Black Activism on Predominantly White College Campuses: Transplanting Successful Campaigns to Greater Results

• In Event: Constructing Possibilities for Advancing the Historical and Contemporary Relevance of Southern Black Educators’ Activism

Abstract

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action for university admissions. In response, the spokesperson for the University of Missouri (UM) emailed the following statement to all employees in the UM system.

… programs and scholarships have used
race/ethnicity as a factor for admissions and
scholarships. Those practices will be
discontinued, and we will abide by the new
Supreme Court ruling concerning legal standards
that applies to race-based admissions and race-
based scholarships.

It took the system only a day to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision to negate admissions based on race/ethnicity. Conversely, forced by a court order, it took the university over one hundred years to enroll its first black student.

Historical research on the education of blacks in America reveals the white majority’s reluctance to provide black children access to an education equal to their white peers. Likewise, the early black normal schools and colleges suffered a similar fate. Most black institutions of higher learning were more like high schools than the colleges and universities attended by their white peers.

The intent of this paper was to examine how black faculty and students used their collective power to engage administration about barriers that hampered black students’ success and what was needed to remove obstacles. The UM, Columbia (UMC), was our subject because of its history with black student uprisings and its long-serving Black Faculty and Student Organization. We wanted to learn about the organization’s processes used to identify problems and solutions and consider the ways they executed their plan. By studying their processes and identifying successful campaigns, we aimed to use the findings to share with others facing similar plights.

Two frameworks, social capital and interest convergence, support this study. The social capital framework helped identify the networks of black people who combined their efforts to push back against the power structures that ignored their needs as black students and faculty. Also examined were the spaces blacks convened to discuss, plan, or execute their strategies. The interest convergence framework loosely defined illustrates how white people align with blacks when it is in their interests and when it threatens their interests the support is withdrawn. It helped uncover any changes made during periods of unrest that reverted to the status quo once the disruption dissipated.

We conducted a historical analysis of black activism at a predominantly white institution (PWI) because black undergraduates continue to be severely underrepresented at more selective four-year institutions. Not only has there been little change in their status, but it has also significantly declined due to anti-affirmative action policies and practices. Primary data from the personal collection of the first black faculty member hired by the UMC and UMC black faculty and student personal papers revealed black activism on college campuses can lead to positive changes. Secondary data included newspaper clippings about unrest at PWIs. Since hard-earned victories that bolster the rights of minority communities are always at-risk, this research helped isolate successful campaigns with the potential to fortify the rights of minorities.

Authors

• Vanessa B. Garry, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Paulette Isaac Savage, University of Missouri - St. Louis