Resistance From the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Author:Lauren Lassabe Shepherd [Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, History & Theory, Education, History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, General
ISBN: 9781469674506
Google: hIK2EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2023-08-10T17:46:44.641671+00:00

Demands for Punishment against the Black Power Student Movement

Even before the success of the first Black studies programs, the most hardened conservatives sought punishment against student agitators who drew attention to the need for them and administrators who approved of them. From students and their parents to federal agencies, calls for retribution included fines, jail time, and civil suits. At the highest level of government, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) threatened to revoke federal funds from any institution that created Black studies programs that discriminated against whites by enrolling only Black students or hiring only Black faculty. HEW officials required Antioch College in Ohio to submit a “desegregation plan” for its Afro-American Studies Institute on such a basis, threatening to withdraw $1 million in federal funding for violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.56 At the institutional level, clubs like LSU YAF threatened to sue if the university invested in a Black cultural center on campus.57 As Bebout explains, such “assertions of victimhood function to flatten out or invert social hierarchies and make them illegible.” By claiming that Black studies programs discriminated against white students, they were knowingly weaponizing “victimization and fairness to secure inequality.”58

Conservative students took it upon themselves to report their institution’s civil rights initiatives, though not all their petitions bore results. Dick Lindmark’s complaint with the state human rights department against the University of Minnesota for allowing the all-Black Afro-American Action Committee to participate in a Morrill Hall sit-in was apparently ignored.59 While the complaint proved inconsequential, the effort to punish the institution for creating an educational justice committee was revealing.

Other students on the right were outspoken in calls for violence against Black activists, issuing disturbing literature at institutions such as the University of Minnesota. One self-declared neo-Nazi group passed around advertisements for tear gas as “Negro control equipment, guaranteed to drop the most vicious buck in his tracks.” The ad was originally from a 1969 issue of the Liberator, the magazine of the National Socialist White Peoples’ Party. Duke shared copies of the same issue on the LSU campus.60 Other materials from the University of Minnesota group characterized white men as “gutless creeps” for condoning interracial relationships between “your women” and animals, and encouraged white men to execute Black campus demonstrators en masse.61

The president of the Society for the Preservation of the American Republic at the University of Minnesota explained, “Perhaps I have a good deal of racist tendencies in me. I can’t help it, it’s just the way I was brought up.… When a black person walks up to me and says that I have him in slavery and my forefathers were raping his in the backyard—well, I know for a fact my forefathers didn’t own slaves and chances are yours didn’t and anyone else’s in Minneapolis, for that matter. Gross generalization makes me sick. They condemn the entire white society for what only a few whites did.”62

While the overt white supremacy paraded by neo-Nazi groups did not characterize conservative students as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.