The rift between civil rights workers, leaders, and northern white liberals, became more wide. Many of the blacks working in the Civil Rights Movement began to distrust their white counterparts, whom they felt had always been acting paternalistic towards them. Within a year, the organizations led by younger, more active black students had purged themselves of their white members. The older, soft-spoken and more acceptable leaders, such as King, were seen as trying to ?kiss up? to an establishment that had rigged their efforts to fail by throwing the blacks into the arena of electoral politics, an arena that, by definition, was a place where the majority would take whatever it wanted, and the minority would receive nothing but only what the majority allowed it to have.
Perhaps as an indication of the rift between the white liberals and black activists, on March 26, 1965, only six persons (a white clergyman, four white students, and one black student) left NIU to spend their spring break in Selma, Alabama, to march in the streets for black civil rights. They left NIU thirteen days after one hundred and fifty people at NIU protested the death in Selma of a white clergyman who marched for civil rights. As a sideshow, there were two white counter-demonstrators. The ?liberal consensus,? as Godfrey Hodgson described the black/northern white/labor/clergy coalition, becan to fragment.
4. ?Burn, Baby, Burn!!:? The Pot Boils Over
In May of 1965, Hosea Williams, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, warned an audience at NIU that the Civil Rights Movement was heading north, and that Illinois might be the first state to feel the impact. He described racism in the North as very different from that of the South. In the South, he said, it was vocalized, but in the North it was silent. At this period of time, blacks in the North, experiencing racism in the form of de facto school segregation, housing segregation, and unemployment, began telling each other and anyone who cared to listen that they would no longer be silent while whites in the North pointed fingers at whites in the South. Riots erupted in the Watts district of Los Angeles; in Cleveland; in Newark, New Jersey; and many other cities across the North. Images of police and National Guard units patrolling the streets with firearms, helmets, and bulletproof vests filled the television screen amid backgrounds of angry, loud, and menacing young black men venting their anger in words and deeds. Fortunately or unfortunately, Dekalb and NIU were spared those deeds, but not the words.
The slogan of ?Black Power? began to be said and to be heard. Many whites seemed not to hear the arguments of how black students in inner-city schools were being given a second-class education, and how poverty begot poverty, but paid attention to two simple words: ?Black Power.? Did the persons who spoke these words know that they were getting attention? Stokely Carmichael, one of the first leaders in the Movement to publicly use the phrase, knew so, and so did Noble Harris, president of the Afro-American Cultural organization (AACO). In the December 14 issue of The Northern Star, he defined Black Power as blacks determining their own settings, actions, and results, free from pressures put upon them by whites. As an admonishment to those who had suddenly taken notice of the situation of blacks in the North, Harris stated that ?They should have known we had problems.?
In Chicago, a city known for its liberal, Democratic political machine, King marched in Marquette Park, calling for an end to housing discrimination. The working class residents and others responded with bricks and bottles. King commented that the racism in Chicago was worse than the racism in the South. These words produced indignancy from the whites. King became an enemy to many whites across the nation for his activities, including his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Like other members of the Civil Rights Movement, he was abandoned by many members of the white liberal community, for both his civil rights activities, and his stance against the War. To white conservatives and some liberals, he was unpatriotic for being against the War. Other white liberals, turned off by the rhetoric and purges of the SNCC, had abandoned the Civil Rights Movement after 1964 and turned their attention to the war in Vietnam. To the anti-war/anti-draft liberals, Dr. King was spending too much time on the Civil Rights Movement, and not enough time on the Anti-War Movement. King felt that the war and civil rights were inseparable, and wanted more white liberals to work towards ending racism as they worked towards ending a war. As if King did not have enough problems with whites, he faced mistrust among blacks as well. He was seen by many young activists as an ?Uncle Tom,? a ?bootlicker,? someone who would do the bidding of ?The Man.? On April 4th, 1968, in Memphis, as he was preparing for a multiracial ?Poor People?s March on Washington?, King?s earthly problems were solved by an assassin?s bullet, and the problems of others across the nation, including NIU, were brought to a head.
