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Bourgeois Black Activism
Brown University and Black Freedom
Racism at Brown University and other citadels of higher learning is so entrenched and pervasive that it becomes blatantly visible.
—Black Studies: An Educational Imperative, 1971
When many consider the words “Brown” and “education,” their minds quickly race to the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Others may remember the recent revelation about Brown University, the exclusive Ivy League institution, and its ties to slavery. The university oversaw the work of a study group that researched the amount of revenue that the founders of the institution garnered from the trade of human chattel. Others might think of the notable fact Brown recently featured not only a woman as president but an African American woman, Ruth Simmons. In that way, Brown has hurdled past many of the racial barriers that still exist at other institutions of higher education. It is conceivable, though, that much of the racial progress that Brown has made would not have been possible were it not for the activism of concerned black students in past decades. During the decades following World War II, young black people—like their nonblack peers—came to the elite institution situated in Providence, Rhode Island, to achieve degrees. In the process, however, these black Brunonians sought to advance the larger black freedom movement by agitating their university to create further opportunities for African Americans on and off campus.
At Brown University and Pembroke College (Brown’s women’s college) in Rhode Island, African American students made up a small but significant segment of the generation of students who sought to effect change on their exclusive campuses. While students, they provoked a renaissance of ideas about black life that sometimes stirred controversy. The discourse that resulted from the renewal of perceptions and concepts eventually improved the university.
In localizing the story, it must be noted that although many young African Americans admired the courage and leadership of figures like King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the few black Ivy students could only look to themselves (and potentially their surrounding communities) to advance change. In essence, these students had to become their own versions of freedom fighters. This chapter concludes that this small but effective minority of youth practiced Black Student Power: African American students used their racial status in conjunction with their ties to institutions of higher education to win victories for the larger black freedom movement. Brown students’ peaceful display of Black Power advanced the freedom movement and indirectly aided the effort to appoint the Ivy League’s first (and so far only) black president.
To contextualize the role of black people in determining post-World War II policies, it is important to understand the relationship of Brown to black people in earlier periods. Brown University began as the College of the English Colony Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1764. As one of the oldest universities in the nation, it has long stood as a pioneer of education. According to the official university website, Brown was the first of the Ivies to admit students from religious backgrounds other than Protestant. The school boasts that making the college available to those of all religious affiliations was a “testament to the spirit of openness” that existed at Brown then and now.1
Although Brown was open to the various religious affiliations of its oncoming students, the elite university has a storied past concerning people of African descent in this nation. The university is named after the Brown family, who had profited from the American and international slave trade. With the Browns acting as original signatories on the college’s charter and as benefactors, the university directly and indirectly benefited from the trafficking of humans. Enslaved people even built some edifices on campus.2
Brown, in that way, is one of the most conflicted of all the Ivy institutions with regard to its history of black freedom. Although the university got its start, in part, from the enslavement of black people, Brown had an important impact on black educational advancement in the nineteenth century. In 1877, Inman Page and George Washington Milford Brown became the first two black students to graduate from the Ivy institution in Rhode Island. Impressively, Page served as president of Lincoln College and Western Baptist College in Missouri, Agriculture and Normal University in Oklahoma (later Langston University), and Roger Williams University in Tennessee.3 At the turn of the twentieth century, black Brunonians John Hope and John William Beverly affected the educational opportunities of other black students by taking posts as president of historically black colleges and universities like Morehouse College and Alabama State Normal School.4 John Brown Watson, who graduated in 1904, founded a college and eventually acted as president of Arkansas Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. Another black alumnus, William Dinkins, was president of Selma University from 1935 to 1950. Ethel Robinson, a student at Women’s College in Brown University, graduated in 1904 and then began teaching at Howard University. While there, she acted as an advisor to a group of women who established the world’s first college sorority for black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.5 The university was also the alma mater of alumni like Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, a 1919 graduate and the first black professional football coach. Pollard, while at Brown, was a standout running back who made the prestigious Walter Camp All-America First Team.6 Those Brown and Pembroke alumni returned to the black community to uplift and create more opportunities for others.
