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A selection of student activist news from fifty years ago this month, courtesy of the archives of the New York Times.
March 1, 1959: High school students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil begin a strike against increases in private school tuition. By five days later of all the city’s students are participating in the strike. Meanwhile, two hundred students at England’s Cambridge University march in opposition to the appearance of an “ugly” new building on their campus.
March 2, 1959: Crowds in La Paz burn an American flag and stone the US embassy in response to reports that an American diplomat has called for the country of Bolivia to be broken up. One student is shot and killed by police in the demonstrations.
March 3, 1959: Nearly two hundred students are arrested in Bogota, Colombia during the course of mass protests against increases in bus fares.
March 4, 1959: Professors and college administrators attending the National Conference on Higher Education in Chicago pass a resolution calling for the repeal of a law that requires college students to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States before receiving federal financial aid.
March 5, 1959: Police in Goiania, Brazil kill one student and injure 160 more when they break up a demonstration against tuition hikes. Students riot in protest of the violence the following day, setting fire to two buildings.
March 7, 1959: Tens of thousands of Catholic students march in Vienna, Austria to protest plans to stage a communist World Youth Festival in that city in July.
March 14, 1959: A three-day conference of campus newspaper editors, sponsored by the United States National Student Association, opens in New York City. More than one hundred student editors from around the United States are in attendance at the conference, which will become an annual event.
March 16, 1959: Forty Yale undergraduates are arrested and the entire undergraduate student body is placed on probation after two snowball fights, one at the New Haven St. Patrick’s Day parade, turned into riots.
March 18, 1959: The twenty-one black students in Virginia’s Warren County High School enter their second month as the school’s only attendees. The federal government ordered the school opened on an integrated basis in February, and since then none of the school’s one thousand white students have attended class.
March 27, 1959: Marching bands from two black high schools drop out of a ceremony honoring Richmond, Virginia’s minor league baseball team to protest segregated seating at the event.
March 28, 1959: Six hundred students stage a rally against nuclear weapons in New York City’s Bryant Park. Speakers include AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Thomas. Seventy-five of the students march overnight to the rally site from outside the city; some are detained by police en route.
March 30, 1959: Fifteen thousand anti-nuclear protesters march in London, England, demanding that Britain unilaterally give up its atomic weapons and that the United States close its British military bases. The march includes a substantial student contingent.
Bhumika Muchhala, a recent graduate who is now working full-time in USAS’s national office, says anti-sweatshop activism can be “cliquish.” She describes a close-knit, white hippie activist culture that is “not welcoming to people of color.” … Dave Thurston, a black USAS activist who attends CUNY’s Hunter College, agrees that the organization can be inhospitably white and middle-class, semi-indignantly citing the all-vegan food at conferences. “Oh my fucking word,” he sighs, “and twinkling!” (Twinkling is a hand gesture that comes from the Quakers, used to signify assent without disrupting the meeting or repeating what they’ve said; while many find it useful, it can feel alienating to outsiders, and is often cited as a symbol of the odd, cultish behavior of white activists.)
–Liza Featherstone, Students Against Sweatshops, 2001.
An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.
Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)
The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”
Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.
A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl have long been student activist heroes of mine. The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a tiny group of German opponents of the Nazi regime. Hans was a veteran, and he and his sister were both students at the University of Munich, where they were caught scattering pamphlets on February 18, 1943. Four days later the two were tried, convicted, and guillotined, along with their friend and ally Christoph Probst, a 23-year-old father of three.
Google Alerts sent me a link to a new article on the White Rose this morning, and I figured I’d pass it along.
“Student power is not so much something we are fighting for, as it is something we must have in order to gain specific objectives. Then what are the objectives? What is our program? There is much variety and dispute on these questions. But there is one thing that seems clear. However the specific forms of our immediate demands and programs may vary, the long-range goal and the daily drive that motivates and directs us is our intense longing for our liberation. In short, what the student power movement is about is freedom.”
–Carl Davidson, National Secretary, Students for a Democratic Society, 1967.
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