Student Activism in the '70s and the New Millennium by Raymond Winbush, Ph.D.

The chant started slowly, had rhythm, was muffled, but grew louder.  It almost sounded like “Get out of my way, or I’ll go to sleep.” That didn’t make any sense, and as I looked out the classroom window on the quadrangle of the University of Chicago, I saw the origins of the noise coming from a large gathering of students on the opposite end of the quad marching toward the class building I was in.  Their chant grew louder, until I could distinguish the words “Get out of the classroom and into the streets”. It was October 1970 and Angela Davis had been captured.  The fugitive professor was accused of supplying guns to the imprisoned Soledad Brothers and ended in a shoot-out at the Marin County Courthouse and had been taken by FBI agents in New York.  The students were telling the campus what to do, and I looked at my somewhat bewildered professor, packed up my books, left the classroom, donned an already made “Free Angela” button and joined the crowd…

I was a Black child of the 1960s. It meant experiencing the assassination of Medgar Evers in June of 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, watching the March on Washington in August of that same year and hearing about four little girls bombed to death in September of 1963.  It also meant watching the events of Dallas unfold before a nation as America killed its President named John Kennedy; hearing about Malcolm X’s death; watching televised urban rebellions in Watts, Harlem, Cleveland and Newark; and in 1968 watching news coverage of JFK’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, killed just two months after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Historians refer to such events as “defining moments” since they affect the lives of large numbers of people who ruminate about them years later.  Young Black people growing up in the 1960s entered the 1970s with more “defining moments” in their lives than any other generation before or since.  We witnessed first hand the changing of America as it lost its innocence and grip on the lives of millions of Black people whom it had practiced American apartheid on for nearly 400 years.

By 1970, the music of the 1960s had toned down a bit.  The “Motown Sound” was in its heyday, and the Temptations, Four Tops and Supremes offered a sanitized version of Black music to a broad audience of white listeners.  In 1971, Marvin Gaye would break the rhythm of Motown’s non-political musical hits by asking the world “What’s Going On?” and thus providing the anthem for a generation jaded by assassinated leaders, growing corporate globalization, war, and polluted environments.  The real possibility of being drafted to fight a war reshaped life goals as young Black men were dying by the hundreds in a far off place called Vietnam.  Al Gore, who would be Vice President of the United States, would serve in that war as a journalist, while another rich and famous young man by the name of George W. Bush would be placed in the Air National Guard by powerful men who thought he might be a president one day.

Students then really believed they could change the world and did.  What were peripheral issues during the 1970s? Civil rights, the environment, and feminism would become core values in the United States, and used to determine where politicians stood on subjects that mattered to most Americans.  There was almost a self-righteousness air about the fact that we could change the world because we were right.  We knew that racism in the form of segregated housing, voting and education was wrong and so we did something about it.  We believed that politics should be “on the ground” and helped pass laws that gave 18-year olds the right to vote, even though subsequent students would squander this privilege.   We organized without permission, challenged bureaucracies without hesitation, and talked into the wee hours of the night about the “legitimacy of our rights as a people.” We were “bad” and knew it-powerful and relished it-idealistic and used it to liberate our people.

I teach at a university that was central to the Black struggle of the 1960s and 1970s-Fisk.  Nikki Giovanni was here, so was John Lewis and Marion Berry.  It was ground zero for what would later be called the “Nashville Movement,” and before fax machines, laptop computers and e-mail, Fisk would set the trend for what other Black institutions were doing politically across the nation.  Now it is difficult, not only at Fisk, but other universities as well to see students organizing around substantive issues that are life changing. So what happened?  I believe that this generation lacks the defining moments that helped the 1970s generation shape values that would motivate them to action on a host of issues.  Young people today ask permission to address societal wrongs by the very perpetrators of the wrongs themselves.  On this point, I have been to numerous meetings in which young African Americans will complain to their older mentors that “these meetings don’t take into consideration young people” or “you don’t have any young people on this or that committee.” Such complaints were rare during the 1970s, since students often ignored adults and formed their own groups.  In the 1960s when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was viewed as moving glacially on issues of civil rights, Ella Baker formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that set its own agenda for pressing civil rights.  Young people today need not wait on their seniors to “include” them in their programs.  Advocate for inclusion, but if they fail them in that regard, they should create their own programs and agendas to address the needs we neglect.

Just as it was in the 1970s, today’s world is full of challenges that need to be taken on by young people.  Environmental racism, reparations, globalization, police brutality, racial profiling and other ills are in sore need of young voices mounting protests against their existence.  Organized protests in the form of boycotts and political action are standard weapons in the arsenal of justice warriors and should never be put down.  Communication using the Internet, faxes and other technology make it easier for students to organize internationally on issues that tackle global issues oppressing large groups of people.  I look back and marvel how Black young people were able to mobilize hundreds of people to political rallies and mount boycotts without the technology that we nowadays take for granted.  We couldn’t rely on cell phones, or e-mail to let people know where we were and being isolated from protests groups was taken for granted with all the risks involved.  The Internet can serve as an electronic drum, to get messages quickly to large groups of people in a variety of locations.

In September 2000, Naomi Tutu, program coordinator for the Race Relations Institute, at Fisk University and daughter of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, 26 Fisk students and I worked for the election of Selma, Alabama’s first elected Black mayor, James Perkins.  Traveling by bus to where Fisk alum, John Lewis had been, the students relived some of the same activities that a previous generation saw as a defining moment in the struggle for voters’ rights.  The students were surprised to see Black voters intimidated and afraid to go to polling places for fear of reprisal from the racial caste system that gripped Selma under the notorious leadership of Joe Smitherman, the same white supremacist who had been mayor of Selma on “Bloody Sunday.” We walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge again.  We traced the footsteps of John Lewis where 35 years ago he had been beaten senseless by the storm troopers of the Alabama police force.  The students wept as they relived a history that had only been some text in a book.  Now it was alive again and began the creation of their “defining moments” that will integrate political activism in all that they do.

Dr. Raymond Winbush is the director of the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University.