"No Other Moment Like This One"
1/23/2003 | | Bill McMoore, pictured in the 1951 <I>Gopher</I> annual knocking down a San Jose State boxer, advanced to the NCAA semifinals and in dual meet competition had the best record: 6–1. In 1950, he was kept home from a team trip to Miami, where black and white boxers were prohibited from facing each other. |
By Tim Brady
The small numbers of African American students at the University of Minnesota in the early years of the 20th century served to isolate racial problems on the Twin Cities campus. As more black men and women arrived in the 1920s, the University seemed less interested in responding to their needs than in creating separate spaces for whites and African Americans to function within their own segregated communities. World War II helped open minds to the possibilities of an integrated society at the U, as elsewhere across the United States. But change came slowly in the postwar years, even as the Civil Rights and Black Power movements gained momentum.
In February 1950, Bill McMoore (B.A. ’51) of the University of Minnesota boxing team received a front-page Minneapolis Tribune apology from the school’s president, James Morrill. The light-heavyweight had been kept home from a team trip to Miami because coach Ray Chisholm said he wanted to rest McMoore for an upcoming Big Ten bout with Michigan State. In truth, the stay at home was prompted by Florida boxing rules that prohibited white fighters from facing black fighters in the ring. The boxing team wasn’t interested in making an issue of the matter.
It won’t happen again, Morrill told McMoore through the newspaper. “The right of a home team to prescribe conditions of athletic contests on its own campus has been generally recognized in intercollegiate competition,” he wrote, “but the University of Minnesota cannot participate if those conditions are contrary to its own fixed policy.” The Minnesota boxing team, which was in Miami at the time of the announcement, would be allowed to compete, said Morrill, but it would be a last time for Gopher athletics teams. “No further intercollegiate contest will be scheduled under circumstances that might bar eligible members of its teams from participation.”
In the years following World War II, the segregation that had characterized prewar campus race relations was becoming an embarrassment to much of the University community. But black students remained isolated at the U, and an uneasy future loomed. The student body as a whole had changed. The University of Minnesota was teeming with new students, many of them war veterans, many with families, and many in need of housing. But African American students were still few and far between and most concerns expressed toward their well-being on campus came in the form of studies that documented what black people already knew: namely, that discrimination was firmly embedded in the life of the campus and the community around them.
A 1948 survey from the Office of the Dean of Students, for instance, indicated that 27 student organizations at the University—almost all of them fraternities and sororities—had restrictive clauses expressly prohibiting Negroes from joining them. Housing remained a problem as well. It wasn’t until 1950, at the prodding of the NAACP, that the University quit asking its approved roster of landlords to list religious and racial preferences for renters.
Like so many other students of the era, McMoore had arrived at the University, in 1946, after a two-year stint in the U.S. Army. A graduate of Minneapolis South, he was the first member of his family to earn a high school diploma and would become the first to graduate from college. At the U, he majored in education and was the only black person in the department. “That wasn’t anything new to me,” McMoore says. “I was the only black player on the football team and the only black boxer too.”
McMoore remembers that the football team played no southern schools during his stint at the University but that he roomed by himself on the road, until teammate Ted Christiansen volunteered to bunk with him. When he graduated in 1951, McMoore couldn’t immediately find a job in the Minneapolis school district. (A 1947 “Survey on Human Relations” conducted for the city of Minneapolis showed that in all 121 of Minneapolis’s public schools, exactly one African American was employed, as a clerk. There were no black teachers in the system.) McMoore spent two years working as the athletics director at a community house in St. Paul, then earned his master’s  | | Bill McMoore (B.A. ’51), who graduated with a degree in education, was not able to find a job in the Minneapolis School District until 1958. He eventually became director of health, physical education, and athletics for all Minneapolis schools, a position from which he retired in 1989. He then worked as manager of community relations for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Photo by Mark Luinenburg |
degree from a school in Missouri.
McMoore returned to Minneapolis in 1958, when “the district was finally willing to hire me,” he says. He spent a number of years teaching at Minneapolis South before becoming director of health, physical education, and athletics for all Minneapolis schools, a position from which he retired in 1989. He spent another half-dozen years in the 1990s working as manager of community relations for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Of his years at the U, McMoore says, “I learned never to quit. My experiences helped me to just keep going in life.”
Clarence Taylor (B.A. ’62) arrived at the University from St. Paul Central in 1958 and was soon recruited into one of the University’s first attempts at educating itself and the community about matters of diversity: a branch of a nationwide student organization called the Panel of Americans.
