Patterns of Student Activism at Historically Black Universities in the United States and South Africa, 1960-1977

Abstract

In the ongoing campaigns to abolish legalized racial segregation in the United States, the nonviolent direct action protest strategy adopted by students at black and white colleges and universities in the South, referred to as the sit-ins, is considered an historically significant innovation. This act of resistance and civil disobedience had been practiced by previous generations of social and political activists. However, when the four black students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, who were heirs to a black and white radical tradition, decided to sit-in at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store, a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States was initiated. The southern college campuses spawned hundreds of willing to put their lives on the line in the cause of social justice. The sit-ins and the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented a turning point and historical marker in the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. (1) In the black freedom struggles in the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, launching of protests by black students also marked a turning point and the onset of a new phase of the larger anti-apartheid movement. The Soweto protests in 1976 demonstrated the degree of political consciousness even among elementary and secondary school children and signaled a renewed level of resistance to South Africa's white minority government. But even earlier in the late 1960s student activists in South Africa launched a new phase in the black freedom struggle in South Africa with the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement and South African Students Organization (SASO). Under the leadership of Stephen Biko and Barney Pityana, SASO mobilized black African, Coloured, and Indian students and, according to Gail Gerhart, raised the level of political education and ideological diffusion never before achieved by any black [South African] political organization. (2) In the black freedom struggles in the United States and South Africa in the 1960s, black activism played a significant role and made distinctive contributions to the larger campaigns for social and political change. In this essay I will examine black activism at three historically black, public universities in the 1960s and 1970s--Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the University of the North and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa--focusing on the patterns of protests and the responses of university and government officials to activism. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA While the launching of Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in December 1955 was generally considered the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the United States, sociologist Aldon Morris in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, published in 1984, argued that the bus boycott organized in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, and led by Baptist minister Rev. T. J. Jemison, served as the model for the protest launched in Montgomery almost two years later. In Baton Rouge, the mobilization of the black community through church leadership, the formation of alternative means of transportation, and the filing of lawsuits to challenge segregation on public transit in the state and federal courts in Louisiana served as the model for activities that would take place in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. Jemison became an important advisor to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association during their year-long bus protest. (3) According to Rev. T.J. Jemison, in the period between 1953 and 1960, African Americans in Baton Rouge made some attempts to desegregate eating establishments in the downtown areas, and these efforts were often led by students from Southern University. …