A History Lesson on Activism
College Campuses Have Given Birth to Many Protest Movements
An American college student looked out at a sea of protesters and spoke of a machine that had grown so “odious” that it had left people of good will little choice.
“You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop,” he said.
Soon the students would flood into a campus administration building.
That scene played out 60 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley.
The words were directed at the university leadership, and referred to limits on campus political activity. But the speech, from the student leader Mario Savio, and the sit-in that followed could have happened yesterday.
The protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have erupted on college campuses around the United States are the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism dating at least to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Often, the protests have played out on college campuses: At Columbia University in New York, Hamilton Hall was taken over by students in 1968 as well as this year, and at least four times in between. Sometimes the protests have seemed to be off-campus adaptations, like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 or the racial justice demonstrations of recent years.
Like today’s protests, most of the older movements were polarizing. Some at the time praised protesters
for their courage and idealism, while others criticized them for being misguided or guilty of flirting with — or embracing — dangerous rhetoric.
“When you’re talking about college students, you are talking about people who are barely out of childhood,” said Rick Perlstein, a historian and author. “People who are barely out of childhood and basically on their own for the first time, and exploring ideas for the first time, sometimes say crazy things.”
Some of the student protests, like the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements, helped achieve goals that have become accepted over time. Others continue to cause debate. Like the older movements, the current one is likely to be the subject of decades of research into its origins, its aims and its aftereffects. Politicians acknowledge its potential to sway elections in the way the demonstrations of 1968 are credited with helping to elect Richard M. Nixon.
Former President Donald J. Trump has called the protests a “disgrace to our country.” On May 2, after protesters and the police clashed at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other campuses, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sought a middle ground. “There’s the right to protest,” he said, “but not the right to cause chaos.”
Civil Rights and Free Speech
The template for student protest coalesced in the 1960s, as Baby Boomers swelled the ranks of colleges in a wealthy America that was beginning to confront its long history of racism, and would soon be engulfed by the Vietnam conflict — one in which 61 percent of the 58,000 U.S. soldiers killed were under 21 years old.
One of the early sit-in protests that sought to desegregate public places in the South was carried out by four students from historically Black North Carolina A&T State University, who took spots at lunch counters reserved for whites in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely refused to leave.
With this and other efforts, the college student began to be seen as a catalyst for structural change. But the protests hardly brought universal praise.
In 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, protested free speech limitations that had been enacted in earlier years amid a fear of the radical left. After a sit-in in the school’s administration building, the protesters saw the restrictions abolished. Soon colleges entered a new era in which a paternalistic model of administration began to fade.
Some Clear Successes
By the mid-1960s, the United States had begun greatly increasing its troop presence in Vietnam. Beginning in 1964, and continuing through 1973, the government would draft 2.2 million men into military service. And college campuses would spend years in upheaval.
The high point of campus protests would come in 1970, with news of President Nixon’s expansion of the war effort into Cambodia. Students were also incensed by fatal shootings by the authorities amid protests at Jackson State University in Mississippi and Kent State University in Ohio. Students at 900 schools took part in a strike, according to a University of Washington analysis.
The televised scenes of chaos, and the growing radicalization of some elements of the antiwar movement, created a significant backlash. One Gallup poll from May 1970 showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students for the Kent State shootings, in which the Ohio National Guard killed four students and injured nine. (The shootings came after protests in which some people threw rocks at the troops, and a building had burned down.)
But historians said that the large-scale protests on and off campus pressured the Nixon administration to hasten the withdrawal from Vietnam, with the last U.S. combat troops leaving in January 1973.
In the 1970s and 1980s, student-led movements sprang up calling on schools to divest from companies that did business in South Africa, which at the time was under white apartheid rule. Some schools divested, at least partially, from companies with investments in South Africa.
That divestment movement inspired the current demands that schools divest from businesses connected to Israel.
Black Lives Matter
Until this year’s protests, the most formative political experience in the lives of today’s college activists was arguably the series of antiracist street protests that rocked the United States beginning with a Florida vigilante’s killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in 2012, and reached a peak after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, in 2020.
Many activists, like Vonne Crandell, a student at Tulane University in New Orleans, saw the Palestinian struggle and the effort to end racism as part of the same broader fight against colonial powers exploiting people of color.
Mr. Crandell, a Black man who was suspended from Tulane in April for his participation in the protests, said, “We are witnessing a genocide in real time.” Speaking of Black Americans and Palestinians, he added, “All of our struggles are together.”