Yesterday I tweeted a link to a photo of a 1967 sit-in at Duke University, but it wasn’t until just now that I followed up to see the story behind the protest.

Wow.

In the fall of 1967, the Duke student government proposed a regulation that would have barred student organizations from patronizing segregated off-campus establishments. The regulation was put to the Duke student body in a referendum … and it failed by a 60-40 margin.

In response to the vote, members of the campus Afro-American Society staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the offices of the university president, and the university senate quickly agreed to impose the ban that the students had rejected.

The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in public accommodations in 1964, but Duke had not enrolled its first black undergraduate students until the fall of 1963, and the university did not hire its first black professor until 1966, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the college’s white student majority would still be so hostile to integration in 1967.

Shocking, perhaps, but not surprising.