To launch the event, we chartered a small airplane to fly over the college green and dump thousands of colored Ping-Pong balls stamped with WELCOME SPRING WEEKEND. The university administration was already worried about the scale of our programming. They anticipated busloads of students arriving from schools as far away as Washington, DC. When they heard about the Ping-Pong balls, they said, “Absolutely not.” They feared that a falling ball might hit someone and cause dire injury. We had some physics students prepare a treatise to show that no damage could be done, but the administration was not persuaded.
We had already colored and stamped thousands of Ping-Pong balls and could not get a refund on the chartered plane, so we told the administration that we would not yield. But in fact, after consulting with our engineering-student brain trust and learning that they, too, were envisioning potential car accidents caused by errant balls, we had decided to call it off. But we did not tell the administration. Instead, we instructed the plane to fly over the green towing a banner saying, WELCOME SPRING WEEKEND. When nervous members of the administration dashed onto the lawn to watch the plane, we had some students sneak in through the back of University Hall and dump the Ping-Pong balls in the dean’s office.
Looking back on it now, I’d say that this wildly successful Spring Weekend, and the organization it took to pull it off, was a precursor to the organized effort we created to pass the New Curriculum.
One of our first tasks in the fall of 1968 was to get enough copies of the report we had written. At a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, this was no easy challenge. We had no Internet, no copy machines, no electric typewriters, and the only computer at Brown—the IBM System/360—was larger than a railcar.
The student government had a small office with a mimeograph machine that had to be manually cranked. It produced copies with blue ink, giving off a fragrant, chemical smell. We worked day and night, in shifts, cranking out several hundred copies of each page, carrying huge batches of paper into the small room where the machine resided, and storing the pages wherever we could. In order to get a thousand copies collated and stapled, we decided to get one of the best rock bands on campus to play in Sayles Hall and we sponsored a collation dance. We set up four hundred chairs around the perimeter of Sayles Hall and the price of admission was to circulate around the hall once and collate and staple a full copy of the report. It was utter chaos—there was little room to dance in, once a few hundred people had gone through—but we did get several hundred copies collated.
We started visiting dorms to talk with students. Usually on the first visit somebody on our committee had a good friend in the dorm who could gather four or five friends together, so we could talk to them about the report. We were then able to motivate them to recruit more of their friends for another meeting a few days later. We kept returning until we had twenty or thirty students showing up to a meeting in a dorm. In all cases, the meetings included detailed discussions so that students truly understood the report and came to support it.
At the same time, we sent the report to all faculty members and asked for appointments to discuss it with them. We sent teams of three students to meet each faculty member, one of whom already knew the professor. Often when we showed up, faculty members had not read the report or had only skimmed it. So we actively engaged them in a dialogue, often leaving them a bit shaken. We then rated the faculty members on a scale of 1 to 4 as one would in a political campaign. The 1s were definite supporters and the 4s were a lost cause. We posted people outside of faculty meetings to take attendance, which helped us to target our efforts on the “likely voters,” who were 2s and 3s.
In November, we started holding short rallies on the green. They were limited to thirty minutes. Student speakers were told to limit their talks to five minutes each, to be humorous and entertaining, but also to illustrate some problem with the curriculum as it existed. The number of attendees at our rallies grew over time, until over a thousand students were regularly attending.
We also visited student clubs and other places where students congregated and we gradually built lists of interested students, creating a large network so that eventually, if we needed to do so, we could turn out thousands of students on short notice.
We pushed for the creation of a high-level committee of administration, faculty, and students to consider the recommendations, with a mandate to produce a comprehensive reform package to be considered by the full faculty before the end of the year (prior to this, students did not serve on university committees).
Finally, in December 1968, when our rallies were drawing large crowds on campus and we had a petition signed by well over half the undergraduate student body asking for the committee to be established, I sat down with the president for a serious talk. Other universities were experiencing violent protests and occupations of administration buildings. We had produced a four-hundred-page footnoted report and were engaging in discussion and debate worthy of a university setting. We had broad-based student support. We did not want to engage in more militant tactics. We were simply asking that the university form a committee to consider our recommendations. The president agreed.
A high-level committee including some student members was formed under Vice Provost Paul Maeder. They met frequently and urgently and produced a set of recommendations broadly in line with those we had advocated.
Around this same time, in December 1968, black students at Brown took a courageous step. They orchestrated a walkout to press for greater minority recruitment and more African-American faculty and course work. We immediately utilized our network to mobilize widespread student support for their efforts through a rally and a petition that was signed by almost three thousand Brown students.
On the first night of the walkout, I was invited to the president’s house to meet with senior administrators and trustees and discuss the situation. I told them that if they did not negotiate a satisfactory resolution and address the issues being raised, a massive walkout of white students would take place in sympathy with our black student compatriots.
