Fight Power

Friday, February 26, 1999

Fight Power

CIVIL: From equal rights to extended educational
opportunities,

student protests have long been an influential force

of change at UCLA

By Nick Williams

Daily Bruin Contributor

Nommo, Swahili for "the magic power of the word," has guided the
African American activist population on campus for 50 years.
Whether through writings, speeches or chants, the word has proved
to be one of the best tools for the university’s most vocal
groups.

The African American population on campus has historically been
one of the most active. Throughout the past 50 years, UCLA’s
African American population has been actively fighting
discrimination.

The earliest accounts of African American activism on campus are
from 1949. Around this time, African Americans were attending the
university in large numbers but were not given the same treatment
as their white peers.

Although African American students did not have their own
student union in the 1940s, they were known to gravitate to several
well-established campus groups, including the Marxist-Communist
Society.

A 1949 flyer distributed on campus advertised a speech by
Herbert Apthekek, Marxist historian and authority on African
history. The flyer encouraged African American students to go to
the speech to "join the fight against discrimination!"

The Communist Party in the 1940s was also interested in
gathering support on college campuses, and it often targeted
underrepresented groups, including African Americans.

In a Communist Party newsletter distributed in March, 1949, the
Communist Party advertised that it "places the Negro-White alliance
in the foreground."

The association with the Communist Party further alienated
African Americans from the rest of campus, as America was caught in
the grip of the Red Scare at this time.

Later in 1949, communist writings distributed on campus
encouraged African Americans not to give loyalty oaths to the
United States.

The Communist newsletter stated that the Daily Bruin was
suppressing the truth in an article that encouraged faculty to take
the then-required oaths instated by Sen. Jack Tenney in 1949.

1955 saw the first sign of an organized African American student
population through the National Association of the Advancement of
Colored Persons (NAACP).

Later that year, the NAACP published its first newsletter for
the Westwood campus chapter. The NAACP was not, however, recognized
by the UCLA administration. and this rift soon became the most
written-about subject in the NAACP newsletter.

The next decade saw a more significant protest movement.
Throughout the 1950s, the major problem facing African Americans on
campus was segregated student housing.

In 1964, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) gathered 2,000
signatures on campus to protest Proposition 14 (the Rumford
Initiative), which would have further separated races in campus
housing.

In early 1965, CORE called for a special committee to review
underprivileged races in campus housing, which later resulted in
greater campus housing integration.

The late 1960s was marked by heavy activism by African Americans
on campus and around the country. During these years, African
American activism was carried out by numerous organizations.

In 1967, African American attentions were focused upon the Peace
and Freedom party, led by Eldridge Cleaver, a charismatic and
controversial activist who worked to mobilize African Americans. In
1968, Cleaver was asked to teach a class on racism at UC
Berkeley.

Also influential among African Americans in the 1960s was the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an organization that began
helping the African American population after events such as the
Watts riots and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr.

In 1969, SDS came into the forefront of African American issues
when the organization protested the killing of two Black Panthers.
John Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, two Black Panther
student leaders, were shot to death after a meeting in Campbell
Hall to discuss the qualifications for the director of the newly
established Afro-American Center.

Two students were later convicted of the shooting and sent to
prison. The convicts escaped five years later and were captured
again in 1994.

The incident at Campbell Hall highly aggravated race relations
on campus. Led by the Black Student Union and SDS, African
Americans refused to go to class and many lost their financial aid
as a result.

It has long been rumored that the FBI had infiltrated the two
African American groups United Slaves and the Black Panthers,
exacerbating tensions between the two groups and eventually leading
to the shootings at Campbell Hall.

Also led by the SDS, minority students staged a sit-in in
Campbell Hall in May, 1970, to protest discrimination. As a result,
the LAPD was called in to restore order. Several students sustained
injuries, and the outcry and protest by African American students
was so severe that 10 days later, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan decided
to shut down all UC campuses for four days.

In 1970, there were 1,300 African American students on campus,
who were represented by a powerful campus group, the Black Students
Union (BSU). Established in the late 1960s, BSU tried
unsuccessfully in 1970 to take over the African American student
magazine, Nommo. The editor and most of the staff quit in response,
and the magazine nearly folded.

BSU later became less of an activist group and more of an
advocate’s group by holding African American pride events. These
events included the 1974 Ultimate Expo in which African Americans
were invited to a four-day session of speeches, music and debate
held in Ackerman Union.

The Ultimate Expo was held on the idea that "we are tired of
people who get all they can, can all they get, and sit on their
cans," said Expo proponent and mayor-elect of Atlanta, Maynard
Jackson.

In 1978, BSU began to lose influence, but not before discovering
that several UC Regents had money tied up in South African
companies. BSU consequently held protests arguing that the regents
were funding apartheid. The most notable of these protests was held
at the L.A. Convention center in March, 1978.

BSU soon discovered that the Regents had invested $1.7 billion
in pension funds in companies that supported the South African
government.

In protest of the Regents’ investments, the newly strong Black
Students Association (BSA) staged protests in 1985. The protests
were carried over several days in Royce quad. It was formally
called "Mandela City" as the association made a camp in the quad
complete with a cemetery signifying the dead and forgotten of South
Africa. "Mandela City" caught notoriety all over the world.

Eventually, the board voted to divest itself from companies that
did business in South Africa.

The remainder of the 1980s was relatively quiet as far as
African American activism was concerned.

The 1990s were also relatively quiet until 1995, when the UC
Board of Regents once again became the center of protesters’
attention. That was the year that the board considered and passed
Regents’ decisions SP-1 and SP-2, which ended the consideration of
ethnicity or gender in university admissions and hiring
practices.

SP-1 and SP-2 were the immediate forerunners to Proposition 209,
the statewide ballot initiative that, when it passed in 1996, ended
the use of ethnicity or gender in all statewide hiring.

The end of affirmative action in UC admissions sparked the
largest series of student actions this decade, with marches,
rallies, protests and sit-ins at every UC campus that still
continue sporadically today.

The protest culminated when the African American president of
the Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC), Kandea
Mosley, refused to support the selection of Albert Carnesale as
UCLA’s new chancellor during her speech at his inauguration in
1998. In the following week, over 500 protesters stormed Royce
Hall, taking over the building and disrupting classes held in the
building. The protest ended when Chancellor Carnesale had the LAPD
arrest 88 students who had intended to spend the night occupying
Royce.

The protests continued this year, as UCLA faculty and students
joined others at every UC campus last fall in walking out of
class.

Rafael Perez-Torres, professor of English literature and a
walkout organizer, said the protests will continue until something
has changed.

"This is a long-term, board-based strategy," he said.Black
History Month

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