," later remembered Mitchell-Kernan. "It made all the centers come alive. So
that faculty renewal is key to the health of any academic program and without that
nothing would have happened."171 The Centers recruited the faculty, but the new hires
were housed in a regular department. "We went after a number of people who were
very fine scholars," noted Mitchell-Keman. Melvin Oliver, Belinda Tucker, and
Richard Yarborough all were hired using these institutional FTEs.
Even with this infusion of new faculty, the Centers were woefully understaffed.
Academics have numerous conflicting demands on their time involving research,
teaching, and service. Faculty affiliated with the Centers had to balance these
traditional demands with their service to the Center. In particular, faculty affiliated with
the Center often struggled to publish. The reason Robert Singleton quit after only one
year as director was the lack of progress he had made on his dissertation. On paper, the
Center directorship was a one-third-time position with the other two-thirds dedicated to
teaching. The real picture was quite different. "In reality I always spent forty hours a
week in the center the whole time I was involved in it and another thirty hours a week in
my department," recalled Mitchell-Kernan. "The center was being maintained in an
almost exploitive relationship to the leadership and most of the stuff would never have
happened if we had limited ourselves to fifteen hours a week."172
Ethnic studies centers clearly struggled to find their place in the academy.
However, it would be a mistake to point to their struggles as a sign of failure. While
never reaching the lofty heights envisioned by black student protestors, the Centers
were, at a minimum, a qualified success. Black students' original ten goals for the
Center included encouraging and supporting faculty research, developing a black
170

"Strengthening of Ethnic Studies At UCLA," William Gerberding, May 4, 1976, CAAS 512, Box 36.
Mitchell-Keman, author interview.
172
Ibid.
171

studies curriculum, encouraging the acquisition of library items, sponsoring public

lectures, and bringing to the University scholars and people with expertise relevant to
the black experience.173 On some level, all of these goals were met.
The Center was indispensible to developing a black studies curriculum. By
1974, the Center had sponsored fifteen new courses, five of which became regular
offerings in departments. The classes, which covered a wide range of topics, included
Psychological Response to Racism, Afro-American Oral Tradition, Economics and the
Black Community, Black People's Theater in America, Race and the Cities, History of
Black Art, and Black Women in America. Four years later, according to CAAS's
annual report, UCLA offered 160 courses related to black studies with fifty-one focused
exclusively on the African or African American experience.174 A decade earlier, Virgil
Roberts had organized a single class on the black experience to demonstrate such a
course could be successful. This dramatic increase, from a handful of courses to over
fifty in less than ten years, was a remarkable accomplishment. "When I came to this
campus there were probably less than a handful of courses that had to do with African
American subjects and themes. When I left there was a large suite and it has only
continued to grow," reflected Mitchell-Kernan.175
CAAS charted a similar successful path in faculty research and publications.
Soon after taking the Center's reigns, Singleton appointed Arthur Smith to establish an
academic journal focused on the black experience. The Journal of Black Studies
published its first issue in 1970 and had an estimated subscription level of 4,000 when
Smith took the Journal with him when he moved to SUNY Buffalo. The Center also
provided the space and resources that allowed the Black Law Journal to become a
reality.

The Center, by itself and through the Institute of American Cultures,

sponsored an impressive array of research projects in its first decade. The Marcus
Garvey Project, directed by Professor Robert Hill, collected, edited, and eventually
published nine volumes of primary sources on Garvey and the Universal Negro
173

"Five Year Review Data," June 20, 1974, CAAS 512, Box 36.
"Five year Review," March 7, 1980, CAAS 512, Box 36.
175
Mitchell-Kernan, author interview.
176
"Philosophical Basis," CAAS 512, Box 20.
174

Improvement Association. Other projects in this period included research on the

educational attitudes of Watts' residents, the linguistics of Jamaican Creole, an
exploration of the attitudes of black and white workers during Reconstruction in
Atlanta, and the role of community participation in urban planning. By 1980, the
Center had sponsored over $180,000 in research grants.177
Outside its primary mission of facilitating research and curriculum development,
CAAS served as an invaluable place of refuge for black students, faculty, and
administrators. Many black students attending UCLA had never gone to school with
whites until UCLA. These students often experienced UCLA as an alien and
intimidating place. "Campbell Hall not only was the place that you were taking classes,
but it was also the refuge for any kind of possible confusion that you were feeling on
this campus," later remembered student Beverly Robinson.178 Henry McGee, who
served twice as interim director, believed CAAS "created a center of gravity for African
Americans on campus.... In fact, I can't conceive of what it would have been like
without one. If there hadn't been one, you would have had to have invented it."
Students congregated at the Center to feel at home; faculty found support for their
research; and all African Americans benefited from having a place to discuss ideas,
attend cultural programs, or find a familiar face. CAAS created a sense of community
and gave blacks a sense of belonging.
Many blacks students also came to UCLA without significant exposure to black
history. At the University of Texas, Geneva Gay recalled "and for a lot of the African
American students the courses in the black studies program that gave them a chance to
study to become familiar with a legacy they may not have known otherwise."180 The
black studies curriculum became a chance for students to know themselves. Charles
Pace, a Vietnam veteran, entered UT planning to study microbiology. After taking
courses on black history and culture he decided to honor black history through acting.
177

"Five Year Review," March 7, 1980, CAAS 512, Box 36; M. Belinda Tucker, "The First Decade:
CAAS 1969-69," UCLA CAAS Report, 4, no. 1 (November, 1979): 1-4.
ng 30th A n n i v e r s a r y Celebration: Panel Discussion," UCLA CAAS Newsletter, 17, no. 1 & 2 (2001): 8.
179
McGee, author interview.
180
Gay, author interview.

To this day he travels the country acting out the lives of historical black figures
including Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X., W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.
Today, ethnic studies centers suffer from what one might call a doubleconsciousness in relationship to their place in the academy. On one hand, they have
become successfully institutionalized. A five-year academic review conducted at
UCLA in 1980 concluded that the centers had made extraordinary contributions to the
University. "One of the great strengths of the UCLA campus is the diversity and
richness of its academic programs. The ethnic studies centers have become so central a
part of this diversity and richness that it would be hard to imagine UCLA without them.
Diversity and richness are also features that characterize the four centers themselves."
Across the nation, hundreds of black studies centers and departments make substantial
contributions to university life. These accomplishments include sponsoring research,
curricular innovations, and cultural activities, and serving as a permanent and relatively
powerful institution that advocates for the needs of black students and faculty. At the
25th anniversary celebration of CAAS at UCLA, after listening the to the Associate
Dean praise the Center, keynote speaker Angela Davis could not resist commenting that
"twenty five years ago it would have been impossible to imagine a representative of the
administration speaking in those terms."182
At the same time, ethnic studies centers still suffer from issues of legitimacy
within the academy. Critics continue to argue the fields lack any cohesive paradigm.
Shelby Steele, a black conservative academic at Stanford's Hoover Institute, insisted in
2005 that, "It [black studies] was a bogus concept from the beginning because it was
grounded in politics, not in a particular methodology. These programs are dying of
their own inertia because they've had 30 or 40 years to show us a serious academic
program, and they've failed."183 Critics also point out that black studies is an unpopular
major. Only 782 African American students majored in black studies nationwide in

"Five Year Review," March 7, 1980, CAAS 512, Box 36.

"Angela Y. Davis," UCLA CAAS Report, 16, no. 1 (2000): 20.
Robin Wilson, "Can Black Studies Be Saved?," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 2005, A9.

2000. This starkly contrasts with the 22,478 African Americans who earned a degree in
business management that same year.184 Even black studies advocates acknowledge the
field continues to lack respectability. Historian Nell Painter argues that academic works
published in black studies are less cited than those published in more established
fields.185 As many centers approach their 40-year anniversaries, they are successfully
institutionalized, but continue to suffer from a lack of respect and legitimacy.
Ethnic studies centers also suffer a double-consciousness in regards to their
mission and purpose. They have been very successful in sponsoring new research and
expanding the curriculum. For example, the National Council for Black Studies
(NCBS) successfully devised a core curriculum that standardized the content of black
studies. The field has developed a number of competing paradigms, including what
scholar Perry Hall calls "'integrationism,' 'Afrocentrism,' and 'transformationism.'"186
More recently programs have promoted transnational and diasporic approaches. While
it is impossible to speculate what course academic research might have charted without
the influence of black studies centers, the overall effect of research into race and
minorities since the 1960s has helped transform entire disciplines.
But black studies centers have fallen well short in their commitment to making
education relevant by addressing the needs of the black community. At UCLA, this
urban service component was abandoned in the early 1970s. While CAAS's
contemporary programs include some outreach to the black community, it is not on the
scale imagined by black student protestors. The need for universities to utilize their
knowledge and expertise to directly face urban challenges is just as great today as in the
1960s. The black community still suffers from many of the same maladies it faced
when the centers were created: segregation in schools and housing, high poverty and
unemployment, and unequal justice under the law that has led to a massive African
American prison population. Recently Manning Marable has called on black studies to
184

"News and Views: Black Studies is an Unpopular Major," The Journal ofBlacks in Higher Education,
July 31, 2002, 14.
185
Nell Irvin Painter, "Black Studies, Black Professors, and the Struggles of Perception," The Chronicle
ofHigher Education, December 15,2000, B7.
186
Perry Hall, "Paradigms in Black Studies," in Out of the Revolution: The Development ofAfricana
Studies, eds. Delores P. Aldridge and Carlene Young (New York: Lexington Books, 2000), 26.

171
"conceive itself as a type of praxis, a unity of theory and practical action. It is
insufficient for black scholars to scale the pristine walls of the academic tower, looking
down with calculated indifference on the ongoing struggles of black people"187 At most
black studies programs, this call has yet to be met.
Ethnic studies has also, perhaps, failed in decolonizing the academy. When
Clayborne Carson, in 1987, offered an alternative to the Western core class at Stanford,
he encountered fierce opposition from Dinesh D'Souza and "other self-appointed
defenders of Western culture and academic standards."188 Critics argued a non-Western
core devalued the accomplishments of Western civilization while elevating the work of
less influential authors. While most curriculums at national universities have become
increasingly diverse, they still tend to favor Western thinkers and Western values. As
Carole Boyce Davies notes in her introduction to an African Diaspora studies
anthology, "the very philosophical basis on which the academy rests is one which
functions to privilege knowledge emanating from European thinkers, to legitimate
European belief systems, histories, ideologies, principles, literatures."189
While the full promise of black studies has not been met, the hundreds of
programs, centers, and departments that were forged in fires of black student protest
helped to transform the university. But black studies centers were not the only minority
program transforming the academy in the late 1960s. At UCLA, students fought
successfully to create a Faculty Development Program (FDP) that brought minority
scholars to UCLA. Like black studies, the program was a qualified success. Also like
black studies, the FDP exposed contradictions in American liberalism.

Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (London:
Verso, 1996), 112.
188
Clayborne Carson, "A Scholar in Struggle," in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of
Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 302.
189
Carole Boyce Davies, "Introduction: Decolonizing the Academy: Advancing the Process," in ed.
Carole Boyce Davies, Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (Trenton: African World
Press, 2003), ix.

Chapter Four: Scholars in Struggle: The Faculty Development Program at

UCLA

Claybome Carson probably felt like he was caught in the eye of a hurricane
during his first years at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Carson
entered the graduate program in history in 1969 with minimal academic background in
American history. But his lack of a strong foundation in history did not impede his
progress as a graduate student. He earned his M.A. in one year and took his Ph.D. oral
examinations after only five quarters at UCLA. After completing his course work in
almost record time, without a moment to catch his breath, the history department hired
Carson as an acting assistant professor in the spring of 1971. Carson later remembered
this quick transformation from graduate student to professor as "exhilarating."1 His
tenure as a professor at UCLA lasted only three years before he was successfully
enticed to teach at Stanford in 1974.
UCLA had hired Carson under the recently adopted Faculty Development
Program (FDP), a program designed to attract minority scholars to teach at UCLA and
aid in their development as scholars. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities
across the nation initiated formal programs and informal efforts designed to hire
minority faculty. The civil rights movement, the Great Society, and militant black
student protest forced universities to reexamine their traditional hiring practices and
implement new policies that took affirmative steps to bring minority faculty to their
campuses. These efforts, coupled with the emergence of black studies programs,
created an unprecedented job market for minority scholars with their doctorate degree,
although minorities without a Ph.D. were less successful in finding academic positions.
Black student protest also helped transform, in only a few years, the racial
composition of academia. Overall, this change can be viewed as a glass that was either
half-empty or half-full. Traditionally white universities had, as late as 1966, as few as
1

Claybome Carson, "A Scholar in Struggle," in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of
Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 301. My
chapter title borrows from Carson's article.

none and at most a handful of black tenure-track professors. A decade later, African
Americans comprised 2.5 percent of predominantly white universities' faculties. At
the same time, 2.5 percent representation fell far short of matching the nation's racial
composition.
Clayborne Carson, along with thousands of other newly hired black faculty,
navigated immensely challenging and vastly rewarding job conditions. Black
professors struggled to balance the traditional demands of teaching and research with
the task of mentoring and advising black students and black studies programs. Black
faculty, as one black studies director noted, had to perform in two worlds: "the one
expected of him or her as a Black, and the other demanded by his colleagues as if he
were not."3 The nearly impossible chore of finding enough hours in the day to act as
activist, advocate, and academic meant many minority assistant professors were denied
promotion due to a lack of publications.
At the same time, qualified professors faced a job market of incredible
opportunity. Black candidates often received multiple job offers, in many cases without
even applying for the positions. These offers often garnered black scholars significantly
higher salaries than their peers and black studies programs unleashed a wave of interest
in scholarly topics related to minoritiesblack history, black education, affirmative
action, and civil rights, to name a few. The emergence of new black scholarly journals,
such as UCLA's Journal of Black Studies, along with recently created black studies
courses, provided black faculty with a powerful forum to explore black history and
culture. When black students and faculty created new syllabi, taught new courses, and
researched new topics, they were engaging in a process of cultural production. The
normalizing power of the university helped legitimize this (re)production of black
culture and identity.
Born in conflict, the FDP had to overcome administrators and politicians who
raised charges of reverse racism even before the ink was dry on the initial draft. The
2

Robin Wilson, The Chronicle of Higher Education 48, no. 44 (July 12,2002): A.l 1.
Trevor Chandler, "Minority Faculty Promotion and Tenure," WU Affirmative Action, 18-19, Box 6,
University of Washington Archives.
3

creation of the program was by no means a slam-dunk. The battles surrounding the
program demonstrated an inherent tension in liberalism in the late 1960sthe dream of
a color-blind society contrasted with the acknowledgement that race does matter.
Finally, the success of the FDP depended on the commitment of dozens of individuals
who were dedicated to transforming UCLA's faculty. Without that commitment it is
possible the wealth of scholarship and teaching produced by faculty who got their start
with the FDP would not exist today.
The story of the FDP begins with the demands and the initiative of black
students. By 1968, black students at UCLA were becoming increasingly vocal
proponents of change. They demanded that UCLA provide an education relevant to
their lives. These demands included adding courses on black history, literature, and
issues affecting inner-city life, along with a black studies program to house and
administer them. Nationwide, the non-negotiable demands made by black student
groups invariably called for the hiring of black faculty, staff, and administrators. For
example, students at the University of Illinois demanded the University hire "500 Black
faculty within a four year-period beginning with 150 by September 1969."4 The exact
letter of these demands was rarely met, but black student pressure invariably brought
new black faculty to campus.
Another favorite black student demand, the creation of black studies programs,
was inextricably linked to demands for black faculty. These programs, if staffed by
black faculty as black students envisioned, guaranteed white universities would hire at
least a handful of new black faculty. At UCLA, to demonstrate that there was both a
need and demand for Black Studies, the Black Students' Union's educational
committee, led by Virgil Roberts, organized a course titled "Black Man in a Changing
American Context." The class was enormously successful with attendance at the

Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University ofIllinois, 1965-75 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2003), 94.

lectures often topping 500 students. The overwhelming student support of this class
legitimized the demands for black studies courses.5
That same semester, addressing the University of California Regents, UC
President Charlie Hitch pronounced that "our nation, our state, and our cities are in the
grip of a crisis." The UC system, Hitch declared, must apply its research, educational,
and public service resources towards a solution for the urban crisis.6 This speech
helped lead to a collaboration between students, administrators, and faculty at UCLA to
address the urban crisis. At a spring administrative retreat, three committees comprised
of a balance of students, faculty, and administrators were created. Among them, the
Urban Affairs Committee was charged with creating a black studies program. At the
same time, the BSU presented the administration with a detailed blueprint for the
creation of a black studies center. This proposal included the syllabi and reading lists
for forty-five new black studies courses.7
When black students created these syllabi they were engaged in an exercise in
cultural production. By brainstorming course goals, themes, and reading lists, they
were thinking about what it meant to be black and what forces and institutions had
shaped black life. For example, the goals of a course on black culture and personality
included appreciating, "the worth and dignity of the Black individual as a human
being," identifying, "the major obstacles preventing an exuberant and full-fledged
expression of blackness," and exploring, "what it means to think Black." The course
also explored black personality types, which, according to the syllabus, included the
docile black man, house niggers, the integrationist, the separatist, e.g. Black Muslim,
independent black, women, and the black hero. A class on black literature in America
included a three-page reading list that, black students believed, every university library
should own. Books on the reading list included Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various
5

Virgil Roberts, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral History
Program (University of California, 1998), 28. For more on this course see Chapter Three.
6
"To the Regents of the University of California," May 17, 1968, UCLA, Office of the Chancellor,
Administrative Subject Files of Franklin D. Murphy, 1935-1971,401, Box 125, UCLA University
Archives (hereafter cited as Murphy 401).
7
Murphy 401, Box 124.
8
"Black Culture and Personality," CAAS 512, Box 4.

Subjects, Sterling Brown's Southern Road, Langston Hughes' The Dream Keeper, and
LeRoi Jones' Home. Black students and faculty, in creating and taking new courses,
were trying to make sense of "Black reality, both past and present."9
While the Urban Affairs Committee acknowledged the need for aggressive
hiring of minority faculty at UCLA as the foundation of a successful black studies
program, they did not propose how to directly address this imbalance. Fortunately,
Charles Z. Wilson, the first black Vice Chancellor at UCLA and head of the task forces,
understood that none of the committees were directly developing a program to bring
minority faculty to UCLA. C.Z. Wilson arrived at UCLA in the fall of 1967, when
racial tensions were heating up on campus. Wilson came from SUNY Binghamton as
an American Council on Education (ACE) fellow, a program designed to train faculty to
become college administrators. The program paired him with Charles E. Young as his
mentor. Wilson planned to spend a year at UCLA and then return to SUNY
Binghamton as an administrator. Instead, at the end of his ACE fellowship, Young
hired Wilson as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Educational Planning at UCLA. Young
understood UCLA needed a black administrator to serve as a liaison to black students
and to demonstrate a commitment to diversity. Wilson, whose job included planning
new educational and curricular efforts, began brainstorming during the summer of 1968
a rough outline of what would eventually become the Faculty Development Program.10
Wilson understood that quickly hiring large numbers of minority faculty would
be a difficult, if not impossible, task. A doctorate and a publication record were the
traditional requirements for most faculty positions at UCLAcredentials that few
African Americans held in 1969. For example, in the natural sciences, only 650 blacks
had received a Ph.D. since the end of Reconstruction.11 Even fewer were trained at
9

"Black Literature in America," Center for Afro-American Studies Center, 512, Box 4, UCLA University
Archives.
10
C.Z. Wilson to Charles Young, "Faculty from Minority Groups," July 31, 1968, UCLA Vice
Chancellor Academic Programs, Administrative Files of Charles Z. Wilson, 764, Box 6, UCLA
University Archives (hereafter cited as Wilson 764); Charles (CZ) Wilson, Notes and Reflections of a
Boundary Manager (Saving Inner City Black America from Within) (CZAND Associates, 2005), chapter
7, 1-5.
11
James Jay, Negroes in Science: Natural Science Doctorates, 1876-1969 (Detroit, Balamp Pub., 1971),
4.

programs considered top in their field. C.Z. Wilson estimated that in economics, his
own field, there were no more than fifteen black economists in the country trained by
one of the top twenty departments of economics. If a hundred traditionally white
colleges and universities sought to add a black faculty member to their economics
department using traditional academic qualifications, only fifteen schools would be
successful. Adding to the problem, many of the available black Ph.D.'s were already
teaching at traditionally black colleges and universities. Simply stealing professors
from black colleges might have met the letter of black students' demands for more
minority faculty, but certainly not the spirit.12
Wilson believed that traditional qualifications were the main roadblock faced by
any minority hiring program. At the end of July, he sent chancellor-elect Charles
Young his preliminary thoughts on the problem. "The chances of getting Black faculty
with the research achievement generally required by departments are very limited,"
wrote Wilson. If UCLA were to successfully hire large numbers of minority faculty,
Wilson argued, the school must redefine traditional qualifications for employment. In
the same memo to Young, Wilson noted that no hard data existed as to the number of
minority faculty working at UCLA. He urged the administration to conduct an
inventory of minority faculty.13
Young heeded Wilson's advice and ordered the survey. The results were bleak.
For the 1967-68 school year, there were only nine black and two Mexican American
tenure-track faculty members. These numbers included the professional schools such as
medicine and engineering. That same year UCLA had around 2,000 faculty members,
meaning minorities numbered about 0.5 percent of the entire faculty. For purposes of
comparison, in 1970, California had approximately 20 million residents of which 1.4
million were black and 2.5 million Mexican American. Blacks and Mexican Americans

Wilson, chapter 8, 41.

C.Z. Wilson to Charles Young, "FacultyfromMinority Groups," July 31, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 6.

comprised approximately 20 percent of the state population, a percentage almost forty

times higher than their level of representation at UCLA.14
At UCLA, the demand for black studies accentuated the need for minority
faculty. When the BSU presented the administration with a list of forty-five new black
studies courses, the administration's reply, that a lack of qualified faculty prevented
UCLA from immediately offering those courses, underscored the connection between
ethnic studies programs and minority faculty. The BSU, sensing the administration had
given them an opening by acknowledging that UCLA needed to find qualified
candidates to teach these courses, sought to fill this void. Like C.Z. Wilson, black
students understood that there were few black professors with traditional academic
qualifications available to enter the classroom. However, they believed that within the
black community there were plenty of black professionals with real world experience
who were qualified to teach at UCLA.
The BSU spent a month gathering resumes from professionals in the black
community interested in teaching at UCLA.15 At the end of the summer of 1968, they
handed in these resumes, but administrators took no immediate action. When UCLA
failed to hire black faculty by the middle of fall quarter, the BSU denounced the
administration for dragging its feet. Administrators, however, viewed UCLA's
response as quite reasonable. That fall, the ethnic studies programs were barely past the
planning stages. Until directors were hired and the curriculums of these programs were
approved by the faculty, it made little sense to rush to hire faculty.
Additionally, a commitment by the administration to hire minority faculty could
only go so far. In the world of academia, the power to hire minority faculty lay with
departments. In the summer of 1968, at a summer task force meeting, many department
chairs pledged, in front of the Black Students Union, to hire black faculty. That fall,
disheartened that few departments had begun recruiting minority faculty, the BSU
personally visited department heads. At these meetings, the BSU forcefully reiterated

1970 Census. The 15 percent sample counts 2,738,513 and the 5 percent sample counts 2,369,292 of
Hispanic origin.
15
"Complete Statement of Black Students' Union," Daily Bruin, November 18, 1968,2.

the desperate need for black faculty at UCLA. Pressured by the BSU, a majority of
departments renewed their pledge to proactively recruit minority faculty. A few,
however, refused, resulting in an often tense and bitter confrontation. At one meeting in
particular, between the BSU the economics department chair, the tone quickly turned
rancid, igniting a vituperative public and perhaps violent battle between the BSU and
the economics department. This conflict provided part of the final impetus for the
creation of the FDP.16
In November, the BSU met with the chair of the Department of Economics,
William Allen, and demanded the department hire at least one black professor. Black
students thought a black professor of economics was of particular importance, since the
field of economics had direct relevance to the needs of the black community. A black
professor could conduct studies on how to revitalize the economically depressed black
community. Black students envisioned a professor training cadres of young black
economists who would then apply their expertise to the black community.
The economics department was also seen as being particularly racist. When
UCLA made C.Z. Wilson its first ever black Assistant Vice Chancellor, he needed a
department to grant him a tenured position. Even though Wilson had a Ph.D. from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in economics and would be a part of the
department in name only, the department refused. The Department of Economics
believed he possessed an inadequate curriculum vitae for a department of its stature. A
possible conflict between the administration and the department was avoided when
Charles Young successfully negotiated with the School of Education to offer Wilson an
appointment.17
The economics department did its best to live up to its racist reputation.
Meeting with the BSU, Allen refused to promise to hire minority faculty. Determined
to hold the line against weakening academic standards, Allen told the delegation that,
while he would seek out qualified black applicants, the department would hire only the

"Open Letter to Chancellor Young," Daily Bruin, November 6, 1968, 4.

Robert Singleton, interview by Elston L. Carr, UCLA Center for African American Studies, Oral
History Program (University of California, 1999), 156.
17

best available candidate. He proceeded to lecture the students that any search for a
qualified black candidate would undoubtedly prove unfruitful, since elite graduate
schools were not producing black economists. Rather than recognizing that his
department might bear some responsibility for this discrimination, he dismissed it, not
as a problem of employer demand, but employee supply. That is, the students should
take their demands to the elite schools responsible for not producing black doctorates.
In general, he patronized the black students, viewing them as childish malcontents who
failed to understand the real world.18
On November 6, as part of their black faculty hiring campaign, the BSU
published a letter in the Daily Bruin addressed to Chancellor Young. The letter began
by emphasizing the urgent need for black faculty at UCLA. "Considering the intensity
of the current social crisis, UCLA should be moving fast to meet the needs of a growing
community of Black students." The BSU then specifically attacked Dr. Allen for his
unwillingness to commit to hiring black faculty and his personal attacks on the BSU at
their meeting. Considering the patronizing attitude of Allen towards the students, this
public critique of Allen by the BSU seemed measured. "And while impressing upon
him the need and urgency of the situation, he became visibly irritated with our presence
and resorted to referring to one of us as 'baby boy.'" While Allen represented the
virulent racism that still existed in places at UCLA, the BSU worried a feud with Allen
could prove distracting. In the letter, the BSU kept their eyes on the larger prize of
bringing black faculty to UCLA.19
Allen responded to the BSU's critique the next day by publishing a scathing
statement addressed to Chancellor Young in the Daily Bruin. The opening salvo of his
message revealed how acrimonious the conflict had become. A man's measure, he
argued, is often gauged by his opponents. Thus, he was "pleased to have been singled
out for vituperation in the Bruin by a spokesman of the Black Student Union." His
entire statement was filled with personal attacks on the black students. For example, he
called the idea of hiring black faculty a "patently absurd and shameful commitment."
18
19

"Econ Dept. Chairman Replies to BSU," Daily Bruin, November 7, 1968,4.

