Letter: On the Allen Building Takeover
On February 8, 1968, three 18-year-old students from South Carolina State University, a HBCU in Orangeburg, SC, were killed by state highway patrolmen, who opened fire on a crowd of unarmed college students. Two years later, similar shooting deaths occurred at Jackson State University, another HBCU in Mississippi, and most famously at Kent State University, where four white students were killed by National Guards. This violence was reflective of the tumult of the era, where students across the nation not only made demands for change in the nation, but at the very institutions that were charged with preparing them for the future; a future that many of these institutions were unprepared for the future that those students demanded. Duke was such an institution.