"We drove up to the circle and took off and ran into the [Allen] Building," said Bertie Howard, Trinity '76, who is now executive director of the University's Center for Africa and the Media. "A few people were already at work. We escorted them out and bolted the doors."
Bill Griffith, dean of student affairs, had arrived for work early that day. He had worked with the black students before and knew most of the students bustling through the hall by name. "What in the world are y'all doing?" he asked as hammering filled the hallway and the students used two-by-fours to brace the door.
They answered, "We're doing something and we've got to close these doors," Griffith remembered. Afterwards, he said, "I called President [Douglas Knight] and said, 'We've got a problem.'"
The gathering storm
Griffith may have been shocked to see the Allen Building taken over but he must not have been surprised that black students at Duke were frustrated.
In the last year of what many call the most turbulent decade of the century, the 1960s, black students at the University were institutionally recognized as equals, but were far from being an integrated part of the University. The first black students had been admitted only six years before and in 1969, the total non-white enrollment of the undergraduate population numbered less than 100.
Students encountered professors unwilling to give credit for top work to black students and a general sense from the majority white population that they didn't belong there. Brenda Armstrong, Women's College '70 and currently an associate professor of pediatric cardiology and dean of admissions at the Medical School, was head of the Afro-American Society at the time. She said that black students were told, in essence, "You can't do science, you can't do law. What could you do? Sing and dance."
Frustration with a seemingly apathetic and immovable administration was growing. The demands presented during and before the takeover included calls for an end to harassment by campus police, the creation of an Afro-American Studies Department and an increase in black enrollment.
After two to three years of meetings with the administration achieved few substantive University policy changes, the idea for a takeover of the Allen Building was conceived during the fall semester of 1968. Armstrong said, in a recent interview with The Chronicle, that due to the slow movement of the administration, "toward the end of the semester we just stopped talking." As winter break arrived, each student took home the burden of deciding whether they would participate if a takeover were to occur.
"When we came back I don't think anyone's mind had changed at all," Armstrong said.
Moving quickly from concept to construction of their plans, the young members began covert preparations. They went on reconnaissance missions to memorize the architectural layout of the building. They watched to see when the building began filling with workers in the morning. And they made plans to rent a truck.
A spark was all that was necessary now. For many, it came as the result of Black Week, a cultural awareness week conceived after several students attended a similar conference at Howard University. During the week, many nationally known civil rights speakers and organizers came to the University, including Dick Gregory, Ben Ruffin, Maynard Jackson and Fannie Lou Hamer. For Howard, one of the students in the audience, it was Hamer's quiet but powerful speech on the struggle to register black voters in Mississippi that brought everything into perspective.
"A turning point for all of us was Fannie Lou Hamer being there," Howard said. "For a lot of us it caused us to stop and pause and think about what we were going to do."
Wednesday night, the day after Black Week ended, a majority of the black student community put the final touches on their plan to seize the Allen Building.
Some stayed the night at a rented apartment off Markham Avenue; others returned to their West Campus dormitories.
In the early morning of Thursday, February 13th, the students piled into the back of the rented moving truck and headed down Campus Drive toward the Allen Building and into the pages of Duke history.
Inside the Allen Building
With the first floor of the Allen Building secured, those locked inside stopped for a moment to reflect on what they had done. They had taken over the central record system and the bursar's office of one of the largest, most powerful universities in the South. Sources differ on whether or not the students threatened to destroy the records in the Allen Building, but accounts from The Chronicle at the time noted that they did.
Although the administration was clearly in a tight and uncomfortable position, it would not bow to any of the demands of the black students. "The University played hardball and threatened to charge us with criminal trespassing," Howard said.
Throughout the day, administrators came up to the windows of the building to talk to students. Sometimes negotiating, sometimes threatening, they tried to get the students to vacate. Inside the building that had been renamed the "Malcolm X Liberation School," the students turned on their radios, listening for reports of the takeover.
Outside, thanks to the foresight of the black students, the story of the takeover was breaking nationwide. Tom Campbell, Trinity '70 and a current partner at the Regulator Bookshop, was executive editor of The Chronicle at the time. He remembered that the black students had asked to speak with the editorial board the night before. In strict confidence the leaders of the takeover told a small group of Chronicle editors their plans. "What they wanted us to do was get up at 6:30 in the morning and let everybody know, the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post, the News and Observer," Campbell said. "There were only five or six white people on campus that knew the night before."
Safety concerns prompted the advance warning, Campbell said. "They were concerned that the administration would call in the police or troops and they hoped that if there were national media coverage from the beginning that it would sway the administration from doing it."
But as the day wound on, it became clear both in and out of the building that this hope was dying.
Through the back windows of the Allen Building, the students inside saw the North Carolina National Guard and Durham police assembling in the Duke Gardens. Inside, the men suggested that, for their own safety, all the women should leave. But Howard said, "Uh-uh. We were saying no to chauvinism."
When the men persisted, however, the group decided that many of the younger women would leave while five or six, including Armstrong and Howard, would stay.
During the day, Provost Marcus Hobbs proposed meeting with five of the students separately on the second floor of the Allen Building; the offer was rejected. Although Armstrong said Hobbs was giving his word that the demands of the black students would be addressed by the Board of Trustees, he also continued to deliver ultimatums and statements demanding that the students leave.
After rejecting Hobbs' proposal the students anxiously contemplated their next step. Some felt that their point had been made and nothing would be gained by remaining; others refused to surrender.
"We really wrestled with the idea," said Harvey Linder, Trinity '72, said. "Are we going to stay here and defend the building and be carried out?" In the late afternoon, by a 25-24 vote, the students decided to leave as a group through the front doors. Apparently, they made this decision just in time. "We were coming out the door at the same time the police were getting ready to storm the [back] door," Linder said.
Outside the back entrance to the building, between 1,000 and 2,000 people had gathered, mostly sympathetic white students. The crowd surrounded the black students in a human shield and then walked toward Campus Drive. The black students then went up to the fourth floor of Canterbury Dormitory to watch the rest of the events.
Back at the Allen Building, Griffith said, the police "started coming up from the gardens and I went down to say, 'You don't have to come in, they're gone.'" But it was too late.
Finding the building empty, the police turned to deal with the huge crowd of indignant white students surrounding them. Although not all students backed the Allen Building takeover, they were all angry that the administration had called the police and National Guard to their campus.
"There was no doubt in my mind that police were going to be in charge," Howard said. "[White students] just didn't believe a confrontation with police would happen."
But as the students began to surround the police and taunt them, the police reacted. "A lot of the white students had their rights abrogated the way we deal with it every day and they were very angry," Armstrong said.
Feeling foolish and frustrated about the situation, Campbell said, the police "with no real provocation started tear gassing the people. Some of the most conservative students who were there protesting [against the blacks' Allen Building takeover] got gassed and they were infuriated."
Before the crowd dispersed, records from the University archives show that five people were arrested, 25 were injured (including five policemen) and one police car was badly damaged and left in the quadrangle.
After the upheaval of the day was over, the University pinpointed 25 students as the leaders of the protest, including Armstrong and Howard.
The administration charged them with violating what was then known as the University Protests, Pickets and Demonstrations Policy. The other 24 participants later joined them. Because the united 49 students charged in the proceedings comprised the school's entire black enrollment, the University, said Armstrong, was forced to allow them to stay in school
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