Ahead Of Biden's Morehouse Commencement Speech, Here's The History of HBCU Student Protests

In October 1923, students boycotted classes after the governor petitioned to eliminate the liberal arts program at the school to isolate education to industrial and mechanical academia. The protest resulted in the fiery destruction of several dormitory halls and school buildings. The president, Nathan B. Young, was forced to resign.

In February of 1968, students at South Carolina State University held a peaceful protest against the whites only policy at the local All-Star Bowling Alley. In response, a slew of South Carolina Highway Patrolmen opened fire on the group, injuring 30 demonstrators and killing SC State freshman Sammy Hammond and high schoolers Delano Middleton and Henry Smith. Dubbed the Orangeburg Massacre, this incident is remembered as one of the most violent moments of the Civil Rights Movement.

In December of 1924, students broke curfew and ambushed the school buildings in protest of the rules of president Fayette McKenzie, who authorized the suppression of the campus paper and solicited donations from foundations that kept Jim Crow alive in schools. Nashville police were dispatched to arrest students for inciting a riot. However, most of the student population had boycotted class and applied to Howard University instead.

“Men and women of Black America: Let no decent Negro send his child to Fisk until Fayette McKenzie goes,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in the NAACP’s ‘The Crisis’ Magazine.

By April of 1925, McKenzie resigned.

When the university was still called the Hampton Institute in 1927, students protested racist Jim Crow policies on campus and demanded the establishment of an NAACP chapter. They refused to sing plantation melodies to entertain white donors, boycotted class and locked their dorm rooms to protest room inspections. Students only agreed to come to class after being promised no discipline would be inflicted. However, when that promise was broken, the student strike resumed and the institute was closed for two weeks.

When the school reopened, students who participated in the strike were not allowed to enter unless they pledged their loyalty to the institution and, essentially, the hostile, racist climate to which they were subjected.

In 1972, Leonard Brown and Denver Smith were just 20 years old when they were shot to death while peacefully protesting. They were boycotting for equity in education in front of Southern’s administration building. Brown and Smith—alongside other students—requested the release of students that were arrested for violating state laws when law enforcement came. A single blast of buckshot fired by an unidentified deputy killed the two men in a stream of students who were attempting to flee.

In May 1969, more than 70 students joined a picket line protesting segregation and also the denial of a Black high schooler to run for student body president. Greensboro police and the National Guard responded to the demonstrations by raiding the campus and opening fire on the students. As a result, sophomore Willie Grimes was killed.

In May 1970, students protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as well as the racist taunts from white motorists who would speed viciously through campus and at one time, hitting a student. In response, Mississippi Highway Patrol officers and Jackson police arrived on campus with full riot gear and opened fire after a student threw a bottle at them. Junior Phillip Gibbs and high schooler James Earl Green were killed.

In 1968, more than 9,000 held a four-day protest at Douglass Hall demanding the resignation of President James Nabrit, as well as the exoneration of a group of students who were arrested in a previous protest as well as more Black-focused academic courses. Nabrit ultimately made plans to retire and the students received a seminar to discuss new curriculum.

This particular protest resisting segregation laws began in February of 1960, when a group of North Carolina A&T students sat at a lunch counter in Woolworth reserved for white customers. The students were asked to leave but refused and remained seated until the restaurant closed. The next day, more students arrived and the sit-ins continued for the rest of the month until the mayor agreed to reach a resolution with them. This was only the beginning of the wildfire that would spread across the south, where thousands of college students organized sit-ins to protest segregation and eventually formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In May of 1961, the students with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides in which student activists challenged segregation on buses by traveling on them from Washington D.C. to the South. Some freedom riders were met with angry white mobs, bands of police or violent Ku Klux Klan members given legal permission to attack. The rides continued until November, when segregation on interstate buses was made illegal.

Students from nearly every HBCU in the nation gathered in Richmond, Va in February 1937 to implement strategies on how to support Black Americans in their jobs, voting registration and overall safety from racial violence. Over their 12-year run, they led an anti-lynching campaign, educated Black folks on their rights, organized demonstrations and helped workers fight job discrimination — making their activism visible to government agencies.

In the spring of 1976, Spelman students and faculty protested the fact the school never hired a Black woman as president. The protest resulted in 14 college trustees being locked in a room for 26 hours until they agreed to meet the demands for hiring a Black woman president. Hundreds of students camped out in the hallways outside the room awaiting the decision. Even after the faculty agreed to the terms, it wasn’t until 1987 that Spelman received their first Black woman president, Dr. Johnetta B. Cole.

Students from Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman College and the Morehouse School of Medicine signed an agreement to become to AUC to support the nationwide movement of HBCU students leading peaceful protests for racial equality. Across downtown Atlanta, students held a series of sit-ins and marches, the majority of which ended in arrests. Students would then refuse bail and crowd the jails. With Dr. Martin Luther King’s help, the movement gained even more attention toward the demand of desegregation.

The college launched what would become a seven-year protest in 1978 against the school’s investment in South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement. By 1986, the school’s board was moved to divest. The year before this, Morehouse joined the movement inviting the family members of notable civil rights leaders to urge students to get involved.

In April of 1968, a group of 300 students held members of the board of trustees hostage inside a campus building after their demands of financial aid for athletes, the ceasing of ROTC during the Vietnam War and implementation of more Black-based curriculum were ignored. The campus was closed and student were forced to apply to the school to be readmitted. However, administrators eventually agreed to negotiate and laid the groundwork for a Black studies curriculum that students at other schools would also fight for.

Nine students from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss. staged a “read-in” at a whites-only library in March of 1961. Police arrested them when they refused to move across the street to the “colored” library and each were charged with “breach of the peace. An angry white mob swelled outside as they were escorted out. Each were convicted and ordered to pay a fine of $100.

Segregation protests in Charlotte were mostly directed by student leaders from Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU), the only Historically Black College University in the city. J. Charles Jones, who was vice president of the student council and a 1958 graduate of JCSU’s undergraduate program, was one of these student leaders.