"Open Letter to Chancellor Young," Daily Bruin, November 6, 1968,4.

181
He also admitted that he called a member of the BSU delegation a baby, and then
added, "I also called one of them (with great charity) 'man.'" Utilizing traditional racist
topes, he described the BSU as a "group of fascistic specimens who neither know nor
care to learn the necessary conditions of viable civilization." His final statement
dripped with disdain for the BSU. "Those few students who make it a point of honor
not to comprehend the nature of a university have small reason to whine when they are
held in that special contempt reserved by the scholar for those who are personally
gauche and professionally inept in utilization of their talent."20 In other words, if black
students would only keep quiet, work hard, and study, they could reap the benefits
offered by a UCLA education.
Perhaps the most revealing part of Allen's statement was his defense of hiring
only the best available faculty. The department will only hire the best faculty, he wrote,
"where 'best' is judged by my colleagues and me according to criteria of talent, skill,
and promise, entirely regardless of skin pigmentation." By choosing to use the phrase
"skin pigmentation" instead of race or ethnicity, Allen went out of his way to
whitewash history and devalue racial identity. "Skin pigmentation" implied that race
represented merely a minor external difference, ignoring the reality that in the United
States, particularly in the 1960s, race had been anything but a superficial attribute.
Allen's insinuations aside, race, not "skin pigmentation" prevented African Americans
from attending the nation's top graduate schools. Interestingly, Allen readily admitted
that top graduate schools were not producing black economists. Unfortunately that was
a deficiency of "employee supply," Allen argued, that should not be taken into
consideration when evaluating a candidate.21
The BSU published their reply to Allen in the Daily Bruin a week later. In their
statement, the BSU refused to take the bait offered by Allen to engage in a debate
involving personal insults. Instead the BSU restated their main arguments in support of
hiring black faculty at UCLA and explored what it meant to hire quality faculty.
Quality, they argued, was an ambiguous term often used as an excuse not to hire
20
21

"Econ Dept. Chairman Replies to BSU," Daily Bruin, November 7, 1968,4.

Ibid.

minority faculty. "Is it really a sufficient and necessary condition that a Black person
graduate from a certain circle of schools in order to be of satisfactory quality?" A
graduate degree from a top institution was not the only way to become a quality teacher,
argued the BSU, answering their own question. There were numerous blacks, they
claimed, with the intellect, education, and experience to qualify them for the job. In
fact, a black with real world experience in urban economic issues was more qualified
than a detached professionally trained scholar from, for example, the University of
Chicago. Echoing a stance held by many advocates of black power, the BSU believed
Allen's uncompromising stance was another example of how white institutions were
fundamentally racist and refused to meet the legitimate needs of black people.
Despite the efforts by the Black Students' Union, by the end of November the
economics department continued to refuse to promise to recruit black faculty. This
inaction, coupled with the inflammatory and racist statements by Allen, became, to the
BSU, a symbol of the University of California's institutional racism. In an official
statement made at a press conference at Campbell Hall, the BSU noted that Allen
"represented the entire University of California structure, through his department, when
he made such statements." Allen's actions and comments revealed the "racist
atmosphere" that existed at UCLA, in California, and in the entire nation.
The showdown between the BSU and the economics department motivated other
students to add their voices to the struggle. A group of students living in a campus
dormitory, Hedrick Hall, organized the group White Response. White Response,
drawing its membership primarily from Hedrick Hall underclassmen, lobbied the
administration to hire minority faculty. Leader Steve Aizenstat believed that students
who had dismissed the BSU's demands because they saw the BSU as too radical and
too confrontational would listen to this newly formed group. By distributing leaflets,
submitting letters to the Daily Bruin, circulating petitions, and holding discussions in
dorm rooms, White Response levied additional pressure on the administration to change
its hiring tactics. Echoing arguments used by the BSU, students signing the petition

"Complete Statement of Black Students' Union," Daily Bruin, November 18, 1968,2.

183
agreed that the "unsublime realities of racism, degradation and poverty," should take
precedence over a department's "sublime search for perfection" in hiring new
professors.23
The Community for Awareness and Social Education (CASE), a long-standing
and well-respected interracial civil rights group on campus, joined with the BSU in
condemning the hiring practices supported by Allen. CASE, perhaps best known for
exposing racial discrimination in Westwood's housing market, decided to investigate
minority faculty representation at UCLA. This investigation concluded, not
surprisingly, that minority faculty representation at UCLA was abysmal. "The number
of black and brown professors that are actually in teaching positions," and have face to
face contact with students, "can be counted on one hand," concluded the investigation.
In a Daily Bruin article, CASE challenged the administration to prove that UCLA was
not a racist institution by fixing this "intolerable situation."24 CASE'S vehement
response further pressured UCLA's administration and faculty to take action.
In the midst of this turmoil, Wilson and his staff worked hard to draft a minority
faculty recruitment plan. On November 15, Wilson sent Young a copy of the plan.
Traditional recruitment practices, Wilson argued, had failed to bring minority faculty to
UCLA. The plan called for UCLA to hire more of its own minority Ph.D.'s,
professionals who possessed real world experience, and faculty from small schools
whose paltry publication record precluded them from teaching at UCLA. The goals of
the program were ambitious. Wilson called for the program to fund one hundred new
faculty positions over four years, a number he hoped would be matched by the
departments. Assuming a retention rate of 75%, the program would increase minority
faculty "from approximately 10 to 150."25 Ten days later, on November 25, Chancellor
Young publicly announced the program. Young, speaking before the Academic Senate,

"White Student Group Formed to Promote Black Hiring," Daily Bruin, November 20,1968, 1;
"Qualification in the Eyes of Beholder," Daily Bruin, November 18, 1968, 4.
24
"Hiring Practices Racist," Daily Bruin, November 14, 1968, 1.
25
MemofromC.Z. Wilson to Charles Young, "Faculty Development: A Plan for Increasing the Number
of Faculty MembersfromMinority Groups," November 15, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 6.

proclaimed the FDP would "produce immediate results" without "reducing faculty
quality."26
UCLA was not alone in trying to address their dearth of minority faculty.
Across the nation, universities utilized a myriad of tactics to address this imbalance that
ranged from very informal efforts to large-scale affirmative action programs. Informal
efforts often took place within departments, where faculty, on their own initiative,
sought out minority scholars when conducting specific searches. Professional schools,
including medical and law schools, also frequently coordinated their own minority
recruitment efforts.
At Rutgers, for instance, the administration instituted a system-wide affirmative
action program that reserved specific faculty lines for minorities. The Rutgers'
administration placed race on the agenda after recent graduate Don Harris was arrested
in Americus, Georgia, during the summer of 1963 while organizing for the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The police "seized, mauled," and
arrested Harris on the weighty charge of insurrection, which carried the possibility of a
death sentence. According to the student paper, "The Don Harris case has stirred the
campus like no other issue in years."27 After Harris' arrest, Rutgers created a
committee led by Dean Werner Boehm of the Graduate School of Social Work to
"survey the resources that Rutgers might bring to bear on the problem of the
disadvantaged."28 Working at a pace black power advocates would have found
unacceptable, the Boehm committee issued its report over a year later. The report
called for a "multifaceted 'Equal Opportunity'" program and recommended an
affirmative action hiring program that reserved specific faculty lines for black scholars.
This aggressive program paid immediate dividends. In 1967, fifteen blacks joined the
faculty and almost double that number joined the next year.29

"Report of UCLA's Response to the Urban Crisis," Charles E. Young, November 25, 1968, Murphy
401, Box 125.
27
Richard P. McCormick, The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1999), 12-13; quotation from a fall 1963 issue of the student newspaper the Targum.
28
Ibid., 13.
29
Ibid., 28.

185
At the University of Pennsylvania, the administration took a different approach
to rectify its lack of minority faculty. In 1965, Perm formed a cooperative relationship
with Morgan State College, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland.
Funded with a HEW grant under title III of the 1965 Higher Education Act and a Ford
Foundation grant, faculty members taught classes at the partner schools. The program
exposed Perm students to black faculty without Penn having to hire their own black
faculty.30
Other schools, like the University of Washington, never implemented a
formalized hiring program like UCLA's FDP. Still, similar to other schools, the UW, in
the mid-1960s, inspired by the swift racial changes sweeping the nation, began adding
blacks to the faculty. Between 1965 and 1967, the UW hired five professors in the
fields of education, medicine, nursing, and social work.

Black student protest

accelerated this process. In 1968-69, after the BSU occupied President Odegaard's
office, the University hired five new black professors in the College of Arts and
Sciences alone.32 Eventually the UW created a range of new institutional structures and
efforts designed to promote minority hiring. At the UW, the formula for hiring minority
faculty included departmental initiative, supportive administrators, and an institutional
climate that valued diversity.
Compared to nationwide efforts, UCLA's Faculty Development Program was
both typical and unique. Typical of many other programs, it took affirmative steps to
infuse the faculty with minority scholars and often struggled for adequate funding. Yet
the FDP separated itself from other programs with its focus on hiring scholars other
schools might consider "unqualified" and offering them the training and support to
become "qualified."
The announcement of UCLA's FDP brought immediate response from the
community, University of California administrators, and the faculty. The debates over
30

Wayne Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 22.
31
President's Report to the Senate, April 13, 1967, WU President, 79-54, Box 10, University of
Washington Archives.
32
Trevor Chandler, "Minority Faculty Promotion and Tenure," WU Affirmative Action, 18-19, Box 6,
University of Washington Archives.

186
the FDP mirrored, in many respects, nationwide debates over the appropriate role of
affirmative action. The faculty and the UC administration framed the debate as the
balancing of two almost contradictory tenants of liberalismthe belief that society
should take affirmative action to rectify historical injustices and the promotion of a
color-blind society. On one hand, faculty and administrators acknowledged that UCLA
had discriminated in its faculty hiring practices to the detriment of minorities. At the
same time, they believed the faculty hiring process should be color-blind, where hiring
decisions are based solely on the ability and character of the candidate. At UCLA, the
tension between these two tenants was never fully resolved. Instead the administration
and faculty pledged to initiate affirmative action programs while at the same time
reiterating the principle that a professor's merit should only be judged by character,
talent, and intellect. In particular, Chancellor Young refused to allow the charge of
reverse discrimination to prevent him from opening doors to minority faculty at UCLA.
The FDP opened a door of opportunity for minority educators. Even C.Z.
Wilson was surprised by how many unsolicited inquiries for employment Young
received after publicly announcing the program. For example, Mike Gomez, reading
about the program in the Los Angeles Times, sent Young a letter presenting his
credentials. Gomez, a principal at Nelson Elementary School in nearby La Puente,
expressed interest in teaching a class on elementary school teaching methods. His
traditional qualifications included a degree from UCLA and a master's in education
from Long Beach State. Moreover, his "considerable research on the problems of
Mexican-Americans in the Southwest plus having lived it," made him uniquely
qualified to address recent minority issues in education.33 Like Gomez, Grace Carter
thought the FDP might present the opportunity for her to teach at UCLA. In a
handwritten letter posted the day after Young announced the FDP, Grace Carter
presented her qualifications for employment: "Sir: I understand you are interested in
contacting persons of minority races qualified to teach in your school. I am a Negro
and wish to teach part time." She included a copy of her resume. She had a master's

Letter addressed to Charles E. Young, November 26, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 1.

degree from the University of Iowa and over twenty years experience teaching at the
college level, including twelve years as the head of the English department at Texas
College in Tyler, Texas.34 These enthusiastic, unsolicited responses of minorities
wanting to take immediate advantage of the FDP demonstrated that if schools were
willing to broaden traditional academic qualifications, there would be no shortage of
candidates wanting to take advantage of the opportunity.
Charles E. Young, as Chancellor of UCLA, exercised a great deal of autonomy.
But controversial decisions inevitably drew comment from the larger University of
California administration and the FDP was no exception. Soon after announcing the
program, a debate took place over the acceptable parameters of the FDP within the UC
General Counsel office and between that office and UCLA. Administrators debating
the appropriateness of minority faculty hiring programs stood in one of two camps.
One group took a hard-line approach. They insisted any policy that favored hiring one
race over another was in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the University's
policy on non-discrimination. The second group sought middle ground. This group
acknowledged that creating faculty positions that excluded whites was discriminatory,
but that it was possible to create a program that took affirmative action to increase
minority faculty at UCLA.
Almost immediately after publicly announcing his intention to create the Faculty
Development Program, Charles Young received a memo from the UC General
Counsel's office warning him about the dangers of reverse discrimination. Having read
the press reports on the FDP, Donald Reidhaar, an assistant counsel of the UC system,
dutifully reminded Young that "care must be taken to avoid violations of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964."35 Discrimination in favor of any particular group, Reidhaar
cautioned, must be particularly guarded against, even if that discrimination works in
favor of groups who have historically suffered discrimination. In ironing out the
34

Letter from Grace Carter to President, UCLA, November 26,1968, Wilson 764, Box 1.
Memo from Donald Reidhaar to Charles E. Young, December 9, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 6. Reidhaar
later organized UC's defense in Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke. See Howard Bell,
"Race, Affirmative Action, and Higher Education on Trial: Regents v. Bakke (1978)," in Race on Trial:
Law and Justice in American History, ed. Annette Gordon-Reed (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 197-213.
35

188
specifics of the program, UCLA must ensure that no racial group be given preferential
treatment.
A few months later, after the Academic Senate had passed a preliminary version
of the FDP, Reidhaar sent Young another memo attacking numerous provisions of the
program. In this memo, Reidhaar exercised extreme vigilance in protecting whites from
discrimination. He took offense to even the most innocuous parts of the program. For
example, he noted that the FDP sought "to discover from within traditional manpower
sources the maximum number of thoroughly qualified candidates for appointment to our
faculty from among the minority groups concerned." Reidhaar was willing to concede
that "on its face, this proposal does not require or call for discrimination on the basis of
race." Still, he wondered that even the simple act of seeking out qualified minority
scholars for open faculty positions might be discriminatory when applied in practice.
Reverse discrimination, whether dejure or de facto, he preached, was unacceptable. In
general, any program designed to benefit new faculty must be open to all, regardless of
race. He concluded the memo with a final warning: those who believe "programs
thought to be of benefit to minority group members are exempt from the provisions of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964" are sorely mistaken. Overall, Reidhaar wrote as if he
were lecturing misguided children, using a strong hand to correct their naive and
mistaken beliefs.36
This view, that taking positive action to hire minorities violated the Civil Rights
Act, was fairly common, even before reverse discrimination became an anti-affirmative
action rallying cry. The liberal Democratic Senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey,
while discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, declared on the Senate floor that the Act
would not promote the "bugaboo" of reverse discrimination. The bill, stated
Humphrey, has "nothing in it that will give any power to the Commission or to any
court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial
'quota' or to achieve a certain racial balance."37 Almost a decade later, in his

Donald Reidhaar to Charles E. Young, March 7, 1969, Wilson 764, Box 6.

Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit ofFairness: A History ofAffirmative Action (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 78-79.
37

189
passionate dissenting opinion in DeFunis v. Odegaard, Justice William O. Douglas
argued that Marco Defunis, a white applicant to law school, "had a constitutional right
to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner."
The Civil Rights Act, Douglas believed, should not replace one form of discrimination
TO

with another.
If the administration at UCLA had accepted Reidhaar's commonly held view,
any effort to rectify past discriminatory hiring practices would have been rejected in the
name of reverse discrimination. Fortunately, other administrators disagreed with this
hard-line approach, and sought to find a middle ground between a program that might
employ racial quotas and no program at all. Another member of the UC's General
Counsel's office, George Marchand, argued that the UC system had some flexibility in
how they crafted programs to benefit minorities.
In a memo to the Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara, Marchand explored the legal
and moral quandaries of any minority hiring program. He immediately rejected a quota
system that reserved a certain number of positions for minority faculty. The
"University cannot legally restrict eligibility for employment on the basis of race, color
or national origin, even though the restrictions would operate in favor of members of
minority groups," he claimed. Outside of this most blatant violation, however,
Marchand argued that the university could create space where race could be a
consideration for employment. For instance, knowledge or experience of a particular
racial minority could be a job qualification if directly related to the job. A black studies
program could ask that job candidates have "knowledge or and experience with the
problems" of African Americans. The math department, however, could not require
"knowledge of the African American community" as a job qualification, since it was
unrelated to teaching math. This view opened a very narrow window for UCLA to
expand opportunities for minority scholars.

William O. Douglas, "DeFunis v. Odegaard, Dissenting Opinion," in Reverse Discrimination, ed. Barry
Gross (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1977), 204.
39
George Marchand to Chancellor Vernon I. Cheadle, December 5, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 6.

UCLA held a more expansive view of equal opportunity hiring programs than
the General Counsel's office. Legal counsel at UCLA argued that the University had an
obligation to hire minority candidates. Directly responding to Reidhaar's memos,
Thomas Scully, as Acting Campus Advocate, postulated that a reasonable interpretation
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually encouraged UCLA to develop a program that
addressed historically unequal hiring practices. The Civil Rights Act created the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), noted Scully, and EEOC publications
specifically promoted affirmative action programs. Specifically, one EEOC brochure
encouraged employers to engage in "aggressive recruiting, job training and job
upgrading" as ways to achieve the goals of equal employment opportunity. He
concluded that UCLA's Faculty Development Program "is simply a remedial measure
to mitigate a past unfair employment situation. The procedure is remarkably similar to
the Affirmative Action Agreements worked out by EEOC conciliators."40
These debates contradict the common narrative that opposition to affirmative
action formed after whites found themselves the victims of reverse discrimination. The
UC system opposed affirmative action as reverse discrimination before the FDP was
implemented. Urged by the UC system to water down or eliminate the Faculty
Development Program, Chancellor Young could easily have used that pressure as an
excuse to kill the Program. Young could have declared that the Civil Rights Act of
1964 forbid discrimination against any race and thus closed the door to any program
that actively recruited minority students or faculty. As I discuss in the following
chapter, at the University of Texas, Regent Frank Erwin used a similar argument to halt
any attempt to increase minority enrollment at UT. But Young chose not to use reverse
discrimination as an excuse for inaction. Instead, Young went out of his way to find an
expansive interpretation of non-discrimination policies, one that would give UCLA
room to recruit minorities.
UCLA's faculty engaged in a similar debate over what shape a faculty
recruitment program should take. At two "town meetings" called by the Academic

Dean Thomas J. Scully to Charles E. Young, March 19, 1969, Wilson 764, Box 6.

Senate, faculty members had the unenviable task of crafting, in a contentious largegroup setting, a specific resolution on the FDP. Eventually, two rival resolutions
emerged from these meetings. In January, all Senate members were given a paper
ballot where they could vote for either of the resolutions or against both of them.
The main point of contention between the two resolutions centered on the value
of a racially diverse faculty. Resolution A argued that a professor's racial background
mattered. Adding minority faculty to UCLA, claimed Resolution A backers, would
bring a new diversity of viewpoints to campus, thus improving the quality of education.
A diversity of racial backgrounds would also better serve the student body. One student
might connect well with one professor; a second student might relate better to another.
To provide mentors for a diverse student population, the faculty should be similarly
diverse.
Resolution B argued a professor's racial background had no relationship to that
professor's ability to do his/her job as a teacher and scholar. The key sentence of the
resolution read: "The Academic Senate further RESOLVES that the only basis for
judging a man's performance or potential as teacher or student is the content of his
mind and character." At the same time, Resolution B supported the FDP. It
acknowledged that "where past and continuing (racial or other) injustices have created
needs the university should be responsive."41 Hiring professors, the resolution argued,
should be a color-blind practice. But since past and current discrimination had made
race an important factor in who worked at UCLA, a program was needed to address
those racial imbalances.
Supporters of Resolution A were quick to point out that judging professors by
their character and not their race, while seeking to balance historical discrimination,
resulted in a schizophrenic position. A program that provided resources to specifically
hire racial minorities contradicted the principle that mind and character were true tests
of the quality of a professor. Many UCLA professors were caught between these two

"Faculty Resolution B," Murphy 401, Box 124.

difficult to reconcile positions. They believed race should not matter, while
acknowledging it did.42
Affirmative action programs at the national level faced a similar paradox. The
Civil Rights Act of 1964 clearly stated that hiring decisions should be race neutral. But
"race neutral" criteria often meant an exclusively white labor force, a violation of the
Civil Rights Act's goal of ending racial discrimination in the workforce. In cities such
as Cleveland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, skilled labor unions excluded minorities from
membership. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) began to realize that
many of its federal building contractors violated the law by utilizing Jim Crow labor
unions and began requiring all bids come with a plan that spelled out how minorities
would work on the project. In the last months of the Johnson administration, the federal
government worked out what became known as the "Philadelphia Plan," which insisted
that contractor's bids "must have the result of producing minority group
representation."43 This plan was later expanded during the Nixon administration and
came under increasing pressure from a Congress that believed the plan promoted
reverse discrimination.44
The difference between these broader fights for minority representation in the
building trades and the fight for minority faculty lies in the different nature of the
respective jobs. In the building trades, along with most jobs in manufacturing and the
general economy, it remained difficult to argue that having a diverse workplace made
for a more efficient one. A university, however, was not your typical workplace. In
one resolution in support of the FDP, the faculty argued that having a diverse faculty
would improve the quality of education at UCLA. UCLA had two strong reasons to
support minority hiring: to atone for past racial injustices and to become a better
institution. In other words, the idea of diversity, even at this early date, was being cited
as something a university should value. Since a university served a diverse student
body, the argument went, its faculty should be similarly diverse.

Anderson, The Pursuit ofFairness, 105.

Philip F. Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action, 1619-2000 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2001), 151.
44

On January 24,1969, the Senate approved Resolution A and pledged to take

"affirmative and dramatic steps" to increase the number of minority faculty at UCLA.
Understanding that this goal could not be met by hiring only minorities with doctorate
degrees, the FDP targeted four pools of minority candidates. The first pool included
qualified candidates who wanted to use their expertise as scholars to serve the minority
communities of Los Angeles. An "Africanist interested in Afro-American
developmentseducational, economic and cultural," might be hired under this
category. The second group included candidates with professional expertise who had
not received the Ph.D. This might include someone with a law degree who wished to
teach political science. Candidates with doctorates but without appropriate research
experience comprised the third group. The final group included candidates who were
qualified but only wanted to teach on a part-time basis, for example, a "school
administrator interested in in-service training of teachers."46 C.Z. Wilson and the other
program architects understood that if UCLA was willing to hire outside the usual
academic boundaries, there were talented individuals who could be an asset to the
school.
The FDP also gave minority scholars resources to develop their academic
careers. Completing a dissertation, while working or supporting a family, wasand
isa nearly impossible task. To give faculty adequate time to complete their own
research, the FDP provided summer stipends, which were two-ninths of the faculty
member's annual salary. The program also negotiated with departments for reduced
teaching loads. By developing scholars, UCLA could refrain from simply cannibalizing
qualified scholars from historically black schools. Wilson later recalled that when
planning the program he constantly asked, "How can we push a candidate as fast [and]
as far as possible in the shortest period of time?"47
Although the path-breaking FDP expanded the scope of what it meant to have
"traditional qualifications," it never met the more radical vision of the BSU. Black

"Faculty Resolution A," Murphy 401, Box 124.

Charles Z. Wilson, April 1969, Wilson 764, Box 6.
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, chapter 8, 47.

students argued that real-life experience in anti-poverty programs or community

organizing made someone, in many cases, better qualified to teach about race than a
person holding a doctorate. While the program did hire a number of candidates with
strong professional experience, once at UCLA they were expected to earn their Ph.D.
before they could secure a tenure-track position. The dozens of resumes the BSU
gathered in the summer of 1968 of black professionals and community activists were
never used to hire faculty at UCLA.
Depending on your perspective, in its first years the FDP was either a quiet or
resounding success. While the original optimistic goals set by Wilson in the initial
proposal were not met, after five years, the program had funded forty-five faculty
members. By the early 1970s, the program provided seven tenure-track (FTE) positions
each year. Funding quickly rose from $50,000 the first year to $180,000 by the third.
A majority of program participants were either black or Chicano. Of the forty-five
participants, twenty-eight were black, ten Chicano, four Asian, and three white.
The FDP played an integral part in the survival of the nascent ethnic studies
centers. Without faculty members willing to teach courses with ethnic content, serve on
advisory committees, mentor minority students, and organize and participate in center
events, the ethnic studies centers could not function. Three of the first directors of the
centers were part of the FDP. Molefi Asante served as director of the Center for AfroAmerican Studies (CAAS) from 1970-1973, Juan Gomez-Quinones ran the Chicano
Studies Center for over a decade, and Lucie Hirata directed the Asian Studies Center.
Robert Singleton, the first director of CAAS at UCLA, also received two years of
funding from the FDP. A majority of the faculty involved in developing the Center for
Afro-American studies were part of the FDP. For example, Leroy Higginbotham and
Karen Hill-Scott, both professors of urban planning, sat on CAAS's advisory board,
mentored black student groups, developed Center programming, and initiated Center
sponsored courses.

"Five Year Review of the FDP," Wilson 764, Box 6.

