The Ferguson Effect: The Spread of Black Consciousness at Missouri Campuses

• In Event: "Bout That Action": Community-Engaged Research and the Radical Imagination in Education

Abstract

In the summer of 2017, The NAACP in an effort to shed light on the injustices faced by Black residents in the state of Missouri, issued an unprecedented state travel advisory. This travel advisory provides evidence of a need for inquiry into pressing racism in the state of Missouri. This paper addresses critical educational problems facing Black students in the state of Missouri, namely problems of state-sanctioned violence and institutional neglect.

Black students have played a significant role in institutionalizing Black consciousness and knowledge within institutions of higher education historically and contemporarily (Joseph, 2003). This continues to be the case and was particularly clear in the fall of 2015 when Black students and advocates at institutions across the country formulated movements and spaces to challenge and resist against hegemonic, oppressive, and antagonistic institutional cultures and ideologies. As Kelley (2016) states, that although institutions may not be up to the task of participating in transformative change, students participated in “unveiling the university’s exploitative practices and its deeply embedded structures of racism, sexism, and class inequality” and are “profound acts of demystification on their own.” (p. 157)

This paper uses a Black Consciousness (Biko, 2017/1978; Kelly, 2002) framework to center two Missouri universities’ campus racial climates (Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Pedersen & Allen, 2010) post-Ferguson: The University of Missouri (henceforth, Mizzou) and St. Louis University (henceforth, SLU). The two largest student-led campus protests in the state were the “Occupy SLU” protest at SLU (fall 2014) and The Concerned Student 1950 protests (fall 2015) at Mizzou. The student and community activists from the St. Louis area protested at St. Louis University in the “Occupy SLU” movement for six days during the week of October 10, 2014, and with positive results: the university agreed to many of their demands to increase local access to Black students, and acknowledged that racism and police violence were contributing to Black SLU student underrepresentation. To follow, at the University of Missouri, 11 Black students made national headlines with the Concerned Student 1950 movement. During this protest, in November, 2015, a CS1950 student began a hunger-strike leading to the Mizzou football team boycott - ultimately leading to the resignation of both the University of Missouri system president, and Mizzou’s chancellor.

The research design of this study draws from a 2-year collaborative mixed-method research project from 2014 to 2016. The collaborative study on the Ferguson movement consisted of 4 datasets: 20 participant interviews; media archives from Washington University’s Documenting Ferguson community media project; field notes, document/reports, and U.S. Census data. For this study, I drew from the qualitative data, specifically interviews, field notes, community media and documents.

After analyzing the media and interview data, this study reveals how collective Black struggles are “incubators of new knowledge (Kelley, 2002, p. 8),” and action-oriented movements. These actions interrogate the depredation on Blackness. How black consciousness through community-student organizing was employed in what I’ve termed as the Ferguson Effect - the spreading of Black Consciousness in the state of Missouri - is this study’s major contribution to studies of campus racial climates and student activism.

Author

• Amalia Z. Dache, University of Pennsylvania