Fifty years ago, 300 Black students entered the Wilbur Cross Building at the University of Connecticut with a list of demands.
More than 200 would leave with criminal charges.
It was just before midnight on April 22, 1974, and the then-library was about to close when the Organization of African American Students launched a “study-in” — the students would not leave unless the president of the university and two administrators came to address their concerns.
The next morning, the State Police arrived and arrested 219 peaceful demonstrators, dragging many by their wrists and ankles as a photographer immortalized the moment frame by frame.
UConn Today described the period as “One of the most important, and most volatile, moments” for the university.
After dozens of officers arrested 25 peaceful protesters at a pro-Palestinian encampment on Tuesday, students expressed an immediate sense of kinship with the 1974 demonstrators.
Outside the UConn Police Department, as they anxiously awaited for their friends’ release, many students drew parallels. Fifty years apart, two peaceful occupations, led primarily by students of color during finals week, ended in a dramatic police response.
Before hosting a press conference on the recent arrests, UConn Divest Coalition organizers said they would first tour “ Please Respond Personally: Commemorating the 1974 Black Student Sit-In ,” an exhibition on display at the Dodd Center for Human Rights that UConn Archives and Special Collections curated for the 50th anniversary of the demonstration.
The moment represented a crossover of two generations of UConn activists.
In the young students’ eyes, history was repeating itself.
Archivist Graham Stinnett , the curator of the collection, said the demonstrations are part of a deep-woven tradition of protest on the Storrs campus.
Through the decades, Stinnett said students generated mass movements against the Vietnam War, South African Apartheid, anti-Asian racism, sweatshop labor, and more.
But it was the ‘74 sit-in that Stinnett described as “one of the highest thresholds of student activism in the history of UConn.”
Time to “up the ante”
Penn State Prof. Gary King, was a senior in the spring of 1974 when he and 300 Black students presented then-President Glen Ferguson with signed copies of a letter outlining their demands for more resources and representation on campus — each included a request to “Please respond personally.”
When Ferguson returned an unsatisfactory response, King said students decided to “up the ante” with the sit-in at Wilbur Cross.
King was arrested that day. He remembers the sit-in as “one of the proudest moments of my life, to have participated and to have been one of the leaders of that demonstration.”
During that spring, King said the campus was embroiled in issues concerning racism, race and culture.
“That it was a period in which Black students going to UConn en masse was a new phenomenon,” King said. “It was new for the university and it was new for the students.”
“Most of those students had not had much interaction at all with Black students,” King explained. “We were quite visible in many respects (and) it was challenging for other students to accept the diversity that they confronted.”
King said that at the time, the experience on campus was initially isolating but also coalescent.
“It required us to actually depend on each other in order to find some forms of social acceptability and survival as a student,” King said. “Socially, it was very different and it required me as well as others to muster different types of adaptive skills in order to succeed. And one of those skills was developing and cultural and social climate that we were comfortable with.”
That spring, King and his peers were intent on securing resources and representation for UConn’s growing Black and Puerto Rican community. They needed a new home for the African American Cultural Center that could better serve the rising volume of students. They also wanted the university to hire diverse faculty, institute an affirmative action plan, and put an end to racist research in the anthropology department.
When students settled into the Wilbur Cross Building on the night of April 22, King said it represented the apex of weeks of carefully planned demonstration.
They knew it was time to do “something that would clearly get the attention not only of the university administrators but of the entire state,” King said.
King explained that the students entered the library at closing, specifically to ensure that the demonstration would not disrupt any other students’ ability to study for finals.
Through the night, King said the students received repeated warnings to leave or face criminal consequences. When the state police arrived early the next morning, King said some graduate students and a few athletes left the building, but those who stayed were arrested.
State Police dragged students by their limbs or walked them outside to waiting buses that transported them to the Stafford Springs police barracks or the Mansfield Training School for processing.
Reports from the following day say at least one student was admitted to the UConn infirmary for back injuries and others sustained cuts and bruises during their removal.
All 219 students were charged with criminal trespass in the first degree.
Solidarity and remembrance
Incensed by the university’s response, Stinnett said a group of mostly white students and faculty called the Coalition held an identical solidarity sit-in at the library the next day with the demand that all charges against the Black students be dropped.
Stinnett said State Police arrested the 75 protesters, but the demonstration ultimately worked. Thanks to the advocacy of the NAACP and other groups, charges against all 294 activists were nolled over the summer.
Stinnett said that at the time of the demonstrations, President Ferguson “didn’t want to feel pressured by the demands of the Black students,” however, he remained “very present” in the UConn community and “talked a lot about the issues.”
“He actually held town halls, he met with people to talk about the very action that had occurred. So there’s definitely a record of those kind of dialogues happening that we haven’t seen yet for today’s issue,” Stinnett said.
As for the original set of demands, Stinnett said that it took years for the UConn administration to act, but one demand, he hopes, has been fully realized.
“Their 12th demand out of their list of 12 was that the library have books about Black and Brown scholars and third world scholars, specifically in the special collections, which is the area that I work in,” Ferguson said. “By dint of being able to tell this history and being able to bring the Black student organizers to campus to show them the documents about them (and) by them … they’re seeing themselves in the archives and I think that that definitely is part of the response to a historical demand that maybe happened on a slower timeline but has been met nonetheless.”
Fifty years on, King said he is proud of the university for recognizing this pivotal moment in history and supporting its commemoration through the “Please Respond Personally” exhibition.