* * *
In the 1960s, life for black students at Brown was still, unfortunately, an isolating experience. “Don’t stand together like this, man. If a bomb drops, they’ve got all of us,” went the joke that black students at Brown in the early 1960s told each other.7 Speaking to the psychological effects of desegregating and trailblazing in an Esquire magazine article, alumnus Barry Beckham (class of 1966) wrote: “It wasn’t difficult to reach the ego-building deduction that we were the only talented negroes in the country who could pass the stringent admissions policy of Brunoversity.”8 Shortly after his arrival to campus, he wondered if that were the case or if he had been “chosen only to add some color.”9 There was a fear, he revealed, that “perhaps we [black students] weren’t equal, or at least they [white people] thought it.”10 That particular line of thought was erroneous. University officials later admitted that the institution had not searched for all of the qualified black students it could, which meant that Beckham and his early 1960s black schoolmates were well qualified (and equal to their white peers) but certainly not exclusively talented.11
As the number of black students remained relatively small in the early 1960s, the number of white “legacy” students remained steady. Beckham made note of that fact: “every university in the county maintains separate admissions standards for different groups,” he charged. “Sons and daughters of alumni and alumnae are almost always given preference over other applicants in colleges.”12 Beckham, to some extent, was correct. In the 1963–1964 school year at Princeton University, which was similar to other institutions in the Ivy League, 20 percent of the entering class were sons of alumni.13 The Princeton alumni were all white. The same was virtually true of Brown.
By 1965, black students made up 316 of the 14,125 students accepted to universities/colleges in the Ivy League.14 Harvard’s dean of admissions explained that the forty black students (up from thirty the year before) they accepted for the 1965–1966 school year was double the number accepted to the nation’s oldest university a decade earlier. Harvard accepted 1,370 for the 1965–1966 school year. As Ivy schools accepted higher numbers of black students, an admissions official at the University of Pennsylvania pointed out that the elite schools were competing for a small number of students even though there was an “unprecedented” number of black students applying to Ivy institutions. Applications from students of black middle-class families stood out to the Brown dean of admissions. He was surprised in part by their existence but also by the fact that they had little need for financial assistance. Of course, for decades, the National Urban League’s State of Black America report had indicated there had always been a professional class that existed in the black community that sought to provide their children with the highest forms of education possible, but that may have escaped the Brown dean’s attention.
Black students, apparently, had not been at the forefront of admissions officials’ minds, and so those gatekeepers could unknowingly overlook the children of the black middle class. At Columbia University, black students made up 35 (up from 25 the previous year) of the 1,125 students accepted. Cornell University accepted 70 black students (up from 25 the previous year) and 3,925 students in general. There were an estimated 30 black students (up from 14 the previous year) out of a total 1,220 students admitted to Dartmouth College. At the University of Pennsylvania 2,750 total students were admitted, of which 46 were black students (up from 30 the previous year). Of the 1,210 students admitted to Princeton University, black admitted students comprised 30 (up from 20 the previous year) and Yale admitted 35 black students (up from 25 the previous year) and 1,425 students total. Brown’s dean of admissions estimated that the university was admitting 1,100 total students and 30 black students (up from 15 previous year) into the oncoming class. Each of the universities/colleges saw an increase in total applications, reflecting the effects of the baby boom. Black students, irrespective of their economic status, still made up a lonely minority (2 percent) of Ivy admits by 1965.15 Even though more students than ever before attended four-year institutions, black students only made up 5 to 6 percent nationwide. Along those lines by the end of the decade, half of the students at universities/colleges came from the top 25 percent in terms of family income; only 7 percent came from the lowest family incomes.16 Black high school students were more likely than their white peers to come from the lowest family incomes.