195
Student demands for a curriculum relevant to minority students were met, at
least in part, by FDP faculty. The majority of classes with minority group content
taught at UCLA in the early 1970s were taught by FDP members. For example,
Franklin Price offered Psychology 133, "Psychological Development of the Minority
Child." Clayborne Carson developed history classes that hitherto had never been taught
at UCLA, including an undergraduate colloquium titled "Black Ideology and Society
after 1865." In the English department, Sandra Garcia offered a class on teaching
English to minority groups and Bernard Boxill taught a class on philosophical themes in
Black Literature. Ronald Takaki, hired in the late 1960s to teach African American
history, also received summer support from the FDP. These faculty members' expertise
and their willingness to develop new classes from scratch met student demands for
UCLA to broaden and enhance its curriculum.49
The adoption of the FDP immediately created tension with academic
departments at UCLA. At most universities, the power to hire new faculty rested with
academic departments. When given funding for a new faculty slot, the department
advertised the position, examined credentials, and interviewed applicants. After careful
consideration, and a vote of the entire department, an offer was tendered. While a dean
oversaw this process, rarely did the dean infringe upon the department's prerogative.
The FDP called these procedures into question. Under the FDP, who had ultimate
power over appointments? Who was initiating the request for the appointment?
Departments were unhappy with the prospect of C.Z. Wilson or any administrator
telling them whom to hire.
While the FDP created new tensions between faculty and administrators, it also
provided the money and the motivation for departments to hire minority faculty. A
faculty Committee on Equal Opportunity, formed in 1970 to investigate UCLA's equal
opportunity hiring practices, found that departmental efforts were the key to increasing
minority faculty representation at UCLA. Where progress had been made in hiring
minority faculty, the committee wrote, "it has resulted from special, non-routine,
49

"Faculty Development Program 1969-1974," Wilson 764, Box 1; "Summary of Present Participants in
the Faculty Development Program," Wilson 764, Box 1.

energetic and imaginative departmental efforts to cull out and attract candidates."
Attacking those who claimed it was impossible to find qualified minority faculty, the
committee sardonically observed that many departments had successfully hired
minority faculty. To a degree, the claim that there were no qualified minorities
available was a self-fulfilling prophecy, concluded the committee. Passive efforts
would never bring minority faculty to UCLA. Only an active commitment from
departments could produce results.
Minority organizations and publications founded in this same climate of change
proved to be important resources in the search for minority faculty. The Journal of
Black Studies, founded at UCLA in 1971 as part of the Center for Afro-American
Studies, frequently published advertisements for job openings. For instance, San Diego
State strategically advertised an ethnic studies center faculty position at the end of an
article about black faculty.51 Department search committees would also contact
recently formed minority caucuses within professional organizations, black faculty
associations, and other organizations serving women and minorities about job openings.
Soon after Young announced the FDP, female faculty and graduate students at
UCLA demanded the program be expanded to include women. They understood the
space opened by the administration's commitment to adopting new hiring practices to
address historical inequalities could easily be applied to women. Since women, like
minorities, were grossly underrepresented on the faculty, administrators should make
the redress of these inequalities an institutional priority. For example, in February
1969, Rosalinda Ratajczak, a graduate student in economics, sent Young a letter
proposing the FDP should include women. "I would like to suggest," she wrote, "that
your program should be extended to insure that women are not being discriminated
against in hiring, and to give some encouragement to female graduate students that there
will be opportunities for them to teach at the University level and they will not just be
shunted off onto the state college system." While she applauded the efforts to hire more
50

Committee on Equal Opportunity, "Report Concerning Minority Faculty, UCLA, 1969-70," Wilson,
764, Box 1.
51
David M. Rafky, "Student Militance: A Dilemma For Black Faculty," Journal ofBlack Studies 3, no. 3
(1972): 183-206.

minority faculty, she asked Young to "recognize the existence of a 'majority minority'
and try to be fair to your female graduate students as well."52
While women were slightly better represented on UCLA's faculty than
minorities, they were often paid less than their male counterparts, taught part-time, and
struggled to gain promotion. In 1970, women comprised 4 percent of professor-level
faculty, and 9 percent at the associate and assistant professor levels. "While women
compose about 40 per cent of the national work force, they are under-represented in
top-level positions and over-represented in clerical positions," wrote Vice President
Robert Johnson in a 1971 report on women's employment at UC.53
Although female graduate students and faculty pressured the administration to
prioritize hiring women, at UCLA it was pressure from above, not below, that led to the
inclusion of women as part of the FDP. The original draft of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 made no mention of sex. This changed when Howard K. Smith, a Democratic
Representative from Virginia, partly in an effort to kill the legislation, added sex as a
category deserving protection under Title VII. This provision against sex
discrimination failed to stall the entire bill as Smith hoped, and when Lyndon Johnson
signed the Act into law on July 2,1964, Title VII prevented employers from
discriminating on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin."54
At first, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) refused to
take complaints of gender discrimination seriously. One male on the commission noted,
"There are people on this commission who think that no man should be required to have
a male secretaryand I am one of them." The EEOC also did nothing to change the
protective labor laws found in many states. State laws prohibited women from lifting
heavy objects on the job, working in places of "immoral conditions," or holding
industrial jobs such as a metal molder.55 These laws allowed employees to refuse to
hire women for a broad range of jobs.
Rosalinda Ratajczak to Charles E. Young, February 3, 1969, Wilson 764, Box 6.
"The Fifty-One Per Cent: Where Are They?" Daily Bruin, April 16, 1971, 16; "Report of the
Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women at UCLA," June 30, 1972, Wilson 764, Box 6.
4
Paul Seabury, "HEW and the Universities," in Reverse Discrimination, 97.
55
Anderson, The Pursuit ofFairness, 101.

53

198
Outraged at the unwillingness of the EEOC to take the provision against sex
discrimination seriously, powerful women such as Mary Eastwood of the Justice
Department and Pauli Murray, a black professor of law at Yale University, began to
take aim against what they called "Jane Crow." Eastwood, Murray, and Betty Friedan,
among others, soon formed the National Organization for Women (NOW), to
coordinate the fight for women's equality. This lobbying paid off when, in 1967,
President Johnson signed executive order 11375, adding sex discrimination to his earlier
1965 order. Thus, when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) in
the early 1970s demanded universities submit affirmative action plans, these plans
included provisions for both women and minorities.56
As late as 1971, UCLA's affirmative action plan had "no recommendations
involving women which would ensure a vigorous recruitment and employment
program."57 In 1972, this changed when, under pressure from HEW, the UC system
issued an edict that female faculty had to be given parity in hiring efforts. "Very
quickly, programs to increase the supply of underrepresented minority [faculty]," CZ
Wilson remembered, "became 'women and minority recruitment efforts.'"

After

1972, any mention of the goals of the FDP invariably now included women. For
example, in a memo to his immediate supervisor, Executive Vice Chancellor David
Saxon, Wilson urged UCLA to become more aggressive in competing "for women and
minority faculty on the open market."59 The FDP served as another example of an
institutional structure developed initially to hire minority candidates that quickly
expanded to include women. While UCLA would have eventually developed
recruitment programs aimed primarily at hiring women, the institutional space created a
few years earlier aimed at racial minorities facilitated that process.
Numerous scholars who went on to have accomplished careers got their start in
the FDP. The second half of this chapter focuses on three particularly successful FDP
members, Clayborne Carson, Molefi Asante, and Angela Davis. Their stories provide a
56

Ibid., 101-102.
"The Fifty-One Per Cent: Where Are They?" Daily Bruin, April 16, 1971, 16.
58
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, chapter 8, 39.
59
CZ. Wilson to Dave Saxon, April 4, 1972, Wilson 764, Box 6.
57

window into the tensions and the accomplishments of the FDP. In particular, these
stories demonstrate the highly competitive marketplace for minority scholars in the
early 1970s and the difficulty UCLA faced in retaining minority faculty members.
They also reveal the competing demands placed on minority faculty by various
stakeholders including faculty, minority students, the ethnic studies centers, and the
administration. Black scholars struggled to navigate the dual demands of being black
on a white campus and being a productive scholar.
The political beliefs and activism of Angela Davis, one of the first participants
in the FDP, caused the program to undergo unwanted scrutiny from the UC regents and
the UC system. Donald Kalish, the politically liberal chair of the Department of
Philosophy at UCLA, hired Davis as an Acting Assistant Professor in the spring of
1969. Since she had yet to complete her dissertation, she was hired under the auspices
of the FDP, with the philosophy department providing the full-time position and the
FDP supplying a two-ninths summer stipend.60 In a well-publicized story, the regents,
citing Davis's open affiliation with the Communist Party, used a 1949 Cold War rule to
fire her. A protracted public battle between the regents and UCLA ended only when
Davis was arrested on weapons charges in the famous Soledad Brothers prison breakout case the following summer.61
The very contentious and public controversy surrounding Angela Davis put the
nascent FDP in an uncomfortable spotlight. UC regents questioned the use of FDP
funds for Angela Davis and suggested that the program had misplaced priorities. The
UC system's General Counsel once again raised the issue that the FDP was in violation
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and worried that the program created bad publicity for
the University of California. For conservatives, Davis served as a symbol of everything
that was wrong with America in the late 1960sher affiliation with the Communist
Party, her membership in the Black Panther Party, and her outspokenness against
systems of oppression. By hiring Angela Davis, UCLA made it easy for conservatives
to attack the FDP as a program that sought to infiltrate UCLA with radical leftists.
60
61

Full-time faculty positions are called full-time equivalents or FTEs.

"The Regents' Road to Ruin: A Chronology of the Angela Davis Affair," Wilson 764, Box 1.

200
Davis also served as an object lesson for recently elected Governor Reagan. His stance
against Davis demonstrated that he would use a heavy hand in dealing with radicals he
believed were destroying California's social fabric. Davis's arrest, making the
controversy over her firing moot, was a fortuitous development for the FDP. It is a
tribute to UCLA's commitment to the program that the FDP emerged from the Angela
Davis conflict relatively unscathed.62
The case of Angela Davis also raised the question of whether new minority
faculty at UCLA were truly qualified, or simply the beneficiaries of misguided policies
implemented by administrators who were suffering from liberal guilt and had
succumbed to pressure from radical student protestors. The regents initially fired Davis
for her admitted membership in the Communist Party. When the Superior Court ruled
that political affiliation with the Communist Party could not disqualify Davis for
employment at UCLA, the regents had to develop a new rationale for firing Davis. In
the maelstrom of public criticism, Davis publicly stated that the U.S.'s endemic racism
made the very notion of academic freedom an empty concept. The regents latched on to
these public statements where Davis expressed skepticism about the value of academic
freedom as to why she was unfit to teach. They argued that since Davis was against the
very idea of academic freedom, she could not teach in an American classroom where
the very foundation of public education was a commitment to academic freedom.63
Even Chancellor Young, who, with the support of the faculty, refused to fire Davis on
the grounds that the regents did not have that power, questioned her qualifications as a
teacher and a scholar. In a 2002 oral interview, he remembered Davis "as a mediocre
scholar and a mediocre lecturer and a mediocre person as far as I could tell."64
Outside of her radical politics and her lack of a Ph.D., Davis was more than
qualified to teach at UCLA. After graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis
University with a degree in French Literature, she studied in Frankfurt, Germany, under
bZ

Donald Reidhaar to C.Z. Wilson, July 20, 1970, Wilson 764, Box 7.
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Bulletin (Autumn 1971): 387-88, Wilson 764,
Box 4.
64
Charles E. Young, interview by James V. Mink and Dale E. Treleven, UCLA Oral History Program,
(University of California, 2002), v. 1, 174.
63

the tutelage of Theodor Adomo. She matriculated to the University of California at San
Diego to study under Herbert Marcuse, where she passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams in
philosophy.65 Still these concrete accomplishments did not stop the regents, Reagan,
and even Young from disparaging her qualifications as a teacher and scholar. Even
many members of the faculty, while supporting the principle of academic freedom,
believed her public statements and political activities made her a poor fit as a faculty
member at UCLA. Young, viewed by many as too liberal, saw Davis' critique of the
university as childish and counter-productive. This disparagement of Davis revealed
the limits of liberalism in regards to race in the black power era. Davis's radicalism
clearly crossed the boundaries of what many viewed as acceptable beliefs and action.
Chancellor Young respected black students' critique that UCLA had too long excluded
minorities from the faculty, student body, and curriculum. But Young and the regents
believed Davis went too far when critiquing the very notion of academic freedom. It
was not Davis's resume that made her unfit to teach at UCLA, but her political beliefs
and activities. To many liberals, Davis crossed the fine line between reform and
revolution.66
Clayborne Carson's appointment at UCLA, while less controversial than
Davis's, was still highly contested. Born in Buffalo at the end of World War II, Carson
moved west with his family to Los Alamos, New Mexico. There his father found work
as a security guard at the National Laboratory, joining the thousands of Americans who
found jobs in the emerging military-industrial state in the West. The black community
in Los Alamos was small and insular and, when the civil rights movement began
making national headlines, he longed to become involved with a broader black
community. "I had this really strong curiosity about the black world, because in Los
Alamos the black world was a very few families," he later recounted. As a freshman at
the University of New Mexico, he turned that curiosity into action when he participated
in the 1963 March on Washington. Two years later he transferred to UCLA. In Los
65

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Bulletin (Autumn 1971): 384-85, Wilson 764,
Box 4. For more on Davis's relationship with Marcuse, see Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An
Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974).
66
For another discussion on the limits of respectable political action see Chapter Two.

202
Angeles, his activism led to journalism when he began writing for the Los Angeles Free
Press, one of the first and most influential underground newspapers of the 1960s.

As

an undergraduate at UCLA, Carson's "burgeoning off-campus curriculum" included

joining the Nonviolent Action Group, serving as co-chair of the 1966 California
Conference on Power and Politics, and participating in Harambee-led vigils on UCLA's
Bruin walk.68
Upon graduating, Carson traveled through Europe and North Africa to avoid the
draft, but returned when his traveling companion, Susan Beyer, was diagnosed with
diabetes. Finding work as a computer programmer, Carson decided to audit professor
Gary Nash's course on U.S. race relations.69 "As one of the small number of black
college graduates on campus," Carson later remembered, he was "soon recruited by
Nash to be an informal teaching assistant, leading a section of his course devoted to
black political thought." This experience convinced Carson that graduate school might
allow him to transform his interest in the civil rights movement into a vocation. In
1969, he entered UCLA's graduate program in American history.
His time as a graduate student was one for the record books. In the fall of 1970,
having completed only three quarters of graduate study, the Department of History
considered hiring Carson as an acting assistant professor under the auspices of the FDP.
As a FDP minority scholar, the decision to hire Carson was more complicated than
many typical faculty hires. Different stakeholdersblack students, the history
department, the Center for Afro-American Studies, and C.Z. Wilson's Office of
Academic Programall had different visions of why Carson should be hired and what
he should accomplish at UCLA. These competing job expectations also meant that,
after he was hired, Carson would have to juggle more roles than the typical professor.
Administrators at UCLA understood that black students needed to have some
ownership over new minority hires. The history department, facing pressure from black
Diane Manuel, "A Sudden Call: Profile, Clayborne Carson," Stanford Magazine, May/June 1996,
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/stanfordtoday/ed/9605/9605car01.html.
68
Carson, "A Scholar in Struggle," 297-98.
69
First offered in 1968, Gary Nash created the class "Racial Attitudes in America," when challenged by
fellow movement participants tofightracism at your work. See Chapter Three for more information.

203
students after the department decided to deny Ronald Takaki tenure, was scrambling to
hire a new professor capable of teaching black history. To make certain any new hires
would be acceptable to black students, the department formed an ad hoc committee,
comprised of representatives from the Black Graduate Students Association, the history
department, and the Student Council. This committee met with Carson in the fall of
1970. After much debate, the committee decided to support, but "with some
reservations," his appointment. Their main concern was Carson's lack of knowledge
about Afro-American history before 1900. To solve this gap of knowledge, they
suggested the department should hire another scholar who studied this period.
Interestingly, the committee made no mention of Carson's political beliefs. Perhaps this
was because they were satisfied by Carson's activist past, but overall, the committee
was most interested in Carson's potential as a scholar. They requested that if Carson
were hired, that he be given ample time to finish his dissertation. "We do not intend to
see him bogged down with teaching responsibilities, committee assignments,
examinations to take, a dissertation to write, and students lined up outside his door, only
to be turned down for a permanent appointment when reviewed for evaluation," wrote
the students. The committee's primary concern was that Carson could become a
successful scholar and full-time faculty member.70
C.Z. Wilson had a slightly different set of expectations for Carson. Despite
UCLA's efforts to increase its minority faculty, Wilson saw the results as highly
disappointing. Understanding that the conditions that spawned efforts such as the FDP
would not last forever, Wilson ramped up his efforts to recruit more minority faculty.
In the case of Carson, Wilson promoted his hiring by offering the history department an
extra FTE for a period of three years. This extra faculty slot was offered with the
expectation that, if Carson adequately performed his duties as an assistant professor, he
would be hired as a permanent faculty member. Beyond his contributions to the history
department, Wilson had a second set of duties in mind for Carson. The newly created
Center for Afro-American Studies desperately needed more professors to support its

Letter to Robert Wohl, December 15, 1970, Wilson 764, Box 1.

programs. In offering a FTE position to the history department, Wilson made it clear
that the appointment was contingent on Carson's "active participation in the AfroAmerican Studies Center."
The history department warmly welcomed Carson to the faculty ranks. After
Ron Takaki's abrupt departure, they desperately needed someone capable of teaching
black history. But they were unwilling to guarantee that his position would eventually
become permanent. Writing to Wilson, Robert Wohl, the department chairman,
emphasized that "Mr. Carson's position cannot be conceived of as anything more than
temporary." At the time of Carson's hiring, the entire University of California system
faced a series of major budget cuts. If the history department lost a faculty position as a
result of those cuts, Wohl wanted the department to have full control over "how that
reduction would be absorbed."72 Many in the history department were suspicious that
extra FTEs were really poisoned gifts. Gary Nash, a UCLA history professor, later
remembered that many in the history department resisted such hires, believing that
"every time you accept an institutional FTE, when someone retires or someone moves
on that one will disappear."73
The final set of expectations placed on the shoulders of Clayborne Carson came
from the Center for Afro-American Studies. When the ethnic studies centers first
opened at UCLA, they struggled to attract faculty willing to take an active role in the
centers. Minority faculty were needed to sit on advisory boards, teach classes, organize
and participate in center events, act as advisors to black student groups, and mentor the
hundreds of recently admitted black students who were adjusting to life at UCLA.
Without the participation of FDP faculty, the centers could not have functioned.
To Trevor Chandler, a black professor at the University of Washington, these
multiple demands meant black professors owed allegiance to two worlds. Many new
professors were hired on the basis of a "White vita," argued Chandler. But few of these
professors, "were told that they were being hired to satisfy Federal guidelines, to placate

C.Z. Wilson to Robert Wohl, April 6, 1971, Wilson 764, Box 1.

Robert Wohl to John Burke, April 27, 1971, Wilson 764, Box 1.
Gary Nash, author interview, Los Angeles, CA, July 6, 2006.

Black students, to relieve tense situations existing on campus, to extend the existing
curriculum by developing new courses dealing with the Black experience, or to be the
department's Black faculty in residence." Being black in the world of white academia
created almost impossible working conditions. Chandler concluded that most faculty
ended up serving "both masters badly, or are forced to choose one over the other, or yet
in the rare case, manage to serve both well."74 These onerous expectations meant that
many newly hired black faculty failed to compile the publishing record needed for
promotion.
In the fall of 1971, after only two years in graduate school, Carson began his
duties as an acting assistant professor in the history department. In spite of his relative
inexperience as a historian, and the weight of high expectations, Carson's performance
was an unqualified success. During his first quarter, Carson taught two new seminars,
the first on slave rebellions and the second on post-1965 black society. Without Carson,
these much needed courses on race and black history would not have been offered.75
While Carson's progress on his dissertation went slower than planned, he
utilized his summer stipend and reduced teaching load to continue his research on the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This research provided the foundation
for the eventual publication of his award-winning book on SNCC.76 Remarkably, he
also delivered two academic papers at professional conferences on topics not directly
related to his dissertation. In addition, in conjunction with the Center for AfroAmerican Studies, he participated in Black Culture Week and acted as informal advisor
to a number of black campus groups. Carson, when asked by Wilson to judge his
experience as an acting assistant professor, had few complaints. He told Wilson that, in
general, he was "very satisfied with the Faculty Development Program."77
Unfortunately for UCLA, like so many other outstanding minority scholars in
the early 1970s, Carson's record of achievement made him a prime recruiting target for
74

Trevor Chandler, "Minority Faculty Promotion and Tenure," WU Affirmative Action, 18-19, Box 6,
University of Washington Archives.
75
Clay Carson to C.Z. Wilson, July 18, 1972, Wilson 764, Box 1.
76
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
77
Clay Carson to C.Z. Wilson, May 9, 1973, Wilson 764, Box 1.

206
other universities. After only three years as part of the FDP, Stanford began a
successful courtship of Carson that ended in his leaving UCLA. At Stanford he became
one of the preeminent historians of African American history. His rise to national
prominence was greatly aided when, in 1985, he was named Editor and Director of the
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project. Still active at Stanford, Carson's distinguished
record of achievement includes authoring and editing more than a dozen books and
collaborating with a San Francisco design group to create the winning proposal for a
national King memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. He remains in constant
demand as a speaker and advisor on the civil rights era.78
Whether Carson would have forged an equally successful academic career
without the FDP cannot be known. We do know, however, that the FDP provided the
funding used to first hire Carson and provided extra funding for a course release so
Carson could finish his dissertation. We also know that pressure from the broader civil
rights movement, coupled with black student protest, created an atmosphere at UCLA
where hiring and developing minority scholars became an institutional priority. As
Carson later noted, he entered UCLA as "part of a pioneering class of black students
who were suddenly deemed more academically qualified as a result of the nationwide
black rebellions following King's assassination."

The FDP, the individual efforts of

departments, and the belief that minority scholars improved the quality of university
education all contributed to bringing and retaining minority faculty to UCLA. And, as
the stories of Carson and Arthur Smith, later known as Molefi Asante, demonstrate, the
demand for minority faculty was so great that retaining them proved exceedingly
difficult.
Born as one of sixteen children during World War II in rural Georgia, Arthur
Smith attended college in Texas and Oklahoma, earning his degree in speech from
Oklahoma Christian College. Upon graduating, he moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to
enter a Master's program at Pepperdine University. One year later, Smith entered
UCLA as a Ph.D. student in speech. As graduate student at UCLA, Smith heard
Manuel, "A Sudden Call."
Carson, "A Scholar in Struggle," 300.

207
Maulana Karenga, a former UCLA student, speak on campus about his recently
developed ideas on black cultural nationalism. Karenga believed that African
Americans were suffering a cultural crisis. Too long a footnote of white European
history and culture, Karenga argued, African Americans needed to reclaim their African
heritage by embracing a cultural philosophy rooted in African values and traditions.
Smith later recalled Karenga's message "rang true," and inspired Smith to incorporate
Of)

black cultural nationalism in his analysis of communication theory.

Smith's

dissertation, completed in 1968, hinted at his interest in the rhetoric of the black power
movement that was flourishing in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Smith's subject,
Samuel Adams, a dead white male, was by no means radical. But his topic, Adams'
rhetoric of revolution, foreshadowed that his research would soon focus on the new
urban black rhetoric of power and revolution.81
Although Arthur Smith was still a student at UCLA during C.Z. Wilson's first
year at UCLA, they apparently did not meet until the summer of 1968. Wilson met
Smith while at a conference at Purdue University, where Smith was embarking on his
academic career. The two men became friends and that fall occasionally corresponded
about the changes taking place in higher education in regards to minorities. After
Chancellor Young announced the creation of the Faculty Development Program,
Wilson thought UCLA should pursue hiring Smith.82
In December 1968, Wilson approached the department chair of the speech
department, Waldo Phelps, about the possibility of hiring Smith. Wilson presented
Smith as a successful local product. "I find it very difficult to accept the fact that a
young man with Dr. Smith's potential has gotten away from us when we are so
seriously short of able Black faculty," wrote Wilson. Continuing his sales pitch, Wilson
noted that Smith's "career is zooming," and that he had already found a publisher for
his book on the rhetoric of the black revolution. Wilson concluded the letter by
80

Molefi Kete Asante, interview by Diane D. Turner, "An Oral History Interview: Molefi Kete Asante,"
Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 6 (2002): 717.
81
Arthur Lee Smith, "Samuel Adams' Agitational Rhetoric of Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1968).
Smith did an outside field in Colonial History with Gary Nash, who also served on his doctoral
committee.
82
Charles Z. Wilson to Waldo Phelps, December 16,1968, Wilson 764, Box 3.

pledging the financial support of the FDP program if Phelps were to offer Smith a
83

position.
While Wilson tried to convince the speech department to hire Smith, UCLA
tried to convince Smith to return to Los Angeles. At the end of November, Stephen
Arditti, the Assistant Dean of Students, bragged to Smith about UCLA's transformation
into a campus that welcomed minorities. The Center for Afro-American Studies and the
High Potential Program, a minority student recruitment program, made UCLA "a very
exciting place." Arditti's second selling point was the weather. A traditional
inducement for Mid-Westerners moving to Southern California, Arditti could not resist
sounding smug comparing the winter weather in Los Angeles to Indiana. "Did you say
the temperature there is 28?" he queried Smith. "As I write this the sun is shining
brightly, a mild breeze is blowing, and there is no smog. Temperature: about 75."
Sounding like a typical western booster, Arditti urged Smith to return to UCLA since
"things are booming and [there are] opportunities about for someone of your talents."84
UCLA's courtship of Smith ended when he accepted a position in the speech
department in the spring of 1969. After signing the contract, Smith wrote a quick note
to Wilson thanking him for his support and adding that he was "really excited about
coming back to UCLA."85
Without the FDP, Smith's homecoming might never have happened. The FDP,
by offering Smith three years of guaranteed summer funding, allowed UCLA to make
Smith a competitive job offer. Given the high demand for Smith's services, the extra
funding proved to be a necessary bargaining chip to bring Smith to UCLA.
The summer stipends offered by the FDP served a second purpose. They gave
newly hired minority faculty much needed time and resources, allowing them to focus
on their own research and writing. Wilson understood that for minority scholars to gain
credibility in the academy they had to publish. Typically too busy preparing new
courses and adjusting to life in academia, new hires found it nearly impossible to work

Stephen A. Arditti to Arthur L. Smith, November 26, 1968, Wilson 764, Box 6.
Arthur Smith to C.Z. Wilson, April 24, 1969, Wilson 764, Box 3

209
on their own research. The FDP provided a summer stipend, along with a course load
reduction, to rectify this problem. Upon welcoming Smith to UCLA, Wilson
remembered advising Smith that publishing was the key to success in academia. "I
said, 'Art, we want you to make it big [and] publishing is the name of the game you
know.'"86 Perhaps taking this message to heart, Smith's research productivity at UCLA
was simply astounding. He published or edited five monographs as well as a number of
book chapters, journal and newspaper articles, and book reviews, all while editing the
nascent Journal of Black Studies.
The FDP's extra financial support was matched with extra oversight from C.Z.
Wilson's office. Members of the FDP submitted an annual report listing their research
accomplishments and plans for future research. Wilson, writing to a member of the
FDP program, justified these annual reports as a way to hold both minority faculty and
departments accountable. "I know of no other way to get departments to become active
in helping Black faculty move toward becoming regular and permanent members of the
UCLA faculty."87
Bringing Smith to UCLA proved easier than keeping him there. By 1970, over
one thousand colleges and universities nationwide, responding to demands to create
black studies programs and more minority faculty positions, were hiring African
American faculty.88 A rare imbalance in academic supply and demand, there were
hundreds more tenure-track faculty positions than there were black academics with
Ph.D.s to fill them. Smith, with his extensive publication record, was perhaps in greater
demand than other black faculty, and he did not hesitate to use this to his advantage.
While at UCLA, Smith constantly pursued other job offers and used those offers to
negotiate for a larger salary and better working conditions.
After only one quarter of teaching at UCLA, Smith approached his department
chair about a raise. Noting his publishing record, his editorship of the Journal of Black
Studies, and a competitive offer from SUNY, Binghamton, Smith asked for a promotion
Wilson, Notes and Reflections, chapter 8, 47.
Charles Z. Wilson to Robert Singleton, March 18, 1970, Wilson 764, Box 3.
Robert Allen, "Politics of the Attack on Black Studies," Black Scholar 6 (September 1974): 3.

