Students were more in control of the UW-Madison campus than the administration was by Feb. 13, 1969.
The day before, approximately 1,500 students on strike marched up Bascom Hill to disrupt campus. Physically blockading buildings, chanting and marching through traffic, the protesters attempted to shut the university down.
While the police deployed were able to contain demonstrations in the Social Sciences building and Bascom Hall, Van Hise Hall was entirely barricaded by students supporting their African-American peers and the broad social justices in education they felt African Americans had yet to obtain.
After promising to keep the university open, Chancellor H. Edwin Young enlisted the help of Gov. Warren Knowles to call up 900 rifle-wielding National Guardsmen Feb. 12.
But the National Guard did not make a dent in the crowds. If anything, they made it easier for non-striking students to sympathize.
The 1969 student protest was superimposed on an era of heightened political activism during the Vietnam War, when many college campuses reflected the broader divisions within society.
“[The campus] was a hotbed of … progressive and radical movements,” said Liberty Rashad, who was 19 when she spearheaded the movement as secretary of the Black Student Alliance. “There’s no other time in our history when young people were so actively mobilized. It was like Cairo, in 2011.”
The demonstrations also took place in a unique period of black activism focused on identity in contrast to the Civil Rights movement as a whole. The period from 1966 to 1975 was the Black Power era—a time wherein black Americans wanted their identity to be solidified in the American society, according to Dr. Cornelius Gilbert, whose dissertation helped inform this article.
At UW-Madison, the Black Student Alliance brought 13 “non-negotiable” demands to the administration in 1964 because they were frustrated with the administration’s treatment of the African American student population. Notably, students called for the creation of a Black Studies Department, the addition of black faculty members in counseling positions and the recruitment of 500 black students to the university.
“This is a public institution and they weren’t taking care of the public adequately—not all of the public,” Rashad said. “Besides the fact that once we got there, we also wanted an education that was relevant and useful in more ways than one.”
While the campus’ apparent explosion around the student strike surprised many, its causes were rooted in a tension brewing for years. Gilbert cites the beginning of the movement back to the foundation of Ruth B. Doyle’s academic achievement program in 1966.
Doyle, who Gilbert described as an integrationist faculty member, started the program to bring disadvantaged black students to the university in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. But Doyle rejected the proposals for a Black Studies Department, an all-black residence hall floor and a black student center because she thought they would do more to segregate than integrate.
African-American students found her rejection of a black studies department to be the most contentious issue.
“People want to understand who they are … why they’re in the situation they’re in … and how to make a change. That’s a natural human thing,” Rashad said, “Black students didn’t feel like there was any way they could express that at the university. It was as if we did not exist.”
Rashad said the administration’s refusal to create a black studies department reflected a lack of recognition of their history and African Americans’ contribution to American development.
After submitting a list of demands to the administration and finding their response to be underwhelming, students decided to strike in February 1969, engulfing the campus in protests and leading administrators to call in assumed forces on their own students.
Despite the presence of the National Guard, protests escalated. On the evening of Feb. 13, 7,000 to 12,000 students marched on the Capitol, led by 20 black students linking arms.
Such high numbers could not have been achieved without interracial cooperation and solidarity from many politically active student groups.
“The administration ended up buckling to our demands because … there were enough numbers and evidence that came out in support of what we were demanding,” Rashad said. “The administration had to pay attention.”
These actions, in addition to many letters of support from members of the non-striking student body led the administration to accept a report which recommended forming what is now the Afro-American Studies Department. The report asserted the need for all students to learn about African-American history.
“It was an awakening to the university,” Gilbert said. “The university took notice, but what [today] is lacking is full total buy-in to the appreciation of difference, the fact that everybody is not the same.”
