College Activists Take Up More Causes
By Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent
Thursday, January 11, 2007
On Nov. 9, Michael Sterling showed up to class at the Thurgood Marshall School of law at Texas Southern University dressed a little bit, well, different. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a solid red shirt and red and white shoes, not the attire of an aspiring civil rights lawyer. On that day he was not alone – thousands of law school students across America were wearing blood red.
They were all on a mission: to educate the world about more than 400,000 tragic killings, rapes and acts of violence in the Sudan. With demonstrations and other activities, the 7,000-member Black Law Students Association (BLSA) continued its 37-year tradition of student activism on their designated National Day of Community Service.
BLSA is just one example of what appears to be growing student activism around human rights and public policy issues. “We’re lawyers. I tell our students this all the time. We’re next in line,” says Sterling, national chair of BLSA. “We’ve got to start understanding that our role is one of fighting for justice. And when you see an injustice occurring, when you see some legal issue, it’s like, ‘why wait until you’re in a profession and then try to get involved?’ We ought to be involved right now.”
With the growth of the Internet and ease of modern communication, some believe Black student activism may have surpassed that of the 1960s.
“Young people are more engaged than their predecessors,” says LaToia Jones, the Democratic National Committee’s coordinator of College Democrats, which has more than 4,500 chapters in 50 states. Jones says student activism is more dissipated than it was in the 1960s, making it less noticeable.
“In the 60s, you had everyone galvanized around civil rights and the Vietnam War,” Jones says. “More young people in this generation are actually doing more civic engagement by studying abroad, helping people in Africa, helping in Uganda and Asia and things of that nature. They’re actually doing things locally and abroad, so they’re actually more involved than before.”
Not everyone agrees that students of today are more active, but many agree that student activism of the 1960s has been overstated.
“The fact is there never was as many of us fighting as our faded memories suggest,” says Jesse Jackson Sr., who dropped out of the Chicago Theological Seminary to participate in the Selma-to-Montgomery (Ala.) March in 1965. “Even then, many students benefited from marches that they never participated in.”
The difference between the generations, he says, is that during the 1960s, “We were not free and knew it. Today, these youths are not free and don’t know it.”
He says some students are fighting for the wrong issues. “Many of them are fighting for the right to use self-degrading language, fighting for the right to express freedom, often without content.”
Curtis Jackson, president of the Black Student Union at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, says the issue is more complicated than that. “It’s highly difficult because in our generation, [civil rights] issues are not first priority. Our people would rather know about what’s going on in the rap groups or in hip-hop,” he says. “So, we held a forum talking about the use of the n-word and the b-word.”
Jackson says those forums have been use to organize other actions. “We’re going to Madison [Wis.] this week to protest for affirmative action. “[Black conservative Ward] Connerly is going to be here and we’re taking a bus.”
Today, student organizations, including BLSA, are finding themselves fighting multiple battles. Student leaders say they are often divided between justice for themselves on campus and justice for their surrounding communities.
For example, while busy with international and national issues this year, BLSA – the largest student-run organization in the nation with 200 chapters - was facing the lowest African American enrollment in law schools in almost 12 years, a 6.7 percent decrease since 1995, according to the American Bar Association.
“That’s the lifeblood of our organization,” says Sterling. “We hit the ground running, actively recruiting students.”
He said while focusing on outside issues and the rigors of law school, BLSA began conducting free college law camps to help increase scores on the Law Student Aptitude Test and allowing undergraduate students to join BLSA for free.
The challenge of getting students involved in civic activism is especially great for leaders of Black organizations on majority White campuses.
For Calina Byrd at Carthege College in Kenosha, Wis., the challenge has been just strengthening the Black Student Union she leads while trying to serve the community. The private campus of 2,300 students has only about 100 Black students, 30 of them are active in the BSU. “There’s like one minority in every class here,” she says. “So, we’ve been working on campus first to get that together, trying to see where we can make the biggest impact.”
She said to help strengthen the BSU, students have also formed an NAACP chapter.
Life is much easier at historically Black colleges, says Lakeshia Myers, a graduate of Alcorn University in Lorman, Miss. “Students were more active,” says Myers, now a graduate student at predominantly White Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, “I have to deal with more of the opposing viewpoints.”
Sterling says, “We basically have a burden. We have a debt that we owe to go back and fight because people have fought for us to have these opportunities to attend law schools and work for these firms and make a lot of money and do all these things. Well, we owe them. The best way to pay them back is to be involved in our communities.”