210
from Assistant Professor II to Assistant Professor IV, along with a $3,500 dollar raise.
Replying to this request, Waldo Phelps praised Smith as "a hard worker and potentially
a real asset to the department." However, Phelps noted, Smith had entered UCLA
earning more than the typical assistant professor. Combined with his FDP stipend that
paid him $2,555 each summer, Smith already earned more than many, more senior,
members of the speech department. Given this already generous salary, Phelps believed
a $700 raise accompanied by acceleration in rank to Assistant Professor III would be a
very reasonable compromise. A better offer would, "create serious morale problems
throughout the Department." If Smith was not satisfied with this offer, Phelps stated,
"then we prefer to do without his services."
Given Smith's involvement in the FDP, C.Z. Wilson quickly became involved in
the dispute. In early February he wrote his boss, Vice Chancellor David Saxon, urging
Saxon to meet Smith's demands. Smith symbolized UCLA's progress in hiring
minorities, Wilson argued, and to lose him to another school would underscore UCLA's
lack of commitment to the FDP. "We cannot afford, under any circumstances," wrote
Wilson, "to allow the word to get out that a young man of his capabilities, who happens
to be Black, is being denied a promotion in his department. This would kill the
credibility that our Faculty Development Program and the whole ethnic program thrust
can have on campus." While conceding that Smith's salary demands placed him well
above his peers, he argued that the market could sometimes dictate such salary
discrepancies. Smith was "one of the most widely-sought-after assistant professors" in
the nation, Wilson noted, and the market should serve as a test of his worth. "If he can
get $18,000 at SUNY, Binghamton, he should be worth at least $15,000 to us."90
David Saxon, perhaps persuaded by Wilson, negotiated a compromise that, for
the time being, kept Smith at UCLA. As Phelps had offered, Smith's base salary was
raised to $12,200. The FDP also offered Smith additional funds, increasing his summer
support from $2,555 to $3,832, an unprecedented level of support. This raised his total
salary to over $16,000, an offer reasonably competitive with that tendered by SUNY,
Waldo Phelps to Dean Philip Levine, January 28, 1970, Wilson 764, Box 3.
Charles Z. Wilson to David S. Saxon, February 4, 1970, Wilson 764, Box 3.

211
Binghamton. Without the advocacy of C.Z. Wilson and the additional funding provided
by the FDP, Smith probably would have left UCLA.91
The highly competitive marketplace for minority scholars made it increasingly
difficult for UCLA to retain minority faculty. Only six months after this initial salary
dispute was resolved, Smith again asked the speech department for a substantial raise.
This time, instead of a single offer from another school, Smith had been offered, or was
negotiating, jobs with five outside institutions, including the University of Denver, the
University of Michigan, and Howard University. Smith had become UCLA's director
of the Center for Afro-American Studies that fall, making him even more marketable.
For instance, Michigan offered him the directorship of the Center for Africana
Research. In 1970, hundreds of schools nationwide were looking for directors for their
recently opened African and Afro-American Studies programsSmith could virtually
choose where he wanted to work. Despite Wilson's advocacy, Smith joined Carson in
leaving UCLA. Carson left for Stanford in 1974, and Smith left for SUNY Buffalo in
1973.
The FDP was not the only initiative that brought minority faculty to UCLA.
Student pressure, administrative and faculty support, and the concerted efforts of
individual departments all created a sea change in the culture at UCLA in regards to
racial minorities. This new culture was perhaps best exemplified by William Allen, the
economics chair who engaged in the rancorous public feud with the BSU in the fall of
1968. Allen, while publicly proclaiming that the economics department would only hire
scholars possessing the strongest traditional qualifications, privately pursued adding a
minority professor to the department.
Long after the public conflict between Allen and the BSU had abated, Allen
continued to support the recruiting standards he outlined in his open letters to the BSU.
In a memo sent to Chancellor Young, Allen reiterated that the economics department
would only seek to hire the available candidates, "entirely regardless of skin
pigmentation." In practice, Allen acknowledged, this meant it was highly unlikely the

91

Ibid.

212
department would soon hire a black faculty member. Allen argued that this lack of
qualified minority candidates was not his concern. In fact, it would be presumptuous of
him to take "credit for the evident general absence of black economists in the personnel
market." Critics who claimed this policy was racist, Allen continued, were ignorant.
"Men of sense and dispassion" understood the process was both fair and just.
While he publicly pronounced the economics department would not take any
steps whatsoever to recruit minority faculty, privately he began working on bringing an
African American scholar to UCLA. On his own initiative, he contacted an economist
working at Cornell about coming to UCLA. Thomas Sowell, with a recent Ph.D. from
the University of Chicago, was among a handful of minority economists with elite
credentials. Sowell was a perfect fit for the UCLA's economics department. The
department had a large contingent of University of Chicago graduates who Sowell
either knew personally or indirectly. Sowell was also a conservative who watched with
mounting disdain the changes taking place in the academy. At Cornell, he had become
increasingly frustrated with black students who thought getting a traditional education
was not relevant. He also staunchly opposed lower admittance standards for minorities.
From his view, students admitted under lower standards could not handle the rigors of
academic life at Cornell. While on the job market in 1968, Sowell's first consideration
of any job was the racial attitude on campus. He wanted to know if he was, "expected
to be the guru in residence to the black students," or if he was being hired as an
economist. Sowell had no interest in doing work outside of his field, such as
establishing a special minority program or even tutoring black students.
Allen's courtship of Sowell paid partial dividends when Sowell agreed to spend
the summer of 1969 teaching at UCLA. C.Z. Wilson, upon learning that the
appointment was only for the summer, attended an economics department meeting
where he critiqued Allen for not making a competitive offer to Sowell. Allen,
responding to this critique, sent Wilson a strongly worded memo defending his actions.

William R. Allen, "Recruiting and the Department of Economics," Chicano Studies Research Center,
Administrative Files, Box History/Interns, UCLA University Archives.
93
Thomas Sowell, A Personal Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 206.

213
The courtship of Sowell, Allen argued, was entirely the initiative of the economics
department. In fact, not a single student, administrator, or faculty member provided, "a
useful lead in our search for appropriate 'minority' faculty." Rather than helping the
department find appropriate candidates, he argued that black students had actually
hindered the department's efforts to hire a minority scholar. He bluntly told Wilson that
the "failure to get Sowell here for the entire year is properly imputed to the physical
attack on this department last November and to militant black students on this campus."
As mentioned above, Sowell wanted to work at a school where he could function only
as a scholar, without advising black students or assisting a black studies program.
Before agreeing to work at UCLA, Sowell wanted the department's reassurance that he
was being hired only as an economist. Therefore, Allen was correct in arguing that
black students could not act as an inducement in bringing Sowell to UCLA. But his
claim that they somehow hindered Sowell's hiring seems dubious. The department had
shown, in a very public manner, its willingness to oppose black radicals, a stance that
certainly would have appealed to Sowell.94
After blaming black students for the economics department's failure to hire a
minority scholar, Allen made an interesting confession. The department, Allen wrote,
would continue to try and fill the position for a scholar with a specialty in the history of
theory. But instead of trying to hire what they considered to be the most qualified
candidate, they would most likely only hire a minority. "Sowell does appear on purely
professional grounds" to be completely qualified, explained Allen, and "this is
uncompromisingly a necessary condition to be satisfied." "But, in honesty," he
continued, "I should have to assign a probability barely greater than zero to our
seriously considering for a tenured position a non-'minority' scholar with primary
specialty in the History of Theory." This represented a notable change from Allen's
earlier stance on hiring minority scholars. In his public feud with the BSU, Allen
vociferously maintained the department would only hire the best available scholar; if
limited access to top graduate programs guaranteed this best available scholar was

William R. Allen to C.Z. Wilson, May 23, 1969, Wilson 764, Box 6.

214
white, that was not his problem. Only six months later, he conceded to Wilson that
while the department planned to only hire scholars of the highest quality, they would no
longer reduce race to mere skin pigmentation. The department would go out of its way
to hire a minority scholar.95
Skeptics might argue that this monumental change in the department's stance on
hiring was lessened because Sowell was exceedingly qualified for the position and his
conservative credentials made him a perfect fit for the department. While this is true,
the change from insisting on a color-blind hiring process to taking positive action to add
a minority scholar to their departmentalbeit someone that is highly qualified and
scornful of black power politicswas remarkable. Student pressure, administrative and
faculty support, and an acknowledgement that universities needed to be more diverse,
all influenced even the most recalcitrant departments to take affirmative action to hire
minority scholars.
The number of black professors at white universities in the late 1960s and early
1970s increased exponentially. Minority recruitment programs, a general commitment
by faculty and administrators, and in some cases pressure from the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) transformed faculty at colleges and universities
across the nation. In 1965, despite some inroads to end Jim Crow at elite universities,
black faculty had a negligible presence at these schools, particularly in the arts and
sciences. In many cases, universities had no black faculty members until the late
1960s.96 A few years later, by the mid-1970s, over 2 percent of faculty members at
these universities were black.97 This increase occurred in spite of the paltry numbers of
blacks holding doctorates.
At UCLA, the creation of the FDP was by no means certain. Critics charged the
program promoted reverse racism and conservative politicians viewed the program as
For example, the first black faculty members at the University of Missouri, Columbia were hired in
1969 as a result of pressures levied by a recently formed militant black student group. See Robert E.
Weems, Jr., "The Incorporation of Black Faculty at Predominantly White Institutions: A Historical and
Contemporary Perspective," Journal ofBlack Studies 34 (2003): 102.
97
Robin Wilson, The Chronicle ofHigher Education 48, no. 44 (July 12, 2002): A. 11.

215
another avenue to bring more radicals to the university. To overcome these slings and
arrows, the FDP depended on the courage of Chancellor Young and other
administrators willing to take a political risk.
The push to hire minority faculty also led to a radical transformation in the
faculty hiring process at universities. What once was an old boys network, heavily
reliant on word of mouth and personal recommendations, became a more standardized
and transparent process. Stemming in part from voluntary efforts to increase minority
faculty and in part to meet guidelines set by HEW, schools began to publicly advertise
positions, keep statistics on who they interviewed, and assign a diverse search
committee to oversee the process.
Unfortunately, since the 1970s, the number of black faculty members has
stagnated. In 2003, according to Department of Education statistics, blacks constituted
around 5.2 percent of total faculty members nationwide, including Historically Black
Colleges and Universities.98 At historically white universities the number is much
lowerabout 2.3 percent." These numbers are particularly low in the sciences. In the
fields of chemistry, physics, and computer science at twenty-two top universities in
1995, only twelve out of 1,921 faculty members were blackjust 0.6 percent.100 These
distressing statistics reveal that despite university minority hiring efforts, the racial
composition of faculty does not remotely resemble the racial composition of the United
States. While much of this disparity is rightly attributed to larger societal inequalities,
particularly in primary and secondary education, the issue that Charles Young and C.Z.
Wilson facedhow to add more qualified minorities to UCLA's facultyis still faced
by college administrators today. At the same time, the very fact that these statistics

The actual numbers are out of 631,596 full-time faculty, 33,137 were black. U.S. Department of
Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2003 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data
System (IPEDS), Winter 2003-04. Found on the National Center for Education Statistics website,
http://nces.ed.gov.
99
Robin Wilson, A l l ; Robert Bruce Slater, "The Sunshine Factor: Freedom of Information Act Reveals
Black Faculty and Administrative Employment Statistics at Major U.S. Universities," The Journal of
Blacks in Higher Education 7 (Spring, 1995): 91-96. According to this study, in 1991 UCLA had 84 fulltime black professors2.8 percent of the 2,974 total faculty members.
100
Theodore Cross, "The Black Faculty Count at the Nation's Most Prestigious Universities," The
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 19 (Spring, 1998): 109-115.

exist is a victory of sortsuniversities were first forced to collect statistics on the race
of their employees in 1966 by the Equal Opportunity Employment Office.
Black faculty members hired in the late 1960s navigated exceedingly
challenging waters. They faced the burden of multiple expectations from their
departments, the administration, black students, and the black community. This tension
between producing research and serving the black community continues today.
Manning Marable, in the introduction of Dispatches from the Ebony Tower, argues that
black intellectual tradition has historically included descriptive and prescriptive
elements. "The purpose of black scholarship," writes Marable, "is more than the
restoration of identity and self-esteem: it is to use history and culture as tools through
which people interpret their collective experience, but for the purpose of transforming
their actual conditions and the totality of the society all around them."101 Black scholars
continue to face the pressure of producing scholarship that can transform the black
community.
Despite these continuing tensions, the rapid hiring of minority faculty in the late
1960s and early 1970s should not be viewed as a failure. During this period, a
generation of scholars entered the university who earlier would have been blocked at
the gates. Scholars such as Molefi Asante and Clayborne Carson produced a body of
research that has helped transform our understanding of African American history and
culture. As men and women who came of age in the 1960s, these scholars also brought
to the academy the belief that knowledge and higher education should empower the
black community. They imbued their teaching and research with the spirit of the
struggle for black liberation.
UCLA's faculty, in crafting a resolution in support of the FDP, carefully
balanced the principle that faculty hiring should be based solely on a candidate's
qualifications with the acknowledgement that minorities had, in the past, faced
discriminatory hiring practices and the belief that a diverse faculty would create a better
university. The University of Texas at Austin faced a similar dilemma when crafting a
Manning Marable, ed., Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African
American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 2.

217
minority student recruitment program. How UT responded to calls for affirmative
action is the subject of the following chapter.

218
Chapter Five: The Strange Career of Affirmative Action
at the University of Texas at Austin
In 1972, Texas Civil Liberties Union lawyer Brooks Holman filed a civil suit
against the University of Texas (UT) President Stephen Spurr. Holman, representing a
number of minority students and minority student groups as plaintiffs, alleged that UT's
non-discrimination policy, "by effectively maintaining a predominantly White student
body, denies them [minority students] the Equal Protection of the laws under the
Fourteenth Amendment." One plaintiff, Maria Ortega, argued that her substandard
public school education made it impossible for her to gain admittance to UT. She
instead attended El Centro Junior College. When she tried to matriculate to UT, she
could not transfer her credits, in part, because El Centro was a vocational school that
offered classes in typing and shorthand. Another plaintiff, Martin Jimenez, argued that
when UT had ended its minority admissions program, he had lost his scholarship. His
funding eliminated, Jimenez struggled to balance work and academics. The University
of Texas, the lawsuit concluded, was the centerpiece of Texas' separate but unequal
education system.1
This lawsuit represented the nadir of affirmative action at the University of
Texas. Three years earlier, in August 1969, the Board of Regents issued a ruling that
ended all affirmative action programs at the University. "Neither the faculty nor
students of any component institution shall solicit or recruit for admission to that
institution any person who cannot meet the usual academic requirements for admission
to that institution," the ruling authoritatively stated. The regents also affirmed that UT
would not discriminate in favor of any minority group. Any effort to open UT's doors
to minorities was "reverse discrimination" and would not be tolerated.
Affirmative action at UT between 1960 and 1980 played out as a grand drama in
five acts. In act one, black students, working together with white students and faculty,
1

Civil Action against Stephen Spurr, UT President's Office, 80-50, Box 51, Center for American History,
The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as UT President 80-50).
2
Almetris Duren with Louise Iscoe, Overcoming: A History ofBlack Integration at the University of
Texas at Austin (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1979), 20.

219
eliminated the last vestiges of segregation at UT in housing and collegiate athletics. In
act two, grassroots efforts by students and faculty led to the creation of small-scale
minority enrollment and recruitment programs. Minority student groups, in act three,
fought to expand these programs only to have the regents issue a ruling that all
affirmative action programs violated the idea of a color-blind university. Between 1969
and 1975, act four witnessed continued pressure from faculty, student minority groups,
and community leaders demanding that UT reverse this stance. These efforts met with
limited success, until they successfully lobbied the Department of Health, Education
and Welfare (HEW), to conduct a serious investigation into racial discrimination at UT.
Act five began with HEW issuing a report that commanded UT to take affirmative steps
to increase minority enrollment, and the gradual deployment of resources by UT to meet
that demand.
Unfortunately, this resolution did not last. The struggle over affirmative action
at UT was part of a broader national debate. In these debates, supporters cited past
discrimination to justify affirmative action. For instance, HEW issued guidelines where
universities "must take affirmative action to overcome the effects of prior
discrimination."3 Other supporters used the idea of diversity to support minority
recruitment programs. By exposing students to a wide array of ideologies and
viewpoints, the argument went, a more diverse student body would improve the overall
quality of education at colleges and universities.
"Past discrimination," I argue, failed to adequately describe the United States'
racial legacy and proved an inadequate justification to elicit a national commitment to
affirmative action. The unwillingness of even affirmative action supporters to take
responsibility for the nation's past allowed universities to implement inadequate
compensatory education programs. Partly to avoid undertaking a true national racial
reconstruction, a new narrative on race emerged in the 1970s. Jim Crow was an unjust
system, began the narrative, but the laws passed during the civil rights movement had
leveled the playing field and created a nearly color-blind society. This narrative made it
3

Dorothy D. Stuck to Dr. Lorene Rogers, February 21, 1974, "Minority Groups," vertical file, Center for
American History, The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as Minority Groups, VF).

220
virtually impossible for the University of Texas to overcome its racist past, and is a
primary reason why making higher education accessible to minorities is as relevant an
issue today as it was in the 1960s.

When the University of Texas opened its doors in 1883, the school barred blacks
from attending. At the end of Reconstruction, when Southern whites regained control
of Texas, the new legislature went about the business of creating a separate and unequal
system of public education. Over the next decade, the state opened seventeen public
four-year colleges for whites while restricting blacks to a single, inadequate public
institution, Prairie View A&M.
Segregated education for blacks was not planned surreptitiously behind closed
doors, but publicly and in the open. The Texas Constitution of 1876 formed a
segregated system of public education. "Separate schools shall be provided for the
white and colored children, and impartial provision shall be made for both," it
proclaimed. The legislature, worried some districts might be tempted to open integrated
schools, passed a law in 1884 to clarify the issue. "The children of the white and any
colored races," the law stated, "shall be taught in separate schools and in no case shall
any school consisting partly of white and partly of colored children receive any aid from
the public school fund." In other words, if a local school district decided to open
integrated schools, the state would deny those schools public funds. Segregated schools
were particularly separate but unequal when it came to higher education. For example,
of the 690,000 blacks who lived in Texas in 1914, only 129 were attending college.
Further, all of these students were undergraduatesthere was no public graduate
education for blacks until 1937.4
The gradual integration of UT began as a result of black activism. At a 1947
NAACP meeting in Houston, leader Lulu White asked for a volunteer to apply for
admission to UT law school. At the time, there was no law school for African
Americans in Texas and the NAACP wanted to file a test case to challenge the blatantly
Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in
Higher Education in Texas (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 11-15.

separate and unequal situation. After a long uncomfortable silence, Herman Sweatt, a
3 3-year-old mail carrier, answered the call and volunteered.
When UT President Theophilus Painter received Sweatt's application, he openly
admitted Sweatt was "duly qualified" for law school. But, instead of allowing him to
attend UT, the state hired law professors at UT to hold classes for Sweatt in the
basement of a building south of campus. These classes would count toward an eventual
law degree earned not at UT, but at the newly created Texas State University for
Negroes (TSUN). Founded in 1947, TSUN was to become the separate but equal
counterpart to UT, a way for the state to stave off the integration of higher education.5
When Texas denied Sweatt admittance to UT, Sweatt and the NAACP filed suit.
The Supreme Court heard arguments on the case in 1950. Texas, supported by briefs
from all the Southern States, argued that the newly created TSUN, coupled with the
offer to send blacks to law school in another state, provided Sweatt with an education
equal to that afforded whites. Furthermore, it was argued, if UT was forced to integrate,
this decision would certainly result in violence and social upheaval. A separate but
equal system, Texas concluded, was necessary "for peace, harmony and the general
welfare" of the South and the nation.6
The Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt's favor without overturning the doctrine of
separate but equal. "We cannot find substantial equality in the educational
opportunities offered white and Negro law students by the State," noted the majority
decision.7 Southern whites quickly reacted to the ruling, understanding that it might
end Jim Crow and lead to social equality and racial mixing. The Texarkana Klan, for
example, launched a very successful membership drive using the Sweatt decision as
their main recruitment tool. The governor of Georgia wrote that the decision was "a
dagger ready to be plunged into the very heart of Southern tradition."8

Shabazz, Advancing Democracy, 15, 67-69. See also Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender, eds.,
American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005: Documenting the National Discourse (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 437.
6
Shabazz, Advancing Democracy, 99.
7
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
8
Shabazz, Advancing Democracy, 106.

222
UT, however, decided to abide by the ruling and slowly admitted an increasingly
large number of black men and women to its professional programs. These students sat
in the same classrooms as whites and earned their degrees directly from UT. At the
same time, however, UT continued to refuse admission to students in fields that were
offered by TSUN.
Complete integration at UT followed closely on the heels of the 1954 Supreme
Court decision of Brown v Board of Education, which finally overturned the doctrine of
separate but equal. Unlike a majority of schools in the South who went out of their way
to avoid abiding by the decision, UT took the Brown decision as a signal to fully
integrate. In 1955, UT's Board of Regents announced the undergraduate entering class
of 1956 would include African Americans. That fall, 104 blacks entered UT, including
thirty freshman and nineteen transfer students. The battle to racially integrate UT was
won; the battle to make its resources fully available to minority students had only
begun.9
Residence halls and collegiate athletics were two areas where UT continued to
practice the principle of separate but equal well into the 1960s. Mixed-race residence
halls attacked the very heart of segregation. Whites understood that interracial
residence halls, even though they were not coeducational, could lead to miscegenation.
In particular, children born of a white mother and black father frightened southern
segregationists. Since Jim Crow was based on matrilineal heritage, these children, if
able to pass as white, could eventually ruin the South's race-based caste system. White
parents bristled at the idea of their son or daughter living in close proximity to a black
student.
Students and faculty took the lead in demanding the integration of housing at
UT as the nation entered the turbulent 1960s. In April 1961, the Student Assembly, in a
22-2 vote, passed a resolution enjoining the administration to integrate student housing.
The faculty followed by passing a similar resolution in May. Responding to this
pressure, the Board of Regents adopted a new statement on residential integration over

Duren, Overcoming, 4-5.

the summer. "Whether or not we agree with the decisions of the Supreme Court on
racial integration, we shall in good faith proceed [to integrate dormitories] and have
heretofore proceeded along this path with all deliberate speed."10 While publicly
promising "all deliberate speed," privately the regents took a slightly different position
on the issue. Regent Chairman Thornton Hardie asserted in an internal memo that
dormitories are "the homes of students," and as such, "students in their college homes
should be allowed congenial companions and not have forced upon them close
associates in their homes who would be distasteful to them and their parents." In other
words, the prejudice of the student body and community would govern when and if
dorms were integrated.11
This internal university policy became clear when students returned to campus
in the fall of 1962. At one white residence hall, Kinsolving Dormitory, student advisors
told residents that black women could not use the restrooms or drinking fountains and
forbade black men from visiting white female lounges. After black students picketed
Kinsolving dorm, the university confirmed that these rules were in fact university
policy. In a written statement issued on November 6, the administration declared that,
"The social and dining areas of the other women's residence halls and over night
privileges in these dormitories are not available to Negroes."12
This discriminatory housing policy ignited a storm of protest from students and
faculty. Three black students filed suit to abolish housing segregation and the faculty
passed a new resolution that insisted on "recognition by the University of the right of
any dormitory resident to invite a person to be a guest in the dormitory . . . without
regard to the race of the guest."13 Despite pressure from the faculty, the courts, and the
student body, the Board of Regents continued to support segregated residence halls until
1964, when it adopted a new policy on discrimination.
10

Ibid., 10.
Thornton Hardie to the Board of Regents, September 18, 1961, UT President's Office Records, 19071968, VF 32 B.b., Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. (Hereafter cited as
UT President, 1907-1968.)
12
Duren, Overcoming, 11.
13
Interim Report of the University Committee on Minorities, November 15, 1961, UT President 19071968, VF 32 B.b.
11

This new policy, inspired in part by the impending passage of the Civil Rights
Act, officially ended segregation in University housing. It also provided for
nondiscrimination in a number of other areas, including admissions and staff and
faculty employment. This policy was eventually codified in the Regents' Rules and
Regulations, Part Two, Chapter I, Section 5. The policy stated:
With respect to the admission and education of students, with respect
to the employment and promotion of teaching and nonteaching
personnel, with respect to student and faculty activities conducted on
premises owned or occupied by the University, and with respect to
student and faculty housing situated on premises owned or occupied
by the University, neither the University of Texas nor any of its
component institutions shall discriminate either in favor of or against
any person on account of his or her race, creed, or color.1
This policy, with its conservative language prohibiting discrimination both "in favor of
or against any person," stood at the center of the fight by blacks and other minority
students to access the power and privilege of UT. Over the next decade, administrators
and regents cited this policy to block any efforts they believed granted race-based
preferential treatment.
While housing was integrated in principle in 1964, actual desegregation took
much longer. In the late 1960s, a writer for The Daily Texan noted that while dorms
were technically integrated, many blacks lived in dorms without roommates, often
ghettoized by race. In an insight that recalls the regents' unofficial policy on race and
housing from 1960, the columnist noted, "From all I could gather, those who make the
room assignments assume 1) that Negro and white girls will not be compatible and 2)
that every white girl will object to living with a Negro.... It is assumed from the
beginning that no white girl in University housing would share her room with a
Negro."15 As with so many other Jim Crow policies that fell during the 1960s,
desegregation in principle was not the same as actual integration.

