Conceptualizing social movements as part of a trans-generational struggle is crucial to both stamina and success, he says
In the winter of 1969, a group of 70 Black students occupied Morrill Hall at the University of Minnesota to protest institutional racism—an undertaking that led to the creation of the school’s African American and African Studies Department. Prof. Emeritus John Wright, a fourth-generation Minnesotan who taught in the department for over three decades, participated in the occupation, including penning the demands presented to the administration.
Last October, a group of students at the University of Minnesota occupied the same hall in support of Palestine. Eleven students were arrested and their demands—including divestment from Israel and the severing of academic ties—remain unmet.
I sat down with Prof. Wright on campus to discuss the history of student organizing and his advice for those continuing the struggle today. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AO: How would you describe the relationship between the Morrill Hall takeover you participated in as a student and the occupation that happened last year in support of Palestine?
JW: The current protests, in many ways, are more akin to the divestment, anti-apartheid protests that I and others were part of in the ‘60s and ‘70s than they are like the Civil Rights era and Black Power protests that the Morrill Hall takeover was more directly associated with.
I was a freshman in 1963.That was the year that Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. And in the weeks leading up to my entering the university, the March on Washington [took place], which is associated with Dr. King’s famous speech. One of the things that was a point of reference for me was that Roy Wilkins—Minnesota born and raised Roy Wilkins—got up on the podium and announced that W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, had died in self-imposed exile in Ghana the night before Dr. King gave that speech. That was important for those of us who tried to take the long view on things.
It’s rarely ever mentioned, but Du Bois was a giant—as an activist, as an intellectual, as an international figure in the freedom movement, the freedom struggle. People always want to reference these protests to the Civil Rights movement. I use the Civil Rights movement in a chronologically specific way, primarily from the late ‘40s through the early mid-1960s. I talk more broadly about a trans-generational freedom struggle, a freedom movement, that’s 250 years or more old and that every generation of African Americans in this country have had to engage in one way or the other. So, the roots, again, of this protest are centuries old. My father and aunt’s generation, they impressed upon their children that we were part of this multi-generational freedom struggle.
AO: What can organizers learn from taking the long view and studying the history of this multi-generational freedom struggle?
JW: The years that I was an undergraduate, from ‘63 to ’68, saw, in one sense, the successes of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Acts. But those years were also the years of massive protests against the expanding Vietnam War, the women’s rights movement, and, in reaction to the failures of the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Black Power Movement—leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Our student generation was profoundly influenced by all of these things. The Vietnam War generated the most massive student protest against government policy in American history. The Vietnam War protest, Civil Rights and Black Power protests and women’s rights protests were all interlinked. I was on campus here, in terms of those combined protests on campus, when the local police had helicopters flying over the mall, spraying tear grass on the protesters.
Those years, the military draft was still in operation and all of us young men were subject to the military draft. That was one of the major forces fueling the anti-war protests. And that would become one of the major differences between the protests on campus today and the protests then. One of the outcomes of the Vietnam War protests was that the U.S. military decided to end the draft system and to go to what was called a voluntary enlistment enterprise, which is what we operate with now. So that made a significant difference in the attitude of college students towards American military adventures and misadventures of various kinds over the years. College students were no longer subject to the draft and that somewhat depoliticized college campuses.
But all this is happening at the same time that we’re also witnessing the global upheaval that came from decolonization in the third world. The old European imperialist empires had crumbled in the wake of the Second World War and the Vietnam War and newly independent nations in Africa, Asian Asia, the Caribbean, Latin and South America were emerging. This gave us an increasingly globalized perspective on these things.
The years of 1965 and 1966 came to be called the long hot summers [due to] massive urban rebellions. We prefer to call them rebellions, not riots. Riots are wild, loose festivities. Rebellions are something else: protest against organized institutional for forces, however chaotic they may sometimes be. And that whole scenario helped redefine for us the status of the freedom movement and its linkage with all these other movements for social justice and human liberation.
AO: How so?
JW: When the Black Power Movement emerged, a number of the leaders were Black students who had come from these former colonies. Stokely Carmichael—who would become one of the primary voices of the Black Power Movement, and who was from Trinidad, a British colony—was a student at Howard University and a member of SNNC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That was an offshoot of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference but [was] in part radicalized by anti-colonial movements abroad and the thinking of writers like Franz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and a whole host of third-world writers, activists, and theorists.