The numbers of black admits was bleak, but the sense of otherness black students felt was profound. In discussing his experience, Barry Beckham pointed out ways that he tried to avoid loneliness and stave off isolation. “It was only natural that we [few black students] stuck together,” he explained. In 1966, he counted approximately eight enrolled black students “out of a class of 659.” Many of his white schoolmates had come from the extremely exclusive Exeter, Lawrenceville, and Groton preparatory schools and had families in the banking industry, stock exchange, and medical field. Even though Beckham and other black students may have come from the black middle class, they stood out from their white peers. When asked why the black students sat together at campus locales, his answer was not dissimilar to those of black students at Ivy League schools at the turn of the century: “the common ground between black student and white student is so uncommon, the possibility of a badly needed entente is so slight, that it shouldn’t seem so unusual for black students to spend that perfect opportunity to mix and talk—at mealtime—with other blacks.” The tradition of black students sitting together continued at Brown, with the students even claiming an informal “Black Table.”17 That is precisely what the black Cornell students who founded the first black collegiate fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, did to survive their Ivy League experience.18
Out of a need to socialize and to feel secure, black students in the Ivy League throughout the century felt an obligation to come together. Of the natural coalescence, Beckham claimed that “it was elementary, my dear Watson,” riffing on the Sherlock Holmes line.19 In a circumstance where there were so few black students, professors, staff, and administrators, the social life of young black people was difficult, said Beckham. “Socially we were castrated,” referring to the fact that black students at Brown (and Pembroke) did not have the same options as their peers in terms of dating, housing, and socializing. Beckham concluded: “The white student can date anytime he wants with anyone he pleases.… He has friends who rent off-campus apartments. He has a car.” In essence, Beckham exclaimed: “The white student is white. He belongs here.”20 The nagging question for Beckham and others like him was whether black students did.
As the decade progressed, black students at Brown and Pembroke envisioned themselves as representatives of the larger black community, and they made sure Brown officials understood they belonged at the Ivy League institution and society in general. By 1968, black students only made up 2 percent of the university’s total student population of 3,780 students; at Pembroke, black female students made up 3 percent of the nearly 1,200 students.21 Although the black students at Brown and Pembroke were few in number, they, like previous generations of black students, made the most of their opportunity to attend an elite institution of higher education. Furthermore, the black students of the late 1960s were extremely effective in their bids to improve life for black people on campus. They began their protests with campaigns to increase black admissions, which was the typical course of action for black student activists at Ivy League and other predominantly white institutions (PWIs) during the period.22
The members of the Afro-American Society (AAS), which included members from Brown and Pembroke, led the way in the campaign to increase black enrollments. In 1968, the director of admissions, Charles Doebler, admitted that “We [Brown admissions officials] have had the most marvelous cooperation from our Afro-American Society.”23 Brown needed the efforts of those black students to advance its enrollment campaign. As Doebler explained, “In the years I have been at Brown, all the people who have been involved in getting Negroes to come here have been white. Now it is the Negroes themselves who are involved in it.”24 Doebler could have very well added that those white people who had been involved in getting black people to come to the elite institution could not boast of a record of high achievement.
By referring to the fact that black students were involved in recruitment, Doebler made a crucial point that marked the arrival of a new era for both elite universities and the black freedom movement. With the advent of Black Power throughout the nation, black people (and black students) sought to do for themselves what white America had been unable to do. In this case, an almost exclusively white institution had been incapable (or perhaps unwilling) to recruit a significant number of black students. To remedy the situation, black students at Brown and other Ivy institutions took it upon themselves to recruit fellow students from their race. As leaders and scholars like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Charles V. Hamilton taught, members of the black community needed to use their collective power to support efforts to advance opportunities. Sometimes that meant voting as a bloc; at others, using the collective power meant demonstrating against racism; and in still other instances, supporting the efforts to advance opportunities meant using the resources offered at white institutions to gain knowledge that would assist in the creation of black institutions.
The black students at Brown and Pembroke, who devoured the words and ideas of their leaders, believed their role in the struggle for freedom was to create opportunities for black advancement by making their Ivy institution more accessible to the members of the black community. Taking the initiative and responsibility to recruit black high school students placed AAS squarely in the movement. The initial phase of their version of the movement involved the creation of a larger black presence on their campus. Scholars have explained that in the larger Black Power Movement, leaders pushed for the entrance of black people into positions of power and spaces they had not previously occupied.25 The next step required those black students to use the powerful white institutions to acquire skills and knowledge that could benefit the masses in the black community. “You’re going to fight institutionalized racism” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael told students.26 He was hopeful about the young people who were to take up this battle: “One of the most promising developments in the nation today is the new mood among black college students, who have long formed a conservative group … imitating white America at its worst.” Now, he boasted, “humble appeal is gone; a powerful mood has developed based on a black consciousness.”27 Rather than humble, students entering universities in the late 1960s were determined to make a place for themselves and those who followed.
