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In this edition, Diverse takes yet another look at 1968. In American higher education, 1968 proved a pioneering and momentous year. With King’s assassination, the nation’s colleges and universities experienced the shock of recognizing their own complicity in helping uphold a segregated American society. The experience of the civil rights movement in the early to mid-1960s had already stirred the consciousness of White Americans, particularly those in leadership positions, but the traumatic events of 1968 led many to take decisive action to address racial inequities. I have to admit that I get a little emotional reading the stories in this edition about the struggles 40 years ago for equality at San Francisco State University and, especially, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my alma mater.
Like many institutions looking to respond to Dr. King’s assassination and open its doors to minorities in a meaningful way, U of I jumped head first into an ambitious plan, known as Project 500, to enroll 500 Black freshmen that fall. The university, with a Black student enrollment of less than 1 percent at the time, originally planned to achieve that goal by 1973, but the times dictated otherwise.
As you’ll read in “Diversity Now” by Raven Hill, with little time to address financial aid, housing assignments and campus life for these students, the plan did not go off smoothly. The activist-minded students demonstrated, were arrested and unfairly labeled in newspaper accounts as rioters.
