The Black Campus Revolt in Wisconsin: “Black Thursday,” 1968

• In Event: Black Campus Movements and the Challenge to Higher Education in North America During the 1960s

Abstract

Until the mid 1960s, many colleges and universities throughout the northern and western United States stood somewhat aloof from the social and political turmoil that accompanied the black freedom movement. Beginning in 1966, however, many of these institutions became embroiled in debates concerning the place of race within the academy. By 1968, militant black students on campuses throughout the United States were beginning to challenge directly the racial status quo.

This paper focuses specifically on one significant episode of black campus activism during that year, the so-called “Black Thursday” demonstrations at Wisconsin State University at Oshkosh.

The paper begins by explaining how administrators at Wisconsin State University—Oshkosh launched an aggressive effort to recruit black students from Milwaukee (located ninety miles to the southeast) several years prior to the campus protest. It then relates how the campus administration and members of the nearly all-white community of Oshkosh did not appear quite as welcoming to the students once they arrived in Oshkosh.

Responding to a range of objectionable conditions on the Oshkosh campus, approximately one hundred members of the newly formed Black Student Union (BSU)—more than a few of whom had participated in the boycotts and marches that shook Milwaukee during the mid 1960s—made a series of demands to campus president Roger Guiles. Frustrated by what they interpreted as President Guiles’ dilatory tactics in avoiding their concerns and demands, angered by episodes of racism they experienced in the nearly all-white Oshkosh community, and inspired by the example of militant students elsewhere in the United States in 1968, BSU members on November 21 erupted in an angry and destructive outburst, one which resulted in heavy damage to the campus administration building. The response of local law enforcement was swift, and President Guiles wasted little time in meting out expulsions to 94 black students. Despite the interventions of Father James Groppi, Milwaukee assemblyman Lloyd Barbee, and groups of white students who staged protests against the campus administration, the Wisconsin State University Board of Regents ultimately upheld the expulsions. The great majority of expelled students never returned to Oshkosh.

Informed by historical methodology and based on archival research and a new collection of oral histories, this paper narrates the story of the “Black Thursday” protest and offers reflections on racial politics in the state of Wisconsin. It engages a series of historical debates centering on how dissenting African American students ought to be disciplined, how far colleges and universities ought to go in accommodating African American students’ for “relevant” subject matter and, not least, what obligations public institutions of higher learning have toward serving the educational aspirations of black Americans.

Author

• Stephen Edward Kercher, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh