Of Black Power On Campus - The University of Illinois, 1965-75 Ahr.110.3.827

Review
Author(s): Eileen Eagan

Review by: Eileen Eagan
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 827-828
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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Canada and the United States

abolishing the Jim Crow Central Jurisdiction (CJ). The
latter in its quadrennial conference responded by
appointing a Committee of Five to explain to C36 how
African Americans thought desegregation should proceed. Regional jurisdictional conferences, except those
including most white southern Methodists, immediately joined the CJ in planning an end to segregation
although the latter was always more insistent and
specific than other bodies in attacking white Methodist
racialism. These committees and commissions and
jurisdictions and regions reflect the political and bureaucratic structure of an American religious denomination that probably represents a cross section of
middle-class America better than any other. With their
groups and plans and meetings and pronouncements
and caucuses, their rhetoric, pragmatism and occasional idealism Methodists struggled with what Peter
C. Murray calls the Crucible of Race. Eventually,
white southern jurisdictions, too, found ways to change
by rearranging regional structures above the local
levelalways after the larger society, though civil law
and social movement had already legitimized change.
That is, the church followed; it did not leadand
this is a source of disappointment for the author and
probably for progressive and conservative Methodists
as well, if for differing reasons.
One of the important revelations of Murrays study
is the ways in which nongovernmental organizations
can effect social change beyond speciously concrete
civil law and speciously effective social movements
neither of which is the daily locus of life for most
Americans. That is, flawed as Methodists achievements were, their actions together with those in other
conflicted churches and voluntary societies were important engines in social transformation beyond law
and movement. The mundane but passionate conflicts
between elites who tried to work out details of organizational change and the different parties who resisted, prodded, denounced, and then settled rather
than achieve all that they wanted brought social
change home to Methodists in ways that appeals to
their better selves could never have accomplished.
Ecclesiastical politics trumped Christian ethics and
pushed Christians toward Christian goals, all by a
process of voluntarism that felt coercive to some,
inadequate to others, and clumsy to all. There was
unhappiness enough for everyone.
Murrays stories of ecclesiastical pressures, glitches,
failings, and partial successes reveal that there was
never one struggle for desegregation or racial equity
and there was no clear, final resolution of all the
different struggles about race among Methodists in
all their different jurisdictions any more than within
U.S. society generally. As Murray points out (p. 232)
by the early 1970s, Methodists had only cleaned up
the mess they had created during the Jim Crow period;
the goal of racial inclusiveness remained elusive, especially on the local church level, where it mattered
most. On this issue as well as those matters touching
gender, sex, peace, tradition, and public life the de-
827
nomination is still afflicted by a commitment to diversity, inclusiveness, and openness that demands it try to
sustain a membership that includes people who lovingly embrace as well as angrily despise these three
characteristics. This catholicity is sustained by compromise, forbearance, and ambiguity and may break down
soon as secular society fumbles toward its own inclusiveness. But it is not as clear from this book as it
should be why Methodists have been so committed to
this ideal, or why black Methodists compromised their
own position and roles when electing to remain
bonded with whites by entering the Central Jurisdiction in the first place. African-American Methodists
have been essential to keeping the church as catholic
as it is and in providing a radical critique of American
society. Methodists, as Murray knows, have always
attracted radicals and harbored conservatives for reasons that are not altogether clear in his book. There is
a Wesleyan catholicity of devotion and discipleship
valued by those who feel indebted to the enigmatic
autocrat who founded a popular movement, and this
needs teasing out if we are to understand the inner
dynamics of a church that many conservatives clearly
want to fail. This is a good book about a significant
institution and a continuing American agony.
DONALD G. MATHEWS
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
JOY ANN WILLIAMSON. Black Power on Campus: The
University of Illinois 196575. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 192. $34.95.
Joy Ann Williamson tells the story of the black student
movement of the 1960s at the University of Illinois.
Her primary focus is the impact of that movement on
the university, and the relation of students, and their
ideas, to educational reform. Williamson also presents
the complexity of student activism in a period of
protest that embodied local and national issues.
Touching on the complications of class and gender
within the movement, the author deals directly with
the problems, and pain, students encountered in defining Blackness. The role of students in the black
power movement deserves more study, and this work
sets a good example. With an evenhanded discussion
of the contradictions within the movement, Williamson argues that the students, through the Black Student Association (BSA), were successful in changing
the universitys culture and structure.
The University of Illinois had been the site of earlier
student protest on issues including racial discrimination. As other historians have noted, World War II and
its aftermath encouraged veterans and other progressive students to challenge the conservative mores of
the community and the university. Then, as later,
student housing was a crucial issue. Students were
subject to landlords discrimination against blacks,
Jews, and women (Jewish women in particular). Williamson notes that in the 1960s the issue of housing
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
JUNE 2005
828
Reviews of Books and Films
sparked a major protest: the arrest in September 1968

