Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis & Jon Wiener

Author:Mike Davis & Jon Wiener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

In this context, she concludes, “student leaders were turning the slogan ‘Black Power’ into a grassroots social movement.”1

Unlike the first wave that recruited from campuses to launch and sustain struggles in Southern communities, the second wave was for the most part focused on the campus itself, where BSUs and similar groups fought for Black studies programs, more Black faculty, scholarships and special programs to raise Black enrollment to levels proportional to population, and (especially on campuses with authoritarian administrations) for free speech and the democratization of campus life. The resistance to these demands, especially in the South, was often brutal, leading to the police murder of students at South Carolina State in Orangeburg; North Carolina A& T in Greensboro; Jackson State in Mississippi, and Southern University in New Orleans, with dozens of others wounded by police gunfire at Texas Southern in Houston.2

Outside the South, second-wave struggles grew to epic dimensions, especially in California, where the battle for Black studies at San Francisco State, led in its early stages by 24-year-old former L.A. SNCC organizer Jimmy Garrett, produced the longest student strike of the era in the winter of 1968–69. Before it ended, another, more violent, strike broke out on the UC Berkeley campus in January 1969 after the BSU joined with Chicano and Asian students to form a Third World Liberation Front to demand the establishment of an ethnic studies college on campus. (Similar demands had been raised earlier at UC San Diego.) Black enrollment in California’s university and state college system was shockingly small. At San Jose State, for example, there were only 200 Blacks out of a student population of 22,000, while Valley State in Northridge in 1967 had exactly twenty-three Blacks and seven Chicanos enrolled.3 In Los Angeles the Black Student Alliance / BSU at Cal State LA was organized in 1967. BSA was envisioned by its founder, sociology professor Harry Truly, as the first step in building a regional alliance of BSUs. Active BSU chapters subsequently emerged at LA City College, UCLA, LA Southwest College (a new community college where the Che-Lumumba Club played a leading role), Long Beach State and especially at Valley State (later Cal State, Northridge), where mass felony arrests produced a crisis.

What made Los Angeles unique, however, was the commanding role of students in grades seven to twelve, usually organized in their own BSUs, in a sustained struggle for local control over education. Although the movement recalled to a certain extent the 1963 protests against the LA County Board of Education, it was much more massive, and it sought community control rather than integration. (The ACLU’s Crawford case had been reactivated but would be delayed for years by the board’s stalling tactics and stunning duplicity.) The LA protests, while sharing most of the same complaints, unfolded in a dramatically different fashion than the famous New York school battles of the same period. In the latter metropolis, white teachers struck in 1968 against a newly elected community school board in a Black and

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