To their credit, administration leaders like President Heffner, Provost Stoltz, Vice Provost Maeder, Dean Eckelmann, and corporation student life chair Judge Alfred Joslin were enlightened leaders who understood that “times were changing” and they became active partners in that process. Had they taken the hard-line approach of officials at other universities, Brown would never have undergone such a successful transformation. The Black Walkout yielded important concessions and we turned our attention back to education reform.
From January to April 1969, a committee led by Paul Maeder drew up a set of recommendations for curriculum reform based on the suggestions in our student report. In May, at the final faculty meeting in Sayles Hall to vote on the recommendations, only the three students who were on the Maeder committee were allowed to attend. But we persuaded the administration to set up loudspeakers so students might congregate on the green outside of the hall and hear the proceedings. Aided by fortuitous good weather, over 80 percent of the student body gathered outside. When a faculty member in Sayles Hall endorsed the reforms, the crowd loudly cheered, while a chorus of boos accompanied any negative statement. The reforms passed overwhelmingly.
The mobilization of students allowed us to bring other needed changes.
By the time my class left in 1969, Brown was on a course to increase its African-American student population dramatically, and also to increase admissions of other minority students. Pembroke was to be disbanded and women would soon make up half of all Brown students. An education system was established that put student choice and responsibility and more creative learning at the center of the educational process. Brown students were engaging in activities in the Rhode Island community to combat poverty, improve the environment, and fight for social justice. Students were also serving on university oversight committees and were allowed to run businesses through the Brown Student Agencies to serve other students. And parietal rules gave way to coed dorms.<
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Nationally, civil rights demonstrations—often organized by students—led to laws being implemented that would reverse centuries of racial discrimination; student-led protests had forced the president of the United States not to seek a second term, and large parts of society were calling for an end to the Vietnam War; the numbers of women admitted to professional schools were increasing dramatically; the roles of women were being redefined, and attitudes toward sexual harassment were changing to blame the harasser, not the harassed. Movements like Earth Day and protests against air and water pollution would eventually lead to the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, and the voting age was moved from twenty-one to eighteen.
Brown and America transformed in ways that were positive and have endured. This is the legacy of the student generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As we now advance into old age (though I still think of myself as being twenty-one years old even if my body tells me differently), the legacy of our student days is one in which we can take great pride.
Today’s Brown students benefit from the values that my generation fought for: civil rights, equality between the sexes, a cleaner environment, a more creative and open educational system at Brown, and the reduction of poverty. But there are important battles today’s students should fight for the next generation. Problems of global poverty, climate change, growing income inequality in America, and equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans are among the issues that rightfully command the attention of today’s Brown students. I wish today’s student activists at Brown success as they take on these and other important issues.
Creating Change: Black at Brown in the 1960s
SPENCER R. CREW
Attending a school like Brown was not on my radar before my junior year of high school. I grew up in northern Ohio, spending my early years in inner-city Cleveland before attending a small suburban high school. My family had moved to the suburbs because my parents wanted my brother, sister, and me to live in a more racially and economically integrated environment. My high school graduating class had two hundred students, six of whom were African-American. The common path for most college-bound graduates was to attend one of the many private or public colleges in the state. Going out of state was rare, and attending an Ivy League university was even more unusual. My older cousin was attending Yale, but he was considered “the brain” in our family and not someone I thought I could emulate.
I expected to attend an in-state college. But because I had maintained good grades, held class offices, won several awards, and lettered in three sports, my high school counselor had higher aspirations for me. She arranged for a Brown admissions officer and the Brown football coach to talk to me, and I was recruited to play football at Brown as a member of the class of 1971. It was an exciting moment for me and my family. Neither of my parents was a college graduate, though my mother had graduated from nursing school and my father had attended Ohio State for two years before becoming one of only two African-American chemists in the paint industry in Ohio.
Going to Brown was a big step for all of us, as I was not just going to college, I was traveling more than five hundred miles to the East Coast to attend an Ivy League university. During the twelve-hour drive to Providence, my father spoke with me about what was ahead. He told me how proud he was of me. He expected me to apply myself and do well. Sending me to Brown was a financial stretch for the family and an opportunity that I was not to squander.
I arrived early enough to attend Freshman Week activities but spent most of my time in the twice-daily football practices. My new teammates came from around the country, as did my dorm mates in Caswell Hall. Living with people from such diverse backgrounds was a new experience for me. I had never gone away to summer camp, and in Ohio, I had lived in the cocoon of my extended family, high school friends, and other African-American families who lived in our community. Late-night dormitory discussions about our backgrounds and views on world politics were at once exciting and intimidating. Everyone I met had excelled in high school and they were dauntingly articulate.