Instituted at UCLA during World War II in response to the wave of anti-Japanese sentiment that came with the onset of war, the Panel of Americans sent groups of students of diverse religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds into the community to discuss their experiences and to educate Minnesotans about their differences. The U’s branch of the organization was first suggested in 1954 but didn’t get off the ground until 1958. Taylor was one of the first African American students enlisted.
“Basically we went all over the Twin Cities and out state too,” says Taylor, a recently retired sales associate from Twin Cities–based Best Buy. “There’d be five students on each panel, and we’d speak about our experiences and then answer questions: ‘Do you feel like outcasts? What do you think about Martin Luther King? Would you ever date a white woman?’”
The panel would also typically include a Jew, a Catholic, a member of a large Protestant faith, along with a person from less well-represented racial, ethnic, or religious groups on campus, including Native Americans, Asian Americans, Mormons, and Unitarians. The Panel of Americans would exist at the U into the late ’60s, and through the years it visited hundreds of high school assemblies, fraternities, sororities, women’s clubs, and Sunday school classes.
The Civil Rights movement itself was just beginning to be a presence at the U during Taylor’s years, and he recalls numerous campus conversations about sit-ins and being a part of an early Civil Rights organization called Freedom Minnesota. But African Americans at the University were still isolated, and—with the exception of a group of star football players—kept a low profile. Like Taylor, they tended to live off campus.
The football players included Sandy Stephens, Judge Dickson, Bob Bell, Bill Munsey, and Bob McNeill. They were a part of the program’s first major effort at recruiting black athletes and would help carry the Gophers to the 1960 Big Ten championship and a 1961 Rose Bowl victory—the last time the University of Minnesota has won that title. Stephens was the nation’s first black all-American quarterback; Bell would also receive all-American honors and go on to a great pro career as an all-star tackle.
The Gopher basketball team was not as quick as Murray Warmath’s football program to recruit African American players. It wasn’t until 1963 that the University awarded scholarships to its first three black players, the extremely talented trio of Lou Hudson, Archie Clark, and Don Yates.
That was the same year Clarence Taylor’s brother, David, arrived on campus. David Taylor (B.A. ’67, Ph.D. ’77) was one of a very few African American students in the College of Liberal Arts and was a little overwhelmed by the sheer size of the University and the lack of kindred souls on campus. “I would go for days without seeing another black student,” says Taylor. “We were basically dumped into the masses at the U and told to make do. There were no scholarship programs for African American students, no cultural programs, no attempt to recruit students of color.”
“I would estimate that there were about 50 or 60 African Americans on the campus at that time,” says John Wright (B.S. ’68, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’77), who also arrived at the University in 1963. “There were more international students from some  | | Student leaders Rose Mary Freeman (B.A. ’70) and Horace Huntley (B.A. ’70) led the Morrill Hall takeover January 14, 1969, when demands they delivered to University President Malcolm Moos a day earlier were not met. The incident brought about the establishment of the Afro-American and African Studies Department, the hiring of several African American faculty members, and grand jury indictments for the student leaders. Most of the charges were later dropped. Photo courtesy of University Archives. |
individual countries than there were African Americans.”
Gloria Williams (Ph.D. ’75) came to the University the same year as Clarence Taylor, in 1958. She held a master’s degree from New York University and had taught in elementary schools in Boston before entering the doctorate program in the School of Home Economics at the University. She was hired as a teaching assistant and assigned to the Department of Textiles and Clothing. “I always felt a little isolated on the St. Paul campus,” she says. “I still do.”
For 44 years, Williams has taught in what has now become the College of Human Ecology. She received her doctorate in 1975 and sent a daughter, Kate, to the University. She recalls that during the 1960s there were just a handful of African American faculty and staff members at the University—the School of Social Work hired the first black woman faculty member, Ruby Pernell, in 1954—but there was no precise count.
Likewise, getting a handle on a precise number of black students at the U remained an ongoing problem. Matt Stark (M.A. ’59) began his career at the University in 1952, doing graduate work in educational counseling under the dean of students, E.G. Williamson. In 1954, Stark became coordinator of counseling for University residence halls and then was hired in 1963 to head a new human relations program established within the Office of the Dean of Students. In this last position, Stark would serve as adviser to a number of African American groups through the years, and he recalls making perhaps the University’s first effort at creating a record of black students on campus. His admittedly unscientific methods included buttonholing African Americans he didn’t know and simply asking them who they were.
