Sunday, November 15, 2015
(In November, 2015 Purdue students rallied in
solidarity with African American students at other universities. One year
later, Purdue University students protested the appearance of racist,
Islamophobic, and anti-semitic flyers around the campus attributed to a
neo-fascist national organization. Subsequent to the November 20, 2016 protest
a series of demands were made to the administration that would recognize the
rhetorical threat the flyers represented. They also called for educational
opportunities that would explain why the flyers created a threatening campus
environment. Currently a group of students are sitting in at the executive
building to dramatize their concerns. The essay below helps to ground the
student activism today in the history of struggles to create a climate free of
discrimination at one university).
Harry Targ
Harry Targ
If
there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick
Douglass
The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W.E.B. DuBois
What
a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like
Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels
All across the country students, black and white,
hit the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and
interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday,
November 13, 2015 to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and
to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at Purdue; a racism
that the university president says no longer exists.
Of course nationally and locally the struggle for
social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the
Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War
American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when
black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to
create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction
raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the
federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the
rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist
policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the
South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the
country.
The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was
inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which
declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors
of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the
country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed
racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also the “war on poverty” was
launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential
candidate Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift
federal and state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party
rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the federal and state
levels.
Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that
elected President Obama, there has emerged a Third Reconstruction. It features
the mobilization of masses of
people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and
white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no
faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a
truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory,
egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.
The resurgence of protests on college campuses,
although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of the kinds of
struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked about. For example, on the campus of Purdue
University, the struggle for racial justice has a long history. For the first
60 years of the twentieth century the African American population was less than
one percent of the student body. The
numbers of African American students grew to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in
the context of the Second Reconstruction and activism around civil rights and
opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students organized a “Negro History
Study Group”(which later became the Black Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize
what they saw as institutional racism coupled with an environment of racial
hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying brown bags marched to the
Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from the bags. The bricks
were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set next to the bricks.
The students submitted a series of demands including the development of an
African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center.
The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear.
The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty
set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor
changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African
American professor in Liberal Arts.
One year later, after an African American member of
the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response
led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more
demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the
establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational,
social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator,
accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the
campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it
has become.
One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric
McCaskill, told then President Hovde by phone during the protest march and
visit to the Executive Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.” Forty-six
years later one thousand similarly motivated students rallied together on
Friday, November 13 on the Purdue campus. They expressed outrage at the
systematic violence against people of color throughout the society and the
perpetuation of racism in virtually every institution. On the Purdue campus
they protested the lack of full, fair representation of African Americans on
the faculty and in the student body, a climate on and off campus that
perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all the old stereotypes of minority
students that has prevailed for years. They also shared their solidarity with
the students of the University of Missouri and they made it crystal clear their
disagreement with the statement by the Purdue University President that the
Purdue campus was different.
The organizers provided thirteen demands including:
-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue
University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue.
-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with
student involvement in the hiring process.
-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness
curriculum.”
-the establishment of a campus police advisory board.
-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented
minorities in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020.
-greater representatives of minority groups on
student government bodies.
Frederick Douglass was correct. Progress requires struggle. DuBois is still
correct about the twenty-first century as he was about the prior one: the
problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many of those who observed,
participated in, and applauded the organizers of this latest protest at Purdue
believe that the struggles are long, the victories sometimes transitory, and
each generation of activists is participating in a process of fundamental
change that will move society in a more humane direction. The generations of
Purdue students of the 1960s and the second decade of the twenty-first century
are linked in a chain for justice.