14
15

Duren, Overcoming, 14.

"Students 'Ghettoized' in Dorms," The Daily Texan, found in Duren (Almetris) Papers

225
With the official integration of housing, one final bastion of segregation at the
university remainedvarsity athletics. In 1960 not a single university in the Southwest
Athletic Conference, which included schools primarily from Texas and Arkansas, had
black athletes. While not opposed to integrating the conference, UT Austin was not
willing to lead the way in taking such a dramatic step. In 1961, the Chairman of the
Board of Regents wrote, "as a matter of practice, no team in the Southwest Conference
has Negroes. We think The University of Texas should not take unilateral action to
disregard this practice." He continued with the caveat that, "if a majority of Schools in
the Conference voted for such a change [admitting blacks] we would cheerfully go
along with the new practice."16 In other words, UT was not willing to face a storm of
criticism from other schools if they began recruiting black athletes.
Similar to the housing issue, the regents faced pressure from students and
faculty to change this policy. As part of the resolution condemning housing
segregation, the faculty urged the Athletic Council to negotiate the integration of the
Southwest Conference. The Student Assembly also passed a similar resolution. Facing
such pressure, on November 9,1963, the regents decided to allow what they called
"activity integration." By December, two freshmen blacks had joined the track team,
although it would take seven more years before the first black football player played
before the 65,000 fans at Memorial Stadium.17
The battles over college housing and athletic segregation provided a good
window into UT's stance on race in the mid-1960s. Especially when pressured by
students and faculty, the administration proved willing to slowly integrate UT. At the
same time, however, they were unwilling to accede full status to black students. This
pattern of progress, coupled with continued and pervasive racism, held true for UT as a
AR 81-112 Box 4A252, Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. (Hereafter cited
as Duren Papers).
16
"Interim Report of the University Committee on Minorities," November 15, 1961, UT President 19071968, VF 32 B.b.
17
Leon O'Neal, a linebacker from Killeen, in 1968 signed a letter of intent for a football scholarship, but
never played on the varsity team. One coach called him a "fine young man and a fine athlete."
"Longhorns Recruit First Negro Player," The Daily Texan, February 15, 1968, 5. It was not until 1970,
when Julius Whittier earned the first of his three letters in Texas Longhorn football, was the team truly
desegregated; Duren, Overcoming, 14.

226
whole. Between 1962 and 1964, the University hired its first black assistant professor,
students elected the first black to serve in the student assembly, and the Interfraternity
Council in principle allowed blacks to rush. Still, the number of black students on
campus remained woefully low, many black students faced subtle and blatant incidents
of racism on a daily basis, and the football team remained lily white.
Texas has a deep and rich history of African American protest. In particular, the
NAACP often took the lead in protesting Texas' separate but unequal education system.
When black students began arriving on campus in the 1950s, they carried on this
tradition by protesting the most obvious vestiges of UT's Jim Crow past, fighting to
integrate residence halls and collegiate athletics. By the mid-1960s, with UT at least
nominally integrated and the influence of black power on the rise, the goals of black
student protest shifted from integration to demands that UT serve the needs of black
students. These new demands were similar to those made by black students at hundreds
of universities around the nation in the late 1960s, and included increasing black
enrollment, establishing black studies classes, hiring black faculty and staff, and
funding black cultural activities. How UT responded to these demands revealed the
acceptable boundaries of efforts taken on behalf of minority students at a university two
parts conservative and one part liberal.
Efforts to secure a black history class at UT Austin began as early as 1967 when
representatives of the student group Negro Association for Progress (NAP) approached
the history department about offering such a class. The history department chair Robert
Divine essentially brushed aside this request by commenting that since students
exhibited no interest in taking a class on black history, there were no plans to offer one.
Besides, Divine added, black history was already covered in a number of survey
courses. He dismissed the demand that black students should be able to study their own
history as inconsequential, unless there was white student demand for such a course.
Black students found a more sympathetic audience when they approached William
Goetzmann, the director of American Studies at UT. Goetzmann, recognizing the
emergence of social history and black history as up-and-coming academic fields,

wanted his program to offer a black history course, but was having difficulties finding
an instructor.18
Although NAP's request for a black history class was a product of the emerging
black power movement, their tactics were neither militant nor confrontational. Their
requests, politely made, were designed to make themselves look respectable in the eyes
of the faculty and administration. This black power in moderation was in part a
reflection of the political proclivities of UT black students and in part an understanding
that a more radical approach would most likely be dismissed by the conservative history
department. One member of NAP described the attitude of black students as "serious
and determined, but nonmilitant."19
Organized in 1966, NAP's early protests focused on discrimination in the
athletic department. In spring of 1966, members of NAP converged on the office of
Darrell Royal, the athletic director and head football coach, demanding to know why
there were no black athletes at UT. Royal, in a statement released a few days later,
claimed that black athletes were not interested in UT, that there was not enough black
talent in Texas, and that they could not meet entrance requirements. Needless to say,
black students were not satisfied with Royal's reply, and in the fall of 1967 they
renewed their protests against UT athletics. NAP picketed home football games
holding signs that read, "Orange and white lack black."20 These protests brought no
immediate response from the University. As noted above, it would be three more years
before orange and white included black.
NAP's efforts also proved insufficient in the fight for a black history class.
Only when white students became involved in the campaign did the history department
act. NAP's campaign for a black history class seemed dead in the water until the
student newspaper, The Daily Texan, published a special supplement on race on
October 22, 1967, outlining UT's racist past and present. Using the momentum created
by the special supplement, black students circulated a petition in support of a black
18

Dean Banks, "The Course of Negro History," Duren Papers, Box 4A255. A slightly different form of
this document was published in the December 1968 issue of the alumni Alcalde.
19
Ibid.
20
Duren, Overcoming, 15.

228
history class. The petition utilized moderate and ecumenical rhetoric. "Because we feel
that communication is important in bringing about the better understanding between the
black and white races in this country and because we feel that knowledge is one of the
keys to better communication, we, the undersigned students, recommend that courses be
established at the University of Texas in black history and culture."21 Black history
should be taught, the petition argued, not because it would empower black students or
because the white establishment had for too long hidden the accomplishments of blacks;
instead it was needed to promote communication and understanding between blacks and
whites.
The momentum created by The Daily Texan grew and the student petition spread
to the Student Assembly. On November 9,1967, the Student Assembly passed a
resolution urging the history department to institute a black history course. The
Assembly also created a Minority Affairs Committee to investigate complaints of racial
discrimination on campus. Housing, sororities and fraternities, and the football team
were all investigated by this new committee.22
The pressure from the student body worked. On November 13, the history
department voted "overwhelmingly" to offer a course in black history. In public
statements, the department insisted it was not capitulating to student demands. Instead,
it was merely meeting the needs of the student body. Robert Divine explained the vote
as follows: "Student involvement served its purpose and without question it speeded
things up. Largely that's the way the system works. Student interest makes or breaks
about any course in this university." Even William Goetzmann, who followed Divine
as chair of the Department of History, insisted the department did not give in to the
students. "So in part, concerning this phrase, 'bowing to the students,' it's a poor
university that isn't aware of student interests and responsive to those arising from
significant change." Another faculty member added, "It [the fight for a black history

"The Course of Negro History," Duren Papers, Box 4A255.

Ibid.

229
class] is an example of responsible student power.... This is what can happen when
students and faculty work together and communicate."
The editors of The Daily Texan, a relatively progressive force on campus,
echoed this non-militant rhetoric of creating understanding between cultures. In an
editorial applauding the addition of a black history class, The Daily Texan credited the
addition of the class as the result of hard work, "chiefly by the Negro Association for
Progress." The editorial ended by commenting, "We can only hope that it is not the last
success in NAP's attempts to bring about greater understanding on this campus."
Reiterating this narrative of the university community working together to meet a need,
the alumni magazine Alcalde described the process to offer black history as the
"University community led by moderate Negroes and whites bowing to itself."
The narrative told by the newspaper, faculty, and administrators was that UT
offered the class to meet student demand and to promote understanding between blacks
and whites. Missing from this narrative was any mention that the class should be
offered as an alternative to the traditional UT history classes that equated civilization
with Western civilization and viewed Texas and United States history as the
accomplishments of brave white males. Also missing from this narrative was the idea
that the history class might empower black students. In other words, UT managed to
debate black history without mentioning the two main reasons black students at
hundreds of universities across the nation were demanding the class. The narrative was
completely removed from its black power context.
The battle for a black history class demonstrated a successful recipe for racial
change at UT. That formula started with a conservative administration and faculty, but
one that was willing to accept moderate change. Add a dash of concerted pressure from
black students and mix it with public pressure from a broader range of students,
including traditional sources of student power such as the student newspaper and the
Student Assembly. Make certain the pressure is publicized so the university worries
23

"Negro History Lectures, Course Stand as Proof of Student Power," The Daily Texan, October 10,
1968,4.
24
"Negro History Course Not First of Kind," The Daily Texan, February 1, 1968,4.
25
"The Course of Negro History" Alcalde, December (1968): 13.

230
about its public image. End it with a way for the administration to justify the change in
the most conservative of terms and you have a black studies class added to the history
curriculum.
UT's conservative formula for racial change stood in stark contrast with racial
change at the University of Washington and UCLA. For example, when the UW BSU
demanded increased minority student recruitment and the creation of a black studies
program a majority of the faculty supported the demands. Almost two hundred faculty
members signed a memorandum that addressed the issue of race and education at the
University of Washington. The memo supported recruiting more black undergraduate
and graduate students, the hiring of black faculty, and reviewing departmental
curriculum. Race neutral criteria must be discarded, the faculty argued, "because the
result was an almost all-white university, with the patterns, values and style of the white
middle class."26 At UCLA, President Charles Young believed the university practiced a
form of institutional racism that prevented women and minorities from the full benefits
of a UCLA education.

These acknowledgements of institutional racism sharply

contrasted with UT justifying its black history class on the grounds that it promoted
understanding between the races.
The approval of a history course did not mean that one would actually be
offered. The department insisted that before the class could be taught, a qualified
instructor must be found. Blacks students were seen as naive for not understanding the
difficulty of hiring a qualified instructor. In 1968, Alcalde carried an article on black
history at UT. The writer explained that the reason the search for an instructor caused
friction was because "some students didn't understand that lengthy specialized training
preceded the scholar's entrance into the classroom, or that available scholars in Negro
history are quite scarce because of swelling national demand."28 Students knew that
there was a lack of qualified Ph.D.'s available to teach black history, but understood the
"Race, Education, and the University of Washington," May 1968, BSU Papers, 71-69, University of
Washington Archives.
27
Charles E. Young, interview by James V. Mink and Dale E. Treleven, UCLA Oral History Program
(University of California, 2002), 780.
28
Ibid.

231
cause of the shortage to be the racist exclusion of blacks from the university. They
viewed such an excuse as delay tactics.
At the same time, the history department's insistence on a "qualified" instructor
was not a mere excuse for delay. In May 1968, a UT press release proudly announced
that next spring the history department would offer its first course in black history.
'"The Negro in America' will be taught by a prominent Negro scholar, Dr. Henry Allen
Bullock, Sr., of Texas Southern University." Bullock was a perfect choice. He had
recently won the Bancroft Prize, one of the most distinguished prizes in history, for his
book, A History of Negro Education in the South. His distinguished career included
dozens of publications on race relations, black education, and crime. He was head of
TSU's sociology department and chairman of the division of social sciences.29
Unfortunately, in Austin in the late 1960s, finding and hiring Bullock was not
enough to bring him to campus to teach. At the end of spring semester, Goetzmann sent
a letter to UT President Norman Hackerman for help with a little problem that had
arisen in bringing Bullock to UT. "At the present time we appear to be having some
difficulty with regard to housing for our visiting professor, Dr. Henry Bullock,"
Goetzmann wrote.30 This situation was not helped by the white backlash against open
housing that pulsed through Austin. Early in 1968, the Austin City Council passed a
fair housing ordinance. The Austin Board of Realtors, profiteers of housing
discrimination through block busting, immediately circulated a petition calling for a
repeal of the ordinance, garnering 27,000 signatures. The City Council spent the next
few months working to formulate a more acceptable housing ordinance, only to have it
rejected by Austin voters on October 19 by a comfortable margin of over 3,000 votes.
Meanwhile, Goetzmann discovered a company willing to rent to visiting black
professors, solving the problem of bringing Bullock to Austin. In all areas of race
relations at UT, even when the University supported racial progress, the racist soil of
Texas often acted as an impediment to that progress.

2y

UT Press Release, May 6, 1968, UT President 80-50, Box 28.

William Goetzmann to Norman Hackerman, June 18, 1968, UT President 80-50, Box 28.
31
"Austin Voters Turn Down Fair Housing Ordinance," The Daily Texan, October 20, 1968, 1.
30

232
Even the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. received a tempered response
in Texas. King's death shocked the nation, ignited dozens of urban riots and rebellions,
and, on university campuses, outraged black students. But at the University of Texas,
the administration's reaction to King's death represented the moderate course charted
by UT in the stormy waters of race relations. The reaction of the community revealed
the virulent and endemic racism found throughout Texas. Black students used King's
death as a platform to demand more radical changes at UT. Finally, in the wake of
King's death, the administration acted to strengthen its control over student protest.
The day after King's assassination, after much deliberation, the university
canceled classes beginning at 11:00 and held a campus memorial service. The service
was the brainchild of John Silber, Dean of Arts and Sciences. Charismatic, patronizing,
and paternal, Silber represented the quintessential liberal arts man. "What is a liberal
education?" he asked in one of his numerous publications. "At the very least, it [liberal
education] sharpens the student's perceptions of his world and of himself, and both
broadens and disciplines his understanding."

Silber viewed himself as a racially

enlightened liberal. He wrote that black students viewed the world differently and that
their character should be judged not by their IQ, but by their "soul quotient," which he
defined as "general spontaneity, capacity for a full range of emotional response, and
emotional sensibility."

His paternalistic attitude toward students was not lost on New

Left commentators. Austin's alternative newspaper the Rag opined, "Silber is in favor
of freedom for blacks only if it is on his own terms."34
This mainstream white racial liberalism was on full display at UT's official
memorial service for King. At the service, Silber praised King's devotion to freedom as
well as his non-violent tactics, reading significant passages from King's Letter from a
Birmingham Jail. Other speakers lauded King as a great civil rights leader and a moral
light for the United States. Although the administration anticipated being criticized for
canceling classes, the memorial service demonstrated that publicly UT was willing to

1970 University Catalog, UT President 80-50, Box 9.

UT Press Release, October 8, 1968, UT President 80-50, Box 9.
"Silber's Memorial Circus," Rag, April 15, 1968, 3.

embrace the ecumenical side of King's vision. At the same time, Silber worked hard to
ensure the protest kept an appropriate moderate and respectful tone and did not become
too militant or radical. In a move reminiscent of the request that SNCC leader John
Lewis tone down his 1963 March on Washington speech, Silber asked Otis Sadler, the
black student representative, to keep his remarks moderate. Sadler only partially
complied, telling the audience that he had been asked to refrain from making radical
comments. Silber also asked students to put away the signs they were displaying with
slogans ranging from "I Support Black Power" to "30% Black Unemployment in
Memphis."35 He claimed such political statements were inappropriate at a memorial
service. This respectful show garnered positive press coverage that called the service
"touching."36
The UT administration faced sharp criticism from many in the community for
cancelling classes to honor Dr. King. A typical letter sent to President Hackerman after
King's death began: "Dear Sir: I very strongly protest the American and Texas flags
having been at half mast during the Texas Relays [a popular annual track meet held at
UT in April]. Most Texans, indeed most Americans, don't mourn the demise of Martin
Luther Coon. They know him for what he wasan anarchist and law breaker who
caused the death of many people and millions of dollars of personal damage....
Respectfully yours, W.A. Johnson."37 In general, UT took heat for its decision to
cancel classes and hold a memorial service. "I understand that there are people asking
if we are going to close down the University 'every time some nigger is shot,'" wrote
one administrator. While such an opinion was perhaps not in the majority, the fact that
this opinion was proudly and publicly shared with the University speaks volumes about
the conservative racial climate in Texas.
The day of King's death the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation (AABL) met
and planned a memorial service of a decidedly different nature. Only a few months
earlier the Negro Association for Progress had changed its name to the more radical

1U1U.

Charles A. Wright to Norman Hackerman, April 8, 1968, UT President 80-50, Box 28.
W.A. Johnson to Norman Hackerman, UT President 80-50, Box 28.

234
AABL, reflecting the more militant goals of the group.38 That night, the AABL
informed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) of their planned march, and SDS
agreed to advertise the rally for the AABL. The militant rhetoric publicizing the rally
stood in stark contrast to the official "respectable" ceremony held by the administration.
"Dr. Martin Luther King, Leader of the Nonviolent Movement, was murdered by the
violence of a sick racist society," began one rally flyer. "Medgar Evers, Patrice
Lumumba, Malcolm X and Dr. King died in the freedom struggle. We must be willing
to follow them, to pay whatever price necessary to win that struggle."39 King's death
awakened and strengthened the commitment of black students to the struggle for black
liberation.
Drawing a crowd larger than the official memorial service, the AABL protest
met on campus and marched to the Texas State Capital where speakers demanded
accountability from the power structure for King's death. Mainstream press described
the march as "rowdy" and "disrespectful."40 The ABBL used the rally as an
opportunity to press for more radical change at UT. AABL leader Grace Cleaver issued
a set of demands that were to be met by the administration by the end of the semester.
The demands included open housing, black history classes, the removal "of all racist
sororities and fraternities," and the hiring of black professors and deans. These
demands demonstrated the continuity from early NAP goals of open housing and a
black history class. They also demonstrated a shift to more radical goals such as "a
black man on the Board of Regents; to be approved by Afro-Americans for Black
Liberation." Black students were beginning to demand control of decisions that
affected their college experience.
King's death also inspired the AABL to organize a Black Arts Festival in
Austin. Exhibiting the AABL's continued shift away from a moderate, cautioned
approach, the festival advertisements read: "Racist America, in order to maintain its
This name change followed a pattern similar to the University of Washington and dozens of other
universities. When new politicized leadership influenced by the black power movement took control of
these organizations they invariably changed the name of the group.
39
"Protest the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," UT President 80-50, Box 28.
40
Dallas Morning News, April 7, 1968, Duren Papers, Box 4A242.

oppression of black people, has had to deny us our humanity. The myth that we have
no history, no art, no civilization of our own has been and is being used to deny us our
freedom, but we know that the strong tradition of black art stretches back thousands of
years to Mother Africa."41 Floyd McKissick, Dick Gregory, and Ron Karenga all spoke
at the festival, a line-up of national black power advocates who traveled around the
nation speaking before black campus groups.
The increasingly militant rhetoric of the AABL, coupled with a rise in antiVietnam protests by the New Left, led to a crackdown by the regents on student dissent.
In April, the regents passed new rules that called for the expulsion of a student or the
firing of any staff or faculty that was convicted of any crime, including drug crimes, or
who attempted to disrupt by "force or by violence, or by threat of force and violence,"
any authorized campus activity.42 The broad nature of these new rules meant that
almost any form of speech that critiqued the university might be a reason for dismissal.
Not wanting this new rule to languish on the books, the regents expelled five
students who were convicted of disorderly conduct during an ROTC inspection. A
majority of staff and faculty supported the dismissals. Even those opposing the
dismissals, such as R. Harrison Wagner, president of the UT Chapter of the American
Association of University Professors, tempered their reaction. Wagner wrote to newly
installed Interim President Bryce Jordan to complain about the new rules. "These rules
are much more restrictive of freedom of expression on this campus than is warranted by
the right of the university to protect itself from disruption." Almost any confrontation,
such as one between fans at a football game, could be grounds for dismissal, Wagner
argued, but the rule would likely only be used to "restrict the expression of political
ideas." He concluded his letter, however, not with a demand that the university
overturn the rule, but by reaffirming the right of the university to expel those who
engaged in disruptive behavior. "Let me make clear," Wagner wrote, "that I am not
quarreling with the right of the university to punish or eject those who attempt to disrupt

"Black Arts Festival," Rag, April 22, 1968,4.

"Regents' Rule Limits Student Protesters," The Daily Texan, April 21, 1968, 1.

236
its activities."43 Wagner's letter demonstrated that even some liberal professors
supported a broad interpretation of UT's right to maintain "order" on campus.
The decision to fire philosophy professor Larry Caroline also revealed the
relative conservatism of UT. Caroline's troubles began when he called for a social
revolution during an anti-Vietnam war protest at the State Capital in October 1967. The
entire system in America must be overthrown, argued Caroline, if there is to be an end
to racism and imperialism. This speech drew wide-ranging critiques from the media for
Caroline's advocacy of revolution. In May 1968, in a 7-6 vote, the philosophy
department voted not to renew Caroline's teaching contract, set to expire at the end of
the 1968-69 school year. When New Left groups protested Caroline's dismissal,
President Hackerman declared the decision to not renew Caroline's teaching contract
final since he did "not detect any prejudice or political pressure" on the part of the
philosophy department.44
Facing increased student pressure to keep Caroline, the administration deployed
Silber to defend publicly the largely unpopular decision. To justify the decision, Silber
utilized a standard argumentCaroline was fired for his poor academic credentials, not
for political reasons. Caroline failed to make progress on his dissertation, Silber argued,
and had stopped growing as an intellectual. Regarding Caroline's controversial
comments, Silber used an approach similar to the University of California Regents'
justification for firing Angela Davis. While Caroline had an inherent right to free
speech, reasoned Silber, his anti-intellectual critiques of American society deserved
scorn, not respect. Instead of contributing to a robust marketplace of ideas, Caroline
contributed to an emotional anti-intellectual discourse, the antithesis of the very notion
of informed discourse at the university. Since Caroline's actions undermined the very
foundation of a liberal arts education, the university would not long survive if it failed
to dismiss Caroline. Free speech issues aside, Silber emphasized that Caroline was
fired for his performance, not his politics.45

R. Harrison Wagner to Dr. Bryce Jordan, July 30, 1970, UT President 80-50, Box 34.
"Decision Upheld in Caroline Case," The Daily Texan, October 22, 1968, 1.
"Silber Says UT No Democracy," The Daily Texan, October, 11,1968, 1.

237
Contrary to Silber's claim, Caroline was clearly fired for his politics. That
Silber did not openly disclose this revealed that, even at UT, publicly admitting that the
university fired a professor over a free speech issue was not a tenable position. Instead
Caroline's dismissal was couched in the much more moderate terms of inadequate
progress on his dissertation. This moderation was also demonstrated in the decision not
to fire Caroline outright; instead, the department decided not to renew his contract.
The administration's stance on Caroline was moderate compared to other voices.
The Dallas Times Herald opined in a September 1968 editorial that "The University of
Texas should direct 'Professor' Larry Caroline to pack his pad and his sack of
poisonous radicalism and get off the campus NOWnot in 1969 under a stupid
academic freedom dodge."46 Politicians also saw the issue as one that could be played
for political gain. Waggoner Carr, who had recently and unsuccessfully sought the
Democratic gubernatorial nomination, wrote an open letter to the Board of Regents
claiming that he was "deeply disturbed that the present University administration has
been so hapless in protecting young Texans from the teachings of Caroline." Carr
continued by calling upon his authority as a taxpayer to question the regents' decision.
"As a taxpayer I strongly protest any further use of tax money to pay Caroline while he
teaches overthrow of the government."47 In Texas, politicians, newspapers, and a large
percentage of the public believed campus radicals should be disciplined for their
reckless promotion of lawlessness. This view, held by so many powerful stakeholders,
could not be easily dismissed by UT.
Again the administration called upon Silber to publicly respond to these
conservative critics. He argued that to immediately fire Caroline would violate
contractual obligations and might jeopardize UT's standing with the Southern
Association of Colleges and Universities. Silber also appealed to liberal arts ideals to
defend the University. The purpose of a university, Silber argued, is not to make "ideas

The Dallas Times Herald, September 24, 1968, Duren Papers, Box 4A252.
"Carr Note Asks Caroline Removal," The Daily Texan, August 2, 1968, 1.

238
safe for students," but to make "students safe for ideas."48 UT's administration clearly
charted a middle-ground course between the New Left and conservative critics.
While the administration sought a middle ground on race, motivated staff,
faculty, and students worked together to implement small-scale, racially progressive
programs at UT. Conceived in the spring of 1968 by a group of faculty and students,
including Dr. James Ayres and Ernie Haywood, the Program for Educational
Opportunity (PEO) admitted and supported minority students who might otherwise not
have attended UT.49 Administered by a Committee on Educational Opportunities under
the Dean of Students Office, the program started small, by bringing only twenty-five
studentsthirteen black and twelve Mexican Americanto UT in the fall of 1968.
These students were given full financial aid packages and received support from a
volunteer network of student counselors and tutors.
The original purpose of the program, "to provide an opportunity for the
culturally, economically, and academically disadvantaged student," sounded similar to
traditional uplift rhetoric. Drawing on the cultural deprivation model utilized by many
Great Society programs, the PEO proposal argued that minority students, with their
poor cultural background, would especially benefit from attending the university. That
is, by leaving the culturally deprived black or Mexican American community, minority
students could become respectable citizens through their UT education. But the
program added two twists to this familiar theme. Another purpose of the program was
"to provide for the mutual enrichment of the total University, through a structured
learning experience, for faculty, students, and P.E.O. students." Here, the proposal
viewed minority students as not only being enriched by attending UT, but they were, in
turn, enriching the university.

"Silber Comments on Carr's Letter," The Daily Texan, August 2, 1968, 1.

