Black History Month: Some Purdue Remembrances
Harry Targ
Journal and Courier photo
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, 2014 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. (A later rendition of the KKK dominated
Indiana politics in the 1920s).
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 (and Trump
supporting MAGA) rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the
federal and state levels.
Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that
elected President Obama, there emerged a
Third Reconstruction. It featured 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 over
the last decade, 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.”
https://omeka.cla.purdue.edu/s/investigating-150-years/page/civil-rights-protests-in-1960s
History of protests at Purdue shows 'another world is
possible' | City & State | purdueexponent.org
Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated
students rallied together on Friday, November 13, 2014 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 protests
in 1968, 2015 and today at Purdue recognize 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 twenty-first
century are linked in a chain for justice.
WBAA Photo