Through his office, Stark guided a number of student civil rights and educational programs during the tumultuous years to come, including the Panel of the Americans; Project Awareness, a program designed to aid “the educational enrichment and vocational motivation” of Native American youth; and the SCOPE (Summer Community Organization and Political Education) project, which was the famous—and perilous—voter registration drive of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With the guidance of the human relations office, student groups brought to Minneapolis a string of national Civil Rights and Black Power figures, including King, Hosea Williams, and Stokely Carmichael, for talks and convocations.
Nationally, there was an increasing sense of anger and frustration within black communities regarding continued racial injustices and the slow pace of change. The powerful legacy of Malcolm X, the emerging Black Panther movement, and a growing acknowledgement—culminating in the urban riots of the mid-1960s—that racism was not isolated to southern states led to an escalating tension that was felt deeply on the campus of the University of Minnesota. “As the scene shifted from south to north, student organizations reflected the change,” says Wright. “We started to look closely at the institutions around us.”
In November 1966, an organization called Students for Racial Progress (STRAP) was founded at the U. According to one of its early leaders, Scotty Stone, in a Minnesota Daily article from January 24, 1967, the purpose of the group was to “stress self-directed progress” and put “more emphasis on the Negro and his relationship to his internal setting.”
In the spring of 1967, STRAP sponsored Carmichael’s visit to campus. That fall, Stone and other STRAP leaders led a demonstration that disrupted the opening convocation of the school year. The protest began with a silent sit-in in the front aisle of Northrop Auditorium during the program and ended with speeches and a tussle on the plaza outside Northrop. The ostensible reason for the protest was that an invitation to the convocation had not been extended to Ida Elam, the president of STRAP. But the deeper issues centered on black student frustrations with their isolation on campus and the lack of regard and respect shown them by the University. More disruptions were on the way.
In the winter of 1967–68, STRAP changed its name to the Afro-American Action Committee (AAAC). The  | | Gloria Williams (Ph.D. ’75), a professor in the College of Human Ecology, has taught at the U 44 years. She was on the faculty in 1969 when African American students, her daughter among them, took over Morrill Hall and was called in to help mediate the situation. Photo by Mark Luinenburg |
organization continued to grow, and new student leaders, like Rose Mary Freeman (B.A. ’70), Horace Huntley (B.A. ’70), and John Wright, emerged. By the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, AAAC was a force to be reckoned with. “There had been a great deal of grousing on campus for a long time,” recalls David Taylor, “but until AAAC came along, it tended to be non-directional.”
“It’s also important to note the town-gown connection,” Wright says of the increased politicization of the black student body. “We found encouragement and support through African American community organizations like the Urban League, in the community centers like Phyllis Wheatley and Hallie Q. Brown, and through the Way, led by Mahmoud El-Kati.”
In the wake of King’s murder and a mass demonstration that followed, AAAC created a list of seven demands that it presented to University President Malcolm Moos. Drafted by Wright, these included an insistence that 200 full scholarships be granted African American high school students from Minnesota in Martin Luther King’s name; that guidance, counseling, and recruitment agencies be established and geared toward black students; and that an educational curriculum be established at the University “that would reflect the contributions of black people to the culture of America.”
In response, Moos and the administration began raising funds for a scholarship program to begin in the fall, established a Task Force on Human Rights to examine racial issues on campus, and formed a faculty committee to begin work on a “minority studies program.”
Through the course of the summer, Wright and others helped recruit black students for the newly created scholarship program. But there was confusion about whether the scholarships were solely for African American students or low-income students in general, and if they were to be fully funded grants or scholarships supplemented by loans. In addition, the pace established by the faculty committee for creating an Afro-American studies curriculum seemed glacially slow to black students.
By January 1969, AAAC decided some action was needed to prod the administration. On Monday, January 13, seven representatives of AAAC visited Moos’s office in Morrill Hall and presented a list of three demands to the president that they said needed to be met immediately. They asked that an Afro-American studies program be established by fall 1969, that the University contribute one-half of the cost of a proposed national conference of black students to be held in February, and that control of the Martin Luther King scholarship program be placed in the hands of an agency of the black community. Moos was given until 1 p.m. the following day to meet the demands.
The next day, 70 AAAC members gathered in Moos’s office. Moos met with the students briefly but had no answers that could appease their demands. Led by Freeman and Huntley, the students left the president’s office, but instead of exiting the building, they simply went down a floor and took over the admissions office. Morrill Hall was occupied, and it would remain so for the next 24 hours.