For Brown University, there were different phases in the creation of its new identity as an institution that welcomed black people. The first phase required the institution to get beyond its liberal rhetoric and actually increase the number of black people on campus. The next phase involved making resources available to a group of people (black students) who were essentially strangers to institutional white America. The resources came in the form of funding for student organizations, curricular enhancement, and space for the students. In addition, that second phase necessitated changes in the university’s human resources practices. While higher numbers of black students was a coup for the institution, more students without higher numbers of black faculty and administrators might cause them to lose the newly admitted black students.
As a result of their spring recruitment efforts, Brown students were able to point to the fifty black students admitted in the fall of 1968. Brown’s admission of black students, while impressive by its own standards, was somewhat lower than its peer institutions. For instance, Princeton admitted 76, Columbia and Cornell admitted 80 to 85, Penn admitted 125, Yale admitted 70, and Harvard admitted more than 80.28
Although Brown and its peers were admitting black students at a higher rate than ever before, the actual matriculation of black students did not grow as quickly. Part of the reason for this was the fact that the accepted black students had made applications to several of the Ivy schools but could only attend one. Also, in spite of efforts from groups like AAS and progressive-minded white administrators, the pool of black students that would matriculate was still relatively small. To that effect, Princeton’s director of admissions revealed: “We’re [Princeton and other Ivy League schools] pretty much admitting guys who are getting lots of good college offers.”29 That was the case with Brown student Spencer Crew, who originally planned to stay in his home state of Ohio. Upon meeting with a forward-thinking guidance counselor and consulting with his cousin who attended Yale, Crew applied to and was accepted at Brown, Cornell, and Penn. He chose Brown, in part, because a representative from Brown came to meet with him.30
The Princeton admissions director’s statement about competing for the same students pointed to the prospect that the students that Brown and the other schools admitted would have potentially been admitted anyway—that the institution was not in fact extending its search for black students much farther than it had been in the past. Noting this possibility, the director explained that “what we’re doing for the disadvantaged is not enough.”31 That was precisely the point that black students on Brown’s (and Princeton’s) campus had been making since the mid-1960s and why they demonstrated in the latter part of the decade.
Black students at Brown and Pembroke began the transition to the second phase of their movement (getting black support staff hired). In November 1968, members of the Afro-American Society at Pembroke brought a list of demands to the president of the college that included calls for a black admissions officer to be hired by January and for the matriculation of at least thirty black students by the fall of the next year. This is an important aspect of black student activism during this period because the role of black male activists has been heavily highlighted in the majority of scholarly works, but it is noteworthy that black women like those at Radcliffe or the members of the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters (BOSS) at Columbia pushed the envelope with regard to the black freedom movement on campus.32 The women of BOSS led the way in the push for a Black Studies program at Barnard College, which had a great influence on the efforts to create one at Columbia University.
As did consciously black women elsewhere, the Pembroke students took action. On November 18, 1968, they declared: “We, the black women of Pembroke, are concerned about the lackadaisical attitude of the Pembroke Admissions Office towards the case of the black woman applying to Pembroke.”33 They wanted a system put into place that would more pointedly focus on black recruitment. Without the serious commitment, they said, “We will refuse to help in finding black students.” Perhaps foreshadowing, the black Pembrokers also noted that if the college did not put forth an immediate and more concerted effort, then “we will do what we can to make known this lack of interest” in black people.
Via a series of position papers, activists at Pembroke demanded that the overall enrollment of black students at the women’s college at least match the overall percentage of black people in the United States, which was 11 percent. The black men of Brown University supported the female activists’ cause. In response to the demand, Brown University president Raymond Heffner (who presided over Pembroke as well) wrote a letter that began “Dear Black Students” and explained that the university would not automatically agree to admit any percentage of students, but that it would “endeavor” to enroll thirty-five black students into the incoming class at Pembroke (which would make up nearly 12 percent of the class).34
The Pembroke women also demanded a black admissions officer for the college that could act in the same capacity as Richard Nurse, the newly hired admissions officer for Brown. Nurse came to the university after Brown’s AAS took its grievances regarding the need for a black recruiter to President Heffner.35 These student-activists on the Brown and Pembroke campuses knew the benefits of attaining an education and a degree from such a prestigious institution, and they attempted to make it possible for more black people to enjoy those benefits. In doing so, these young members of the black intelligentsia were extending the movement for black freedom to campus, like many other students across the nation had done. In their minds, black students could not afford to be just students. They had to be freedom fighters as well. In their push for freedom, they were maneuvering white university officials into areas of thought and action that the officials had never contemplated.
