The Black Campus Movement and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–72

This paper outlines the Black Campus Movement, beginning in 1965 and ended in 1972, in which hundreds of thousands of black students, aided on some campuses by white and Latino students, requested, demanded, and protested for a relevant learning experience. At historically white and black colleges and universities, black campus activists formed the nation’s first politically and culturally progressive black student unions (BSUs) with varying names and gained control of some student government associations (SGAs). They utilized these pressure groups to advocate for a range of campus reforms, including an end to campus paternalism and racism, and the addition of more black students, faculty, and administrators, the reformation and upgrading of “Negro” universities into “Black” universities, and the introduction of Black Cultural Centers and Black Studies courses, programs, and departments. In sum, this paper argues, these black campus activists and their allies forced the academy to rewrite the racial constitution of higher education, which for more than a century had been based on four doctrines: the standardization of exclusion, the normalized mask of whiteness, the moralized contraption, and ladder altruism.