.-') _ .-') _ | |
( OO ) ) ( OO ) ) | |
.-----. ,--./ ,--,' ,--./ ,--,' | |
' .--./ | \ | |\ | \ | |\ | |
| |('-. | \| | )| \| | ) | |
/_) |OO )| . |/ | . |/ | |
|| |`-'| | |\ | | |\ | | |
(_' '--'\ | | \ | | | \ | | |
`-----' `--' `--' `--' `--' | |
lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial | |
ARTICLE VIEW: | |
In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | |
By Alaa Elassar, Nicquel Terry Ellis and Ashley R. Williams, CNN | |
Updated: | |
1:53 PM EDT, Tue April 30, 2024 | |
Source: CNN | |
Students have established encampments and s to protest Israel’s war | |
in Gaza, roiling college campuses across America. Many of them say | |
they’re inspired by the long – if often turbulent – history of | |
university activism in the United States. | |
As with how to address the protests, some have called in to | |
disperse participants and take down their encampments — resulting in | |
tense confrontations with police and mass arrests. | |
Students, often joined by faculty, remain adamant that they will not | |
abandon their encampments until their schools meet their demands — | |
saying their actions in support of Palestinians follow a tradition of | |
student-led social movements. | |
Civil Rights protests and sit-ins | |
While student protests for racial equality gained the most traction | |
during the 1960s, some of the first demonstrations took place decades | |
before the height of the Civil Rights Movement. | |
In 1943, student leaders at Howard University Law School began | |
practicing what they called a “stool-sitting technique” where | |
students would go to restaurants in Washington, D.C., that denied Black | |
people service and remain seated, from the Student Nonviolent | |
Coordinating Committee. | |
One notable example was in April of that year when student activist | |
Pauli Murray led classmates to a “Whites only” cafeteria and | |
requested service. | |
“They requested service, and when they were refused, took their seats | |
and pulled out magazines, pencils, pads and poetry books,” . Managers | |
closed the cafeteria within 45 minutes. | |
The following year, while protesters demonstrated outside, 55 Howard | |
students staged a sit-in at another local restaurant. They sat and read | |
books as employees refused to serve them. After losing 50% of its | |
service that day, the restaurant’s headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, | |
ordered management to serve the students, according to the SNCC. | |
The Howard sit-ins didn’t immediately lead to an end to racial | |
segregation in the nation’s Capital, but they were later emulated by | |
Black activists across during the civil rights movement. | |
In 1960, a group of four Black students from the university now known | |
as North Carolina A&T, when they went to a Woolworth’s department | |
store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat at a lunch counter that | |
was reserved for White people, They became known as the “Greensboro | |
Four.” | |
Sit-ins at the restaurant grew in the days to follow and six months | |
later the Greensboro Woolworth’s began serving Black people at its | |
lunch counter. | |
Segregation wasn’t the only issue that college students protested | |
during the Civil Rights Era. | |
In 1968, the Black Student Union at San Francisco State University that | |
shut down the university and forced the administration to cancel | |
classes over three months, according to the website. | |
Students were demanding racial equality in admissions practices, | |
curriculum that reflected diverse perspectives and more people of color | |
on the faculty. They staged rallies across campus with some protests | |
turning violent, resulting in students being arrested or beaten by | |
police. | |
The university eventually agreed to meet the demands of students by | |
establishing the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies and Black | |
Studies Department, increasing admissions slots for underrepresented | |
students and committing to hiring more Black and brown faculty. | |
The efforts by students paved the way for other universities to create | |
curriculum that focused on the perspectives of marginalized groups. | |
The Vietnam anti-war protests | |
The Vietnam War that began in 1955 and saw an increased presence of US | |
troops prompted widespread protests across American college campuses | |
by the mid-1960s. | |
The US intervened in an effort to halt the spread of communism that | |
had already expanded to North Vietnam and other Southeast Asian | |
countries. | |
College students demanded the war’s end and spoke out against the | |
military draft that put them at risk of being sent to fight after | |
graduation. Thousands of students went on to protest the war in which� | |
American troops were killed. | |
On May 2, 1964, around 400 students from Columbia University, New York | |
University and other colleges protested US involvement during a march | |
through New York City, calling for withdrawal of troops from South | |
Vietnam and the , the New York Times reported. | |
The University of Michigan hosted the nation’s first Vietnam War | |
teach-in on March 24 and 25, 1965. Students, faculty members and | |
others attended the which included rallies and seminars focused on | |
protesting the US military’s role in the war, according to the | |
University of Michigan. | |
The teach-in format became popular among several other American | |
colleges over the . | |
Then, President Richard Nixon, who was elected in 1968 partly due to | |
his promise to end the war, announced in the spring of 1970 that US | |
troops had entered Cambodia. The incursion triggered among the | |
anti-war movement. | |
On May 1, 1970, students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, hosted | |
an on-campus anti-war rally. Later that evening in downtown Kent, | |
another protest that began peacefully escalated to a breakout of | |
violence among police and demonstrators, prompting the city’s mayor | |
to declare CNN previously reported. | |
The mayor requested the Ohio National Guard’s presence over the next | |
two days. Around 3,000 people gathered on Kent State’s campus on May | |
4, 1970, to protest the war and the National Guard’s on-campus | |
presence. | |
After the crowd refused to leave, guardsmen launched tear gas at | |
protestors and later fired shots into the crowd, killing four� | |
students and . The protest became known as the “Kent State | |
Massacre.” | |
After Kent State, hundreds of colleges and universities shut down as | |
a wave of student and faculty strikes and protests spread to .� | |
The anti-war protests ultimately led to the US withdrawing troops from | |
Cambodia less than eight weeks after the invasion started, according to | |
