They have no official leader, no constitution and no recognition from Duke Student Government.
Yet the members of the Duke Student Movement are determined to make change.
Although it may appear that members of the Movement were wholly united in their demonstrations against The Chronicle last spring, the history of the Movement is anything but black-and-white.Although most members of the Movement agree on the initial reason for the protests, other issues, like how to provoke change in a way that was both politically savvy and in line with the beliefs of the protesters, were up for debate.
Unlike some campus organizations, in which a select group of leaders make the decisions and everyone else follows along, the Movement is a direct democracy, void of an official hierarchy.
But did the decisions this direct democracy made have an impact? How well did Movement leaders reach out to the broader Duke community to explain why so many students were angry? And was that the responsibility of the Movement in the first place?
A behind-the-scenes look at the formation of the Movement begins last March, in a Central Campus apartment with two women, one advertisement and an e-mail that no one, not even its senders, thought would provoke the response that it did.
When senior Sarah Wigfall opened the March 19 edition of The Chronicle to find a full-page advertisement denouncing reparations for slavery, she says she was so infuriated by what she saw that she couldn't even read the ad.
"My initial reaction was disbelief--I was astounded that it had been published," says Wigfall.
She says her disgust was so great that she waited until the next day, when a friend approached her with a copy of the advertisement, to sit and read it closely.
Wigfall copied the ad and brought it back to her apartment. Around 7:30 that evening, she showed the advertisement to her roommate, then-senior Camika Haynes, who had not yet seen it.
Haynes, who now works for a law firm in Washington, D.C., says she had always found The Chronicle racist and had stopped reading the student paper two years before. "Absolutely enraged" over the ad, Haynes says she talked with Wigfall for over five hours about its content and The Chronicle's decision to publish it. Then, Haynes says, at about 12:30 a.m., March 21, "I finally walked back to my room and said, OLook, we need to do something about this.'"
Paid for by conservative writer David Horowitz, the advertisement, entitled "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea--And Racist Too," was sent to 47 American colleges and universities.
The ad, which included among its reasons the argument that reparations are "based on the unfounded claim that African-American descendants of slaves suffer from the economic consequences of slavery and discrimination," incited debate over what constitutes free speech on college campuses nationwide. At Brown University, protesters stole newspapers after student editors at The Brown Daily Herald chose to publish the advertisement.
Meanwhile, at Columbia and Harvard Universities, editors refused to accept the advertisement altogether.
At Duke, Haynes and Wigfall decided to send an e-mail out to a number of students, mostly black, who were on an e-mail list for an upcoming party being planned. In the e-mail, the two women encouraged students to meet in the Alumni Lounge that afternoon "to sit and talk about the [advertisement] for a couple of hours," Wigfall says.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21, Haynes and Wigfall went to the Alumni Lounge, hoping to find a few students interested in discussing the ad. But instead of the 30 or 35 students the women expected, 200 ended up pouring into the West Union space.
The impromptu gathering of mostly black students soon turned into part sit-in, part debate, with students arguing over how to best respond to the advertisement and encouraging administrators to improve the racial climate on campus. By the end of the evening, the small gathering Haynes and Wigfall hoped for had made the nightly news.
Haynes says she was shocked when so many students showed up, and even more surprised when President Nan Keohane came to address the students herself. "We never thought the protest was going to go through the night. I seriously made dinner plans that afternoon," Haynes says.
Early the next morning, 15 students marched into the editorial office of The Chronicle and had to be removed by police. Letters to the editor also began to arrive en masse at The Chronicle, some supporting and some protesting the decision. Eventually, students would walk into Keohane's office with petitions and hold demonstrations on Main West Quadrangle.
As protesters continued to meet on a regular basis and formulate demands of both The Chronicle and the University administration, they also gave themselves a name: the Duke Student Movement. Though the group had no official leader, individual students, including Haynes, Wigfall, junior Troy Clair and senior Bianca Williams, began
At a protest in the Bryan Center on March 22, Charles McKinney, a graduate student in history, approached members of the Movement to see if there was anything he could do to help.
Also a research associate in the Office of Intercultural Affairs, McKinney had advised the Black Student Alliance in the past, and soon became what he calls a "convener," helping to facilitate the process of debating how best to proceed.
The Movement now had a name and an unofficial steering committee. But other questions were beginning to mount. Were the 200 protesters all there exclusively to protest the Horowitz advertisement, or were greater issues at play? What was the mission of the Movement--to protest The Chronicle or to improve the racial climate on campus as a whole?
As the Movement progressed, it started to become clear that although The Chronicle controversy enraged many students,it was only one part of a larger problem. Could Movement leaders use the issue to crack open a substantive discussion of the University's racial climate?
McKinney says that although all of the students participating in the Movement were horrified by Horowitz's statements, they couldn't come to an immediate consensus on what exactly they were protesting.
Some students argued the ad should not have been run at all, and that Chronicle editors should never have dealt with Horowitz. Other students believed the Chronicle should have run the ad, but as an opinion piece, which is what The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did.
Ten months later, most will say it wasn't that The Chronicle published the ad, it was how they initially ran it--without any editorial comment explaining its decision. It wasn't about stifling free speech, says Clair. It was about "printing propaganda without a disclaimer."
McKinney says another major point of contention involved Oinstitutional disrespect,' a phrase often used by members of the Movement to describe why they, as black or minority students, sometimes feel uncomfortable at the University. The phrase, he says, had a different meaning for different students.
"For some folks, it means that when I'm on West Campus, I feel alienated," says McKinney. "And other folks said, OWell I don't feel like that.'" McKinney says some students were "pissed off about the ad, period," and others were more invested in addressing the broad racial issues.
