Book Review: Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75
In Joy Ann Williamson's Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75, the author charts an interesting time in higher education, as the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath began to be felt on college campuses, integrating black and white students. The Black student movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was a perfect example of that phenomenon, as black students doubled in enrollment during this decade. Mostly white universities experienced the most dramatic increase in enrollment, creating a new black presence in the student body reflective of the need of American schools to accept a more racially diverse world. With that new outlook came its own set of trials and tribulations, and the ideology of Black Power in American higher education increased substantially in importance.
Despite the fact that black students began to enter into the student body, they still faced the same problems with acceptance that plagued them before. Once they were admitted, they were either met with the typical hostility that came with mostly-white schools becoming more integrated, or were simply ignored. The apathy encountered by these black students was an institutional practice that was fully ingrained into the works and measures of the university itself. After all, even in the late 60s blacks still made up approximately 1% of the population, while 98% was still white, and Champaign-Urbana was said to be a notoriously racist area. It was during this time that many changes were happening to black society as well, including the change from Negro to Black as a self-identifying term - the former term had become pejorative, and so the latter term was used to identify the Blackness of these students, which desperately needed to be represented. Black power and militant civil rights efforts were already a mainstay in Chicago, and it is no coincidence that this attempt to integrate higher education would extend to Champaign-Urbana. A sit-in in September 1968 led to 250 black students being arrested, as evidence of further tensions between white and black students.
Williamson employs a number of resources to bring the story of integration and Black Power in the University of Illinois to life, including interviews with administrators, students and faculty who were there at the time. With these detailed assessments of the environment of the 60s and 70s in higher education, the reader gains a unique view of how civil rights were conducted in universities, and how education reform was performed to accommodate this new body of students. For example, the chancellor of UIC started a black studies program in anticipation of its request by the BSA, noting the trend in universities like San Francisco State College of creating and establishing these programs. These initiatives and more are evidence of the additional considerations that were made towards black students, either as a consequence of changing national sensibilities or the demands of an increasingly-militant black student body themselves.
Williamson's book provides an interesting look at the social aspects of higher education during the Civil Rights Movement. The University of Illinois faced its own unique challenges and pitfalls during the time in which it integrated more and more black students into its ranks. At the same time, blacks themselves were embracing and exploring their Blackness, and creating student organizations to represent them the way they desired. The changes to public institutions and their organizational makeup, as well as concessions to minorities and initiatives toward racial equality, are noted in detail and their consequences explored in depth. To that end, Williamson presents University of Illinois as an example of the way in which colleges were changing to fit into these new roles they had to play post-integration.
References
Williamson, J.A. (2003). Black power on campus: the University of Illinois, 1965-75. University
of Illinois Press.