Black students began critiquing the outlook of the Civil Rights Movement—nonviolent direct protest strategies—and another model of social change and receiving social justice emerged. That was the model of decolonization, which was necessarily and inevitably violent, because the institutional structures that had created both the colonial and post-colonial enterprise were not going to voluntarily relinquish power.
AO: Why do you think higher education is often the site of such struggles?
JW: The campus has been one of the elements of the training of post-Enlightenment intellectuals in the modern world. Morrill Hall, which we took over, is named for Justin Morrill, a 19th century senator from Vermont who was part of the generation of abolitionists in the 1850s who opposed slave power. Justin Morrill and another group of abolitionists tried to institute in Congress, during the 1850s, legislation to create [public] education of the working classes for what Morrill called the sons and daughters of toil. That meant both the white working classes and freed slaves.
That legislation was opposed year after year in the 1850s during the presidency of James Buchanan, who was a northern doughface, a term again for white northern allies of the slave power. The legislation which created public university land grants would not get passed until 1862. Why in 1862? Because in 1861, the southern states seceded from the Union, and they can no longer controlled Congress. Morrill’s legislation to create public higher education passed under Lincoln’s presidency.
AO: What would you tell current students if they came to you asking for advice about their own organizing efforts?
JW: Much of this is ultimately about the fate of democracy. We are facing major challenges to the democratic ideals upon which the freedom movement is founded.
AO: What do you expect to see from, from students in the next few weeks? Do you expect to see another occupation?
JW: Well, one of the things that’s also happened, of course, is that the institutional forces system become more sophisticated in terms of counter-protest measures. Are you familiar with COINTELPRO?
AO: Yes.
JW: These organizations were going about the business of infiltrating Black activist groups and organizations. We’re fairly certain there were representatives of COINTELPRO trying to get into our student organizations on campus back then. But the leaderships of this whole array of Black organizations were subject to the government counterintelligence enterprise. J Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI during those years, had cut his teeth as an FBI operative in the surveillance and destruction of Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist Movement of the late teens and early twenties.
AO: Can you speak to the interplay between Zionism and Black Nationalism? I’m thinking of Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations,” which was modeled off Israel. But then he went to Palestine and wrote a mea culpa of sorts. But the parallel is there, right, as both groups want to create a safe space for a persecuted group?
JW: Well, it’s part of the history of nationalism as an ideology. Nationalism is a post-enlightenment development in modern political thinking. These nation states that we live in and pledge loyalty, most of them didn’t exist before the American and French revolutions. One of the problems that we’re dealing with right now is the dissolution or the fragmentation of the modern nation state system and the movement of refugee populations around the globe. This will increase in part as a marker of the increasingly failure of these modern nation states to meet the needs of people in the new millennium. And the phenomenon of what political scientists called failed states is one of the clearest manifestations thereof.
I’m as old as the state of Israel. Israel was founded the year I was born. The claims of the Israelis for the historical rights of that land are no more valid than those in the people of Gaza. And most of the Jewish historians that I know acknowledge that, which is why you have Jewish anti-Zionists. But all the turmoil … in the Middle East … many of the problems are rooted again in the fragmentation of these modern nation states, many of which were created by modern European imperialism.
Chopping up Africa is the clearest example. You look on the map and you see all these ridiculous lines. There’s absolutely no relationship to the cultural history of the continent. It’s Europeans sitting down on a table and drawing lines on a map about zones of power and influence. A lot of the battles you’ve got going on in African continent are ultimately linked to that what Du Bois called the Scramble for Africa.
Part of the long view—and a lot of the Israelis, particularly the radical Israelis recognize this—is that the biggest threats long term to the state of Israel may not be what goes on in political conferences and the diplomatic channels, but simple demography: that the Palestinian population over time will simply overgrow Israeli population. So, they try to impose policies akin to South African apartheid.
AO: What advice do you have for students protesting on behalf of Palestine, less in terms of tactics and more in terms of endurance?
JW: This is not a sprint. This is marathon. A multi-generational marathon. If you’re not prepared for that, then you’re outta your element.
AO: How does one prepare for that?
JW: In part, by developing the right kind of consciousness.