As the Movement headed forward, broader issues won out. "As the protests progressed, it became about a lot of different issues," says senior Richard McCray, a participant in the Movement. "It became about unequal financial aid, it became about housing, social space--it became about attitudes."
"I really wouldn't give Horowitz all of this credit as being the great guy who drove all the black students to [unite and protest]." says Clair, president of BSA. "It was a series of events and [Horowitz] was the last straw."
Clair says The Chronicle's previous decision not to cover a speech by Susan Taylor, vice-president of Essence communications, coupled with the mysterious exit of Phillip Shabazz, artist-in-residence at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture and the cancellation of the Blue Roach, a popular open mic, biweekly spoken word event that Shabazz helped found, angered members of the black community on campus.
Even broader racial issues--ones that have angered blacks since Duke integrated in the 1960s--also helped motivate the protests. "Eighty percent of the demands were here in '68-'69 [when black students took over the Allen Building in protest] and in 2000-2001," McKinney says. "The fact remains we're still concerned about [Duke's racial climate], still underwhelmed at efforts to bring black faculty on campus and to retain black faculty."
Haynes says that in her Duke career, "There were more than a couple times when I felt like a black student and not just a student at Duke."
She recalls an incident during her junior year, when she and four white men were working in a public computer cluster. Haynes accidentally picked up someone else's work at the cluster printer--a printed copy of an e-mail reading, "Niggers and JAPS go to my school."
"A lot of times, things that [minority students] think are racially motivated, you'll talk amongst yourselves about, but you don't have enough evidence to make a valid claim," Haynes says. "But when The Chronicle ran the ad, it was the evidence I needed that something I suspected was going on was actually going on. It brought to surface a lot of problems that were going through the minds of African-American students."
As protesters tried to sort out these personal issues, questions of political strategy also began to emerge.
"It was a tremendous struggle between the forces that be--everyone had a different opinion," Haynes says. "There were radical forces and more [moderate] forces--I was a compromising force."
McKinney, who
"One of the things that was great to see was this was a microcosm of what I study--there were lots of contesting views... and you create a really democratic space where people really have to think about why they believe what they believe," he says.
McCray says students in the Movement used to joke about how during meetings "for the first hour and a half we would argue with one another, and then for the last 10 minutes we would get something done.... I got to learn that I may be black, but every black person doesn't think what I think."
Students would generally debate and then vote on an issue. Leaders acted as facilitators, working out compromises, as opposed to pushing through their own agendas.
Students discussed how much they should focus on the black community versus minority issues as a whole. Senior and former Asian Student Association president Patty Chen participated in some of the initial protests, but when she brought a resolution to the ASA Executive Board calling for support of the Movement in their protest, members split on whether to support the measure, and the resolution was defeated.
"They felt like this ad was not something they wanted to rally around," Chen says. To half the members of the ASA board, the Horowitz issue was a matter of free speech, not disrespect against minorities.
Looking back, McKinney says he would "encourage students in the Movement to be more proactive in trying to reach out to other students." But, he adds, he'd also ask non-black students why they weren't participating.
Junior Aaron Windecker, one of the few white students involved in the protest, says he felt comfortable participating. Though some members initially suspected he was actually a Chronicle representative working undercover to sabotage the Movement, others defended his right to protest and he was quickly accepted into the Movement.
Windecker remembers debate over protesting at the McDonald's All-American game last March as being particularly intense. Some students wanted to make a splash by protesting outside Cameron Indoor Stadium--with the news media present and the game's big-name corporate sponsor watching. Others already had tickets to the game, and wanted to spend the night as spectators, not protesters.
Windecker helped organize the protest after the Movement decided to hold it, even though he "personally didn't think it was the best use of our time and resources." Windecker says he would have preferred to find ways of educating the general public about the Movement, "as opposed to putting it all into a one-shot thing." After the protest, students began to lose momentum, in part because they had been putting off schoolwork to focus on Movement activities.
Ten months have passed since the Duke Student Movement was born. Movement leaders say the protests have helped unite the black community on campus, and helped to spread awareness about institutional disrespect at Duke.
In addition, the President's Council on Black Affairs has been reinvigorated. McKinney says Keohane comes to PCOBA meetings--and listens.
A subcommittee of PCOBA has also been set up to focus on assessment of campus racial climate, wrote Vice President of Student Affairs Larry Moneta in an e-mail.
Moneta wrote that other changes that have come both directly and indirectly out of the Movement include the development of an interim multicultural center in the Bryan Center and the future opening of a more expansive, permanent center in 2002.
And there has been a renewed focus on the Black Faculty Initiative, which aims to hire and retain black faculty at a much greater rate.
Bertie Howard, professor of African and African-American studies, says the Movement was a catalyst to resurrect the idea of the Black Collective at Duke, which was established in April to help unite black faculty, staff, graduate and professional students and alumni. Howard is a member of the Collective's 17-member steering committee.
Ironically, the one thing Movement leaders never received was the first thing they asked for--an apology from The Chronicle. If faced with the same decision again, former Chronicle editor Greg Pessin says, "I think we would've done it the same way. The decision was never about agreeing or disagreeing with the opinion of David Horowitz.... It was about the spirit of what we were trying to do at The Chronicle and running opinion advertisements is part of that, as is running as many letters to the editor as we can, as is attempting to get all the different points of view in stories that we write."
Movement leaders say they are currently in dialogue with Keohane and although they are not as visible on campus as they were last spring, they are still going strong, committed to spreading understanding, eliminating institutional disrespect and improving the racial climate on-campus.
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