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WALKOUT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
STUDENT ORGANIZING

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WALKOUT: A BRIEF HISTORY OF STUDENT ORGANIZING

The 1970s • In the early 1970s, organizing against the war in Vietnam intensified, and students continued their solidarity with Black liberation movements. A gathering on May Day 1970 in New Haven to protest the arrest of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was simultaneous with President Nixon's announcement that US troops had been sent into Cambodia. Outrage amongst students across the country — as well as those gathered in New Haven — sparked a decision to strike with three demands: US Out Of Southeast Asia; End Campus Complicity With The War Machine; and Free Bobby Seale & All Political Prisoners.

Students walked out of campuses and burned draft cards across the country. Throughout the month of May 1970, over one million students participated in protests or strikes on almost 900 college campuses — this number does not include the many high school students who also mobilized. Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in the National Guard to Kent State University on May 2nd, and they arrived just in time to see the Reserve Officers Training Corps building set alight. When Kent State students gathered on May 4th for a protest that the administration had attempted to ban, the National Guard opened fire, killing four students and wounding nine. On May 15th, local and state police under the command of Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams opened fire on a protest at Jackson State University, killing two students and wounding at least a dozen more.

Outrage at these massacres only fueled further protests across the country. Throughout the 1970s, students continued to pursue the demands of the strike. Additional demands for open enrollment as a mechanism to support integration inadvertently provided university administrations new motivation for oppression. New York City’s CUNY schools — increasingly diverse and integrated as a result of open enrollment — were challenged by administrative oppression in the forms of imposed tuition and remedial program dismantlement. These setbacks effectively reversed many of the gains of the open enrollment movement. The mid-1970s saw a shift in student organizing towards a major emphasis on anti-austerity activism in the United States; this is visible in subsequent decades and remains an issue on campuses today.