“Even though it was an action that was against the university administration, it was also an action to make UConn a better institution,” King said.
When he learned that the pro-Palestinian protesters felt a strong connection to the ‘74 sit-in, King said he felt “very touched by the fact that they would gain inspiration and gain courage from some of the things that we did 50 years ago.”
“Whether you believe in what they’re doing, you certainly believe in their right to protest and free speech,” King said. “I’m strongly connected to what they’re doing. Certainly in spirit and in some respects in principle.”
Divestment movements decades apart
In many ways, the ‘74 sit-in is considered a bookend to a period of student unrest that was defined by civil rights and the Vietnam War .
Back then, the demands from antiwar protesters were nearly identical to the calls echoing through college campuses today: To divest from weapons manufacturing and end on-campus recruitment by military companies.
Students regularly traveled to D.C., New York and New Haven to protest. They organized disruptions of board of trustees meetings, held sit-ins at the President’s Office, and attempted to shut down employment recruitment conducted by Dow Chemical Company, the manufacturer of napalm, on campus
Skirmishes with the police and arrests were not uncommon. Stinnett said student protesters were constantly maligned by the media, including the Hartford Courant.
“‘Troublemakers’ was the knee-jerk phrase of the time,” he said.
As tensions between the university and its radical student body came to head in December of 1968, UConn became the subject of “ Diary of a Student Revolution ,” a documentary produced by National Educational Television , the precursor to PBS.
By the late 1960s, the university even commissioned a whitepaper titled “The Continuing Crisis at UConn” to examine the unrest that gripped students and faculty.
Through the tumult, then-President Homer Babbidge held restraint until he no longer could. Babbidge remembered the day he called the State Police onto campus in November of 1968, as the “ saddest day ” of his life.
Stinnett said that Babbidge was known “for a lot more facilitating and dialoguing with the students.”
In May of 1970, UConn and E.O. Smith students took over the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps hangar for a “paint-in.” The students turned the building into a “daycare,” coating the interior and exterior with images of peace signs, flowers and bright colors.
“President (Babbidge) basically came down one day with coffee in hand and spoke with the students (and) got them to leave,” Stennett said.
No arrests were made, the hangar was repainted gray, and Stennett said the ordeal is remembered as an example of Babbidge “using his diplomacy in a very careful situation.”
When 200 students marched into the President’s Office, George Jacobi of the class of 1971 remembered Babbidge greeting the crowd “with equanimity.”
“In retrospect, even though we might have yelled at him then, he did a great job,” Jacobi said.
Chris Malis of the Class of 1972, said that without Babbidge things “could have been a lot worse.”
“He acted on what he said when he said things like ‘I’ll meet them anywhere, any time,’” Malis remembered. “We had a lot of late-night confrontations/debates with him either at his house or on campus. … He could have been home sipping a martini or something and he just stuck around and talked with us.”
Jacobi met Malis as a freshman at UConn. In 1969 they bumped into each other at Woodstock and today are best friends.
Malis joked that by the end of his college career, his parents got tired of seeing him on the evening news. Malis said he must have been arrested a dozen times and was temporarily suspended in 1970 for student actions following the Kent State and Jackson State killings.
Jacobi was never arrested.
“Many of my friends were, I just didn’t feel it was going to accomplish anything … the same as I feel like what these kids are doing now is not going to accomplish anything,” Jacobi said.
As the fight for divestment at UConn continues, Jacobi and Malis have differing thoughts on the renewed antiwar activism sweeping college campuses across the country.
Jacobi said he supports the courage and enthusiasm of the protests, but he feels this generation of students is “somewhat misguided.”
In his eyes, the fight against the Vietnam War was much more personal. There was a draft, everybody was either going overseas to fight or had a son, brother or friend who was. But most importantly, Vietnam was America’s war and the U.S. government could end it.
Jacobi said he is thankful that the UConn demonstrations have been peaceful, but he is troubled by the images of violent protests in other parts of the country.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Jacobi said, things were “remarkably peaceful compared to the way it is now.”
“We took our role models in the civil rights movement, who were all five years older than us, seven years older than us. And they went totally peaceful and with tremendous courage to do what they did completely unarmed. That was still fresh in our minds,” Jacobi said. “What’s fresh in these kids’ minds now is violence.”
“The increasing violence, the way I see it, looks more like January 6th than it did 55 years ago,” he added.
When Malis looks at the response to the college protests, he said he feels “disheartened because the police state is much more prevalent today as a first response tool than it was back then.”
Malis said that what gives him hope are the students who “appear to have some of the same spirit that we did back in the ’60s and early ’70s at UConn.”
“Just knowing that it’s happening has brought a smile to my face,” Malis said. “I keep looking for the next decade that is going to make the impact that we did. … Every now and then there’s glimpses of it, and one of them is happening right now on college campuses across the country.”
“This is certainly a worthwhile cause to say ‘Math and science and engineering and business law will be here tomorrow, these people may not, and therefore, I need to speak up and do something,’” he added.
Jacobi said “the history of the world is very, very complicated” and “we don’t know what the heck is going to happen” with the conflict in Gaza, but he also noted that when students opposed the Vietnam War, the impact was not immediately apparent.
“The stuff that happened in the ’60s, a lot of people did a lot of different things. Some of them were violent. Some of them were astonishingly stupid. A lot of them seemed useless,” Jacobi said. “In the long run, I think it ended up having a positive effect on the country and on the world, but it didn’t look like that (then). It may not have even looked like that for decades afterwards.”
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