In all the years that African American students had been at the University of Minnesota, there was no other moment like this one. For the first time in the school’s history, its central concern—the concern of the administration, of faculty, of alumni, of the rest of its student body, and of the state’s citizens—was focused intensely on the University’s African American students.
Gloria Williams had never been contacted by the president’s office before. Now she was asked to help mediate the situation. “When I was called to Morrill Hall, I didn’t even know the president knew I worked on campus,” she says. Williams grabbed an old, fur-collared coat, “in case I had to spend the night,” she recalls, “I thought the collar would make a good head rest,” and went down to the administration building. She entered the bursar’s office, which had been occupied by a group of white demonstrators from the Students for a Democratic Society organization (SDS), and then walked toward the admissions office where a chair barred the door. She knocked, and a skeptical face greeted  | | Clarence Taylor (B.A. ’62) (left), a retired Best Buy sales associate, came to the University in 1958 and was soon recruited into one of the U’s first attempts at educating itself and the community about matters of diversity: a branch of a nationwide student organization called the Panel of Americans. His brother, David (B.A. ’67, Ph.D. ’77), arrived in 1963 and was one of the few African American students in the College of Liberal Arts. He is now dean of General College. Photo by Mark Luinenburg. |
her. Then someone from inside called, “That’s Kate’s mother!” and Gloria Williams was let inside, where she saw her daughter among the protesters. “I stayed for a while and talked with the students,” Williams says. “It seemed to me they knew exactly what they were doing, so I left.”
Through a day of back-and-forth negotiations between black students, administration officials, and community intermediaries, a settlement was hashed out. Administrators agreed to accelerate the pace of the creation of an Afro-American studies department, agreed to the placement of an AAAC presence on the Martin Luther King scholarship committee, and agreed to fund the February student conference. The black students agreed to leave the building.
There were recriminations. Moos came under intense criticism in some quarters for his handling of the situation and acceding to student demands. Some $11,000 damage was done to the offices of Morrill Hall, though it was disputed then and now just who did the destruction (black students or the SDS, whose members had come late to the sit-in). A commission was formed by Moos to investigate the circumstances of the takeover. And in March, a Hennepin County grand jury indicted Freeman, Huntley, and Warren Tucker and charged them with riot, criminal damage to property, and unlawful assembly. In the ensuing two-week trial in October and November 1969, Warren Tucker was acquitted of all charges while Freeman and Huntley were acquitted of felony charges of riot and criminal damage and given a year’s probation for the misdemeanor charge of unlawful assembly.
When the dust settled on the scene, it revealed a fresh landscape at the University of Minnesota. By June 1969, the University’s Board of Regents had approved a new Department of Afro-American and African Studies, and by 1970 courses were being offered within it. El-Kati, Earl Craig, Josie Johnson, and Lillian Anthony were hired as faculty. They would soon be joined by Anita Brooks (M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’77), Reginald Buckner (Ph.D. ’74), and Geneva Southall in an interdisciplinary program that covered subjects that ranged from jazz to African history to the sociology of the African American family.
The corps of African American faculty and graduate students in the program created on campus a community that had never existed before: a thriving intellectual assembly dedicated to the study and enhancement of the African American community. Some of the first to benefit from the program were those who struggled to create it. John Wright, the son and nephew of 1930s graduates of the University, would switch from engineering to American studies; he is now an associate professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies. Horace Huntley is a history professor at the University of Alabama–Birmingham. David Taylor (B.A. ’67, Ph.D. ’77) is dean of the General College at the University of Minnesota.
The Department of Afro-American and African Studies has stood central to the intellectual and cultural life of African American students at the University of Minnesota since its inception in 1970. Its history and the history of African American students in general at the University continues to be written—even as we acknowledge the sacrifice, courage, and diligence of the pioneer black students at the U. Andrew Hilyer (1882), Frank Wheaton (1894), Elvira Turner (’06), Olive Howard (’14), Roy Wilkins (B.A. ’23), Barbara Cyrus, Bill McMoore, and scores of others created a foundation for a better and more accepting home for African American students on the campus of the University of Minnesota.
Still, more work needs doing. African American students and faculty have continued to express a sense of isolation. The campus remains largely white, and acceptance of cultural differences remains a struggle. But the generations of black students who have followed their elders keep adding to that foundation and the house keeps rising.
Tim Brady, a St. Paul–based freelance writer, thanks the University of Minnesota Archives and librarian Lois Hendrickson for invaluable assistance in writing this series of articles. The first two parts in this series can be found at the links above.
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