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Day Two

Raising Our Profile

It was hard to sleep that first night. The reality of actually being inside the admissions office was sobering. We had rehearsed what we would say and how we would say it to the office staff when we took over. That part was executed pretty much as we had envisioned it.

Harold had created a schedule for guard duty. The rear door and a window in the office had to be guarded at all times. Everyone had to take a turn, and each person would be on duty for two hours at a time. Jannette did not look forward to being the first to guard the rear door. Far away from the rest of the group, it felt dangerous back there because of the possibility of a surprise invasion by the administration, most likely in the middle of the night when people would be asleep, scattered around the carpet. Black students in a non-violent protest in the South had been attacked and killed less than a year before. We couldn’t rule out that some rogue elements in this community might attempt vigilante actions.

Everyone tried to wait until the designated times to use the restroom, which required the guard to unchain the back doors and ensure that no outsider was near the stairs to the lavatories on the lower floor where there was little traffic. We had tipped off the custodial staff the day before that something was about to happen and, once they realized we were staying, they had surreptitiously re-stocked the restrooms with extra toilet tissue, paper towels, and powdered soap each day for as long as we would be there.

The black janitorial staff may have put their jobs at risk by alerting us to security procedures so that we could use the toilets regularly and safely during off hours. The relationships that we had built with them and other black service employees paid unexpected benefits. We had always treated them with respect. After all, they were the only black adults around.

Once daylight came, and we made it through the first night of the Takeover without anyone charging the premises and trying to remove us, we exhaled.

Keeping an eye on the one accessible window was the much more interesting guard assignment. With a ledge about a foot-and-a-half wide and four feet above ground, whoever was on guard could actually sit on the windowsill and observe campus goings and comings when the sun was up. If someone approached, the guard would lift the window. If any admissions office occupiers needed something from their dorm rooms, they could slip in and out, climbing through that window, so we wouldn’t have to unlock the doors unnecessarily.

By the morning of day two, a Friday, we got a clearer idea of just how far the news of our action had spread. We had seen members of the local press show up on campus later in the afternoon of the day we took over the admissions office. But, heading into the weekend, the national and regional papers already had us in headlines.

After only twenty-four hours inside, the window guards began making frequent announcements that supporters were approaching and signaling that they wanted to communicate with us.

We didn’t realize until later how word about our protest spread like wildfire. SASS founding Chairman Sam Shepherd had graduated, and the founding Co-Chair Clinton Etheridge had assumed the mantle. He and Co-Chair Don Mizell spoke to a group of reporters and community organizers who appeared on campus on the first afternoon we entered the building. Four days later, the Washington Post would claim, incorrectly, that black militant outsiders were directing us and other students at “known liberal colleges” in what “had all the earmarks of a revolutionary conspiracy.”13

They had no idea that the so-called militant outsiders who laid the foundation for the action were really a small group of young women, dubbed the Seven Sisters, and a Brother who understood how to build a family to get a difficult task accomplished. Not a conspiracy to destroy.