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Last August, Mother Jones magazine ran a spread on campus activism that included a timeline of “Student Activism Firsts.”
It was a fluff piece, obviously thrown together pretty quickly and without much interest in historical accuracy, and like many such pieces it treated student activism as something that began in the sixties. I took a few notes with the idea of putting up an annotated version of the timeline, pointing out some of the more obvious mistakes, but I never got around to finishing it.
As I was preparing the Hillary Clinton/Carry Nation story last month, though, I stumbled across something that really jumped out at me.
In the course of researching that post, I Googled temperance campus prank photo, trying to remember what campus the Carry Nation prank had taken place on. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find this.
That’s the index of the Oberlin College Archives, and as I flipped through it looking for temperance materials, I stumbled across a reference to a folder titled “Temperance ‘Sit-in,’ 1882.”
Huh.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Sidwell Friends is a quaker school, founded in 1883. For more than seventy years Sidwell was whites-only, but in 1956 the school’s trustees announced that they would allow African Americans to enter the following year. The class of 1957 was thus the last to experience Sidwell as an all white school.
William Zantzinger was among the graduates that year.
Zantzinger was the son of a prominent Maryland tobacco farming family. In the years after he graduated from Sidwell, he married and took over the operation of the family plantation. On the evening of February 8, 1963, Zantzinger and his wife went out to dinner and a society ball.
Zantzinger drank quite a bit at dinner, and quite a bit more at the ball. Over the course of the evening, he verbally and physically harassed several black serving staff. At about one-thirty in the morning, annoyed that she hadn’t returned quickly enough with a bourbon he’d ordered, Zantzinger struck African-American barmaid Hattie Carroll in the head with a cane.
Hattie Carroll was fifty-one years old, and the mother of eleven children. She collapsed not long after Zantzinger struck her, and was taken to the hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage the following morning.
Zantzinger was indicted for murder. He said he was so drunk at the time of the assault that he didn’t know what he was doing. His lawyers said it was stress, not physical injury, that caused Hattie Carroll’s death.
After a three-day trial, Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter. He was fined $500, and sentenced to six months in jail, with the sentence to begin after the tobacco harvest. (While he was still in jail, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded a song about his crime.)
On January 3 of this year, William Zantzinger died.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Former US Senator Claiborne Pell died on New Year’s Day, at the age of 90.
Pell wrote the laws that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but as his New York Times obituary noted, he is best known as the father of Pell Grants.
Pell Grants, federal need-based grants to college students, today provide assistance to almost one-third of all those who attend American colleges. Claiborne Pell was the Senate’s greatest champion of the program, and an editorial appreciation of Pell Grants appeared in yesterday’s Times as a tribute to him.
But the Pell Grant program, passed by Congress in the summer of 1972, was not simply the product of Pell’s vision. It was also the first great victory in the American student movement of the 1970s.
On June 30, 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing the vote to Americans between the ages of 18 and 20. With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed, professionally-staffed student lobbying organization.
Created by students in the service of the students’ interest, NSL was a milestone in American student history … and the passage of the Pell Grant program was its biggest priority.
I stumbled across two classic movies over at Hulu.com yesterday. Both are streamed in high-quality video for free at the site, and are available to watch anytime.
In the last few months it’s been hard to avoid hearing the name of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco activist and community organizer who became the nation’s first-ever openly gay elected official in 1978 — and was assassinated just eleven months later. The Gus Van Sant/Sean Penn biopic Milk has been getting well-deserved rave reviews since it opened in November. But Milk isn’t the first movie made about Harvey, and it may not be the best. The 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an astounding achievement, and a great lesson in the history and practice of organizing. Check it out at Hulu if you haven’t seen it already.
The Marx Brothers’ 1932 Horse Feathers is history of a different kind. In it Groucho plays a university president, and the movie’s plot — such as it is — centers around corruption and gambling in college sports. College students were cultural icons in the 1920s and 1930s, and Horse Feathers gives a fascinating glimpse at how the university was perceived in popular culture at the time.
Via Arts and Letters Daily comes an Atlantic essay on the causes and implications of the Greek youth and student riots. Why are they happening? Why now? And what can we expect in 2009?
Excerpts:
“Youth unemployment is high throughout the European Union, but it is particularly high in Greece, hovering between 25 and 30 percent. With few job prospects, rampant poverty in the face of nouveau riche prosperity, a public university system in shambles, a bloated government sector in desperate need of an overhaul, and a weak, defensive conservative government with only a one-seat majority in parliament, it is a ripe period for protests…”
“The first real crack in the military regime came in November 1973, when protests at the Athens Polytechnic led to the downfall of one junta leader and the ascension of another, whose regime was toppled the next year with the reinstitution of democracy. From then on, student protests in Greece have had a particularly poignant legitimacy to them, as well as a distinctly leftist edge, laced with the left’s uniquely effective ability to question authority…”
“Yes, youth alienation in Greece is influenced by a particular local history that I’ve very briefly outlined here. But it is also influenced by sweeping international trends of uneven development, in which the uncontrolled surges and declines of capitalism have left haves and bitter have-nots, who, in Europe, often tend to be young people. And these young people now have the ability to instantaneously organize themselves through text messages and other new media…”
“Pay close attention to Greece; at a time of world-wide economic upheaval, it might eerily presage disturbances elsewhere in 2009.”
studentactivism.net 
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