From Columbia University in New York City to San Francisco State University in California, Northwestern was just one of the many epicenters of student protests in the 60s. What tied these movements together? From the Daily Northwestern, I'm Paul o'. Connor.
This is Defining Safe, a podcast looking at the intersection of identity and student life at Northwestern. On May 3, Northwestern commemorated the 55th anniversary of the takeover of the Bursar's office. The event saw over 100 students peacefully occupy the Bursar's office in response to unequal treatment of black students and university policies surrounding housing, financial aid and academics. They were looking at questions of housing, the curriculum, dormitories, faculty hiring, cultural and social activities on campus.
And they were really examining every aspect of student life. They were bringing up a robust racial justice. That was African American studies and history professor Martha Biondi Biondi, author of the book the Black Revolution on Campus, which traces the history of black student activism and social movements across the 60s and early 1970s. She says the student activists involved in the Bursar's office takeover were partly galvanized by the political and social turbulence of 1968.
I think the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968 was a kind of stunning and grievous event that really impacted young people and pushed them to, I would say, a new chapter in the movement's history. When Dr. King was assassinated, I think one message of that was students felt like, oh, here's this a possible non violence, you know, get killed.
It just made them sad and angry, but also made them feel like they had to sort of intensify their tactics and they had to sort of pose more of a challenge up to institutions. And I think what you saw nationwide is students really engage in more confrontational tactics. Like they went on strike, they engaged in sit ins, they took over buildings, they blocked traffic that's transmitting. Protests on campus against institutional racism coincided with protests against the Vietnam War, which lasted in the 1970s.
Here's heaven. Leonard, a university archivist for Northwestern. Here's how he described the atmosphere in the country during the late 70s, 1960s. This is a very restive time, not only in the United States, but around the world.
You have context of the Vietnam War. You have context of the impending presidential election. You have the context of the Memphis sanitation strike. There was opposition to allowing course credits for military training programs.
There periodically were demonstrations against the presence of corporations doing hiring on campus if those corporations had been somehow tied to the war effort. While alumni involved in the Bursar's Office takeover say the 38 hour protest was intense. Contact between students and the administration never became violent. The university elected instead to negotiate with the students in a series of provisions collectively known as the May 4 agreement.
Among other things, the administration agreed to increase enrollment rates for black students, worked to provide financial aid packages and create identity based housing and communal spaces. However, student protests at other college campuses did not produce the same type of negotiations. Just a few days before the Berkshire's office takeover In Evanston, over 700 students were arrested and over 100 were injured by police after student activists at Columbia University occupied a campus building. The occupation was in response to university plans to expand further into the neighborhood of West Harlem to construct the new gymnasium.
And six months after the bursar's takeover, the longest ever student strike in higher education occurred at San Francisco State University. Spearheaded by student activist organizations on campus. The the strike lasted five months with police arresting and injuring hundreds. I think that the police were called in a lot of public institutions that were in states with conservative governors.
For example, in California, the governor at the time was Ronald Reagan, who rose to public prominence on law and order platforms. Dr. Sundiata Kayita Chajua teaches in the Departments of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He offered more insight into the involvement of police in student protests.
It's not so much students and their Catholics, because I think you can find places where a student brought guns on the campus, but the police weren't called. You can find places where the students didn't bring guns on campus and the police weren't called. So I think it had more to do with the particular administration, the president, the chancellor, the board of trustees in terms of their reaction. As a student, I of course participated in student protests.
We took over some classrooms and those things turned on whose classroom you took over. So I think it's always going to be a dialectic between how those in power respond to the initial tactics of movement activists. While many often mistake the civil rights movement as the key motivation for activism on college campuses at the time, Chachoa distinguishes the Black Power movement as the primary source of inspiration for student activists. The big distinction with Black power is that black power is for to some degree structural access, but largely black powers are called to build independent black institutions and for black people to gain control, to take control of the US public institutions that function in their community.
So even though from that extent you could say that it's about being allowed to enter those structures, but it's talking about controlling those structures, not just being brought in but taking control. You can look at their dress raised black jacket. You can look at the listen to the rhythm rhetoric mirrors the black power movement. Chadua says that these student activists weren't necessarily trying to fix or adjust the university system.
Rather, they were trying to construct something that adequately accommodated their demands. A major target then became the development of black studies programs. We want black studies. We want a full array of courses, a full curriculum that explores the experiences of black folk in every discipline.
And we want to see the creation of an idea in which these disciplines are brought together in a way that something new emerges. Biondi says this demand was at the heart of the bursar's office takeover as well as other student protests across the country. In some ways, you can think of it as going beyond what we might think of as a kind of simple process of desegregation or integration and calling for a rejection of a Eurocentric curriculum and a kind of white liberal colorblindness that sort of didn't acknowledge and recognize black cultural contributions to American life. Be sure to check out the rest of our content for the 55th anniversary of the BirdStar's office takeover.
Get a physical copy of the daily or visit dailynorthwestern.com to read our reporting on the efforts to revive the 1968 demands, what an upcoming Supreme Court ruling could mean for nu admissions, and more from the Daily Northwestern. I'm Paul o'. Connor. Thanks for listening to another episode of Defining Safe.
This episode was reported and produced by me. The audio editor of the Daily Northwestern is Nik Ellison, the digital managing editors are Ava Mendoli and Erica Schmidt, and the editor in chief is Alex Perry. Make sure to subscribe to the Daily Northwesterns podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.