There was some confusion as to PEO's official name. The Daily Texan referred to the program as the
Project for Educational Opportunity or Program for Economic Opportunity and Almetris Duren calls it
the Program on Educational Opportunity. Its official name, however, was the Program for Educational
Opportunity. Duren, Overcoming, 20; "Regent Erwin Supports Project Info Stand While Defending
Board's PEO Stand," The Daily Texan, August 22, 1969, 1; "Discontent Looms," The Daily Texan,
August 19, 1969,4.
49

The program also acknowledged that many minority students failed to meet the
entrance requirements, not because they lacked innate intelligence or were culturally
deprived, but because "some students' academic potential is incompletely demonstrated
on the college entrance exams . . . "50 This recognition that the dearth of minority
students at UT might be due to faulty or biased entrance exams, coupled with the belief
that these students would help to uplift the faculty and the rest of the student body,
represented almost a complete break from earlier uplift philosophies. A new
philosophy was clearly emerging, one that celebrated diversity and multiculturalism.
Just as the institutionalization of black studies programs within ethnic studies
departments helped to legitimize the inherent worth of non-white U.S. cultures,
minority opportunity programs implicitly acknowledged the value of a diverse student
body. In fact, the program was designed, in part, to prove that SATs were not a
complete and accurate indicator of college ability. If PEO students had successful
academic careers, this would prove UT's admission standards to be biased.
As with many nascent minority programs, funding proved difficult. The
program had to rely upon private funding sources to operate. In a remarkable show of
solidarity, the student body agreed to donate 20 percent of their bookstore rebate to
support the program, raising $4,500. Sororities, through the Panhellenic Council,
agreed to donate another $1,800, the Minority Student Affairs Committee, and The
Daily Texan also contributed funds. The Office of Economic Opportunity, a Great
Society program, provided $16,000 in tuition aid and a local philanthropic group, the
Hogg Foundation, provided another $15,000. This impressive array of funding sources
demonstrated the possibility of implementing small-scale minority programs without
large appropriations from the legislature, as well as the broad-based support these
programs enjoyed.51
During the summer of 1968, UT's School of Law implemented a similar
program for minority students. The Counsel for Legal Educational Opportunity
Program (CLEO), a national program sponsored by the American Bar Association and
30
51

PEO Report, UT President 1907-1968, CDL2/E2.

Ibid.

supported by a Ford Foundation grant, invited eligible minority students to attend a

summer law program. Upon successful completion of the summer program, students
entered law school in the fall. By any measurement, UT's first year of participation in
CLEO, 1968-69, was an unqualified successonly three of thirty CLEO students left
UT, lower than the average law school drop out rate.
Grassroots student activism spawned a third program aimed at bringing minority
students to UT. Founded in 1968 by students serving on student government's Minority
Student Affairs Committee, including Ernie Haywood, Alphonse Brown, and Charles
Cervantes, Project Info sent current UT students to Texas high schools to encourage
minority students to attend UT. "We want people to go back to their old high schools to
inform and influence people," explained Brown to a Daily Texan reporter. Brown had
"always been bothered by the fact that there were so few Negroes at the University."
Project Info gave capable minority students the opportunity to learn about UT. Funded
by student government and run entirely by students, Project Info operated on a
shoestring budget, often scrounging to afford stamps for mailing information to
students. Similar to the idea of a black history class, Project Info leaders sold the
program as way to foster interracial understanding on campus. Brown noted that one
benefit of the program was "that more minority students on campus would help create
better understanding and dialog."53
Project Info leaders believed that many qualified prospective minority students
viewed UT as.a hostile environment or did not believe they could afford to attend UT.
One Project Info recruit, Homer Garzia, had "dreamed of going to the University but
never thought I could afford it. My high school is predominantly Mexican-American,
and the type of instructors we usually get recommend that we go to some trade or
technical school. I'm majoring in sociology and plan to go back to my neighborhood
and do something about it some day."54 Another student wrote to thank the "people of
Project Info," for the "fine assistance" they had given him in navigating the complex

"Law Students Charge Spurr Inaction," February 12, 1972, The Daily Texan, 1.
"New Program to Recruit Minority Students," The Daily Texan, December 12, 1968,4.
"Students Voice Gratitude for Project INFO's Concern," The Daily Texan, September 18, 1969, 1.

241
application process. Project Info recruiters assisted perspective students in filling out
applications, financial aid forms, and the student unrest provision form.55 At the end of
its first year, an estimated twenty students had entered UT as a direct result of Project
Info.
By the end of 1968, these three modest programs were slowly opening UT's
doors to minority students. The Afro-Americans for Black Liberation, however, viewed
this slow pace as unacceptable and, at the end of February 1969, presented a list of
eleven demands to President Norman Hackerman. The AABL argued that UT had
ignored the essential needs of black students and radical change was needed to "insure
the fullest development of the black student."56 The AABL demanded a black studies
department, affordable housing, and official university holidays honoring Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their demands also included a call for the admission of
two thousand minority students within one year and the immediate rehiring of Larry
Caroline, who acted as AABL's informal faculty advisor. To communicate that these
demands were not to be taken lightly, the AABL insisted, "THAT THE
AUTHORITIES ANSWER THESE DEMANDS WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF THE
DAY ON WHICH THEY RECEIVE THEM."57 A month later, the Mexican-American
Student Organization (MASO) added its voice to the debate by presenting the
administration with their suggestions on how UT might better serve minorities.
Once again, the administration charted a moderate course in responding to these
demands. Dean John Silber invited the AABL to attend a special faculty meeting of the
College of Arts and Sciences held to discuss the AABL's demands. Always the center
of attention in any situation, Silber spent the first hour of the meeting praising and
ridiculing the demands. He magnanimously supported the demands he considered
reasonable while demeaning any demand he considered unreasonable. For example,
when the students wrote, "It seems obvious that any institution that concerns itself with
the process of education would direct its attention toward developing the potentials of

Villosefia to People of Project Info, January 31, 1970, UT President 1907-1968, CDL2/E2.
Afro-Americans for Black Liberation, Eleven Demands, UT President 80-50, Box 33.
Ibid.

242
ail individuals," Silber replied, "I hope that no-one in this room would care to argue
with that. This seems to me to be self-evident and it seems to me to be our
constitutional responsibility." On the other hand, when the students demanded, "There
shall be fifty professors and instructors [in the black studies program]," Silber stated he
had no objections before gently ridiculing the students for the impracticality of the
demand. "I would only point out that I asked for 115 new faculty positions this year in
the College of Arts and Sciences and was given 35.1 only wish that, by making a
demand on the President that he had to meet within two weeks, I could increase the
number of new faculty positions in Arts and Sciences to 155 [laughter]." He continued
by mocking the AABL's demands as impractical and ridiculous. "I am inclined to
wonder, you know, if all we have to do is express our heart's desires in the name of
demands, whether we shouldn't submit as a twelfth demand that the Tower Building
levitate 35 feet off the ground so that we can use the ground space for parking."5 This
mixture of praise and ridicule was done to increase his standing with both liberals and
conservatives. By granting blacks what Silber considered their most reasonable claims,
he endeavored to maintain his status as an enlightened liberal, willing to fight for equal
opportunity and racial equality. By ridiculing their most extravagant claims, Silber tried
to maintain his position as a reasonable moderate in the eyes of the more conservative
members of the faculty and the university community.
President Hackerman met with the AABL at the end of February where he
reportedly expressed support for black studies and hiring more minority staff and
faculty. He urged the group to work within the system to change the university. This
open discourse made one AABL member optimistic, who felt "like we [the AABL] are
moving forward."59 Hackerman also solicited comment from dozens of students and
faculty members on the AABL's proposals and on what specific action UT should take.
This request naturally elicited a broad gamut of responses, but nearly all agreed some
action needed to be taken. The Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy, representing

"Documents and Proceedings of the College of Arts and Sciences," February 27, 1969, Duren Papers,
Box 4A259.
59
"Hackerman Answers Eleven Black Demands," The Daily Texan, March 9, 1969,1.

243
this widely held opinion, frankly stated that the University "must do more to involve
more disadvantaged students more fully into all aspects of University life and to provide
additional academic programs which encompass the contributions of American ethnic
groups."60 Hackerman took the demands seriously and devoted many hours to
developing concrete proposals. One faculty member wrote to thank Hackerman for his
efforts. "I fully appreciate the many, many hours of your valuable time that has been
spent on this issue. I have some feedback that several of the Black students are also
appreciative of the time you are spending." She added, in a handwritten note at the end
of the letter, "Courage you have. Support you need."61
Eventually Hackerman established an ad hoc committee to present a formal
recommendation on the AABL's demands. A swift but formal bureaucratic process was
put in motion. Subcommittees were formed on specific issuescurriculum changes,
recruitment, admission, financial aid, and adjustment to campus lifeand open
hearings were held to solicit input from anyone willing to attend the meetings. The
main committee also consulted with all of the key players on campus working on these
issues, including Henry Bullock and the students and faculty involved in Project Info
and PEO.
The committee presented its findings to the faculty in May. The committee's
report provided a blueprint on how UT should serve minority students. Its
recommendations included the creation of an ethnic studies program, increased minority
recruitment, and the hiring of a full-time director of Ethnic Minority Programs to
oversee all campus programs that served minorities. The committee enthusiastically
endorsed "the recruiting programs of Project INFO, of PEO, and of CLEO and hope[d]
that their programs will have increasing support from the entire University community."
There are "students in minority groups who are capable of doing college work," argued
the committee, "but who are not evaluated by the SAT as having this capability."62 The
committee recommended that PEO incrementally be expanded to include as many as
60

Memo to Hackerman, March 6,1969, UT President 80-50, Box 33.

Ira Iscoe to Norman Hackerman, March 6 1969, UT President 80-50, Box 33.
62
"Report to the Faculty Councilfromthe Faculty Ad Hoc Committee on Ethnic Studies," UT
President's Office, 86-209, Box 2. (Hereafter cited as UT President, 86-209).
61

244
two hundred students. While not committing himself to such a large increase, partly
due to funding concerns, Hackerman called for PEO to continue for a minimum of four
more years.
The AABL's and MASO's demands dramatically increased the momentum of
racially progressive campus programs. Outside of the efforts spearheaded by
Hackerman, individual colleges and schools initiated their own efforts to make the
University more responsive to minorities. Dean John Silber solicited donations from
the faculty to fund an Equal Opportunity Scholarship Fund. While Silber, promoting
his status as an enlightened liberal, made clear the funds were available to
"economically deprived students, regardless of race," the scholarship was primarily
aimed at minority students.63 The College of Engineering made also twenty
scholarships available to minority students.64 As the semester ended in the midst of the
hot and humid Austin heat of early summer, minority students had to feel good about
the changes taking place on campus. In the words of Henry Bullock, the university was
taking seriously the demand to involve minority students "in the vital structure of the
University so that they can feel that they have a place here."65
Given UT's progress in implementing minority programs, the entire campus was
shocked, surprised, and confounded when that summer the regents issued a ruling that
ended these efforts. Meeting on August 1,1969, the Board of Regents issued the
following ruling:

Neither the faculty nor students of any component institution shall solicit
or recruit for admission to that institution any person who cannot meet
the usual academic requirements for admission to that institution. No
funds appropriated by the Legislature, including local institutional funds,
shall be expended for the direct recruitment of students who otherwise
would not have had an opportunity for a higher education.66

John R. Silber to Professor Ruth P.M. Lehmann, May 8, 1969, UT President 80-50, Box 33.
"Report to the Faculty Council by the Faculty Ad Hoc Committee on Ethnic Studies," UT President,
86-209, Box 2.
65
"Documents and Proceedings of the College of Arts and Sciences," February 27, 1969, Duren Papers,
Box 4A259.
66
Duren, Overcoming, 20.
64

245
The UT community had no idea the regents were about to end all minority programs.
For instance, PEO staff members had recently sent twenty-two acceptance letters to
PEO students set to enter UT in the fall. President Hackerman did not know the regents
planned to discuss minority programs before the meeting, let alone issue a ruling ending
them. Students returning to campus that September all wondered what happened?
The decision to kill any program aimed at bringing minority students to UT was
the handiwork of the most powerful man in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s in regards to
higher education, Frank Erwin, Chairman of the Board of Regents. A tireless advocate
of higher education in Texas, Erwin served as a regent from 1963 to 1975. Erwin
derived much of his power from the ruling Democratic Party in Texas, and he once
served as the national Democratic committeeman for Texas. He was a good friend of
Lyndon Baines Johnson and John Connally, the Texas Governor from 1963-69. Erwin,
a fierce cold warrior, believed the only way for America to thrive in a complex postWorld War II world was through a well-educated populace. He ended a favorite stump
speech by positing "that the critical question before us in 1968 is not whether Texas can
afford higher education of the first class. The critical question is how much longer can
Texas afford to be without it.67 A larger-than-life figure, Erwin drove a Cadillac
painted in Texas' school colors, orange and white. An alumnus of both UT and UT
Law, Erwin oversaw a period of vast expansion at the University of Texas. Some of the
campus buildings completed during his term included an expansion of the football
stadium, the LB J School of Public Affairs, and the Beauford Jester complex. Using his
political connections, he was enormously successful in lobbying the legislature for
increased financial support of UT. Between 1963 and 1975 legislative appropriations
for UT increased from forty million to 350 million dollars.68
Erwin employed a hands-on style of management. President Hackerman
described Erwin as "very quick to grasp all aspects of the many faceted problems of the

"Rising Expectations in Higher Education," The Daily Texan, August 6, 1968,4.

"29 New Buildings Since 1950," The Daily Texan, August 16, 1968,3A; see also Doug Rossinow, The
Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 183.
68

246
University. He is deeply interested in the University, that's for sure."69 When the SDS
tried to block the planned stadium expansion in 1969 by chaining themselves to trees,
Erwin personally oversaw their arrests. Erwin wanted complete control over UT. For
instance, a year after the ruling on minority programs, Erwin ousted Dean John Silber
from UT, in part, because he viewed Silber as a threat to his power. In the wake of
Silber's firing, six professors left UT. One professor explained in his resignation letter,
"My reasons for resigning are simple. First and foremost is the effective tyranny which
Frank Erwin, as Chairman of the Board of Regents, has established at the University."70
In a protracted battle in 1974 over who would control The Daily Texan, Erwin cut funds
to the paper rather than concede any oversight of the newspaper. "We don't fund what
we don't control," explained Erwin in a quote published dozens of times in editorials
critical of the regent chairman.
In 1969, the faculty rebelled against Erwin's heavy hand. That October, the
faculty passed a resolution calling for Erwin's resignation. Erwin responded by noting
that only 30 percent of the faculty attended the meeting and only 20 percent of the total
faculty voted against him. This faculty minority who opposed him, according to Erwin,
were the true troublemakers, through their support of campus disturbances and protests.
But Erwin was confident he would win the battle with the faculty since the "people of
Texas are sick and tired of paying taxes to support that kind of conduct on the part of
both faculty and students."71 Minority students, not surprisingly, were also not overly
fond of Erwin. AABL's fifth demand called for the immediate dismissal of Erwin.
Two AABL students aptly described him as their "arch-enemy" in the fight to make UT
responsive to the needs of minority students.72
Why did the regents, without consulting anyone involved in the program,
without consulting even President Hackerman, decide to eliminate the PEO? First and
foremost, the decision was a repudiation of different admission standards for minorities.
"University's Board of Regents Present Diverse Backgrounds," The Daily Texan, August 16, 1968,
12 A.
70
"Arrowsmith Explains his Resignation," The Daily Texan, December 13, 1970, 1.
71
"Chairman Exit Asked By Faculty Resolution," The Daily Texan, October 29, 1969, 1.
72
"Two Black Students," The Daily Texan, February 28, 1969,4.

247
Erwin publicly defended the decision by noting: "We are turning down thousands of
students each year who cannot meet our entrance requirements, and it does not seem to
me and to the other members of the Board that we can continue to turn down thousands
of applicants of Irish, Scotch, Yugoslav, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, French, and other
descents on the ground that they cannot meet our admission standards and at the same
time deliberately admit Afro-Americans and Mexican-Americans who fail to meet the
same standards."

In a separate interview Erwin added, "The University of Texas

System will make maximum use of its resources to admit and educate as many qualified
students as possible."74 In other words, so long as Erwin was in charge, there was no
way "unqualified" minority students would be admitted to UT in the place of
"qualified" whites.
The decision was also a reaction to the faculty recommendation that PEO be
expanded to include two hundred students. Erwin believed such an increase would only
serve to bring black radicals to campus who would sow the seeds of campus unrest.
When asked if other universities had programs similar to PEO, Erwin replied, "Yes, and
they've had hell on wheels at Brandeis and Berkeley."75 Erwin's fears were not entirely
unfounded. At numerous other universities in the late 1960s, large incoming classes of
black students did lead to campus activism and strife. The fear that the PEG might be a
success helped lead to its demise.
The regents' ruling also threatened the existence of Project Info. The Texas
General Appropriations Act already forbade the use of any funds appropriated by the
legislature for use in recruiting students. But the regents took that one step further,
implying that no institutional funds, regardless of their origin, could be used to directly
recruit students. That meant that even if the funds were raised from private sources,
Project Info could not accept those funds. In the end, Project Info continued to operate,
but had to pretend it was simply offering information about UT while visiting high

Duren, Overcoming, 22.

"Discontent Looms," The Daily Texan, August 12, 1969, 4.
75
"Regent Erwin Supports Project Info While Defending Board's PEO Stand," The Daily Texan, August
22, 1969, 1.
74

248
schools. Any encouragement to attend UT might be construed as "recruitment" and had
to be avoided at all costs. The decision crippled, but did not kill Project Info.
After the smoke cleared from the regents' August ruling, the only substantial
minority program left standing was ethnic studies. The hours of work by dozens of
students, staff, and faculty, the momentum created by the AABL's protest, the willing
sacrifice of the student body to fund these programsall were destroyed by the regents
declaration that UT would make no special effort to serve groups that had historically
faced discrimination. For almost one hundred years UT had admitted whites to the
exclusion of blacks and in some cases Mexican Americans. When grassroots efforts by
students and faculty established a program that might admit minority students at the
expense of whites, that program was deemed reverse discrimination and quickly ended
by the regents.
The regents' decision to maintain so-called race-neutral admittance criteria
stood in stark contrast to the policies implemented at the University of Washington. As
early as 1965, UW President Charles Odegaard, inspired by the civil rights movement,
acknowledged that race-neutral policies would only promote the status quo of denying
access to minorities. If the UW was serious about providing equal opportunity to
students, staff and faculty, Odegaard argued, it needed to take affirmative action to
make the university more accessible to minority groups.77
By 1968, the UW had made minimal, but important gains. The University had
six black faculty with full-time appointments, a dramatic increase from a few years
earlier when the university had no tenure track black faculty and a single black visiting
professor. The university also utilized new community social service agencies to
promote the educational opportunities at the University. In 1968 the university hired an
African American counselor, offered a course on "Afro-American History and Culture,"
and instituted Soul Search, a program designed to create interracial dialogue among

77

1U1U.

"Letter to All Members of the Faculty Senate," May 20, 1968, BSU Papers, 71-69, University of
Washington Archives.

students on issues of race. Unlike UT, these changes were initiated by the
administration without pressure from black students.
Similar to UT, black student protest at the UW transformed these minimal gains
into major ones. In March 1968, Black Student Union (BSU) members met with the
administration to discuss the needs of black students on campus. The BSU presented
three key programs that they thought the University should adopt: increasing minority
student recruitment, creating a Black Studies program, and hiring more black faculty
and administrators. While President Odegaard pledged his support for the BSU's
demands, the BSU remained unconvinced that Odegaard intended to meet their
demands and decided to occupy Odegaard's office until a settlement could be reached.
On the evening of May 20th, interrupting a meeting of the executive committee of the
Faculty Senate, the BSU barricaded Odegaard in an inner office, while they occupied
his main office. After three hours of phone negotiations between the two offices,
Odegaard and the protestors reached an accord. Signed by members of the faculty and
the BSU, the agreement pledged that the next faculty senate meeting would "take the
steps necessary to secure funds from private or public sources" to implement "expanded
recruitment of minority group students . . . and an expanded black studies program."
That summer, the UW responded rapidly, instituting path-breaking changes.
The University hired Bill Hilliard to coordinate minority recruitment efforts. Hilliard's
staff of eight students travelled across the state recruiting minority students.79 Unlike
Project Info, which could only offer information about UT, the UW recruiters could
offer likely admission to any student with a high school diploma. That fall 257 students
were admitted to the University of Washington through the Special Education Program.
Eighty-five percent were black; the rest were largely Mexican American. The number
of entering black freshmen under the SEP was larger than the total number of black
undergraduates at the time, estimated to be around 150.80 The university also quickly
developed a black studies program and eventually created the Office of Minority Affairs
78

"Odegaard Signs Statement, Agreement Ends Student Sit-in," The Seattle Times, May 21 1968, A5.
"Bill Hilliard Communicating with Young," University of Washington Daily, July 18, 1968, 1.
80
"Report on University of Washington Programs for Black Students," May 23, 1968, W.U. President,
79-54, Box 10, University of Washington Archives.
79

250
to oversee minority recruitment and student life. These new programs marked the
beginning of the UW's large-scale commitment toward producing educational
opportunities for minorities.
Thus, by 1969, the University of Washington and the University of Texas held
diametrically opposed racial policies. At the UW, the faculty, President Odegaard, and
the BSU all agreed that race neutral policies only served to reproduce the status quo of
the university as a racist institution and that programs which specifically served
minority students helped correct past racial discrimination. UT held the opposite view.
The regents insisted that any affirmative action taken on behalf of minorities violated
the letter and the spirit of equal opportunity. As their official policy stated, "neither the
University of Texas nor any of its component institutions shall discriminate either in
01

favor of or against any person on account of his or her race, creed, or color."
If the main purpose of the regents' policy on equal opportunity was to limit the
number of minorities attending UT, the policy was enormously successful. The five
hundred-student entering law school class of 1971 included no blacks and only five
Mexican Americans.82 The number of minority undergraduates at UT was only slightly
less abysmal. In its 1970 compliance report submitted to HEW, UT listed 257 black
students and 1,178 Mexican American students attending UT, about 4 percent of the
total undergraduate student body of 31,114. UT also reported it had thirty-three black
and 105 Mexican American graduate or professional students, less than 3 percent of the
4,918 total. Statewide, blacks and Mexican Americans comprised approximately 30
percent of Texas' total population.83 UT's student body was a pale reflection of the
state of Texas' diversity.
The battle over equal opportunity at UT in the first half of the 1970s resembled a
scratched record that keeps skipping back and playing the same chorus repeatedly.
Faculty, minority student groups, minority community leaders, and student government
leaders all repeatedly demanded the administration take affirmative steps to make the
1

Duren, Overcoming, 14.

"The Injustice of Killing CLEO," The Daily Texan, June 14, 1971,4.
3
Compliance Report of Institutions of Higher Education, Fall, 1970, UT President 80-50, Box 54.
2

251
university more accessible to minority students. In the winter of 1971, a newly formed
black student group appropriately called The Blacks, and the Mexican-American Youth
Organization (MAYO) presented the administration with a list of proposals. The
Blacks focused their proposals entirely on increasing the number of black
undergraduates at UT. MAYO's proposals ranged broadly from an increase in
counseling and tutoring services to the creation of a bilingual teacher education
program. Both groups emphasized the need to expand Project Info into "every major
black, chicano and other disadvantaged (economically) high school in Texas."

While

these groups met repeatedly with the administration, no action was taken on their
demands.
With the death of CLEO, law school faculty worked feverously to create a
replacement program that might meet the approval of the regents. Instead of focusing
on a student's ethnicity, the program proposed to serve "educationally disadvantaged"
students. This could include poverty, racial segregation, or cultural isolation. White
students, as well as black and Chicano students, would be eligible for the program.85
When this proposal was rejected by the regents, a broad coalition of student
groups from the School of Law began meeting with the administration to work out an
acceptable CLEO alternate. The coalition of student groups included the La Raza Law
Students Association, the Human Rights Research Council, the Thurgood Marshall
Legal Society, and the Student Bar Association. In 1972, these groups submitted a
scathing editorial to The Daily Texan. The "character of the 1972 freshman law class
will be that of an exclusive country club for the southern gentility," the editorial began,
"with all the incidents thereof: golfing, sailing, tennis, bridge, cocktail parties, teas and
socials at the Alumni Palace, located in the shadows of Emperor Erwin's multimillion
dollar Coliseum."86 UT, as a public university, had an obligation to serve the diverse
populations living in Texas, the article concluded. The efforts of these groups to revive
some form of CLEO, not surprisingly, failed. Efforts by the Texas legislature to restore
"Chicano Proposals," The Daily Texan, February 28, 1971,4.
"Replacement for CLEO Approved by Law Faculty," The Daily Texan, November 8, 1970, 1.
"The 1972 Law School Country Club," The Daily Texan, February 29, 1972, 5.

252
CLEO met with similar results. In 1971, both the House and Senate of the Texas
legislature passed separate resolutions calling on the law school to continue to
participate in CLEO. This measure, sponsored by Joe Bernal of San Antonio and
Barbara Jordan of Houston, represented the growing power of minority representatives
in Texas.87 While small in number, minority representatives levied constant pressure on
UT administrators and regents to desegregate UT.
In 1972, minority groups issued, yet again, another set of proposals to the
administration. These demands were not fundamentally different than those from 1969
or 1971.88 One subtle difference was that a new interracial student group, The
Improvement of Minority Education (TIME), joined the Blacks and MAYO in voicing
concern about the lack of minorities on campus. As in 1972, the administration met
with these groups and claimed to take the demands seriously. The regents allowed the
groups to speak at their March meeting, even though they were not on the agenda. At
the meeting, Gordon Johnson, co-chairman of TIME, pleaded with the regents to "put
forward a commitment to desegregate this institution." These pleas fell on deaf ears.
Regent's chair John Peace rebuked the students by saying, "This institution is already
desegregated. We have no segregation policy."89 While the regents proved willing to
listen to minority student proposals, the results were the same.
Examples of students, faculty, and community members advocating for the
return of progressive racial programs at UT in the early 1970s are almost endless. In
1971, the University Council recommended UT expand Project Info and rewrite
admissions criteria to focus more on academic records than on test scores. Aided by the
Texas Civil Liberties Union, a number of students and minority groups sued UT in
1972. The suit argued the UT regents have "knowingly and willfully discriminated
against chicanos and blacks in admissions policies." Martin Jimenez, admitted to UT in
1968 under the PEO, sued because the cancellation of the program had forced him "to
rely on personal loans and employment in order to remain at the University." The

"UT Minority Recruitment Endorsed," The Daily Texan, June 17, 1971, 1.
"Spurr to Discuss MAYO's Demands," The Daily Texan, February 11, 1972, 1.
"Board Denies Minority Plea," The Daily Texan, Friday, March 17, 1972,1.

