LCV Winter 2013-14 - (Page 23)

three faculty members. Such faculty collusion wasn't rare. Faculty members tended to play a much more active role in the protest actions at black colleges and universities. White liberals played a role, but black professors, often made militant through their own collegiate experience, participated in even greater numbers. Howard University, for example, released radical professor Nathan Hare, who had been critical of black colleges. In August 1967, Hare described the schools as "caricatures of the most conspicuous aspects of white college trivia... These colleges, in the minds of many of their students, represent in almost every way a total failure." The Grambling administration didn't do much to dissuade the students of that idea. The day after Scott made the Student Government Association's demands on November 1, 1972, Jones left for Hawaii with the Grambling football team. There would be no capitulation when the Tigers had a game to play. While Grambling's security force would be in charge of maintaining order on campus, forces from the Ruston City Police, Lincoln Parish Sheriff's Office, Louisiana State Police and Louisiana National Guard were on alert. Shortly after 5 o'clock, November 2, one of the student groups meeting in front of the administration building began removing tables and chairs from the dining hall, using them to form a barricade blocking the street. Still, there didn't seem to be any systematic plan in place. campus moved in and began making arrests. By midnight, 12 students had been arrested and sent to the Lincoln Parish jail. The number totaled 25 by morning. With the core group of approximately 150 student protesters unable to marshal any sort of mass consciousness among a student body of more than 4,000, the brief revolution had fizzled. But the student unrest at Grambling seemed like an introduction, not a conclusion. The protest failed, but the protest wasn't over. PROTESTS AT SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY Student activism was nothing new at Southern, just north of Baton Rouge. In the Rev. T.J. Jemison's Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953, for example, Southern students actively declined to ride local buses. As the early '50s THE GRAMBLINITE, GRAMBLING STATE UNIVERSITY THE GRAMBLINITE, GRAMBLING STATE UNIVERSITY Around 9 o'clock, the violence started when a frustrated student threw a garbage can lid through a plate glass window at the student union. Students streamed into the building, looting clothing and jewelry from the campus bookstore. Then the first shot was fired. A student blasted a glass door with a pistol, inciting students to begin destroying all of the glass windows and doors. The frenzied group then moved to Adams Hall, the women's dormitory. "Wake your dead up!" they shouted. They threw rocks into the dorm's large glass windows before moving on. At some point in the evening, members of the group overturned a Volkswagen. There was no order to the violence. No system. State troopers waiting on the edge of became the late '50s, Southern students began a series of lunch counter protests that preceded the popular birth of the sit-in movement at North Carolina A&T State University in February 1960. When the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 became a national movement, Southern again became a state flashpoint for racial protest. At the same time, however, it became a glaring example of the disconnect between a radical student body and a conservative administration. The state Board of Education warned the presidents of all Louisiana colleges, white or black, to discourage such radicalism through "stern disciplinary action," and Southern president Felton Clark obliged, issuing directives to stem the tide of protest before it even started. It didn't work. In late March, Southern students sat in at local businesses. An estimated 3,000 students marched to the state capitol. Clark expelled the 16 students arrested in the sit-ins and the one who organized the march. At this point, the Southern administration had proved to the student body that racial equality Winter 2013-14 * LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 23 

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