It is true that after the advent of the Civil Rights Movement Ivy League institutions attempted to admit higher numbers of black students, but it took black students themselves to intensify the tenacity with which these universities approached the effort (this happened, in part, because students and professors at these universities were participating in the Civil Rights Movement).36 In doing so, black students helped their universities and colleges live up to their own proclamations of fairness and liberalism. For those student demonstrators, however, the goal of admitting thirty-five black students into Pembroke that Heffner suggested for the fall 1969 semester was not enough to assure them of the institutional commitment to black advancement. The protesters explained that while that number might have been a good goal for the time being, the president did not take into account the fact that Pembroke’s (and more broadly Brown’s) population might increase in the future and thirty-five black students per class would be less significant.
Their rebuff of the president’s suggestion launched a debate in which Heffner publicly refused to employ any “quotas” to admit students. The black student activists reacted quickly by clarifying that they did not seek a quota. “A quota is an upper limit. We are seeking a minimal goal,” explained Pembroke sophomore Sheryl Grooms, who came to the college from nearly all-black Roxbury, Massachusetts.37 As the term “affirmative action” was just coming into the lexicon of the nation, the debate regarding black college admissions and employment raged at Brown and Pembroke.
Dissatisfied with the progress of the negotiations, Brown and Pembroke students took further and more militant action. The New York Times reported that on December 5 (incidentally the thirteenth anniversary of the start of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott), sixty-five black students from Pembroke and Brown, with suitcases and sleeping bags in hand, organized outside the student center on Brown’s campus and then marched to the nearby Congdon Street Baptist Church, where they intended to stay. Because there was so little in the way of black life on campus, students had previously established connections with the members and pastor of the church. The relationships the students established made it possible for the Congdon Street congregation to welcome them as they boycotted the university.38 The actions of the church members mirrored those of black community members around the nation who provided solace and help to black students seeking to advance their causes on and off campus. In the South in particular, the black church became the staging ground for the movement in the 1960s. In Providence, the black church also provided the space for black freedom visions. In a similar vein, black community members who lived nearby and observed institutions like Brown, Yale, Columbia, Penn, and even Cornell, understood the difficulty black students had in navigating the starkly white environments. The residents sympathized with the actions of the students who were attempting to increase access to a white institution, and in doing so improve the community.
The black student activists pledged to boycott classes and stay in the basement of the church until their demands were met. The New York Times reported that the students claimed they were “disassociating” from their institutions because of the schools’ inability to meet the needs of black people and particularly the students.
As was the case in other demonstrations involving black students and demands, white students and professors showed up in solidarity with the black activists. Nearly 800 mostly white supporters met at University Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus—and one that enslaved black people helped to build—to discuss the black student demonstrators’ demands.39 Before showing up, white supporters issued a statement that read, “We support our black brothers in the Afro-American Society in their attempt to achieve their goals.”40 The statement called for progressive white people to “Come to the Speak-Out” at “noon on the green” to discuss ways to augment the black protesting students’ efforts. In a message sent to “White Brothers and Sisters,” student Marc Sacardy outlined the philosophical conflict facing his racial peers. “Because black students have taken the initiative to test the university’s policies and its sincerity,” he wrote, “it is our [white students’] responsibility to take sides: part of the problem or part of the solution,” Sacardy said. “I hope we, as white students, can learn to understand blacks on their terms” and in a way that allows white students to at least attempt to “think black.”41
Other students reinforced Sacardy’s message: “We white students of Brown support completely the twelve demands of the Afro-American Society and their right to determine the terms on which they will remain as members of the university community,” wrote Paul Rosenburg.42 Then, a group explained that they were inclined to support AAS’s demands for two reasons. The first involved black students having the ability to “determine for themselves decisions affecting their position”; the second was in regard to “the racist policies of the University” and “how they affect the entire educational environment.”43
