Lessons from the 1960s: Reflections on The Protests and Disregard Collective and the work of public memory and Disregard
The Protests and Pedagogy Collective was formed in 2018 to organize a series of commemorative events for the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Sir George Williams University Protest. These commemorations were held at Concordia University in Montreal between January 29February 11, 2019. (Details of the two weeks of commemoration in 2019 can be found here at: https://protestsandpedagogy.ca/).
This year marks the 55th anniversary of the 1969 Sir George Williams University (SGWU) student protest in Montreal. While the revolutionary 60s saw many student protests worldwide, this campus uprising reverberated across the Caribbean. The political awakening of Caribbean students studying in Montreal can be traced to the Congress of Black Writers in 1968, which saw a notable gathering of Caribbean radical thinkers in Montreal. Walter Rodney’s attendance at Congress gave the Jamaican government an excuse to bar his re-entry, leading to the “Rodney Riots” at UWI Mona the same year. Several future leaders were at the forefront of the SGWU protest, including Rosie Douglas, the late PM of Dominica, Delisle Worrell, who would become the governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, and Ann Cools, from Barbados, who became a Senator in Canada. While the students involved were predominantly Black, it was also a moment of “crossracial solidarity,” to quote Nigel Westmaas, evident in the activism of Joey Jagan (son of Cheddi Jagan) who was studying in Montreal at the time. It also directly led to Black Power in Trinidad; the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) championed support of fellow students arrested in Canada. Following a speaking tour across the Caribbean, SGWU student protesters influenced the Black Power movement in St. Vincent and the Grenadines as well.
Since the completion of the Protests and Pedagogy events in 2019, we have been working together in community to continue the work of remembering this important student protest and also grappling with its implications and legacies for our current times. For example, what are some of the lessons we may learn as we see a new moment of student dissent and anti-war protests happening across various campuses in North America and across the world in relation to the ongoing genocide in Gaza?
Robert Walker reminds us in his essay “Reflections of Sir George Williams University” published as part of a special issue of the journal Topia (vol 44) on the “Legacies of the 1969 Sir George Williams Student Protests”, that the 1960s were a time of anti-war political sentiment and action in which students underlined and resisted the imperial impetus and implications of wars in Vietnam and Algeria for example. Walker allows us to think about these things in relation to each other when he tells us that:
“During the fall of [his] second year at the Sir George Williams, there were many anti-war actions on campus. On November 15, [1977] for example, there was a debate on the war attended by five hundred students where they voted by a majority to demand the US withdraw from Vietnam. Other anti-colonial and antiimperialist activity on campus included the popularization of the film Battle of Algiers in support of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism and discussion on the writings of Frantz Fanon.”
Walker’s reflections, in referencing the work of Frantz Fanon, point to the implications of Caribbean thought for understanding wider anti-imperialist struggle. He additionally calls attention to different intersections of colonial experience and struggle that have particular resonance for events unfolding today in Palestine. He notes that, “Later…there were confrontations as a result of Israel's Six-Day War on the Arab countries and Palestinians…the newly formed Jewish Defense League (JDL) made their first
(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
appearance to suppress discussion on the Six-Day War and to intimidate Palestinian students.” (43). Remembering the 1960s today reminds us that the ongoing protests against war and the struggles against settler colonialism have long and complex histories.
We might also think about lessons that might be learned by remembering the university’s response to Black students in 1969 when administrators at SGWU called the police to end the protest on campus. In October 2022, Concordia issued a historic apology in which they noted, among other things, the implications of this institutional action and the ripple effects that this had on the lives of the Black students involved. In a statement read by the university’s president and published on the school’s website, they acknowledged that:
In response to the occupation of the Hall building, university leaders called the police. That decision led to the arrest — in some cases the violent arrest — of 97 students. Those arrests and the suppression of the protest had serious lasting consequences for many individuals. These ranged from jail sentences to deportation, psychological trauma, physical injury, social alienation, loss of employment and the disruption of — even to the point of not finishing — academic degrees.
One of the students from 1969, Lynne Murray who attended the university’s apology and who spoke in response to the apology also noted some longer-term and far-reaching effects of the university’s actions.
Many students, including myself, were beaten and tortured by the Montreal police…In fact, one of the students from Bahamas suffered a brain aneurysm and died shortly after and her parents believe it was because of the actual beating that she suffered that day. […] In addition to this, was the deliberate misrepresentation, and indifference of the university's administration. All the students suffered mental anguish […] Many had to seek multiple jobs in the hope of clearing their name and from the stigma of being branded a criminal […] Another thing, whenever you were traveling whether to the US, Europe, Canada, you have to apply for a visa, there was always a hesitancy on the students behalf when one of two questions is typically asked. Have you ever been arrested or detained? Do you have a criminal record? All of these things the students had to bear.
