Black Students for Revolution (BSFR) led a student walkout from classes at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign (UIUC) in late October. They demanded an end to tuition hikes, increased retention and scholarships for Black, Latino and Indigenous students, and other progressive changes. They demanded the UIUC administration schedule a public town hall style meeting to discuss their demands, which Chancellor Robert Jones rejects.

Fight Back! interviewed Zila Renfro from Black Students for Revolution about fighting racist discrimination on campus.

Fight Back!: What was the purpose of the Oct. 24 student walkout at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign (UIUC)? Why should the student movement fight for increased retention and enrollment of Black, Chicano, Latino and Indigenous students on campuses?

Zila Renfro: The Oct. 24 student walkout was held to formally deliver the Demands for a Transformed University to the administration. These demands, created by a coalition of radical campus organizations, revolve around everything from halting tuition hikes, to justice for people who have been sexually assaulted on campus, to living wages for university employees.

Demand number two revolves around funding for the recruitment and retention of Black, Chicano, Latino and Indigenous students. This is crucial because of our severe underrepresentation. UIUC claims to be a land grant university, but Black people make up only 5% of the campus, while we make up over 14% of the state.

Our freshman enrollment rates have not improved significantly for decades. In the 1960s, there was an initiative here called Project 500, where Black students fought to bring 500 Black students to campus and were able to enroll 565. This year, our freshman enrollment had only 548 Black students and that’s the highest it has been in ten years. We know that Black and Brown people are capable of being here, but are being systematically shut out because of outrageous costs. We are letting the university know that we will fight for our representation in higher education.

Fight Back!: Why did Black Students for Revolution (BSFR) decide on organizing a student walkout?

Renfro: We know that our university administration has a history of having small group meetings to negotiate demands, and then disseminating misinformation to disrupt and weaken student movements. We wanted to do a walkout to show the university administration that we are demanding transparency and accountability. Furthermore, a walkout is something that garners public awareness. We aimed to show not only administration that this is something for which we are willing to take risks and halt classes for, but also to show the wider student body that these demands belong to all of us.

Fight Back!: For the Jan. 20 Inauguration Day of President-elect Donald Trump, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has issued a countrywide call to action for student walk-outs to demand free tuition, equal access to education for Black, Chicano, Latino and undocumented students, as well as sanctuary campuses everywhere as part of their national Education For All campaign. Is the BSFR planning an action for this day, and if so would they endorse similar demands?

Renfro: While plans for an Inauguration Day action are still in the works, we absolutely endorse demands regarding free tuition, equitable education and protection for undocumented students. Unfortunately, after efforts by professors and students alike, our petition to become a sanctuary campus has been denied. According to an email from the UIUC administration, “As a public institution of higher education, we must uphold state and federal laws.” Once again, the university has put its own interests as an institution above its most marginalized students. However, this in no way means that Black Students for Revolution is going to stop organizing in conjunction with undocumented students so that their safety, protection and rights are upheld.

Fight Back!: Since the Chancellor rejected having a town hall style meeting, how will BSFR continue the struggle on campus for progressive change?

Renfro: At a recent event, our new chancellor spoke consistently on his wish for transparency as an administrator. Now that he’s openly stated this commitment, we will continue to push him to stay true to his words, and we will not budge on having a public meeting where our demands can be discussed. Furthermore, we plan to continue to garner student support for our movement through outreach and political education. Every week, more organizations on campus reach out to us to become more informed about the demands and find out how they can join the movement, which is exciting. There truly is power in the people – the wider our group grows, the more impact we can have to create transformative change.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #BlackStudentMovement

The players announced the strike on Nov. 8, less than a week before taking the field against Brigham Young University. Their stand won the support of their head coach, Gary Pinkel, the University of Missouri's athletic department, and most of the team. Black students make up almost 50% of the team's football players and nearly 70% of the team's scholarship players, according to the faculty-published Columbia Missourian.

The University of Missouri, which is the largest public or private university in the state, is overwhelmingly white. White students make up 79% of all undergraduates, while African Americans, make up just 8% of undergraduates, according to the New York Times.

Since September, Black students, faculty and allies at the University of Missouri have protested the administration's failure to address racism on campus. The students, including student body President Payton Head, began demanding that administration take action after a series of racist incidents. These incidents ranged from repeated racial slurs to deranged racist graffiti to the disruption of a Legion of Black Collegians meeting by a drunken white student last month.

Since then, Wolfe and the university administration faced mass protests and rallies organized by Concerned Student 1950, an activist group formed in response to these incidents.

