UW-Oshkosh issues Black Thursday apology 50 years later
OSHKOSH - Fifty years ago, 94 black students at State University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh — now the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh — entered then-president Roger Guiles’ office and demanded he address their concerns over widespread racism on campus.
The event would become known as Black Thursday, coined by the Advance-Titan campus newspaper.
The demonstration took place on Nov. 21, 1968, and the students — known as the Oshkosh 94 — demanded the firing of an employee who refused to cash financial aid checks, hire black instructors and increase African American history and literature taught in classes, but the students were arrested and jailed soon after entering Guiles’ office.
The university held an event on Wednesday to honor the Oshkosh 94 and recognize the 50th anniversary of Black Thursday. Thirty-six of the 94 people who were part of the Oshkosh 94 attended and received chancellor’s medallions.
Chancellor Andrew Leavitt formally apologized on behalf of the university for its treatment and expulsion of the students.
“Let me take this opportunity as chancellor on the 50th commemoration of Black Thursday to apologize formally to you all on behalf of the university for how you were treated, how your lives were disrupted and transformed,” Leavitt said.
Wednesday’s event at the theater in the Arts and Communication Music Hall also featured a dramatic reading by students and faculty recounting the events of Black Thursday and events leading up to it.
A hostile environment
The only reason the protest is referred to as Black Thursday is because the students were black, said Henry Brown, one of the Oshkosh 94.
Brown came to Oshkosh in 1967 to study music, and while he was moving in on his first day he heard someone yell “Go back to the jungle” to him and his father. He would hear racial slurs almost daily while living in Oshkosh. Once when he was walking down Algoma Boulevard he heard a man in a truck yell a slur at him and proceed to throw an ice cream cone that ruined Brown’s suede cardigan.
The situation wasn’t any better at the university. Brown said he was harassed in his dorm and his scholarship money was withheld. He said his parents were getting calls from the university to pay dorm fees, when that money was supposed to be coming from the university.
Brown’s assigned roommate walked in the door, saw Brown and never moved in. He later learned his assigned roommate was sleeping on his friends’ floors.
“We were basically abandoned because we were unwanted; they didn’t want us there,” Brown said.
Because of the hostile environment for black students at Oshkosh, they formed their own group to provide support for each other. The students would organize their own football games and cookouts, Brown said. They even organized their own homecoming celebration. “We had a special camaraderie,”
Brown said.
Black students were essentially not allowed to participate in student life, Brown said. They had no fraternities or student groups on campus to join. Brown and other students formed the Black Student Union hoping the president would listen to their concerns as
an organized entity, but Guiles continued to ignore the hostile campus climate.
The night before Black Thursday, white fraternity members threw stones at a black student, giving her a concussion. She was refused care by the local hospital, Brown said. She was then driven 90 miles to Milwaukee for treatment.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Brown said.
The demonstration
The students arrived outside Dempsey Hall on that Thursday morning with their list of demands. When the president refused to agree to the demands, some students began to vandalize Dempsey Hall and subsequently staged a sit-in. After they were arrested, the students were charged with unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct that same day at the Winnebago County Courthouse.
“They feared for their safety and they felt disrespected. People lost it,” said Stephen Kercher, a professor and chairman of the history department at UWO.
All 94 students were expelled from the university without much due process, Kercher said. Many were blackballed from other universities and at least one student had to fight in Vietnam after losing his deferment, he said.
While Kercher doesn’t excuse the university’s actions, he said that Black Thursday didn’t happen in a vacuum. Richard Nixon was running for president on his “law and order” platform that shaped how some people viewed the civil rights movement. The university received letters demanding the students receive harsh punishment, he said.
“It was taking place in a climate of conservative reaction against civil rights,” Kercher said.
The civil rights movement was prevalent in Milwaukee at the time with the Open Housing Marches and demonstrations for fair education. Many of the Oshkosh 94 came from Milwaukee, including Brown.
Brown moved to a white neighborhood in Milwaukee when he was young, and his family was the first black family on the block, which is where he learned about racial interactions, he said.
When he walked from school at 8 years old, older white students would chase him. He could normally escape the older boys, but one day he was caught when the roads were icy. They picked up Brown and swung him against an iced-over snowbank while his face bled.
Brown remembers a crowd had gathered around the scene when someone asked, “How long are you going to do that to Henry?” One of the boys responded, “Until he turns white.”