Abstract
When thinking about Black student activism of the 1960s, most commonly, one remembers the various off-campus protests of the early 1960s. Perhaps the most well known of these events is the 1960 student sit-in movement, which began with four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, and resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The Freedom Rides of 1961 and Freedom Summer of 1964 are similarly well chronicled. However, much less is remembered about the on-campus political action of Black students during the decade. This omission guides Ibram H. Rogers’ The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972.
In a narrative that spans numerous regions of the country and includes colleges and universities of every size and character, Rogers recounts what he terms the “Black Campus Movement” (BCM) describing it as a “struggle among black student nationalists at historically white and black institutions to reconstitute higher education from 1965-1972” (p. 3). While highlighting on-campus campaigns, The Black Campus Movement is also unique for offering a comprehensive account of Black student protest nationwide. Furthermore, Rogers asserts a frame of analysis that emphasizes the importance of the BCM as both a part of and apart from the Black power movement, the campus protests of other racial groups, and “black student off-campus activism during the contemporary civil rights period” (p. 3).
The Black Campus Movement also addresses racist patterns in American education that existed through the mid-1960s. According to Rogers, “there were at least four entrenched elements that had long undergirded the racial constitution of higher education” (p. 4). First was the “moralized contraption,” a constricting code of dress and behavior enforced on Black students, primarily at historically Black colleges and universities. Second was the “standardization of exclusion,” which habitually excluded curriculum about Black people from Black institutions and excluded Black topics and people from White ones. The “normalized mask of whiteness” was the third element, which presented Eurocentric curriculum as universal. And the forth was “ladder altruism,” the ethic that individual Black career and economic success inevitably benefited all African Americans. According to Rogers, these four elements were systematically assaulted and transformed by the BCM, leading to the “racial reconstitution of higher education.”
Chapter 1 covers the history of African Americans in higher education up to 1965. Beginning with home-schooled Black intellectuals, like Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker, the text goes on to describe the first Black men and women to attend college and earn postsecondary degrees. As the narrative moves from the 19th to 20th centuries, it examines how Black students continually endured and challenged the four oppressive elements of higher education just described.
Chapter 2 covers the first phase of the “Long Black Student Movement” (LBSM), the “New Negro Campus Movement” of the 1920s and early ’30s. During these years, Black students organized around a number of issues, including calls for courses on business and enterprise, challenges to the moralized contraptions of curfews and dress codes, and requests (at White institutions) for administrators to address their exclusion on and off campus.
Continuing the narrative of the LBSM, chapter 3 describes Black student activism from the 1930s to early 1960s. Unlike the previous phase of student protest that saw demonstrations focused on campus, the period of the ’30s through the ’60s witnessed a gradual shift of student attention to off-campus campaigns, culminating with student participation in the civil rights movement. Yet, even before the marches and sit-ins, Rogers argues that Black students were an integral part of the era’s activism, particularly by serving as plaintiffs and integrators during the NAACP’s campaign against school segregation.
Chapter 4 recounts the developments in the civil rights and Black power movements during the first half of the 1960s as the context from which the BCM would emerge. Rogers explicates how the combination of outrage at White repression of civil rights efforts, disappointment with the fate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Black rebellions in Harlem and Watts, the life and death of Malcolm X, and the profusion of Black nationalist speakers, student groups, conferences, and periodicals created a generative atmosphere for the BCM that followed.
The fifth chapter gives a narrative overview of the BCM, discussing the events at various schools, such as Hampton, the University of Kansas, Tuskegee, North Carolina A&T, San Francisco State, and Howard. Responding to the tragic events of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, the Orangeburg massacre, the killing of students at Jackson State, and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Black students demanded Black studies and other reforms at institutions nationwide. Next, chapter 6 presents a detailed discussion of the BCM’s organizing methods, demands, and protest tactics.
The opposition and repression of the BCM is covered in chapter 7, describing how student activists faced criticism and/or violence from White administrators, Black professors and leaders, the White and Black press, other students, politicians, police agencies, and the judiciary. Chapter 8 summarizes how the BCM effectively challenged the moralized contraptions, standardization of exclusion, normalized mask of Whiteness, and latter altruism, thereby transforming higher education in America. Rogers points out that after the BCM, higher education would no longer be able to exclude content on African Americans or impose dress codes and curfews as it had previously done. And the final section, an epilogue, discusses U.S. higher education from the 1970s into the 21st century, depicting how “egalitarian exclusion”—the limiting of non-White people and race-specific initiatives using the rhetoric of equality—has been used to undermine the gains of the ’60s and ’70s.
Overall, The Black Campus Movement is notable for its thorough research and fresh historical analysis. The work breaks new and important ground by providing insights into trends and patterns of Black student activism across geography, institutional types, and time. Although the works of other authors, like Stephan Bradley, Fabio Rojas, Nowile M. Rooks, or Joy Ann Williamson, have examined late-’60s Black student politics, all have focused on a certain location or theme. In contrast, The Black Campus Movement is the first work to compile such an inclusive account of actions nationwide. Therefore, this text is invaluable for students and researchers of the 1960s, the Black power movement, and Black student protest.