One student in particular, Jonathan Butler, launched a hunger strike on Nov. 2 demanding President Wolfe's resignation. Butler, like many Black student activists in Missouri, was a veteran of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the racist police murder of Michael Brown in 2014. After Wolfe's resignation, Butler ended his hunger strike.

With strike threat, University of Missouri football players leveraged their labor and won

Athletics, particularly football, are big business for schools like the University of Missouri. In 2012, the university joined the highly competitive Southeastern Conference (SEC), which also includes top nationally ranked teams like the University of Florida Gators and the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.

Beyond its success on the field, however, the SEC is the highest earning conference in NCAA athletics. During the 2013-2014 school year, the SEC generated over $455 million in revenue, with an estimated $347 million coming from televised games, particularly football. Over the same period, the University of Missouri took in over $76 million in revenue from its athletics program.

To drum up interest in games and make more revenue, university athletic programs will sometimes hold matchups in different cities or stadiums, like the annual Florida-Georgia grudge-match played every year at Everbank Field, which is the Jacksonville Jaguars' NFL stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. These stadiums are not just venues. They are big businesses themselves, often owned by giant corporations or extremely wealthy individuals. As such, stadiums will contract with the schools to insure that the games are played and generate profit for the owners.

Of course, all of these profits and revenues are only possible because of the talent and labor of the student athletes themselves. While some student athletes receive scholarships from their schools, most receive absolutely no financial compensation for their labor as competitors. Even though their work generates literally billions of dollars in revenue and profits for universities and corporations across the U.S., student athletes seldom share in any of that wealth.

When the players at the University of Missouri announced that they would not play Saturday's game unless President Wolfe resigned, they threatened to strike.

The players' strike threat worked because it effectively shut down the university's revenue stream from its football program. A substantial number of players refusing to play and withholding their labor meant that the university could not have fielded a team in Arrowhead Stadium on Nov. 14. The immediate consequence of breaking the university's contract for the game would have been a $1 million fine. Additionally, the strike threat also leveraged other long-term interests for the university, like the team's recruiting potential and its chance at playing in a coveted Bowl game at the end of the year.

Facing these consequences and a growing movement of students and faculty, both President Wolfe and the university chancellor announced their resignations a day later. Simultaneously, the university's Board Of Curators conceded to many of the movement's demands, including required diversity training for all students and faculty.

Emboldened by this victory, student activists at the University of Missouri vowed to continue the struggle against racism in higher education.

Lessons for the labor movement

While these electrifying events at the University of Missouri hold plenty of lessons for student activists, union militants and labor organizers should also learn from the victory.

Most of the gains made by workers out of the Great Depression – raises, pensions, union contracts, health insurance, etc. – came from militant collective action in the form of the strike. For a strike to be effective though, the workers must shut down production and directly hurt the profits of management. Unfortunately, most unions in the U.S. today have abandoned the militant, production-halting strike in favor of collaborating with management or pursuing legal battles through arbitration. Even when unions go on strike in 2015, their tactics usually involve setting up picket lines without shutting down production or challenging the economic operation of the employer.

As unions abandoned the strike weapon into the 1980s and beyond, employers increasingly gained the upper hand and rolled back hard-fought gains like raises and pensions. Labor scholar Joe Burns describes this in his book, Reviving the Strike (2011), in which he writes, “The abandonment of the strike has led to the erosion of the wage, retirement, and health care gains of the post war period...With the decline of the strike, employers have been able to aggressively attack work rules and the quality of work life.”

Although the organizing and activism of countless students at the University of Missouri made this victory possible, we cannot overstate the effect of the football team's strike threat on the outcome of this campus struggle against racism. These players put themselves, their careers as college athletes, and for many, their scholarships on the line to make a stand against the university administration's tolerance of racism on campus. They threatened to withhold their labor from the upcoming game, forcing the university to consider the large economic cost from ignoring the demands of Black students for change. Supporters flocked to their courageous example, and many of those in power, like the university’s Board of Curators, opted to back the movement's demands out of fear of reprisal. And they won, at least their immediate demand.

Much like a union winning a strike or a contract battle at the workplace, the students at the University of Missouri will continue to face many of the same issues as before. President Wolfe and the chancellor's resignation, along with the small reforms announced by the Board of Curators, will not by itself end racism on campus.

However, the Missouri Tigers' football team's example demonstrated the large impact that student athletes can have in the struggle against oppression on campus, and it serves as a powerful reminder that there is power in a production-halting strike.