AAS member Kenneth McDaniel, who was graduating in the spring of 1969, revealed that the black activists had not asked for the support of the white students but that they were grateful for the white students’ efforts.44 He said AAS members wanted to “extend our thanks to the white students on campus who have given us support.” Progressive white students around the nation took the initiative to bolster the campaigns of black campus agitators. The interaction between the black and white demonstrators did not always resemble the participatory democracy kind of relationships that developed in organizations like SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality in the southern movement in the early 1960s and Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s. Integration was not a priority for many black student activists in 1968, and white students had to accommodate the need for them to close ranks in terms of decision making. Regarding the demonstration at Brown and the Congdon Street Baptist church, black students did not inform white students of what was happening until just before the action. In doing so, AAS attempted to maintain control of communication to the press. Additionally, as McDaniel pointed out, AAS only wanted “direct communication” with the administration. Such communication did not require checking in with white students. Understanding this, white students and Brown affiliates organized on behalf of the campaign, showing solidarity with the cause. The organization of the activists resulted in a petition that 2,878 Brown and Pembroke affiliates signed in support of the black students’ demands.45
White students and university affiliates were not the only backers of the AAS action. In a news conference on December 9, AAS leaders explained that they benefited from external support.46 The wanted to “express gratitude” to the local black community “not only because of their support in giving us money and food but most important of all they gave us moral support.” The black members of the surrounding community may not have been able to attend Brown or Pembroke, but they wanted to make it possible for their children or others’ children to have the opportunity. Community members in urban areas offered help to protesting black students and youth throughout the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement and certainly throughout the black campus movement. Historically, the black church, in particular, was supportive of activist movements, and the Congdon Street Baptist church acted in that tradition.
Black Power, and thus Black Student Power, meant foregoing class distinctions to unify along racial lines for the advancement of black life chances. The students and church members succeeded in that measure. “They [the church members] have done something tremendous in bridging the gap between the community and the students,” the AAS spokesman said. Linking campus and community was imperative to many of the black Ivy League students whose institutions resided within urban areas. That connection was also crucial to achieving Black Power, according to H. Rap Brown. The SNCC leader told students there is a danger that befalls some young people who are fortunate enough to make it to a university: “Black students begin to assume they’re different from the people on the other side of the track,” when in fact, “the [white] man stratifies the [black] community” by creating a distance between the campus and the people in the neighborhoods.47 The off-campus community members and the students hoped to benefit the larger black community from the coalition and shorten the distance to which Rap Brown referred.
In light of that coalition and the support that white Brown and Pembroke affiliates offered, the increased number of demonstrators supporting AAS demands gave administrators that much more cause for concern. Negotiating early was essential if officials did not want the demonstration to reach the proportions of uprisings at Columbia University, Northwestern University, and San Francisco State College.
Indeed, what occurred at institutions like Columbia shaped the outcomes of the Brown campaign. Black students, in a letter written to President Heffner in May, explained that in light of King’s assassination and the student rebellions of the spring, they observed that “the white university in America inherently reflects” racism. Black activist on campuses, the students claimed, were reacting to a “pseudo-egalitarian racist environment” and “Brown University is no exception to this characteristic white, educational institution.” The students warned that “The condition which precipitated the Black student rebellions at Columbia and Boston exist here.” According to the letter, “Brown is a stifling, frustrating, and degrading place for black students.” The students critiqued the university as a “bulwark of American liberalism” and questioned whether they were admitted in “order to maintain its image as a non-discriminatory liberal university.” Years earlier, other black students asked the same question of themselves. The black student agitators in 1968 stated that “it is our hope that the removal of these conditions is carried out without the need of an insurrection here.” In a tone that indicated impending action, the students exclaimed: “The university has been laboring under the misguided impression that we are happy because we have been quiet.”48 Believing that the president was taking the relative peace on campus for granted, the letter explained that Heffner and the university were “sure that we would blend right in and be silently grateful that we were here at all” even as tokens. “We are tired of being tokens and nothing else,” the students said.
