Sunday, November 15, 2015
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, 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.