#ColumbiaMO #StudentMovement #PeoplesStruggles #Racism #BlackStudentMovement #Antiracism #UniversityOfMissouri

Tallahassee, FL – 20 students gathered at Florida State University (FSU) Nov. 5 to begin their campaign to increase African American enrollment. According to the FSU Office of Institutional Research, African American students made up 6.9% of the freshmen class in 2014, a drop of 46% since 1999 when Governor Jeb Bush signed an executive order ending affirmative action programs in Florida.

“What we need is to end racist policies and testing and demand affirmative action for Black students,” said Regina Joseph, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who addressed the students.

Students stood in front of the Integration Statue, a monument built to commemorate the struggle waged by students against segregation that led to the first African American students being admitted to FSU in 1962. Student held signs reading “End racist testing” and “Reinstate affirmative action.”

Chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, discrimination has got to go,” and “Black education matters!” rang out across the plaza. Organizers distributed pamphlets detailing their demands: end legacy preferences, no more standardized testing requirements, and overturn the 1999 ban on affirmative action.

“It is important that we raise awareness to larger systematically oppressive forces because they are so difficult to tackle by any one organization or individual. The more people we have educated on the issue and the more noise we make, the sooner we can expect to see the changes that we come out and organize for” said Jabari Wheatley, Chair of the FSU NAACP Political Action Committee.

#TallahasseeFL #SDS #AfricanAmerican #BlackStudentMovement #BlackEducationMatters

Engineering students from both colleges, as well as students of other majors, spoke out vigorously against the proposal. The students were angered by the lack of democracy in the process. Student voices were never once heard when administrators put the proposal through. Many students denounce the proposal as a ‘separate but equal’ policy that treats students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as second-class students.

Brian Marshall, the campus president of FSU Dream Defenders, stated, “This proposal reeks of racism and sends a clear message that predominantly white institutions view themselves as superior over Black institutions.” Students chanted with passion, “Separate but equal is not for the people,” and, “FAMU or FSU, we believe in one goal, one E- school! One E-school! One E-School!” The Engineering School was a joint program run by both universities for 32 years. Reactionary Florida State Senator John Thrasher made the proposal to separate the two schools. John Thrasher is the campaign manager for Florida Governor Rick Scott and is vying for the spot as President of Florida State University. The split is being done under the guise of turning FSU into a Top 25 University.

Regina Joseph, FSU vice-president of Dream Defenders, stated, “FSU may be trying to be a Top 25 university, but it is clearly not concerned with being a Top 25 university in racial diversity and inclusiveness.”

Engineering students took time from their projects and called out the undemocratic move and stated unequivocally that the school would be best served if it stayed united. With only one week left to stop this racist proposal from coming to fruition, organizations like Dream Defenders and National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) are urgently working to stop the split. African-American students in Tallahassee are angered by this second-class treatment. Many students conclude there is an utter disregard from both Florida politicians and campus administrators. Student organizers vow to thrash racism wherever they see it.

#TallahasseeFL #AntiRacism #BlackStudentMovement #FloridaStateUniversity #DreamDefenders #FloridaAgriculturalAndMechanicalUniversity

Chapel Hill, NC – A diverse group of over 120 students braved heavy rains to rally on UNC Chapel Hill's campus, Sept. 21, in protest of the scheduled execution of [Troy Davis](/tags/troy-davis). The students held signs saying “I am Troy Davis”, “Stop the execution”, and “Abolish the death penalty”.

The demonstration had a large turnout despite being organized in just under a day, and featured speakers from [Black Student Movement](/tags/black-student-movement), [Students for a Democratic Society](/tags/students-democratic-society), the [NAACP](tags/naacp), and other student organizations. Students chanted “We want justice for Troy Davis!” and sang civil rights songs such as “We shall not be moved”.

Rev. Curtis Gatewood of the NAACP spoke last, giving a powerful speech punctuated by students chanting “Too much doubt!”. “We need to turn this into a movement against the racist and classist death penalty,” said Rev. Gatewood.

Gatewood also reminded protesters of the parallels to [Darryl Hunt](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Darryl_Hunt), a North Carolina man who spent two decades on death row for a crime he did not commit. Hunt is now a prominent North Carolina advocate with the Innocence Project working to abolish the death penalty.

Despite the overwhelming odds against Davis, the protesters vowed to continue the fight for justice and civil rights.

#ChapelHillNC #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #NAACP #AfricanAmerican #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #TroyDavis #BlackStudentMovement #UNCChapelHill #ReverendCurtisGatewood