There were only two African-American students in Caswell—me and Gregory Brown—and we both played football. Gregory had attended a city high school in Buffalo, New York. We hit it off immediately and remained very good friends throughout our time at Brown. Conversations with Gregory and with other black students in the freshman class broadened my perception of African-American experiences across the country. We were the largest class of African-American students to matriculate at Brown and Pembroke to date.
Upperclassmen in the African-American community made the freshmen feel welcome, drawing us into a close-knit community in which academic class was less significant than ethnic heritage. We created an active social and intellectual life for ourselves, which allowed us to interact both in the larger Brown community and within our own group. This community gave me an anchor, a home base to which I could return whenever things felt overwhelming or homesickness set in. My new friends understood the challenges and adjustments I was experiencing. They understood the pressures of being expected to serve as a spokesperson for all African-Americans whenever issues of race came up in dorm conversations or classroom discussions. Eating together in the Ratty at what came to be known as the “black table,” or just hanging out together casually, offered needed relief from the burden of being one of the few black students at Brown in the late 1960s.
I developed a number of close friendships at the time, but the most important and enduring one was with a Pembroke freshman from Washington, DC, named Sandra Prioleau. Casual conversations sparked a friendship that evolved into a long-term relationship; we married four years later, right after graduation.
We were at Brown in a time of heightened civil rights activism across the country and our shared experiences sharpened our political sensitivities. Black Power was emerging as a movement that contrasted sharply with the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. Students on campuses across the nation were protesting the Vietnam War, as well as racial issues. The longer we were at Brown, the more sensitive we became to issues regarding minority students. The most obvious deficiency was the dearth of courses on African-American issues at a time when they were at the center of many critical and heated discussions in the academy and across the nation. There were also very few administrators and faculty members of color. We all felt that these courses and faculty members would enhance the Brown educational experience—not just for us, but for all students. In addition, while the number of black students in the class of 1971 was a step forward, Brown needed to be more aggressive in recruiting African-American students from a broad range of backgrounds.
These issues were central to forging the creation of Umoja—the Afro-American student organization. Umoja meetings provided the platform for many thought-provoking discussions about how to get the university to address our concerns. These heated conversations made me think seriously about my own feelings concerning activism and confrontation. They made me question what I was willing to jeopardize in support of my increasingly strong beliefs.
African-American women at Pembroke took the first step by pressing Alberta Brown, dean of admissions at the college, to commit to a plan for recruiting more African-American students. When she failed to respond positively, the demands were pushed higher up the ladder. A letter signed by sixty-five African-American students was sent to the president of Brown, Ray L. Heffner; we demanded that the university make a long-term commitment to hire more minority faculty. In addition, we asked the administration to set targets for increasing the percentage of minority students; to offer academic courses focused on the history, culture, and politics of Africans in America; to set aside a house on campus for African-American student activities; and to develop a program to help students of color make the transition to the academic and social environment at Brown.
Heffner’s response did not satisfy the signers of the letter and we decided to take more dramatic steps to attain our goals. On other campuses, students were
taking over buildings to emphasize their demands, which often resulted in tense confrontations. We chose a different strategy. Instead of occupying a building, we would boycott classes in a very visible manner by leaving campus en masse and refusing to return until the university agreed to our demands. Consequently, in December of 1968, the black female students of Pembroke marched to Faunce House, where they were joined by the male students. There were sixty-five of us in the group, including me and Sandra, three-quarters of the black undergraduates at the university, who marched silently off the campus.
The decision to take this step was not easy. We knew we might be putting our careers at Brown at stake. The administration had the power to expel us; this had happened to many student activists in the South, and it was a sobering prospect.
Many of us contacted our parents by phone to tell them what we were planning. We were not sure how they would react. My father questioned me closely on our thinking and the issues. He wanted to know whether I believed what we were doing was right and to make sure I was not just following the crowd. I assured him that even with my high regard for the upperclassmen who were leading our protest, I knew this was a decision I had to make for myself. I reminded him that he had raised me to be an independent thinker. After our discussion he gave me his full support.
Others in the group had similar conversations with their parents, who worried about what might happen but understood how important it was for us to act on these issues we felt so strongly about. They were all too familiar with the impact of discrimination and knew that change did not happen easily or without pressure.
When we walked out, we headed over to the Congdon Street Baptist Church, which was less than a mile from campus on College Hill. Their minister, Reverend Dennis Earl Norris, and the congregation had agreed to provide shelter and food for us. It was very generous on their part. Only a few of us had prior connections to that church, but they supported us as fellow Christians and African-Americans. While we stayed there, the women upstairs and the men downstairs, they watched over us and tried to make us comfortable. Some members even took small groups of us to their homes for meals.
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