However, despite the words of reflection and apology offered by the university in 2022, only one year later, in November 2023, the police were once again being called to intervene in an oncampus student protest. This prompts further questions about the connections we need to make between the present and the past and what the university as an institution has learned from these intertwined histories. It also underscores the fact that apologies have to be accompanied by different kinds of actions on the part of institutions.
In an article titled “Towards a PostApologetic University” written by the Protests and Pedagogy collective, we have suggested that we need to move beyond the idea “that apologies alone suffice as transformative mechanisms”. Instead, we have called for transformative actions that might help to usher a shift from what we have termed “the apologetic university” where performative gestures, such as land acknowledgments (recognizing the theft of indigenous lands) and apologies for institutional wrong-doing are offered without serious remediative and reparative work towards change.
We have seen the operations of the apologetic university in recent years, particularly in the “The post–George Floyd moment and the confluence of Black Lives Matter protests, the Rhodes Must Fall movement, and the Why is My Curriculum so White? Activism”. We have noted that these moments of institutional reckoning “have resulted in numerous statements and commitments by universities”. However, from the vantage point of 2024, we might also ask how much has seriously changed in the intervening years since the murder of African-American George Floyd by a police officer in 2020?
In our reflections we have also pointed to “connections between the neoliberal university and the apologetic university where there is a cost/benefit analysis of apologies”. This process of weighting costs and benefits has in large measure resulted in the establishments of task forces at various institutions to investigate the cost and the stakes of making change. These task forces can also be deferral tactics that serve to forestall actual changes. Between 1968 when the students at Sir George Williams University reported their experiences of racism and 1969 when they occupied the computer centre, they participated in several meetings and a number of panels were convened by the university administration, none of which led to the resolution of their queries. While some of the recent reports that have been done by university committees may be useful contributors to change, some may simply become documents which report the problem rather than enable real change. In a number of instances, the recommendations suggested have also come with extended timelines reinforcing ideas that change should be gradual rather than disruptive and unsettling. In our own interventions we call for a “move toward a post-apologetic university—one in which an imperative of acting ethically is the primary ethos and where justice, fairness, and openness are guiding institutional tenets.”
In thinking about the lessons for today, we might also note that 55 years after the Sir George Williams University Protests, we are in another historical moment where international students are once again the focus of broad national panic in the context of Canada. In 1969, there were calls chanted from the streets in Montreal as well as flashed across newspapers in headlines across the country demanding that the international students from the Caribbean be sent home. The stories painted them as a threats and as disruptive elements who would destabilize the “peaceful”, “cooperative” structures of Canada. This narrative served to justify the students’ surveillance by state bodies and legal prosecution in courts. In the past year, we have seen increased panic about the place of international students in Canada today which has resulted in, among other things, new rules for international student migration, caps on the number of international students to be admitted, as well as stories in the media raising questions about the ways in which international students put pressure on facilities for housing, health care and other services. As Leah Hamilton and Yvonne Su have pointed out in a recent discussion in the Conversation:
“This is neither accurate nor fair. It’s overly simplistic, untrue and xenophobic.” It also echoes some of the rhetoric of the sixties which resulted in necessary antiracist and civil rights protests.
In the last five years since the formation of the Protests and Pedagogy collective we have been committed to remembering and sharing some of the lessons of the 1960s and from the 1969 protest. This has involved publishing work in a number of journals including an issue of sx salon and of Topia (vol 44). All the members of the collective also contributed to the volume The Fire that Time, a collection of essays which includes reflections by protestors who participated in the occupation in 1969.
However, the work of the collective has also involved different forms of public pedagogy beyond journal articles and books. These have included a series of conversations that have brought different scholars together to talk about protests and activism in a transnational context. The collective has also been sharing stories and reflections on X (formerly twitter). This provides one means to bring different histories of student activism across different moments in relation to each other. You can follow us at @ProtestSGW.
Our work over the last six years has also involved the mounting of four public exhibitions in different parts of Canada on the Sir George Williams University protest. The most recent exhibition opened this past week on February 22, 2024, at Dalhousie University. The exhibition Protests and Pedagogy: Archival Afterlives and the Sir George Williams University Affair runs until the end of March 2024 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.