of nearly 250 newly recruited black students in the
Illini Union. That event and the hostile and often
racist press response increased solidarity among students and strengthened black power organization and
ideology on campus.
The BSA becomes the center of the black student
organization and power. The successor to a Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE) group, the BSA created an
organizational structure and newspaper that, while
sometimes engaging in internal conflict, did succeed in
pushing the university to increase recruitment of black
students and to create a black cultural center and, to
an extent, a Black Studies program. The successes
coincided with the height of the black power movement (and, I would note, student activism in general).
Its decline came with the decline of those movements
in the 1970s. Williamson argues that the universitys
ability to coopt some of the program through educational reforms was a measure of the movements
achievement as well as a reason for its demise.
This is an important contribution to a more in-depth
study of student movements, one that includes a wider
variety of campuses and student groups. Studies of
student activism in the 1960s often focus on the civil
rights movement and antiwar activity and groups like
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
and ignore less dramatic campus organizations. Studies of black power sometimes ignore black college
students. That bias comes in part from the quasiautobiographical nature of movement historiography.
It is helpful to have a newer generation of historians
who can view a heated time more dispassionately. The
downside, however, is that accounts based on written
documents and selective interviews may miss important aspects of a movement. Williamson interviewed
thirty-one individuals (including seven or eight
women) who were active then. It would be helpful to
know how they were selected. Missing from this account is any substantial discussion of left-wing groups
on campus that may have included black as well as
white students. Since the university had a history of
Marxist groups, it seems unlikely that in the period
here, there were no, or even few, black students
involved in such activity. Williamson does suggest
some class issues among the black students in general.
Was there no open division or debate between supporters of black power and supporters of power for the
working class? Likewise, the impact of the demonstrations and violence at the university following the
murders at Jackson State and Kent State, and the
response of black students and the BSA to trials of the
Black Panthers and of Angela Davis, also deserve
attention.
Still, Williamson offers an institutional and cultural
analysis of a significant movement and presents the
history of an important part of the struggle for academic democracy and real education.
EILEEN EAGAN
University of Southern Maine
PAUL LYONS. The People of this Generation: The Rise
and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. 279.
$39.95.
In recent years, a number of local studies of 1960s-era
activism have been published. Several of them have
sought to render a comprehensive picture of the
wide-ranging tumult that swept across communities
throughout the United States during that period, using
local histories to take cross-sections of American
society in the 1960s. The authors of these studies (such
as Rusty Monhollan and Mary Ann Wynkoop), following the examples set by William Rorabaugh in Berkeley
at War: The 1960s (1989) and, to some extent, by David
Farber in Chicago 68 (1988), have included separate
chapters dealing with a now-familiar series of 1960s
movements. Other local 1960s studies (by authors such
as Beth Bailey, Kenneth Heineman, and this reviewer)
have sought to record more detailed histories of
individual political movements in specific places. Paul
Lyons now adds his study of radicalism in Philadelphia
to the second of these types of studies.
Lyons is well situated to accomplish this task. He is
the author of Philadelphia Communists: 19361956
(1982), focusing on the same urban environment that
he studies here, and New Left, New Right, and the
Legacy of the Sixties (1996). Clearly, Lyons knows the
history of the Philadelphia area and the history of the
twentieth-century left, both locally and nationally,
quite well. He displays this knowledge in his new book
and shows considerable interpretive sensitivity, particularly when discussing the interplay of old left veterans
and newcomers in areas of activity such as the Philadelphia peace movement during the 1960s.
The peculiarities of the Philadelphia metropolitan
area, most prominently the importance of Quaker-run
and influenced organizations and schools, including
Swarthmore College (particularly important in the
early new left) and the active Peace Committee of the
Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, receive
ample attention. Lyons does a good job of explaining
the distinctive influence of the Quaker factor in this
local setting while not making Philadelphia seem utterly peculiar.
Instead of focusing on a single institution of higher
education, Lyons surveys activism at a wide range of
colleges and universities, including the University of
Pennsylvania, Temple University, the Quaker colleges,
and Catholic schools such as LaSalle College; this last
category is entirely neglected in other studies. While
his wide coverage of student activism means that some
schools get too-brief treatment, this multi-school account makes Lyonss study different than other local
histories of this era.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
JUNE 2005

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Review

Author(s): Eileen Eagan

Canada and the United States

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Reviews of Books and Films

sparked a major protest: the arrest in September 1968

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

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