University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Spring Break Travel Issue 2015
SPRING BREAK TRAVEL ISSUE 2015
GRAPHIC BY CAMERON GRAFF
UW racial activism builds upon history By Bri Maas THE DAILY CARDINAL
The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 sparked an ongoing insurgence of racerelated activism by young adults across the country, beginning in Ferguson, Mo., and eventually reaching UW-Madison’s campus. This contemporary activism re-invigorated a longstanding history of racially charged student protests at UW-Madison. The university’s legacy of student activism in Civil Rights issues began as early as the 1930s, with a boycott of Madison’s Hotel Loraine after it refused to accommodate a black performer in 1934, according to UW-Madison library archives. Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, housing segregation became a common theme of campus protests. “Segregated housing has been among the most important techniques employed in perpetuating status differences between races in the United States,” according to a 1955 Milwaukee Commission on Human Rights report. Student protests at UW-Madison grew larger as the Civil Rights
Movement reached a national climax in the 1960s, with demonstrations on Library Mall, at Memorial Union and at the state Capitol bringing crowds of 500 or more to rally against racial discrimination. In a nationwide effort to encourage student activism and peaceful protests, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited campus on Nov. 23, 1965, met by a crowd of 3,000. “The practice and philosophy of nonviolence is the most effective way. Love or perish,” King said in his speech, according to a 2006 university report. The next year, at a time when only 500 black students attended UW-Madison, strikes broke out demanding more recruitment of black faculty and students, as well as the creation of a “Black Studies” department, according to the archives. Contrary to King’s suggestions for peaceful protest, the crowds blocked off university buildings and erupted in violent fistfights. On the fifth day of strikes, thengovernor Warren P. Knowles
activism page 3
COURTESY OF UW-MADISON ARCHIVES
More than 2,000 student activists rallied on Bascom Hill and marched down State Street on April 5, 1968 as a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated one day earlier.
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