Fight Power

Published: Friday, February 26, 1999

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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