Black students clarified their stance on life at the university and college. Suggesting that they had been “refined enough, timid enough, and conservative enough to be Brownmen,” they were at the point where they knew “something must be done” and “racism, in all its diverse forms, must be eradicated” from the university (and Pembroke) to make life better for black students.49 Black Brunonians and Pembrokers in 1968 went beyond surviving at the university, which was what Redding and Beckham focused on, to demanding “a right to a complete, educational experience” that allowed them to not only feel as though they belonged but also gave them knowledge of themselves. Although they were willing to give the university time to “prove its sincerity,” with regard to its relationship to black people, the students wrote in the letter that “if the University tries to pacify us with excuses or stop-gap measures, we will have to think of the University as an enemy of black people and take appropriate action.” With their enhanced black consciousness and the letter they wrote, the young activists made the turn from mere presence to protest and sought to use their Black Student Power.
The New York Times also reported that President Heffner did not plan to levy any disciplinary measures on the demonstrating black students. The point seemed moot as the students had not technically done anything to garner such action. They left campus during the day, which was entirely permissible; further, they took their protest off campus, which should have satisfied any restrictions against on-campus demonstrations. By disassociating themselves, these black students illustrated the power that young people had to draw attention to their issues without seeking permission from authorities. As black students disassociating themselves, they used their race and status as students to advance goals for the larger black freedom movement. Recognizing that they could affect black life in their own space, the students acted accordingly. As Sheryl Grooms put it, “The walkout is essentially to get a reaction, to force them [university and college officials] to do something” about life for black students and people in general.50
The decision to walk off campus and boycott rather than take over a building was also deliberate. At about the same time that Brown students boycotted, black students throughout the nation took over buildings and flirted with violence in their demonstrations.51 Brown students moved peacefully—yet forcefully—to the church. Decades after the boycott, Spencer Crew explained that the black student activists understood that there was a “Brown Way.” The Brown Way, Crew indicated, did not involve raucous and potentially acrimonious confrontations. While students may have been concerned about punitive repercussions, they believed that it was more tactical not to provoke a bad reaction with a violent or disruptive campaign. As AAS coordinator Phil Lord remembered later, “we were very conscious of the role that peaceful agitation and nonviolence could play” in the demonstration.52
This proved effective at that moment because Brown officials did not have to look far to see campuses shutting down when students chose to disrupt the normal operations of university business, which was the method used by black students at Columbia and Penn months earlier. Crew explained that before walking off campus there was a discussion about strategy. During the conversation, the students asked: “Do we want that kind of confrontational approach [like that at Columbia University] or do we want to try something different?” The demonstrators, according to Crew, “decided that the position to walk off was different and it might highlight issues without imitating what people had done earlier.” Brown junior and AAS coordinator Phil Lord was excited to be in a position where he could put into practice the “black consciousness” he had gained.53
The Brown students’ discussion was a perfect example of the nuances of the movement for Black Power. Recent scholarship has highlighted the misleading way that traditional narratives about Black Power have inferred that violence or violent rhetoric was inherent to every action. This was clearly not the case with the Brown activists, who sought innovative ways to make their point but who also sought to create opportunities for black freedom. Nonviolent militant action proved effective in advancing the ideals of Black Power.
The situation at Brown caused a problem in terms of publicity and undesirable attention for the university, but officials understood that the scenario could have been worse. University officials saw young black people participating in the urban uprisings in cities across the nation the previous spring, when a white supremacist assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. So, working with black students, who took such a measured approach, was much easier for Brown officials than having to call police onto campus as Columbia University officials did in April and May. Further, it was less expensive with regard to money, time, and energy to respectfully discuss issues with the student protesters than it was to face the fires that blazed in several cities as a result of violent rebellions.54 In that way, Brown protesting students benefited from the actions of demonstrating students at other institutions and young people in urban centers around the nation.
Although their demonstration was peaceful, Grooms, Crew, and the other black student activists undoubtedly drew a reaction with their boycott. When Phil Lord’s mother found out he had walked off campus and settled in the church basement, she exclaimed, in her Barbadian accent: “Get out of there!”55 By the next day, representatives of the university delivered a proposal essentially accepting the Pembroke demonstrators’ demands, saying, “The university pledges as a continuing policy to at the least reflect in each class entering Pembroke the black representation in the general populace.”56 The New York Times reported that the proposal established a five-year timeline. For the fall of 1969, the goal that the university proposed for Pembroke was that black students represent 11.3 percent of the prospective class of 310. By the fall of 1973, Brown and Pembroke officials expected to make black students at least 12.5 percent of the incoming class at Pembroke and to hire a black admissions officer.