University vehemently denied the charges that UT "stands at the epitome of segregated
state higher education in Texas."90
In general, the administration denied that it was not doing enough to make UT
accessible to minorities. UT President Spurr, assessing the status of minorities at UT in
1972, dismissed complaints that UT's undergraduate admissions procedures
discriminated against minorities. UT's procedures, Spurr wrote, "are quite fair and nondiscriminatoryunless someone wishes to argue that we are discriminatory in that we
favor the brighter rather than the less bright student. That we do!" The reason so few
minorities attended UT, Spurr reasoned, was that "relatively few minority students see
the University of Texas as a place to which they want to come" and "if they do come
there is not enough financial aid for them.91 A few years later, Allan Shivers, chairman
of the regents sounded a similar note. Shivers had earlier vehemently opposed the
Brown v. Board decision and is described by historian Amilcar Shabazz as one of the
"worst race-mongering governors in modern Texas history."92 Shivers' very presence
on the board spoke volumes about Texas' conservative racial climate. "The university
wants to do everything it can to help minorities receive scholarship," assured Shivers.
"However, people must realize that a lot of the state's minority students don't want to
come to UT Austin."93 While the claim that minorities did avoid attending UT was
certainly trueone black student noted that for many blacks UT stood for "Uncle
Tom's Institute"these comments came very close to blaming minorities themselves
for their paltry representation on UT's campus.
Many students also believed UT was doing enough to support minorities. In a
campus-wide referendum students were asked if they favored admission preferences for
disadvantaged or minority students. While only a fraction of the student body voted,
2,844 of the ballots cast believed minority students should not be given preferential
admissions, with 2,543 in favor. The Daily Texan, long a supporter of minority
recruitment programs, argued the poll results demonstrated that "the closed mind of
90

Civil Action against Stephen Spurr, UT President 80-50, Box 51.

"My Freshman Year," The Daily Texan, April 27, 1972, 1.
92
Shabazz, Advancing Democracy, 96.
93 u j siege Got Spotlight, But No Quick Solutions," Austin American Statesman, March 23, 1975.
91

254
bigotry that has so long reigned over this campus is clearly not limited to the regental
and administrative forces."94
Since students, regents, and administrators were unwilling to admit, for the most
part, that UT was not already accessible to minorities, racial change at UT moved at a
glacial pace in the early 1970s. Still, if you looked closely, the constant pressure from
student minority groups, faculty, and others did lead to some important changes. For
instance, the law school stopped admitting students based on how UT ranked their
undergraduate institution. Before this change, students who attended poorly ranked
schools had little chance of being accepted.95 Project Info also expanded. It moved into
the admissions office and became funded by the administration instead of student
government. Still, as a Project Info staff member wrote in 1973, the program carried an
annual budget of under $13,000, only slightly more than the University spent to keep
Bevo, its longhorn mascot.96 The most significant progress came when UT established
an Office of Ethnic Student Services to coordinate tutoring, career guidance, and
financial counseling for minority students.97 President Spurr also amended the
Provisional Admissions Program (PAP), a program that allowed anyone with a high
school diploma to enter UT on a provisional basis. If students maintained a 1.5 grade
average or higher, they could matriculate as a regular student the following term. The
PAP, unfortunately, was not well publicized, offered no financial aid, and was utilized
primarily by whites.98 Finally, amending their earlier ruling that no university funds
could be used to recruit minority students, the regents authorized Spurr to seek over one
million in outside funding for minority scholarships. By 1971, most national
foundations had already dedicated their funds to supporting minorities at other
universities. The numerous applications Spurr sent to various foundations were all
rejected. While minimal, these changes are nevertheless significant.

"Texans: Color Them White," The Daily Texan, March 4, 1972,4.

"Minority Recruitment a 'Must,'" The Daily Texan, February 16, 1972, 1.
"Project Info Needs Real Funding," The Daily Texan, November 20, 1973, 5.
Duren, Overcoming, 30.
Stephen H. Spurr to Professor Forest G. Hill, February 19, 1972, UT President 80-50, Box 51.

255
Advocates of progressive racial programs at UT, tired of their fruitless lobbying
of the administration and regents, turned their attention to the one outside agency that
could pressure UT to actthe Department of Health, Education and Welfare's (HEW)
Office of Civil Rights. In November 1973, Student Body President Sandy Kress, acting
on behalf of Student Government, sent HEW a letter demanding an immediate
investigation of UT for racial and sex discrimination. "We've been trying all year to get
the University to correct discrimination here," Kress later explained to a reporter, "We
concluded we'd have to go outside to a federal agency to get something done."99
Student governments typically wield relatively little political power and it is
likely HEW would not have started an investigation on the power of Kress' letter alone.
But when three minority groups with real political power, the Texas Legislative Black
Caucus; the American GI Forum, a Hispanic veterans advocacy group; and the League
of United Latin American Citizens, a traditionally middle-class Hispanic advocacy
group, also pressured HEW, a formal investigation seemed likely. The Black Caucus,
representing eight black state representatives, was no stranger to the racial situation at
UT. In the early 1970s, the Caucus pressured the faculty and administration to fully
integrate UT. "As black members of the 63rd legislature, much of our time and energy
had been devoted to ending discrimination in the institutions of state government,"
began one letter the Caucus sent to UT's University Council. "One such institution
where the problems of discrimination are painfully evident is the University of Texas at
Austin."100 Members of the Black Caucus also met frequently with President Spurr and
the regents urging UT to initiate and expand its minority programs. When these
meetings produced no significant change, they began pressuring HEW to conduct a
thorough investigation into discrimination at UT.101
The pressure on HEW to investigate UT's compliance with Title VI of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 worked. Beginning in February 1974, a five-member HEW team
spent over four weeks on campus. "We're here to review and investigate the allegations
99

"HEW Begins UT Minority Inquiry," The Daily Texan, February 26, 1974, 1.
The Legislative Black Caucus to The University Council, November 16, 1973, UT President 086-247,
Box 11.
101
"Black Caucus Letter Evokes 'No Comment,'" The Daily Texan, January 16, 1974, 3.
100

[of discrimination]," announced Sandra Williams, head of the investigation.

HEW

met with campus minority leaders, student organizations, the Black Caucus, deans,
department chairmen, and admissions officers. HEW wielded true power over UT.
Although unlikely to do so, HEW had the power to terminate UT's estimated twelve
million dollars in federal contracts. Near the end of the investigation, Williams
announced HEW would issue a report on its findings by the end of April.103
The University of Texas had a long relationship with HEW dating back to
Norman Hackerman's tenure as president. When HEW investigated UT in 1968, they
discovered that UT had no equal opportunity plan, failed to keep statistics on how many
minorities applied for jobs, listed many non-faculty positions under "male" or "female"
columns, and had no administrator assigned to coordinate equal employment efforts.
Yet instead of sending Hackerman a report condemning UT for this abysmal state of
affairs, HEW sent a generally positive letter urging only moderate change. In general,
the relationship between the two groups was collegial and congenial.104
Under President Spurr, HEW and UT continued to share a relatively congenial
relationship. In a 1971 report, HEW critiqued UT for its decision to kill PEO and
CLEO. "We deeply regret the dropping of two potentially useful admissions programs
at the University," lectured HEW. "It is not sufficient," the report continued, "that an
institution maintain a nondiscriminatory admissions policy if the student population
continues to reflect the formerly de jure racial identification of that institution." But
then HEW backed off. Instead of demanding that UT reinstate programs similar to PEO
and CLEO, HEW took a gentler approach, writing, "This institution has the
responsibility to discharge its affirmative action duty by adopting measures that will
result in increasing minority group student enrollment, as soon as administratively
possible." In other words, HEW gave UT wide latitude to act with all deliberate speed
to increase minority student enrollment. "We look forward to a mutually beneficial
relationship between your institution and the Office of Civil Rights," ended the report.

"Ethnic Director Charges Absence o f Good Faith,'" The Daily Texan, February 28, 1974, 1.
"HEW Evaluating Findings," The Daily Texan, March 4, 1974, 1.
Miles Shulze to Dr. Norman Hackerman, October 17, 1968, UT President 80-50, Box 43.

257
HEW wanted a harmonious relationship with UT and was unwilling to harm that
relationship by forcing UT to adopt unwanted minority recruitment programs.105
In general, HEW focused more on procedures and data gathering than
demanding universities initiate specific programs. Instead of making demands, HEW
made recommendations. For example, in 1971, HEW noted UT had made virtually no
progress in hiring minority faculty. Instead of insisting that UT immediately hire more
minority faculty, HEW recommended: "Present recruitment efforts should be analyzed
to determine the reasons for their not producing the desired results, if this is the
case."106 In a separate letter to President Spurr, HEW expressed cautious optimism
about the expansion of Project Info and other recent initiatives. "We hope that these
efforts will achieve their aims and goals. However, where this is not the case, we hope
that new strategies will be sought until the equal educational opportunity concept
becomes a clear reality in your University community."107 HEW gave UT the green
light to desegregate on its own schedule so long as there were procedures in place and
statistics being kept.
Not until 1975 did HEW finally take off the kid gloves and demand UT initiate
widespread efforts to fully integrate the campus. As mentioned above, pressured by
student and community groups, HEW spent over a month in early 1974 investigating
equal opportunity policies at UT. The official report from that investigation, not issued
until February 21,1975, began on a typically congenial note. "Thank you for the
courtesies extended to our staff members" during their visits last year. But then HEW,
for the first time, took UT to task for its failure to abide by the Civil Rights Act of
1964's policy on nondiscrimination. "The Office for Civil Rights' investigation
revealed practices which are not consistent with the requirements of Title VI in the
areas of University equal opportunity policy, admissions, recruitment, student financial
aid, student employment, student support services, placement, housing, athletics and
Greek social societies," the report stated. In institutions such as UT that were

' Clarence A. Laws to Dr. Stephen H. Spurr, July 20, 1971, UT President 80-50, Box 69.
* HEW to Dr. Stephen Spurr, September 1971, UT President 80-50, Box 69.
'Clarence A. Laws to Dr. Stephen H. Spurr, April 14, 1972, UT President, 80-50, Box 86.

previously segregated, the report continued, "the recipient must take affirmative action
to overcome the effects of prior discrimination." UT's policies, HEW noted, have
promoted the opposite viewthat corrective measures cannot be taken to eliminate "the
present effects of past discrimination."108
Perhaps anticipating stalling tactics by UT, HEW made clear UT had had ample
time to demonstrate progress. The report noted that, in 1971, President Spurr had
publicly boasted "that substantial progress can be made and that the goals we share can
be achieved by operating within this policy statement as it stands." Four years later,
HEW noted, UT had only made negligible progress. The status quo ante, HEW argued,
could no longer be defended as simply needing more time to bear fruit. The report
made clear that the regents' 1965 rule, that UT shall not discriminate "in favor of or
against any person," could no longer stand. Unlike in previous reports, HEW demanded
that UT establish a minority recruitment program. UT could no longer pretend the
status quo was working and needed to take corrective action and responsibility for the
lack of minorities at UT.
HEW's investigation and report did not transform UT overnight into an
institution that made diligent efforts to serve minority students. The change was more
gradual and subtle. But by the end of the 1970s, UT had changed from an institution
that prevented minority initiatives under the guise of equal education to one that
committed a significant pool of time, resources, and funding to the difficult task of
opening its doors to minority students.
Six months after HEW released its report, the regents voted to overturn its equal
opportunity policy, adopted in 1965, that forbade discrimination "either in favor or
against," any person. The new policy adopted language similar to that of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and forbade discrimination "against any person on account of his
race, creed, color, or sex."109 In announcing this new policy, the regents emphasized
the responsibility of the university to "implement an affirmative action program which

Dorothy D. Stuck to Dr. Lorene Rogers, February 21, 1974, Minority Groups, VF.
Duren, Overcoming, 32.

259
is appropriate . . . and in accordance with law."110 This new statement repudiated the
idea that any program taken on behalf of minorities constituted discrimination and, on a
practical level, opened new space for individuals, departments, administrators, and
schools to initiate their own minority recruitment efforts.
The graduate school, law school, and school of engineering all took advantage
of this new policy to implement their own minority recruitment programs in the late
1970s. In 1978, the graduate school hired Sarita Brown, a recent UT graduate, to
manage the Graduate Opportunities Program (GOP). The program took a personal look
at applicants with scores just below the top tier. The program considered writing
samples, letters of recommendation, and life experience in deciding who to admit to
UT.111 The law school adopted a program similar to those proposed to replace CLEO in
the early 1970s. Many departments and even individual faculty initiated their own
efforts to bring more minority students to UT. Departments could now offer
scholarships and financial aid packages to minorities, and faculty members could invite
minority students with lower test scores to work with them and not be in violation of
UT's equal opportunity policy.112
At the institutional level, the two largest changes involved a significantly
increased budget for minority recruitment and the creation of minority scholarships.
For the school year beginning in 1975, UT budgeted $112,000 toward minority
recruitment. This budget included salaries for three minority Assistant Directors of
Admissions, Clifton Van Dyke, Trudie Preciphs, and Augustine Garza, as well as
money for travel and office support.113 In 1974, UT appropriated $400,000 over a fouryear period for minority scholarships. After the HEW report in 1975, the regents
increased funding to $1.8 million over three years. By the end of the decade, UT
distributed one million dollars annually in aid to minority students.114
110

UT Press Release, July 25, 1975, UT President, 85-215, Box 10.

Karin Chenoweth, "Texas Twister: Highly Successful UT-Austin Graduate Opportunities Program
Imperiled," Black Issues in Higher Education, 13, no. 10 (1996): 27.
112
Duren, Overcoming, 33.
113
"Allocation of Funds From Office of Admissions Budget for Minority Recruitment," Minority Groups,
VF.
114
Press Release, June 5, 1975, Duren Papers, 4A259.
111

260
This is not to say HEW and minority groups all agreed UT's doors were now
wide open to minority students. Conflicts continued, particularly between minority
faculty and the administration in the late 1970s. Still, the situation was dramatically
improved from a few years earlier. In a 1978 letter, HEW concluded "that the
University has made considerable progress in the implementation of the Affirmative
Action Program, particularly during the last two years."115
If viewed over a thirty-year period, the changes at UT can be viewed as
remarkable. Black students were ostensibly first admitted to UT in the late 1940s, but
while in the same classes, they had to sit in separate rows or anterooms to maintain their
distance from white students. The 1950 Sweatt v. Painter Supreme Court decision
forced UT to admit Herman Sweatt as the first black student to attend UT on ground
equal to whites. The first fully integrated undergraduate class entered UT in 1956. It
would take ten more years before UT integrated campus housing and intercollegiate
athletics. By 1970,1,400 minority undergraduates attended UT, including 257 black
students. Compared to the zero black undergraduates who attended UT fifteen years
earlier, the number is impressive; compared to the number of blacks living in Texas, the
number was paltry. These minority enrollment numbers increased very slightly in the
early 1970s and then more dramatically after the HEW investigation. In 1979,1,091
blacks and 3,241 Mexican Americans attended UT, triple the numbers from ten years
earlier.116 While still underrepresented compared to the state minority population
around 10 percent of UT's total enrollment contrasted with 30 percent of the statethe
raw figure of over 4,300 minority students enrolled at UT was an arguably impressive
accomplishment.
The University of Texas' battles over affirmative action was part of a national
story where HEW, administrators, faculty, students, politicians, and taxpayers debated
what obligation universities had, if any, to compensate for past discrimination. Since
public universities received significant federal funds, they were subject to Title VI of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided that: "No person in the United States
115
116

Miles Shulze to Dr. Lorene Rogers, February 23, 1978, UT President, 86-247, Box 11.
David Hershey to Rob Wilds, October 30, 1979, UT President, 86-247, Box 10.

261
shall, on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation
in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or
activity receiving Federal financial assistance." While seemingly clear on paper, this
provision proved exceedingly tricky to enforce in practice. Did the law mean a
university cannot discriminate, at all, or did it mean a school must take action to ensure
minorities do not face de facto discrimination?
Participants in this debate typically took one of two positions. Some argued that
equal opportunity meant all decisions should be color-blind and that discrimination
against whites was as repugnant as discrimination against minorities. For these
individuals, university policies should be written and enforced to prevent discrimination
against any person based on color, race, or creed. Others argued that such nondiscrimination policies only reproduced past patterns of discrimination. If the Civil
Rights Act of 1964's vision were to become a reality, affirmative action was needed to
level the playing field.
Debates at UT followed this pattern. The Mexican American Youth
Organization condemned UT for using the concept of equal opportunity as a shield to
prevent minorities from attending the University. "Much has been said about UT
'acceptance' of the 'disadvantaged,'" MAYO wrote, "but it seems that nothing is being
done about the Regents' policy for 'Equal Education Opportunity' which in effect
appears to be a euphemism for maintaining a low minority representation at UTAustin."117 UT paid lip service to the idea that minorities were welcome, but then did
nothing, critiqued MAYO. In 1969, when Hackerman solicited feedback from faculty
regarding black student demands, one faculty member responded by arguing that since
UT participated in, and reproduced, the South's racial caste system, it had an obligation
to destroy that system. "Some may ask, 'Do we have any business going out of our way
in trying to help a particular segment of Texas society?'" questioned the professor. "I
personally feel that we do because I think we're all a part of the system that has created

117

"StatementfromMAYO-UT to Dr. Spurr, UT President," October 5, 1971, UT President 80-50, Box

61.

262
the present situation here at Texas. A University 'of the first class' should lead the way
110

in correcting a problem that afflicts both itself and the country as a whole."
Many Texas residents, faculty members, and students held the opposite view.
Responding to black student demands in 1969, Sarah Woolrich encouraged President
Hackerman not to give in to unreasonable demands. "As a graduate of the University of
Texas from a family of graduates, let me assure you that many of us are fully in favor of
a strong stand for the rights of the majority groups. It is time for a revival of morality
and decency, with American democracy and majority rule being re-established....
Perhaps it is time some 'demands' are made in reverse."119 Her advocacy of white
supremacy as the only social order capable of promoting morality and decency is only
thinly disguised in this letter. Similar public letters that openly supported white
supremacy as the only reasonable system of governing the South soon became, for the
most part, relics of the past. Those interested in critiquing the opening of UT's doors to
minorities did so on different groundsthat any program benefiting minorities was
reverse discrimination and violated the letter and spirit of the Civil Rights Act.
HEW's critique of UT's affirmative action policies in 1975 drew a predictable
reaction from concerned Texas citizens. Austin lawyer Weldon Holcomb wrote
President Rogers condemning HEW's report for advocating reverse discrimination:
According to the article the HEW would have you knowingly engage in a
planned and articulated policy of discrimination in violation of the Federal
Constitution by a re-stated policy so as to 'in a positive manner which
specifically allows for corrective actions to overcome the effects of past
discrimination.' Such action is nothing more or less than direct invidious
discrimination against students simply because of the fact of birth they are
members of the white or Caucasian race. I do not believe this is in
accordance with the intent of the United States Supreme Court nor the
Opinions of the Court as written.120

Buff Kizer to Hackerman, TJT President 80-50, Box 33.

Sarah Weaver Woolrich to President Hackerman, April 1969, UT President 80-50, Box 33.
Weldon Holcomb to President Lorene Rogers, March 5,1975, UT President 85-215, Box 10.

263
For over seventy years UT discriminated against all African Americans and the state of
Texas provided them with only one public university in comparison with seventeen for
whites. During that time precious few letters were written by white citizens
complaining the state was engaging in invidious discrimination against literally tens of
thousands of African Americans. Now in 1975, the rights of a few Caucasians were
perhaps under attack and whites wrote letters citing the notion that admissions to a
university should be color-blind. The fact that a few years earlier, these same whites
were not writing similar letters defending the rights of blacks to attend UT reveals that,
at least in 1975, the cry of reverse discrimination was simply a new way to defend white
privilege. In 1969, Sarah Woolrich openly advocated for majority rights and white rule.
In 1975, Weldon Holcomb advocated for white privilege under the guise of equal
opportunity.
The battle over affirmative action at UT also raged nationally. As many
universities began implementing affirmative action programs in the late 1960s and early
1970s, many professors rallied against the idea of using race as a factor in student
admissions and faculty hiring. For example, the Committee on Academic
Nondiscrimination and Integrity, led by well-known academics Sidney Hook, Eugene
Rostow, and Nathan Glazer, advocated that universities should always hire the best
candidate and admit the highest quality student only.121 Committee activities included
sending President Ford a letter opposing quota programs, filing a brief in the Bakke
case, and publishing editorials defending academic standards.122
In particular, these faculty critics ridiculed the practice of using statistics to
demonstrate discrimination. At UT, minority groups frequently cited the fact that only
4 percent of the student body was minority, compared to 30 percent of the state's
population, as evidence of discrimination. Paul Seabury, a professor of political science
at Berkeley, argued that in an ethnically and racially complex nation like the United
States, using such statistics to guide affirmative action policies was patently ridiculous.

Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit ofFairness: A History ofAffirmative Action (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 143.
122
'"Quotas' Assailed in Faculty Hiring," The New York Times, December 8, 1974,47.

Did the fact that Jews comprised 3 percent of the national population, but had much
higher levels of representation in academia demonstrate discrimination, Seabury
wondered?123 Sidney Hook, a prominent philosopher of pragmatism who embraced
conservatism during the Cold War, employed arguments that bordered on absurd to
attack HEW's use of statistics. Tugboat operators in New York in the 1970s were
overwhelmingly Scandinavian compared to the general population, Hook noted. Did
this disproportionate relationship mean there was rampant pro-Scandinavian
discrimination in the tugboat industry? Simply because a certain ethnic group lacked
proportional representation in a given industry, Hook insisted, was by itself not
evidence of discrimination.
Defenders of affirmative action conceded that these arguments had some
validity, but maintained that without some form of corrective action for past
discrimination, minorities were unlikely to enter the academy in large numbers. Robert
O'Neil, responding to critics like Hook and Seabury, emphasized that "without some
selective consideration of the special backgrounds, needs, and potential of
disadvantaged minority students, no substantial increase in their numbers is likely to
occur." But even O'Neil, who served as national Chairman of the CLEO Council,
hedged this claim, adding, "the matter is much more complex," than simply claiming
minority enrollment would not increase without preferential policies.124
The language used to justify affirmative action, by its defenders and detractors
alike, was removed from the realities of racial discrimination. In general, academic
articles that debated affirmative action at the university were written in a legalistic tone.
For instance, Thomas Sowell, while teaching at UCLA in 1976 wrote that, "The general
principle behind affirmative action is that a court order to cease and desist from some
discriminatory practice may not be sufficient to undo the harm already done, or even to
prevent additional harm as the result of a pattern of events set in motion by the prior

Paul Seabury, "HEW and the Universities," in Reverse Discrimination, ed. Barry R. Gross (Buffalo,
Prometheus Books, 1977), 103-104. Originally published in Commentary 53, no. 2 (1972): 38-44.
124
Robert M. O'Neil, Discriminating Against Discrimination: Preferential Admissions and the DeFunis
Case (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975), 92-93.

illegal activity."1

Sidney Hook also conceded that "discrimination has existed against

members of minorities and women in higher education and still lingers under various
disguises, no critic of HEW s affirmative-action program denies."126 And Robert
O'Neil described minority programs as "compensation for the effects of past
discrimination and segregation."127 This distant, calculating tone removed racial
discrimination from its lived context.
In the late 1960s, past discrimination served as the primary rationale for
affirmative action. Unfortunately, this rationale was not powerful enough to justify
truly large-scale efforts to reconstruct the university. When those debating affirmative
action wrote, "discrimination has existed," "past discrimination," and "prior illegal
activity," what exactly was being described? All these phrases referred to Jim Crow.
These phrases were as inadequate, I argue, in capturing the essence of Jim Crow as
"minor police action" would be in describing World War II. Jim Crow was a racial
caste system that permeated every level of life in the South. The United States' laws,
customs, schools, social institutions, and business practices were built around the
second-class status of blacks. It defined African Americans as not fully human and its
purpose was to maintain that status permanently. Black men were called boys, never sir
or mister, and black women were called girls or auntie, never Mrs. or Ma'am. Blacks
were lynched, their homes burned, their mothers and fathers shot, their children
drowned, and those committing the crimes were frequently celebrated as heroes for
enforcing the color line.
For higher education in Texas, Jim Crow meant blacks were provided with one,
substandard black institution, compared with seventeen, well-funded universities for
whites. That one public university, Prairie View A&M, was shamefully underfunded.
In the 1930s its library was so small that "if each student and faculty member checked
out six books from the existing multipurpose facility, not a single volume would remain
125

Thomas Sowell, "'Affirmative Action' Reconsidered," in Reverse Discrimination, 114. Originally

published in The Public Interest 42 (1975): 47-65.
126
Sidney Hook, "The Bias in Anti-Bias Regulations," in Reverse Discrimination, 89. Originally
published in Measure 14 (1974).
27
O'Neil, Discriminating Against Discrimination, 106.

266
on the shelves." In 1914 Texas had a population of 690,000 blacks, but only 129 were
attending any college or university, and it was not until 1937 that blacks had access to
any public graduate or professional school.128
Why did even those who supported affirmative action describe the United
States' ugly racial heritage as mere "past discrimination?" The civil rights movement
has been frequently described as a second reconstruction. This is an apt description
since both reconstructions had similar reconciliations between many whites. As early
as the late 1960s, a number of liberals and conservatives embraced a similar racial
narrative: Jim Crow was an unjust and unfair system, the narrative began, but the Civil
Rights Act and other laws had, for the most part, fixed the system and created the
possibility of the color-blind society Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently envisioned in
his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Although it might take a while before the playing
field became truly level, the narrative concluded, there was no need to give blacks forty
acres and a mule, particularly if done at the expense of innocent white citizens.
One reason black power existed only on the fringes of American society and
often encountered a fierce backlash was because it directly challenged this racial
narrative. Black power advocates demanded a confession to and compensation for
America's racist past. The Black Panther Party, for example, demanded the United
States provide blacks with decent housing, education, full employment, and free health
care. At the university, black student groups demanded administrators expend
significant resources for minority programs. They also demanded that administrators
acknowledge that the university's curriculum taught privileged white Western culture at
the expense of black achievements. That black student groups were able to create
programs that admitted a degree of racial culpability in the face of this powerful
narrative makes their success even more important and remarkable. Minority
recruitment programs and black studies programs were one of the few efforts of real
reconstruction in the post-civil rights era.

