The Fall of Student Protests
Feb. 8, 1968: South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. Officers fired into a crowd of 200 people protesting a segregated bowling alley, killing two SC State students and a local high school boy.
May 4, 1970: Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Around 2,000 students came out to protest United States’ involvement in Cambodia. When conflict escalated between the students and the National Guard, the officers opened fire. Four students were killed.
May 7, 1970: University of South Carolina. Five hundred students took over the Russell House student union after a rally on the Horseshoe protesting the Kent State massacre and diminishing freedoms on campus. Forty-one students were arrested after local police and guardsmen forced their way into the building.
Once the center of political unrest and activism on campus, the Russell House is now much more familiar to students as a quick place to get food, buy textbooks and check mail. In fact, most traces of college protesting, so monumental less than 40 years ago, seemed to have vanished from campus altogether.
The Rise of Student Protests
Reenea Harrison, a former activist and professor who teaches a class on activism, said that college protesting took off in the 1960s.
“The mood started to change in the 60s,” Harrison said. “There were enough people who finally felt that they were brave enough to speak out against racism and discrimination.”
Issues like civil rights, the women’s movement and the war in Vietnam united students across the country, and campuses nationwide were a popular spot for protest.
“This is a period of time when a person’s coming into their own; it’s a good age for activism,” Harrison said. “There haven’t been enough people telling you can’t do something that you start to believe it, not at that age, not yet.”
Harrison said that while the average student protest was fairly peaceful, organizers realized that violence made headlines, and violent protests at schools like SC State, Kent State and UC Berkeley made history.
Cleveland Sellers, director of African American studies at USC, was the program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1965 to 1967. When Sellers was 23 he was arrested and shot at the Feb. 8, 1968, incident in Orangeburg, more commonly known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers served seven months of a 10-month hard labor sentence before being released early on good behavior. He was officially pardoned in 1993.
“I spent a lot of time dealing with the issues of anger, frustration and bitterness. You have to find a way to purge those things,” Sellers said.
Sellers said student activism and protest in the 1960s and ’70s was crucial to many of the social movements of the day.
“I think it is important to note that it was young people who stepped onto the stage of history in the 1960s,” Sellers said. “They became the most significant and important social movement during that period in the world.”
Protest at USC
Students at USC were very active with several different movements, the most popular being the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The most notable protest event in this time period was the student takeover of the Russell House University Union, protesting several different things, including a recent Board of Trustees decision to close the Russell House to non-students. Student government, who had initially approved a boycott of classes, withdrew support when students took over the union. Former Carolina student Brett Bursey, who was actively involved in protesting the Vietnam War, was on campus the day of the takeover.
“Those were crazy times,” Bursey said. “I was crazy; they [the police] were crazy.”
Five hundred students occupied the Russell House and refused to leave when asked by university officials. By the time the police arrived, most of the protesters had left, leaving only 75 students, though between 500 and 1,500 onlookers had gathered.
No students were seriously hurt in the incident. Although, after a student kicked a patrolman in the shin, several protesters sustained minor cuts and bruises when the same patrolman used his riot stick. The only other weapon officers had was tear gas.
Bursey, who said he remembers police using tear gas in the Towers later that night and fraternities having competitions over which group had the largest number of arrests, said that students reacted strongly to police presence on campus.
“By the end of the night, the whole dynamic had changed,” Bursey said. “They did a major job of alienating the student body.”
However, Bursey said that today’s political climate on campus is very different from the Carolina he remembers.
The Decline of Student Protest
Harrison said that by the early ’70s, the mood of the country changed once again.
“The public started to say, ‘OK this is enough,’” Harrison said. “We’ve had enough of the violent protests, and we’ve had enough of so much negative media attention.”
With a public turning away from activism, student protests began to die out. Ciara Quarterman, a fourth-year political science student, said that she doesn’t see them returning to campus.
“I don’t want to say no one cares, but nowadays that’s not really top priority,” Quarterman said. “Our generation isn’t really interested.”
Sellers said that part of the reason students aren’t as active now is that they’ve been protected from history in a way previous generations weren’t.
“We have tried to sanitize that period of history. We’ve tried to omit it in many instances,” Sellers said. “We haven’t been told those stories.”
Bursey said that one cause of the decline of student protest is the absence of an issue -- such as the draft -- that can unify and enrage the student community.
“You’d have a harder time sending the sons and daughters of America’s middle class to fight some stupid way,” Bursey said. “It’s bad enough, I’d think people would be pouring out on the streets and demonstrating, but it’s just relatively comfortable to be a white, middle-class American these days.”
Harrison said that people who interpret a lack of college protests as meaning students are apathetic are wrong.
“I think the majority of our youth do care and do try to see what they can do about bringing about whatever change they feel is necessary,” Harrison said, “to try to right whatever injustice they see is out there.”
While old issues such as racial harmony and the women’s movement are still out there, new issues, such as gay rights, HIV/AIDS and poverty have begun to emerge on college campuses nationwide. For Muhammad Samat, a second-year biology student, the Iraq war is the most important issue for him.
“I’m against it. I feel it’s an unjust war,” Samat said. “It’s unnecessary, not just to U.S. citizens but to the Iraqi people as well.”
Samat said he occasionally attends anti-war protests and demonstrations, including a recent one on Garners Ferry Road. However, he does not see his fellow students being as involved.
Rehan Khan, a second-year medical student, got involved with activism through the Muslim Student Association and has helped with their anti-war movement.
“The need arose, so I had to get involved,” Khan said. “I think everyone should be protesting -- pro-war, anti-war, everyone.”
Both Harrison and Sellers said that activism is still alive and well, only tactics have changed. Students and activists alike now use methods like lobbying and nonprofit work instead of sit-ins and protests.
“The example would be that politicians have discovered that the Internet is one of the ways you can actually communicate with the voters,” Sellers said, “And I think there are some Web sites now that are talking about an anti-war in Iraq position.”
Harrison said she doubts that the protest movement will ever come back the way it did in the 1960s.
“It’s certainly possible. I think it is possible for lightning to strike twice, but I don’t see that happening, certainly not anywhere in the near future,” Harrison said. “ I think in order for that to happen, there would need to be an issue that so many people felt strongly about that they said enough is enough, we’re going to make something happen.”
However, Harrison said she sees college students working to fix injustices all the time, and that she doesn’t worry activism will ever die out.
“I would say to a person who says ‘you know our youth don’t care, they’re just completely apathetic:’ you’re not looking!” Harrison said. “You’re not opening your eyes!”