5. Year of Discontent: 1968-69
In the week following the assassination of Dr. King, more than a hundred cities experienced riots. The death count reached thirty-seven people, twelve of them in the nation?s capital. Fires and looting were common scenes in cities with a sizable black population. The death of Dr. King at the alleged hands of a white man had provoked more of a response from black militants and activists than his call for a united biracial campaign to march for economic freedom.
At NIU, an impromptu memorial service was held at the University Center (now the Leslie A. Holmes Memorial Student Center). Black and white, students and faculty alike, met to remember the late Dr. King, and to reflect on the meaning of his non-violent life and violent death. Two things occurred which were meant to send a message to the white faculty and students of the university. The first was a verbal warning sent by two black students. An unidentified student said that the blacks in America were about to ?do its thing.? Fifty persons left the service when graduate student Noble Harris issued a call for a ?united front,? saying ?With unity, perseverance, courage, and love of our black people, we shall be victorious in our struggle.? Outside of the Center, a black flag was raised on the flagpole, in place of the Stars and Stripes.
The next day brought relief to the community, when spring break began, and the students went home. A few students patrolled the streets of their hometown or other cities with their police auxiliary or National Guard units, while some students may have actually participated in the riots in Chicago, and others may have stood by and witnessed them first hand or seen the television footage. This point is certain: as with the riots that had taken place in the northern cities in the previous summers, everyone knew that they were occurring.
When the students and faculty returned to NIU from the break in studies, an uneasy calm came with them. Unlike the larger cities and universities, the black students were surrounded by a rural, all-white community. There might be demonstrations, but the university felt that, unlike the larger cities, there was not the ?critical mass? needed in the black community to bring about the destruction of the university or town. For two weeks, there was relative peace, considering what was happening in the nation outside of the academic confines of NIU.
However, the university did not have to wait very long, when on May 10, almost 200 black students, armed with the knowledge of tactics used by earlier Civil Rights Movement activists, moved towards Lowden Hall, the administrative offices building. The students climbed the stairs of the recently constructed building, with it?s modern (for the Sixties, at least) design, perhaps made to look like the regional headquarters of a modern business. Approximately 100 students crossed the imaginary barrier between acceptable and unacceptable protest, and placed their academic and, perhaps, future professional careers in jeopardy, and went inside the building towards the office of University President Rhoten Smith.
Walking down the corridor, they may have had feelings that they had absolutely nothing to lose, that succeed or not, they would at the very least make someone, anyone, listen to them; demanding for once in their academic careers and perhaps in their lives to be recognized as legitimate persons with legitimate concerns. Other students walking towards the office may have been more hesitant, questioning if their own participation was worth losing everything they had worked for in high school, if it was worth losing the opportunity to perhaps be the first person from their family to graduate from college. Veterans of war will sometimes speak of the fear of being in battle, but doing things they never thought they could do, if only because the fear of doing the wrong thing was not as bad to them as the fear of doing nothing at all. To many of the students, inside the building as well as outside, this fear was very real to them. Their fear was overcome by their anger.
The faculty inside the building were afraid, too. President Smith had sensed that things would come to this sooner or later, and hopefully later. He had come to NIU with the realization that the structure and purpose of the university was changing, and that the change could be for the better. Described as a ?progressive?, he had come to NIU with a ?vision.? His vision for a university in general, and NIU in particular, was not unique. A few years before, at the University of California at Berkeley, President Clark Kerr described his ?vision? of a ?multiversity? that worked closely with government and business, providing them with an intelligent workforce and receiving research grants and federal money. Kerr saw the university as an ever growing institution serving a growing populace. Smith?s vision for NIU included all of those things. He knew that to compete with the other universities, NIU would have to be attractive to as many students as possible, by expanding the size of the campus, and expanding and adding programs in the non-teaching fields of study. He saw the need for the university to react to the changing world around it, and to him, this meant an increasing number of black students with high school diplomas.
The students entered President Smith?s office, and occupied it by doing nothing other than sitting down. The university, for all intents and purposes, came to a dead stop, much like a machine that had been ?m