Shabazz, Advancing Democracy, 40.

Historian Timothy Tyson describes this unwillingness to come to terms with the
past as the "cheerful and cherished lies we tell ourselves." According to Tyson, the
most glaring fiction is "that the black freedom movement was largely a nonviolent call
on America's conscious, which America answered."129 To this list must be added the
fiction that Jim Crow involved little more than discrimination against blacks. The
negative aspects of Jim Crow were not swiftly overcome during the 1960s.
Before the 1970s ended, even past discrimination proved to be too radical a
justification for affirmative action policies. Affirmative action supporters understood
they had to justify the programs as helping not just minorities, but also whites. At the
university, supporters of affirmative action argued minority programs were necessary
because they promoted understanding between the races and created a diverse
university community. The use of diversity to justify affirmative action was not a new
concept in the 1970s, but by the end of the decade it had eclipsed "past discrimination"
as the primary justification for a kind of affirmative action light.
The majority opinion in the landmark Bakke case heralded the triumph of
diversity as the only appropriate justification for affirmative action. In 1971, the
University of California at Davis Medical School established a program that reserved
sixteen spots in their entering class for minorities. Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old
white male, had applied twice to the medical school and was rejected both times. He
sued the UC Davis Medical School for having two sets of entrance criteriaone for
minorities, another for whites. Interestingly, he failed to sue Davis for its legacy
openings or veteran's preferences. In a fiercely divided decision, Justice Powell,
writing for the majority, ruled that race could "be used as a criterion for admission to
undergraduate or graduate and professional schools, or for job recruitment," so long as
there was not a strict quota system. "While the goal of achieving a diverse student body
is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions under
some circumstances," Powell wrote, "petitioner's special admissions program, which
forecloses consideration to persons like respondent, is unnecessary to the achievement
129

Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004),
10.

of this compelling goal and therefore invalid under the Equal Protection Clause."

In

other words, programs that reserved a certain number of admissions for minority
candidates violated equal protection under the law. Race could only be used as one
criterion among many, the Court ruled. Similar to athletic talent, community service, or
musical precocity, race might serve to differentiate candidates with similar grades and
test scores.
Justice Brennan, in his dissent, argued that UC Davis' minority program was
acceptable because of past discrimination. Only 16 percent of the slots were reserved
for minorities, Brennan noted, a percentage significantly less than their population in
California. "Why shouldn't the university adopt a program to overcome obvious
discrimination?" asked Brennan.131 Bakke, in essence, ended the legality of affirmative
action programs based on past discrimination. The race of an applicant could be
considered, but only if used to promote diversity.

Today, almost forty years after UT's Board of Regents ruled that only students
who could meet the usual entrance requirements could matriculate, debates over
affirmative action are as controversial as ever. Cheryl Hopwood, a white female, after
being rejected for admission to UT Law in 1992, legally challenged UT law school's
minority entrance program, created in the wake of HEW s 1975 report. While the trial
judge ruled in favor of UT, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled in 1996 that "the University of
Texas School of Law may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit
in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile
environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the
minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors
other than the law school."132 The decision, although later overturned by the Supreme
Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, meant that law school admissions must be
ostensibly color-blind. After the Hopwood decision, UT eliminated all minority
130

University Of California Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

Philip F. Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action, 1619-2000 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2001), 162.
132
Texas v. Hopwood, 518 U.S. 1033 (1996).
131

269
recruitment programs and replaced them with the provision that any student who
graduated in the top 10 percent of their class was automatically accepted to UT. Since
Texas' high schools are still exceedingly segregated, this rule served to maintain a high
level of diversity at UT.133
The nation's stance on affirmative action in higher education remains
exceedingly complex. On one hand, a majority of Americans seem to oppose any form
of affirmative action. In 1996, 54 percent of California voters passed Proposition 209
which prohibited public institutions, such as universities, from discriminating on the
basis of race, sex, and ethnicity. Two years later, Washington State voters passed
Initiative 200, which read, "the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential
treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or
national origin." It would be easy to point to these votes and argue that the United
States had returned full-circle to the equal opportunity statement adopted by UT's
regents in 1965, whose language is almost identical to Initiative 200. In the wake of the
civil rights movement, through concerted pressure by faculty, community groups,
minority student groups, and HEW, UT changed its affirmative action policy to a more
proactive stance. Now, it seems, states are returning to UT's 1965 policy that forbid
any discrimination in favor of or against a particular group.
Yet, Americans continue to possess a contradictory view of affirmative action.
A 1998 Ford Foundation survey revealed that "66% [of those surveyed] think colleges
and universities should take explicit steps to insure diversity in the student body." That
same study found an even larger percentage, 75%, agreeing "that 'efforts to have a more
diverse student body on college campuses' have had more of a positive rather than a
negative impact on the education of college students."134 Contrast these opinions to the
passage of Proposition 209 and it is difficult to understand where the nation stands on
diversity.
Theodore Cross and Robert Bruce Slater, "How Bans on Race-Sensitive Admissions Severely Cut
Black Enrollments at Flagship State Universities," The Journal ofBlacks in Higher Education, 38 (2003):
93.
134
Traci Mueller, "What's the Solution? The Affirmative Action Debate is Hotter Than EverAll in the
Name of Civil Rights," Diversity Monthly, 1, no. 1: 23.

270
A closer examination of which types of minority programs the public supports,
helps explain this seemingly contradictory stance on diversity efforts. To generalize,
many whites and even many minorities oppose preferential hiring, but support job
training programs. They oppose using different admission standards, but support
diversity efforts. Programs that hint at quotas are vehemently rejected, but those that
support promoting "qualified" minorities are typically supported. The pattern is clear.
Any program that seems to benefit minorities at the expense of the majority is rejected.
Any program that gives minorities a "hand up" without asking for any sacrifice is
supported.
Unfortunately, attempts to end discrimination without ending white privilege
will most likely fail. The very foundation of white privilege was based on the systemic
dehumanization and exclusion of blacks from every aspect of full citizenship. Without
some acknowledgement that the civil rights movement did not erase the continuing
legacy of white supremacy and privilege, the notion of a color-blind society is an empty
concept.
Today, many universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles
and the University of Washington, have fewer black undergraduates than they did in
1970. Race-neutral entrance criteria at these schools translate into significantly smaller
entering minority classes than their representation in the general population. More than
forty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, why so few African Americans generate
the grades and test scores necessary to enter elite universities is a question too
complicated to explore here. But these paltry numbers are unlikely to change so long as
the United States is unwilling to come to terms with its racial past.

271
Conclusion
If you were walking across UCLA's campus during the summer of 2006, a
postcard on the back ofNommo, the black student newspaper, might have caught your
eye. Posted with an Arthur Ashe stamp, the postcard was purportedly mailed to all
black UCLA applicants. "We regret to inform you," began the card, "that due to our
ridiculous and racist admissions policies, we will not be granting you access to our
university. Although you comprise 11% of the population of Los Angeles, We are
doing our best to keep your admittance number as close to zero as possible." The card
was signed, "UCLA admissions."
In 2006, UCLA admitted its smallest African American entering class in
decades. The university admitted fewer than 10% of the 2,157 applications from black
candidates. Of the 210 black students who received the coveted acceptance letter, only
ninety-six decided to join UCLA's entering class of around 4,500 students. UCLA
minority groups called the paltry numbers "an admissions crisis" and organized a march
in protest. Nearly three hundred students from the African Student Union, the Black
Alumni Association, the Black Faculty and Staff Association, and other groups marched
across campus demanding larger African American entering classes.1
Unfortunately, their public protest had little chance of fundamentally altering
UCLA's admission policies. Behind these poor admittance numbers stands Proposition
209. Passed in 1996 by fifty-four percent of California voters, Proposition 209 prevents
public institutions, such as universities, from giving preferential treatment on "the basis
of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin."2 Yet while prohibited from giving
minorities preferential treatment, UCLA remains deeply committed to supporting
diversity on campus. Both the Chancellor and the Academic Senate have issued official
statements proclaiming diversity as a core value. "We will do whatever we can, legally
and appropriately, to preserve and expand the diverse nature of our university
1

"UCLA Admissions Crisis," Nommo, July 2006, 12-13; "UCLA Admits Record Numbers," Daily
Bruin, April 20, 2006.
2
"In California, Voters Bar Preferences Based on Race," The New York Times, November 6, 1996.

272
community," reads the Chancellor's Statement.3 The Academic Senate, in an equally
supportive tone, proclaims, "The diversity of the people of California has been the
source of innovative ideas and creative accomplishments throughout the state's history
into the present."4 UCLA's commitment to diversity, contrasted with small African
American entering classes, represents the mixed legacy of the black student protest
movement on white campuses in the late 1960s to early 1970s.
Black students entering universities in the late 1960s faced a litany of hopes and
expectations. They had both the burden and the privilege of being viewed as soldiers in
the struggle for black liberation. A 1971 advertisement, placed in Nommo by the Center
for Afro-American Studies and addressed to entering black students, demonstrated the
numerous opportunities and obligations these students faced.

By your attendance at UCLA, you are obligated to study, and perhaps, to

be an activist. Maintaining that balance may be the most difficult task
you undertake. The Afro-American family at UCLA has produced both
bourgeois Negroes and instant revolutionaries who worked for the
community, in the name of blackness, and pimped off the few token
programs for which many Black students had labored in earnest. Some
have stopped to reassess their blackness, while others have found
reassessment too painful. It is hoped that as each Black student embarks
on his journey through UCLA, he remembers who he is, what he is, and
what he must do to become the most useful person within his particular
Black community. We urge you to remember the brothers and sisters in
the Black communities throughout the United States who are kept out of
universities because they lack adequate clothing, go without proper
nourishment, and are victimized by the schools that are supposed to
teach them. Recognize the conditions that haunt the Black ghettos and
use the university to acquire the skills that will help ameliorate these
conditions. There are two certainties for which the mind tirelessly seeks:
a reason to live and a reason to die. These reasons are inherent to Black
liberation.5

3,

'Diversity at UCLAChancellor's Statement," UCLA,

http://www.gdnet.ucla.edu/gasaa/admissions/diversity.htm.
4
"University of California Diversity Statement," adopted May 10, 2006,
http://www.gdnet.ucla.edu/gasaa/admissions/diversity.htm.
5
"Center for Afro-American Studies Advertisement," Nommo, October 13,1971, 3.

Reassessing their racial identity, balancing their studies with activism, hearing
exhortations to serve the black community, and becoming active participants in the
struggle for black liberationthese issues helped to shape the lives of African
American students in this period.
As soldiers in the struggle for black liberation, black students acquired a lifelong commitment to political activism. The black student protest movement
empowered a generation of activists including Beverlee Bruce, Larry Gossett, and C.Z.
Wilson. Through struggle, they found "a reason to live," and dedicated their lives to
public service. "Being born in the crucible of the activities at UCLA has really given
me a great deal of vision," Bruce later remembered. "The kind of work that I am doing
now is very similar to what I did with the High Potential Program and if it hadn't been
for the High Potential Program, I don't think I would be the person that I am today."6
When C.Z. Wilson left UCLA, he became publisher of the ethnic newspaper the Los
Angeles Wave, where, in Wilson's own words, he "worked across Greater Los Angeles'
inner city communities to confront the nagging issues of ownership responsibilities,
consumerism, schooling, misdirected public policy and expanding public service."
Larry Gossett dedicated his life to serving the community. He spent decades as a
community organizer where he worked closely with other ethnic groups. Since 1993 he
has served as a King County Councilmember where, according to his official biography,
he advocates for "the cause of equal rights and economic freedom for all people."8
The legacy of black student protest can be viewed as a genuine triumph. What
the movement accomplished at UCLA, C.Z. Wilson later recalled, was a once in a
lifetime advancement. "And what happened here at UCLA will never happen again . . .
We had 150 [black] studentsless than 200and in five years, it literally went to
almost 2,000."9 This remarkable transformation was not limited to UCLA. Between
1960 and 1975 the proportion of twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-old black students
6

"30th Anniversary Celebration: Panel Discussion," UCLA CAAS Report 17, no. 1 & 2 (2001): 11.
Charles (CZ) Wilson, Notes and Reflections of Boundary Manager (Saving Inner City Black America
from Within), (CZAND Associates, 2005), Chapter 10, 1.
8
"Larry Gossett Biography," http://www.kingcounty.gov/Gossett/Biography.aspx
9
"30* Anniversary Celebration," 14.
7

274
attending white institutions increased by more than 150 percent.10 Similar gains were
made in hiring black faculty. Today, blacks constitute around two and one-third percent
of faculty at traditionally white universities.11 This represents a sea-change from the
statistically insignificant numbers of black faculty before the 1960s. This influx of
African American scholars produced a prodigious amount of groundbreaking research
on black history, life, and culture.
This new scholarship, coupled with radical curriculum reform, helped make
blackness respectable. In the early 1960s, many universities offered no courses on the
African American experience. African Americans were invisible. Today, students can
take literally hundreds of courses that cover every aspect of African American life. At
the University of Washington, specific classes include The Jazz Age, Black Women in
Drama, African American Politics, and Race in the American University. Classes not
centered around the black experience also cover African American topics. At Whitman
college, where I earned my undergraduate degree, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm
Xas part of freshman core. Toni Morrison's Beloved has also won its place in many
core classes. These classes have influenced the popularity of black authors and artists
in mainstream society. Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and
Jacob Lawrence have all become household names.12 The accomplishments of African
Americans are no longer invisible in the academy and American society.
Diversity has become a core value at virtually every national college and
university. A generation earlier blacks had to justify incorporating black studies classes
into the curriculum. Today, the idea that America's ethnic groups provide unique and
valuable contributions to the national fabric is so widely accepted that it has become
part of the natural landscape. This powerful, ubiquitous narrative is both good and bad.
10

Sarah Susannah Willie, Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race, (New York:

Routledge, 2003), 21.

11
Robin Wilson, "Stacking the Deck for Minority Candidates," The Chronicle ofHigher Education, July
12,2002, A.l 1; Robert Bruce Slater, "The Sunshine Factor: Freedom of Information Act Reveals Black
Faculty and Administrative Employment Statistics at Major U.S. Universities," The Journal ofBlacks in
Higher Education, 7 (Spring, 1995): 91-96. In this study, UCLA in 1991 had eighty-four full-time black
professors, 2.8 percent of the 2,974 total faculty members.
12
The University of Washington hired Jacob Lawrence in 1971, a concrete example of the school
meeting black students' demands for black faculty.

275
It demonstrates that universities value minoritiesa value exhibited in hiring practices,
course curriculum, and the swift condemnation of acts of intolerance. At the same time,
the cheerful celebration of diversity obscures deep racial divides that continue to plague
the nation. Diversity can serve as a cover that draws attention away from racial
problems that need solving.
Blacks student protest forged a new relationship between minorities and white
universities. Blacks demanded full access to traditional university resources. But they
also demanded the university create new institutional structures, in particular, black
studies programs and offices of minority affairs that studied, promoted, and celebrated
black history, culture, and identity. In doing so, black students rewrote what it meant
for a minority group to assimilate in the United States.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reaffirmed
African Americans' right to vote and to equal protection under the law. But so long as
white society continued to portray African American history and culture as inferior,
their status as full citizens was far from guaranteed. Black students, by demanding
universities create new structures to study and celebrate black history and culture,
helped to legitimize black culture and ensure blacks were viewed as capable of full
citizenship.
The African American struggle for citizenship that began with the passage of the
th

14 Amendment is sometimes marked as ending with the federal government's promise

in the Voting Rights Act to enforce that amendment. This struggle to be treated as full
citizens might be better understood as ending with the creation of black studies
programs and courses at hundreds of white universities. When universities, as powerful
state institutions, began to recognize and celebrate black culture and black
achievements, they helped to naturalize African American citizenship.
It was by no means guaranteed that black student protest would fundamentally
change the university. A myriad of factors helped facilitate the emergence of a new
relationship between black students and white universities. When black students made
non-negotiable demands, their target audience of administrators and faculty generally
already acknowledged that universities had unjustly excluded minorities. Even at the

overall conservative University of Texas, a majority of faculty and administrators

believed the university needed to change to include minorities in the faculty, student
body, and the curriculum. This view is reinforced by the fact that many universities
began implementing small-scale racially progressive policies before formal black
student protest. Ironically, at some universities, it was the development of minority
recruitment programs that brought the same black students to campus who later led
large-scale protests.
The civil rights movement laid the foundation for later black student protest.
The civil rights movement convinced administrators and community leaders that
opening the university to minorities was a moral issue. For example, while Seattle
newspapers critiqued the tactics of the UW BSU, they believed the BSU's cause to be
just. In a similar vein, University of Washington President Odegaard described racism
as a "social tragedy," and believed the University could play a special role in its
eradication from American society. Echoing the philosophy of Martin Luther King,
Odegaard stated that discrimination will "yield only to the language of love . . . It is to
this conversion of human hearts that I hope we in universities can make a special
contribution."

In this supportive environment black students utilized theatrical

protest tactics that transformed the pace and scale of racial change.
The university's unique setting also made racial change possible. The confined
geographic space of college campuses facilitated synergy between student protest
groupsin particular, black student groups, other minority groups, and New Left
organizations. Universities typically gave their presidents a great deal of latitude to
implement large-scale change on campus, especially if supported by the faculty. At the
same time, within the university, departments, colleges, the faculty, and students all
wielded varying degrees of power and purse strings. This allowed students, faculty and
administrators, without top-down administrative support to enact their own local
initiatives. At UT, for example, student government initiated the first minority student

13

"Letter to All Members of the Faculty Senate," May 20, 1968, BSU Papers, 71-69, University of
Washington Archives.

277
recruitment program. At UCLA, individual faculty initiative was partly responsible for
the numerous new courses on race offered in the late 1960s.
For all its success, black student protest fell far short of its promise. Many
universities never fully committed to minority programs. When the chaotic campus
unrest of the late 1960s subsided, so did minority programs. "The attitude of the faculty
toward dealing with the issues of minority access to UCLA, community involvement in
inner cities, and urban problem solving shifted drastically with the decline in student
unrest on campus," later remembered C.Z. Wilson. "Without having students standing
at the gate and disrupting teaching and research in universities, campuses went back to
business as usual."14 Black studies programs, minority hiring efforts, and urban
outreach initiatives began to disappear in the 1970s and any program perceived to
benefit minorities at the expense of whites came increasingly under fire.
Minority programs made easy targets because the nation never fully subscribed
to the idea of compensatory education. The failure of black student protest can be
attributed, in part, to the United States' unwillingness to come to terms with its racist
past. Those opposed to affirmative action seemed to believe that the Civil Rights Act of
1964 magically erased 350 years of racial discrimination and created a level playing
field. Even supporters of affirmative action used the notion of "past discrimination" to
justify the programs. Calling Jim Crow past discrimination, I argue, is like calling
World War II a "minor police action." However, even this justification for affirmative
action proved too much of an admission of guilt for the nation to handle. In Texas, for
example, where the state had systematically excluded virtually all African Americans
from higher education, even one black entering college at the possible expense of one
white caused outraged citizens to cry reverse discrimination. In 1978, the Supreme
Court echoed these sentiments when it ruled in The University of California v. Bakke
decision that quota-based education programs were illegal. Only the goal of diversity,
the Court ruled, could serve to justify affirmative action on behalf of minorities.

Wilson, Notes and Reflections, Chapter 8, 38-39.

This contradicts a narrative told today by many affirmative action opponents.

When Ward Connerly places his "civil rights" initiatives on state ballots, he argues that
while "using the power of the federal government to make certain that people aren't
discriminated against" is legitimate, racial preferences are not.15 Others who attack
affirmative action claim that while race-based preferences might have been initially
justified, today, more than forty years since the Civil Rights Act, it is time to embrace a
color-blind society. But many whites cried reverse racism before the implementation of
affirmative action programs. Connerly's claims aside, you cannot have civil rights if
employers acting in the "free market" choose to hire whites over blacks. A true
commitment to creating a color-blind nation never blossomed and, in many ways, like
the first Reconstruction, the second also died stillborn.
By the 1980s a new national narrative on race emerged. While African
Americans faced discrimination before the civil rights movement, the narrative went,
under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. they fought for the equality of all
Americans, and, for the most part, won. Although minorities may still experience
occasional discrimination, if they are willing to work hard, they can overcome those
stubborn pockets of racism and be judged entirely on the content of their character.
Whites also face reverse discrimination, concludes the narrative, as they struggle
against the odds to be hired based solely on their qualifications.
Unfortunately, contrary to our national narrative, racial prejudice continues to
thrive in the United States. In South Carolina the Confederate flag still proudly flies on
State Capitol grounds where Benjamin Tillman, the Governor and U.S. Senator who
oversaw the disenfranchisement of blacks at the end of the 19th century, is honored with
a statue outside the statehouse. An unabashed white supremacist, Tillman once
declared "We have done our level best [to disenfranchise blacks]... We stuffed ballot
boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it."16 In a recent story on the 2008
15

Alicia Montgomery, "A 'Poison' Divides Us." March 27, 2000. Salon.com
http://archive.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/27/connerly/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=110.
16
"The Blight that is Still with Us," Bob Herbert, The New York Times, January 22,2008; Rayford W.
Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo
Press, [1965] 1997), 91.

279
presidential primaries, while Senators Clinton and Obama continued to square off, a
white male in rural Tennessee swore to a reporter he would never vote for Obama.
When asked to explain his position, the man grinned broadly and stated, "It's regional,
you might say."

In Austin, when an African American-owned nightclub burned to the

ground, police celebrated its demise. On the dispatch system police quipped, "I got
some extra gasoline if they need it." Another officer believed the fire proved that,
"there is a God."18
While the level of discrimination faced by blacks has dramatically diminished
since the 1960s, conditions in black communities remain bleak. African American
communities are flush with poor schools, high crime and unemployment, and endemic
poverty. Four decades after the civil rights movement, blacks are still trapped at the
bottom of society. This is partly attributable to the nation's refusal to invest in black
communities and black human capital, particularly when it comes to education.
Funding for higher education grew rapidly after World War II and reached its high
water mark in the 1960s. When black student protest erupted, universities had funds to
meet their demands. But in a case of either poor historical timing or subtle racism,
blacks gained access to higher education exactly when its funding began to steadily
erode. The ascendency of conservativism in the 1980s created a society that valued
"law and order" over education. This shift in values had profound repercussions for
African Americans. In the year 2000, 791,000 African American men were
incarcerated, more than the 603,000 enrolled in higher education.19
When President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, thousands of cheap
magnetic ribbons began appearing on automobile bumpers. In addition to the
ubiquitous "Support Our Troops" magnet, a popular ribbon appeared that stated
confidently, "Freedom is Never Free," against a backdrop of patriotic stars and stripes.
Those displaying this ribbon apparently believed that a dictator whose army and
17

"Obama and the Southern Vote," The Denver Post, January 20,2008, Al.
"More than 100 Rally for Midtown's Loan," The Daily Texan, March 29,2005, Al.
19
Vincent Shiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg, "Cellblocks or Classrooms?: The Funding of Higher Education
and Corrections and Its Impact on African American Men," (Washington DC: The Justice Policy
Institute, 2002), http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/02-09_REP_CellblocksClassrooms_BBAC.pdf.
18

280
economy had been reduced to shambles by years of sanctions posed enough of a threat
to freedom to justify the sacrifice of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. In 1970,
the same slogan appeared in very different circumstances. Above a picture of the Statue
of Liberty in headline size font, UCLA's black student newspaper Nommo stated,
"Black People: Remember Freedom is Not Free."20 The death of two Black Panther
leaders on campus a year earlier, coupled with Angela Davis' recent placement on the
FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List," served as stark reminders that the black freedom
struggle was far from over. The massive manhunt for Davis, who taught briefly at
UCLA before being fired for being a black radical and a member of the Communist
Party, struck close to home for UCLA blacks. The UCLA black community rallied to
defend her innocence. Molefi Asante, in his capacity as director of the Center for AfroAmerican Studies, wrote a particularly touching statement in support of Davis. Her
story, he wrote in Nommo, served as a reminder that "Blacks have always known
persecution at the hands of American society; this means that the efforts for justice and
equality must be stepped up." Citing an article in Jet Magazine, Asante explained how
in 1970, white hostility and threats had convinced all but one black girl it was not worth
the sacrifice to integrate an all-white school. "Thus, only a courageous and bewildered
Black girl rode the bus when school began. The irony of it is that her name was Angela
Davis. It goes without saying that Angelas are made everyday."21
The greatest threat to freedom in 20 century America was not a threat at all. It
was the reality of a racial caste system that dehumanized and made second-class
citizens of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. Edmund Morgan, among
others, has eloquently demonstrated that American freedom, from the early days of the
Republic, derived, in part, from the servitude of others.22 Power has rarely conceded
anything without a demand when it comes to race in America. Every small step the
20

"Black People: Remember Freedom is Not Free," Nommo, November 5, 1970, 12.
"Afro-American Study Center," Nommo, October 27, 1970, 3. CAAS's statement was included on a
page of statements in support of Angelafromthe UCLA BSU, Che Lumumba, the Black Panther Party,
West LA BSU, and Southwest College BSU.
22
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York:
Norton, 1975); See also Eric Foner, The Story ofAmerican Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1998).
21

281
nation has taken towards granting African Americans full citizenship has been paid with
the hard-earned labor and blood of the innumerable heroes of the black freedom
struggle. Black student protest in the late 1960s also created its fair share of Angelas.
Their courage and vision helped to open the doors of educational access, create
inclusive curriculums, and forced universities to value diversity.

278
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival Collections
Affirmative Action Papers. University of Washington Archives. Seattle, Washington.
Black Student Union Papers. University of Washington Archives. Seattle, Washington.
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White, Bobby. 2005. Interview by Janet Jones, August 25.

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VITA
Craig Collisson earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Whitman College in 1996. Since
1995, Craig Collisson has lived in Walla Walla, Washington, Vienna, Austria,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, Lawrence, Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, San Antonio,
Texas, and Denver, Colorado. He earned his M.A. in History at the University of
Washington in 2001 and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Washington in 2008.