the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. | |
The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 marked the in | |
the Vietnam War, and marked the end of the draft in the US, | |
according to the . | |
The South African apartheid divestment movement | |
Between the 1960s and 1980s, US student activists led a nationwide | |
movement to pressure their universities to cut financial ties with | |
companies that supported South Africa’s apartheid regime. | |
South Africa operated under a from 1948 until the early 1990s, during | |
which the country’s White minority governed over the non-White | |
majority through a series of racist and , including prohibitions on | |
marriage between Black people and White people. | |
Laws divided the population by race, reserving the best public | |
facilities for White people and creating a separate, and inferior, | |
education system for Black people. Non-Whites also endured humiliating | |
work policies, forced relocation and arbitrary treatment by | |
authorities. One of the laws, the Group Areas Act, forced Blacks, | |
Indians, Asians and people of mixed heritage to live in separate areas, | |
sometimes dividing families. | |
The US anti-apartheid movement gained momentum through student-led | |
protests on campuses where students demanded their universities divest | |
from all South Africa-related investments. Students successfully | |
pressured multiple universities nationwide, including in New York, | |
California, and North Carolina to sever financial ties. | |
Among the earliest student-led protests against the South African | |
apartheid regime came in 1966 when members of the Student Nonviolent | |
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the South African Consulate to the | |
United Nations. | |
Students marched in solidarity with renowned anti-apartheid activist | |
Nelson Mandela, who had been sentenced to life in prison in June 1964. | |
Mandela would ultimately spend 27 years in prison for opposing the | |
apartheid system in South Africa, according | |
The SNCC also cosponsored a demonstration with Students for a | |
Democratic Society and the Congress of Racial Equality at Chase | |
Manhattan Bank in New York, demanding that the bank stop financing | |
apartheid by giving loans to South Africa, according | |
Decades later, the calls to divest from South Africa’s apartheid | |
regime continued at Columbia University where, in 1985, students | |
chained the doors to an administrative building shut and blocked the | |
entrance for nearly a month. | |
The university threatened to expel students and sent out disciplinary | |
notices, as community leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Desmond Tutu | |
expressed their solidarity with the students, according to Immediately | |
after the blockade ended, university trustees agreed to consider | |
divesting in US companies doing business in South Africa. | |
Later that year, Columbia became to divest holdings in companies that | |
supported South Africa. | |
Thousands of University of California Berkeley students also held | |
protests in 1985, demanding the university withdraw financial holdings | |
in companies doing business with South Africa, according to the . The | |
following year, the university itself of $3 billion in South | |
Africa-related stock holdings. | |
Students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill also launched | |
an anti-apartheid movement in 1985 that ultimately influenced their | |
administration to divest from their holdings in 1987, according to | |
The actions of students across the country contributed to a growing | |
international movement to isolate South Africa’s apartheid regime and | |
pressure it to abandon its racist policies, which it ultimately did | |
through a series of steps – including the release of Mandela in 1990. | |
Four years later, Mandela won the country’s first democratic | |
election, making him South Africa’s first Black president. | |
Students and the Black Lives Matter movement | |
College students across the country have played a key role in the | |
growth of the Black Lives Matter movement which stemmed from protests | |
following the deaths of in 2012 and in 2014. | |
The demonstrations demanded an end to police violence against Black men | |
and spilled over onto college campuses. | |
In December 2014, some 200 students at after a grand jury decided | |
not to indict Darren Wilson, the White police officer who killed him. | |
Some students wore red X’s on their backs to symbolize Black people | |
being targets. Others, staged what they called a “die-in” by lying | |
on the ground near the feet of the campus’s John Harvard statue. | |
Then, in 2020, the of George Floyd sparked racial unrest in Minneapolis | |
and beyond. | |
Floyd’s death came during summer break for most colleges and at the | |
height of the pandemic when many students were in lockdown at home.� | |
Many students joined the protest movement that swept the nation that | |
summer and some universities also found ways to organize. | |
On June 5, 2020, more than 400 medical students, faculty and medical | |
professionals at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine | |
knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds – the length of time that | |
police held Floyd down – in a silent protest of his death. One | |
protestor held a sign that read “Legalize being Black,” in a photo | |
shared by the university. | |
But the Black Lives Matter protests were about more than just the | |
ongoing fight against police violence in Black communities and groups | |
that aligned with Black Lives Matter successfully rallied for more | |
nuanced issues. | |
In 2015, Columbia University became the first college in the US to | |
divest from private prison companies That same year, Georgetown | |
University protests resulted in the administration agreeing to rename | |
two buildings that were named after college presidents who sold slaves. | |
Notably in the fall of 2015, Black students at the University of | |
Missouri at Columbia began protesting the racism and discrimination | |
they were experiencing on campus. | |
The university’s leadership, the students said, had not done enough | |
to address the tense racial climate of campus. Their included | |
additional Black faculty, racially inclusive curriculum, more resources | |
for social justice centers, and the removal of then-president Tim | |
Wolfe. | |
Their demonstrations gained the support of the university’s Black | |
football players who refused to participate in activities until Wolfe | |
was removed. In November of 2015, Wolfe resigned. | |
CNN’s Clint Alwahab and Harmeet Kaur contributed to this report. | |
<- back to index |