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In January 1969, spokesmen for the Black Panther Party met in their L.A. headquarters after two m

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John Higgins, a member of the Black Student Union and Black Panther Party who was shot and killed

Steve McNichols remembers being inspired to act after he heard about a beating of a group of activists in Alabama in the early 1960s.

Then an undergraduate student at UCLA, McNichols was one of many UCLA students who took an active role in the Civil Rights Movement.

He remembers a mob gathered around the civil rights protesters as they were arrested and taken to the Harris County Jail in Houston, Texas.

“The four of us who were white males were placed in what was called a white-male misdemeanor tank,” said McNichols. “It had been built for 56 inmates but now housed 107 prisoners. The jailers told us that they’d beat us up.”

Looking years into the past at the Civil Rights Movement, UCLA alumni and faculty say the school played a role in affecting the course of history.

McNichols participated as a Freedom Rider in the summer of 1961.

Freedom Riders were a group of people who traveled to the South to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in interstate transportation facilities, such as the bus and railway systems.

Typically college students, the Freedom Riders rode in buses to test the enforcement of these anti-segregation laws.

“A wave of Freedom Riders came from across the country to reinforce those Freedom Riders,” McNichols said.

“Four hundred and thirty-six Freedom Riders were arrested in the summer of 1961. This got great international attention.”

McNichols also participated in sit-ins at a coffeehouse in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He was arrested during the protests, and when riots broke out at the jail where he was being confined, he suffered severe back injuries.

Rick Tuttle, interim director of the Tom Dashew International Center and an administrative representative to the Undergraduate Students Association Council, was a graduate student at UCLA in the early 1960s.

Tuttle said he was part of a group of UCLA students who traveled to the South in the summer of 1963 to advocate voting equality.

“Our objective was to get the majority of the House to sign the Civil Rights Act,” he said.

The Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964, enforced the constitutional right for a citizen to vote, regardless of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.

Tuttle said as a result of his participation as a civil rights activist, he was arrested and spent a month and a half in prison.

“It was a rough but interesting time,” he said. “What I went through, what McNichols went through what we all went through, we said to ourselves that it was a great privilege to be a part of it.”

Civil rights leaders acknowledged the campus’ role in the movement as well.

In the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on campus, and addressed a new project he was working on.

Tuttle said King called this the SCOPE, or the Summer Community Organization and Political Education, project. Approximately 25 UCLA students went to the South to assist King.

One of these students was Joel Siegel, who is now on Good Morning America.

McNichols said a major controversy on the UCLA campus in 1961 was the issue of the Freedom Rider Loan.

The Freedom Rider Loan controversy called for the Associated Students UCLA to raise money to post bail for UCLA students jailed during the Freedom Rides.

McNichols, who was not one of the 18 UCLA students who needed the bail money, said though the majority of the student body accepted the proposal, the administration vetoed the allocation of the money.

John Sandbrook, now the executive officer of business and Administrative Services at UCLA, said such conflict and controversy sometimes marked the university during that time.

Sandbrook was a UCLA undergraduate student when two members of the Black Panther party were shot and killed in the old cafeteria of Campbell Hall by a rival group on Jan. 17, 1969.

He said the shootings brought the civil rights movement home for many UCLA students.

“The reaction was obviously that it meant that we were not insulated from a lot of the tensions and activities that you read about in the newspapers,” Sandbrook said.

“When two people are shot to death in an academic building at UCLA by a gang member, that touches your breath to say the least.”

Sandbrook said the 1960s was a decade of political activism and turmoil and that many student groups and protestors responded to on campus.

“You have to remember that that was during the time of the (Vietnam) war, the whole issue of the military draft and Robert Kennedy’s assassination,” he said.

“At a place like UCLA, free speech activities went on for hours at Meyerhoff Park, outside of Kerckhoff.”

McNichols also reflected that segregation was prevalent in Westwood during the civil rights movement.

“There was a modern barbershop called Oakley’s in Westwood,” he said.

“They’d have pictures of black athletes on the wall, but no blacks could get their hair cut there.”

And Tuttle said the same attitude toward racial segregation extended to campus as well.

“It was all around the campus itself,” he said. “One of the great concerns was the absence of members on staff who were African Americans, women, Asians, Latino, etc.”

Tuttle said he was first inspired to participate in Civil Rights activities after he witnessed instances of segregation in his fraternity as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University.

“It got people like me familiar with the vocabulary of civil rights,” he said. “I decided that if I was going to be involved, this was the time to do so.”

Though he believes the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964 and 1965 were major stepping stones, Tuttle maintains that issues of racism and segregation are still present today.

Still, he said the face of civil rights has changed since the sixties because racial debates now center around multi-racial, rather than bi-racial, issues.

“There’s no question that the battle against racism has to continue and all sorts of challenges are facing us,” he said.