Black Student Activism Topic Guide

This book provides the first national study of this intense and challenging struggle which disrupted and refashioned institutions in almost every state. It also illuminates the context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history through a history of black higher education and black student activism before 1965.

The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration.

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university's unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world's attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion.

A study of the circumstances surrounding the University of Pennsylvania's decision to increase its black enrolment, and the consequences that followed. Focusing on the role of black student activism, it traces the controversy and debate over issues such as assimilation and integration.

Richard P. McCormick has chronicled the black student protest movement at Rutgers University, from the 1960s to today.

The Howard University protests from the perspective and worldview of its participants We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest.

Joy Ann Williamson charts the evolution of black consciousness on predominately white American campuses during the critical period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, with the Black student movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign serving as an illuminating microcosm of similar movements across the country. Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity.