When protesters at the University of Missouri forced the ouster of the system’s president and, by some accounts, the flagship’s chancellor last month, they inspired a wave of similar demonstrations across the country. Black students who said they were tired of keeping quiet about the lack of diversity and the outright racism they’d experienced at their overwhelmingly white colleges borrowed strategies from a Missouri group that called itself Concerned Student 1950.
They spoke out about racism.
In recent weeks, student activists have mobilized on more than 100 campuses. Wielding megaphones, they’ve issued demands, staged sit-ins and hunger strikes, and called on leaders to resign. (Among those who did was the dean of students at Claremont McKenna College.) Sit-ins at several campuses, including Towson and Princeton Universities, have resulted in newly announced plans to increase diversity and improve racial climates. From coast to coast, students are demanding action.
The Missouri group’s name signals that its members see themselves as part of a historical struggle for equity. The university admitted its first black students in 1950, and every black student since, the organizers reasoned, must be concerned with racial justice. Other minority and white students committed to the cause have joined as allies.
When the university’s football team lent its crucial support to the movement, threatening to boycott games and practices until the president, Timothy M. Wolfe, resigned, the players released a statement saying, “We are all #ConcernedStudent1950.”
With the national spotlight fixed on the campus, the group kept proclaiming its demands. In addition to Mr. Wolfe’s resignation, they included increasing the percentage of black faculty members to 10 percent and devising a plan to retain more black students.
Like the Black Lives Matter movement, Concerned Student 1950 has rallied support through social media. People opposing the movement have lashed out, sometimes with racist threats. That’s partly why members, in the heady days following their coup, refused to provide their names to reporters, referring to themselves only as a collective.
Solidarity is another reason. “The media has a tendency to want to have a hero, but this isn’t about any one of us,” says Reuben Faloughi, a doctoral student in psychology and one of the original 11 members of the group. “It’s about our linked experiences as African-Americans.”
The most visible face of the protest was Jonathan Butler, a graduate student in educational leadership and policy whose eight-day hunger strike galvanized support for the cause. But he was largely silent during the protest, and it was the group, rather than any one person, calling the shots.
That’s a change from the civil-rights days, says George Henderson, a professor emeritus of human relations, education, and sociology at the University of Oklahoma and an expert on race in higher education. “There is no longer a need for charismatic leaders,” he says. “Activities can start overnight. They don’t have to take it to a committee or wait for a leader to emerge.”
With roots in the demonstrations in nearby Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man, campus protests have been growing since September. That’s when the university’s student-body president, Payton Head, described in a Facebook post that went viral how he felt when passengers in a pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him on the campus. Then, at a homecoming parade in October, student protesters blocked the route, chanting. The president did not get out of his car to talk to them, and the vehicle reportedly bumped one of the students.
Activists hunkered down, setting up tents on a central campus quad. Their initial refusal to talk to reporters or to let journalists inside the encampment led to a national furor over free speech that reverberated at subsequent sites.
The lessons of those hectic days would help students elsewhere seize their moments. Some have questioned the group’s tactics and demands, but few would disagree that the demonstrations that began at Missouri have raised consciousness about racial inequities and made campus activists a force to be reckoned with.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
