Black Campus Movements and the Challenge to Higher Education in North America During the 1960s

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session focuses on battles African American college students waged against all-white institutions of higher learning during the late 1960s. With the intensification of the civil rights movement and rise of the Black Power movement in the middle part of the decade, African American students at white colleges and universities began to voice opposition to racist educational policies and agitate against curricula which trivialized the historical experience and cultural traditions of blacks. By 1968 and 1969, these students engaged in militant activism on nearly 200 campuses throughout the United States and Canada. As the papers of this session will demonstrate, these students’ actions challenged the foundations of higher education in North America and set in motion reform that profoundly transformed college life.

Sub Unit

• Division F - Historical Inquiry in Education

Cosponsor

• SIG-Research Focus on Black Education

Chair

• Stephen Edward Kercher, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Papers

• The Black Campus Movement and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 - Ibram Rogers, SUNY - College at Oneonta

• The Black Revolution on Campus: The Montreal-Trinidadian Axis - Martha Biondi, Northwestern University

• “On Strike! Shut It Down!”: White College Student Allies in the Black Campus Movement in Madison - Cornelius K. Gilbert, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• The Black Campus Revolt in Wisconsin: “Black Thursday,” 1968 - Stephen Edward Kercher, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh