A poster on a small university office wall declared, “Students Are Slaves!” where students gathered to organize for a campaign.Footnote ¹ This pronouncement mirrored radical student declarations throughout the 1960s; the poster's association of slaves and students held racial and power connotations regarding the university, defined as part of “the machine.” This university, however, was not in a hotspot region for student activism like the West Coast or the Northeast. Instead, the university office was located in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the University of Tennessee (UT) in 1969. Even in supposedly conservative regions, like the Southeast, radical students – black and white – engaged with issues surrounding race and power in the 1960s.

During the 1960s, students throughout the country sought a greater say in their lives while in college, which meant confronting the established practice of in loco parentis, the policy of universities and colleges acting as custodians for students in place of their parents or guardians during their time on campus. Following urban riots in the summer of 1967 and the antiwar movement's escalation during this period, the likelihood of a campus erupting in unrest, even in the politically conservative state of Tennessee, seemed highly probable to university administrators and student radicals alike. This article demonstrates that small, campus-based protests over student autonomy, when combined with continued concerns surrounding racial inequalities in higher education, polarization in the civil rights movement, and the developing anger towards the American military involvement in Vietnam, transformed those demonstrations into large-scale attacks on the university establishment. As debates raged over the extent of student power and racial inequality on campuses, administrators were forced to contend with this changing environment.

This piece puts forward three major arguments. First, beyond seeking to end dormitory curfew and student attire regulations, in loco parentis protests manifested emerging conceptions of student power centered on personal autonomy, which matured by the late 1960s. Black and white students enrolled at public and private institutions demanding a greater voice in campus affairs, denouncing student apathy, and even using the term “student power” reveals the development of student consciousness in Tennessee and across the South. The fact that these debates occurred across Tennessee universities, from large public institutions in major cities like Vanderbilt University, UT, and Memphis State University, to small private religious colleges in rural areas like Sewanee – the University of the South and Maryville College reveals the importance of student power for understanding student activism.Footnote ² After the sit-ins of the early 1960s and the Berkeley, California free-speech movement in 1964, black and white students had widely recognized language for their frustrations over being helpless participants of “the machine.” Both of these movements emphasized student autonomy and free speech within the university system as a political strategy.Footnote ³ Indeed, the free-speech movement leader, Mario Savio, declared that “the battlefields [the South and the university] may seem quite different to some observers … [but] the same rights are at stake in both places.”Footnote ⁴ Some three years later, in 1967, southern student radicals had seemingly cemented the equation of student rights with civil rights. Lynn Wells, a member of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), discussed the growing “intensity” of “student power protests” on campuses like Berkeley and “black campuses in the South.” She looked forward with hope to a time when college students nationally, “for the most part apathetic,” would rise up against their collegiate systems where they were “‘forced’ to consume facts like machines.”Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile, in Tennessee, in a protest at Sewanee against the administration's “autocratic” behavior, some 150 to 200 students invoked the civil rights movement by singing “We Shall Overcome.”Footnote ⁶

Second, the trajectory of student protest in Tennessee challenges the traditional 1960s declension narrative.Footnote ⁷ In Tennessee, student protest developed and fractured more gradually than narratives centered on the era's major student organizations – notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society, and its southern counterpart, SSOC – have allowed.Footnote ⁸ Other studies have identified moments of campus unrest in Tennessee well before the 1960s, supporting a reconsideration of the causes of 1960s student power. In 1924 there was a year-long student protest at historically black college and university (HBCU) Fisk University in Nashville against the university president's perceived “restrictive” control, and during April and May 1930 at private Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee the firing of staff members led to a student strike.Footnote ⁹ Studying the students, rather than major student organizations, reveals that, in Tennessee at least, student protest intensified beyond 1968 (“days of rage,” in Todd Gitlin's influential telling), and crested in 1970. Indeed, campus activism was alive and well in this conservative state post-1968.

Lastly, black and white students declared similar frustrations with “the machine,” but institutional racism on and off campus rendered their experiences distinct. Southern campuses, particularly those in Tennessee, demonstrate this distinction. Accommodation to student demands depended largely on the size of the campus, on whether it received its funding from public or private sources, on and the extent to which it was (or was not) integrated. As the decade wore on, the strategies of white and black students took different forms, running parallel to the divisions in the national civil rights movement.

As the 1960s dawned, campuses faced the problem of building additional facilities to accommodate the baby boomer generation. With such a large increase in student enrolment, many colleges felt the strain on existing facilities, such as dormitories and cafeterias, which in turn encouraged student resentment of university administrations owing to overcrowding. For example, as enrolment at UT increased by 61 percent between 1964 and 1969 (and by 75 percent across the South between 1960 and 1965), students demanded improved facilities.Footnote ¹⁰

At Sewanee, an increased student-body size put pressure on the dining facilities during the 1960s, causing student disorder in February 1967. Following complaints from March 1963 of poor food quality at the campus cafeteria, Gailor, an editorial in October 1966 connected the “expanding student body” with the cramped situation in the dining hall and unappetizing food.Footnote ¹¹ In an editorial, one student stated, “The riots in Gailor should cease, that goes without argument. But if a man is fed as if he were in a kindergarten class, he will probably use the manners of a pre-schooler [sic]. If he is fed like a gentleman, he will undoubtedly employ the manners of gentility.”Footnote ¹² The student's argument blamed the rioting squarely on the administration for not resolving the overcrowding in Gailor. The conflict led to the aforementioned campus protest when student demonstrators gathered and sang “We Shall Overcome” on 23 February 1967.Footnote ¹³

Other types of policy which dictated students’ appearance and attendance at specific campus events fall within the traditional definition of in loco parentis and similarly caused friction among student populations. In particular, private institutions had stricter policies for students’ attire, making dissent from these codes easier to identify than at larger, public universities. Male students at Southwestern at Memphis, Sewanee, and Maryville College were expected to dress neatly around campus and to wear a coat, shirt, and tie for chapel services, while it was mandatory for female students to dress smartly in skirts.Footnote ¹⁴ The student newspaper, the Sewanee Purple, hosted debates over the relevance of Sewanee's dress code as far back as March 1956, indicating the long pedigree of this particular disagreement between some students and administrators.Footnote ¹⁵ Mandatory chapel attendance was a feature of life at many small colleges during the 1960s, and an area of resistance from students at Southwestern, Maryville College, Sewanee, and Tennessee Wesleyan University in East Tennessee.Footnote ¹⁶

In light of women's increased college attendance, dormitory curfews were a common flashpoint for renegotiation between students and campus administrations. White and black students felt similar tensions over dormitory curfew policies, although the administrative response at black campuses was often harsher. At Morristown College, an HBCU located in East Tennessee, the administration expelled students who had protested curfew policies, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Counter Intelligence Program noted the unrest. In May 1968, the college president, Elmer P. Gibson, expelled eleven coed students following a meeting with the college's board of trustees because they “rebelled” when they were reminded to clean up their dormitory rooms and to follow the check-in and check-out procedures when going off-campus.Footnote ¹⁷ The Morristown College case – as with the later expulsion of the Lane College student body in March 1969 after arson attacks on campus buildings – showed how harshly some HBCU administrations reacted to campus-based protests.Footnote ¹⁸

At some historically white universities, administrators chose conciliation over expulsion in the late 1960s. Notably, Memphis State University's president Dr. Cecil C. Humphreys visited campus dormitories regularly from 1968 so students would consider him available to negotiate with and thereby prevent demonstrations from occurring. This tactic was conspicuously successful.Footnote ¹⁹ Administrators at Tennessee Wesleyan avoided campus unrest by giving students representation on faculty committees through the 1960s and on the board of trustees from 1973. The college president, Charles C. Turner Jr., also held what he called “rap sessions” with students to hear their concerns and answer questions.Footnote ²⁰ Essential to this tactic's success, however, were administrative flexibility and accommodation to at least some student demands.

Dormitory curfew protests at Tennessee's colleges progressed differently at private and public institutions. Private colleges and universities operated with more freedom than public institutions, largely because their financial support came from endowments built by alumni donations in larger proportions than state universities that relied more heavily on federal and state funding. The comparative autonomy many private institutions enjoyed compared with state-run colleges allowed for more flexibility in negotiating between administrators and students over student autonomy. Private Tennessee colleges which witnessed dormitory-hour protests during this time included Southwestern, Maryville, Vanderbilt University, and Tusculum College in East Tennessee.Footnote ²¹ As late as 1970, Sewanee students proposed an open-dorm policy that the university's administration vetoed.Footnote ²²

While university administrators statewide were concerned about student unrest, students on campuses lacking substantial liberal or radical student activism routinely decried these apparently apathetic student bodies. These condemnations emerged in both private and public Tennessee universities as early as the mid-1950s, in line with this article's assertion that conceptions of student power were present well before the 1960s. In the context of dormitory regulations in 1958, one Sewanee student called on his fellow students to “reclaim our status as gentlemen in addition to our present scholarly pose,” and to stand up to the university administration, which he compared to an “authoritarian government.”Footnote ²³ Maryville, Vanderbilt, and Sewanee in particular saw student radicals on their campuses call for greater student participation in activism and articulate apathy specifically as an issue. These students’ complaints revealed their awareness of, and disappointment at, the general absence of like-minded students on their campuses. Denunciations of apathy, then, served as calls from more radical students for greater student involvement in dismantling the limitations that university administrations placed on students’ personal autonomy on campuses. Students drew connections between their political power on campus and their personal rights. Echoing comments that had been made over the past decade, one Maryville student declared in 1969, “Paternalism is dead as a doctrine for decisions, and all have to acknowledge that. This includes not only faculty and administration who would like to paternalize, but also students who are willing to sit back and be paternalized.”Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, complaints about student apathy became increasingly frequent in campus publications in the late 1960s, coinciding with the period of greatest organization over students’ personal and political autonomy on Tennessee campuses.Footnote ²⁵

The intersections between racial justice and student power, which would continue to develop throughout the decade, were clear from the mid-1960s in Tennessee. At a student-organized conference at Fisk in May 1964, participants raised the “clarion call for the radical Black Student movement,” according to black power movement scholar Peniel Joseph.Footnote ²⁶ The conference was organized by the Afro-American Student Movement, which historian Ibram H. Rogers described as a “radical affiliation of SNCC.”Footnote ²⁷ The event fostered discussions about developing black studies programs and curriculum reform nationally. According to one participant, the conference “was the ideological catalyst that eventually shifted the Civil Rights Movement into the Black Power Movement.”Footnote ²⁸ Later on in 1968, some Fisk student activists even went as far as to call for the expulsion of white students.Footnote ²⁹

The 1969 Student Government Association (SGA) president election at UT demonstrated the resonance of student power on a majority-white campus for white and black students. The three candidates for the SGA election were Jim Hager of the United for Progress (UP) party, John R. Long of Challenge ’69, and James “Jimmie” Baxter of the Student Coalition party.Footnote ³⁰ While promoting different platforms, each candidate's “party” representation revealed the general interest in increased student power; UP with its literal implication of moving upwards towards something better, the connotation of Challenge ’69 as questioning the administrative system of the university, and Student Coalition representing a unified student body all signified elements of activism.

UT's 1969 SGA presidential election reflected ongoing changes on campuses across the country, particularly students’ increased desire for greater personal autonomy. In the rescheduled election on 23 May 1969, Jimmie Baxter, the African American candidate, won.Footnote ³¹ Formerly all-white universities occasionally elected black student body presidents in the late 1960s but it was rare, particularly in the South.Footnote ³² Baxter was a twenty-five-year-old air force veteran, so perhaps had a leadership edge over his college peers.Footnote ³³ In the run-off election that Baxter won, the vote tallies from the first election were reversed. With a larger number of votes tabulated than in the first election, which itself was “a record-turnout,” Baxter came in first with Hager and Long claiming second and third places respectively.Footnote ³⁴ Following the election, Baxter claimed that the large turnout “demonstrated the [students’] concern with their role in the University.”Footnote ³⁵ Voters and candidates alike recognized that this election reflected growing student interest in the university and the desire for greater involvement in governance. Following the election, Baxter contended that UT “students should be concerned more about making sure they really have a voice here intellectually.”Footnote ³⁶

In his post-election interview with the Daily Beacon, Baxter focused mainly on UT students redefining in loco parentis in the upcoming academic year. His “primary concern” was with “student power” and the student body's ability to increase student involvement in campus decision making through an expanded SGA role. UT's student body, Baxter argued, needed to “demonstrate to the Administration that we are really not satisfied and won't just step by and accept our role as children.”Footnote ³⁷ In a later oral history he claimed, “We needed to have a legitimate say in running the affairs of the University, particularly regarding the affairs of students … we had to be recognized by the University and given some authority.”Footnote ³⁸

In winning the election, Baxter defied many of his fellow students, who “assumed that I didn't have a chance of being elected, because I was black. Their theory was ‘white students just won't vote for you, because this is a racist campus’.”Footnote ³⁹ In making student power his central campaign focus, Baxter sought to make race a nonissue.

While Baxter attempted to frame the election around student rights, the fact that he was black remained a concern for many voters; white UT student Barry Bozeman recalled that Baxter's election “[scared] the crap out of the fathers.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Campaigners for the other two students running for SGA president allegedly used Baxter's race as a strategy; Baxter's campaign posters were “slashed” in the run-up to the election and Hager's campaign showed Baxter's photograph to local business owners and managers and then solicited campaign donations, a staple political tactic of conservatives running against black candidates or white candidates who allegedly promoted black interests, particularly once explicitly racist or segregationist campaigning became politically unprofitable.Footnote ⁴¹ Ultimately, Baxter's campaign platform of representation for all UT students successfully crossed racial lines, but black and white student activists across Tennessee continued to face issues of student power, next in invited speaker policies.

Looking towards the future, Baxter said in his post-election interview in May 1969 that if the university adopted an open speaker policy, he wanted speakers who “would at least make a contribution to the student body. I think it would be good if we could bring, [not] so much the has beens but the young activists.”Footnote ⁴² An open speaker policy would allow students to choose anyone to talk on campus, without university administrators having veto power. In the late 1960s, many universities and colleges in Tennessee and across the country were changing their speaker policies. As with other issues concerning student power in the late 1960s, the behavior of university administration, students, and faculty shaped how these policies changed on individual campuses.Footnote ⁴³

Controversies over speaker policies at Tennessee campuses began in 1967 with SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael's proposed visit to Vanderbilt.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Nashville, the issue soon involved the entire city and multiple campuses. The Vanderbilt University Impact Symposium invited Carmichael to speak, alongside the vocally segregationist South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference head Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1967. Carmichael scheduled speeches at HBCU Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (commonly referred to as Tennessee A & I) and Fisk for his time in Nashville.Footnote ⁴⁵ A few days before Carmichael's scheduled appearance, the Nashville-based newspapers Banner and Tennessean began to attack Carmichael as a radical activist. The day before the scheduled event, the typically more moderate Tennessean repeated a local businessman's slur that Carmichael was “more Red than black,” alleging that Carmichael held Communist sympathies.Footnote ⁴⁶ Incidentally, Malcolm X was reportedly invited to the small, private Tennessee Wesleyan around 1964, so Vanderbilt's invitation to Carmichael was perhaps not as radical as many Nashvillians perceived it.Footnote ⁴⁷

As the Tennessee General Assembly discussed whether to ban Carmichael's visit to Nashville, officials at Tennessee A & I and Fisk debated whether to prevent his presence on their campuses, but soon faced opposition from their student bodies. Despite the uproar at his scheduled visit, Carmichael arrived in Nashville two days earlier than planned and spoke at Fisk that day (6 April), as well as to Southern Conference Educational Fund board members the next morning and at Tennessee A & I that evening, much to the disgust of the Banner.Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite Carmichael's speech being relatively tame compared with local white expectations, the North Nashville neighborhood around HBCU Meharry Medical College, Fisk, and Tennessee A & I witnessed violent incidents as police raided buildings claiming to search for marijuana. Bottles, bricks, and firecrackers were thrown at police and protestors alike. The commotion restarted the next evening. On Monday the Banner covered the disturbances and blamed Carmichael for inciting the violence, despite the fact that Carmichael had actually left Nashville prior to the violence occurring.Footnote ⁴⁹ Following several days of discussions between civil rights leaders, organizers in the community, and municipal staff, the groups remained at odds.Footnote ⁵⁰ African American community leader Avon Williams partially blamed Carmichael for the violence but also said, “part of the trouble was the result of the blindness of the white people who have refused for months to see trouble coming,” a critique applicable to both the wider community and local university campuses.Footnote ⁵¹

Within the UT system, administrators worried in the late 1960s that a lengthy debate on the rights of students and the university to invite speakers to campus would threaten the institution. If the administration took a firm stance on the issue, the university feared facing increased violence, public campus demonstrations, media coverage of protestors, and general unrest on the campus. If they gave more control to the student body, however, issuing invitations to controversial individuals might create bad publicity for the university and threaten the funding it depended on from state- and national-level politicians, and anger conservative alumni and private university donors. After controversy between students and the administration over a prospective visit from African American Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the university administration created a joint faculty–student–administration body, the Student Rights and Responsibilities Committee, to review the incident and potential solutions for future disagreements. The committee was charged with considering speaker policies and making recommendations regarding student life on campus. This committee's existence (with the administration's approval) demonstrated the administration's intent at least to hear the reforms students wanted.Footnote ⁵² In addition to Powell, UT students invited speakers such as lawyer William Kunstler, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, New York Post columnist Max Lerner, LSD researcher Timothy Leary, and southern civil rights leader and Vietnam War opponent Julian Bond during the late 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote ⁵³

When the student-run lecture series Issues sought approval in the summer of 1968 for its upcoming autumn semester speakers through the administrative channels outlined in the university student handbook, Chancellor Charles Weaver told Issues executive committee members and SGA president Chris Whittle in a meeting that one of the invited speakers, comedian Dick Gregory, could not attend the series because “Gregory's appearance would upset the outside community, including the legislature, and could potentially result in a cut in the University's state appropriated budget.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Governor Buford Ellington's recommendation of a lower financial appropriation for the UT system in 1969 seemed to validate Weaver's concern for the university's financial well-being.Footnote ⁵⁵ The ensuing conflicts between students and the administration over Weaver's actions led the university president, Andrew D. Holt, to ask the board of trustees to review the speaker policies on other campuses in the region and to consider alternative policies that the university could adopt. Ranging from not changing the current policy at all to giving administrative approval to university students for all future speakers, Holt's list of options demonstrated an effort to accommodate all interests and keep the university's policy transition private.Footnote ⁵⁶ Contrasting with Holt's seeming encouragement for the board of trustees to adopt an open speaker policy (allowing students to invite outside speakers without prior administrative approval), Chancellor Weaver announced his opposition to the policy in September 1968 on the ground that administrators should have the right to refuse speaker requests, given their need “to supply appropriate security and in effect, appropriate financial aid.”Footnote ⁵⁷ At its October 1968 meeting, rather than adopting an open speaker policy for the UT system, the board of trustees ordered chancellors on each campus to devise a speaker policy, and then return general guidelines for later board consideration.Footnote ⁵⁸

With the board of trustees making no decision on the speaker policy at its February 1969 meeting, impatient students filed suit in a US district court three weeks later. The students’ suit, alongside Julian Bond's refusal to speak at Knoxville owing to UT's denial of an invitation to Dick Gregory, and the university's 1969 blocking of Dr. Timothy Leary's speaking, kept the dispute well publicized through early 1969.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the court case, the judge ruled that the university had violated the freedom of speech guaranteed to all citizens, but he refused to issue an injunction that the students and faculty who had sued the university had requested. A restraining order, the judge contended, was unnecessary.Footnote ⁶⁰ The university developed a new speaker policy by June 1969, seemingly as a consequence of sustained student pressure. The new policy created a fifteen-person committee with final authority over the granting or denial of invitations from groups that requested funding aid to bring speakers to campus. Making up the committee (reappointed annually) were five faculty members, the SGA president, the senior class president, presidents of five other student organizations appointed by the chancellor, two chancellor-designated campus administrators, and a university system representative chosen by the president. The policy further specified that speakers would be held to standing local, state, and national laws and that it would be the sponsoring organization's responsibility to ensure the speakers’ awareness of this condition.Footnote ⁶¹

Issues of race and student power continued to intensify campus-based demonstrations, many of which concerned demands for the creation of educational and social programs for black students. As more attended formerly all-white universities throughout the country in the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American students demanded a greater incorporation of black interests and culture into campus life. This increased interest in African American history, as well as a nationwide black power-derived emphasis on black empowerment, brought the establishment of black studies programs across the country.Footnote ⁶² In petitioning for these programs to exist, many students and faculty members had to argue against the established curricula at their respective institutions. Despite black student admissions to formerly all-white institutions, blacks encountered segregation in campus-based social groups like fraternities and sororities. Their feelings of isolation and desires to have social activities on campus resulted in some Greek organizations admitting black students. But most national Greek organizations remained uninterested in actively seeking black members, causing black students to form their own Greek organizations and black student unions.

Demands by black students for more inclusion and representation generated strife at Memphis State and UT, the two largest state-funded institutions at this time.Footnote ⁶³ Giving black student groups recognition also required administrators to respond directly to student demands or demonstrations. Administrators were generally reluctant to appear too accommodating to student radicals, but the optics of black campus radicalism in Tennessee, particularly at Memphis State and UT, occasionally forced student radicals and administrators into conflict, mirroring trends nationwide.

At Memphis State, black students were a much larger percentage of the student body than at other historically white Tennessee universities. Consequently, there were stronger demands for both black studies programs and black student groups, while the university administration held greater concerns over potential student unrest. In 1967, Memphis State's enrolment was 15,914, of which 7 percent were African American students, while UT's respective figures were 20,111 and 2 percent.Footnote ⁶⁴ In March 1968, a Memphis news reporter claimed that Memphis State authorities maintained social segregation once black students had desegregated the university. One African American Memphis State law student, Isaac Taylor, lamented black students’ inability to participate in social organizations on campus. Instead, one section of the university's student center was “the ghetto,” where black students could socialize with each other. Unable to join other university social activities, another black student stated, “You go to class, you sit in the Student Center, you go home – that's it.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Despite the formation of a Memphis State Black Student Association (BSA) in 1963, many black Memphis State students still felt isolated.Footnote ⁶⁶ Memphis State's BSA issued a 23 March 1969 statement with several demands. It called for starting a black studies program, hiring more black instructors and administrators, creating a budget for black student events (including a proposed “Black Extravaganza”), recruiting black student athletes, and ending antiblack discrimination in campus fraternities and sororities.Footnote ⁶⁷

In April 1969, Memphis State BSA members occupied university president Cecil C. Humphreys's office to demand funding to invite Congressman Powell to speak at Memphis State for the Black Extravaganza program, scheduled for 16–17 May.Footnote ⁶⁸ (UT students had invited Powell to speak in 1967, but university administrators had refused to let him talk on campus.Footnote ⁶⁹) In a morning meeting on 23 April, Humphreys told two BSA representatives that the university had no additional funding in its student speakers’ budget to pay for Powell's attendance; the students had earlier unsuccessfully requested the necessary $1,750 from the Dean of Students’ office.Footnote ⁷⁰ Shortly after noon, over seventy-five African American students arrived at Humphreys's office, again requesting funding for Powell to speak on campus. In a thirty-minute meeting, BSA members also raised the same issues cited in their 23 March statement, before Humphreys asked them to leave to allow him to meet subsequent appointments that day. The students refused, even after Humphreys told them of the university and state's policy to call the Memphis Police Department to end university-building occupations.Footnote ⁷¹ Police soon removed the students without arresting them, and law enforcement remained on the campus as a precaution at Humphreys's request.Footnote ⁷²

Following their sit-in, the BSA students went to the Memphis State University Center, where Dr. H. Ralph Jackson, the vice chairman of Memphis's Committee on the Move for Equality, and Maxine Smith, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Memphis chapter, assured them that both organizations supported the students’ efforts.Footnote ⁷³ The following morning, four BSA members delivered a list of issues they wished to discuss with Humphreys, and arranged a meeting with two representatives from the Dean of Students’ office for the next day.Footnote ⁷⁴ During this session, the BSA students requested the removal of police from campus. The administration refused to do this, and in fact kept them on campus over the next two days (during the weekend). “Because of additional threats to University property, the attempt to recruit people from other cities to come to Memphis, and newspaper statements attributed to certain student leaders,” Humphreys claimed in a subsequent public announcement, “Memphis Police Department assistance was continued over the weekend.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Perceiving the threat from BSA students to be low, that Monday, 28 April, the university decreased the police presence on campus. After a BSA meeting that day, 115 students occupied Humphreys's office shortly after noon while he was not present. They intended to occupy the office, according to Humphreys, “until police were removed or they were arrested.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The administration notified the students that they were in violation of Memphis State's Student Conduct and Disciplinary Proceedings; those who remained would be suspended from Memphis State. Most of the students stayed, and were subsequently driven to jail.Footnote ⁷⁷ A total of 109 students were arrested and charged with trespassing on university property; of that group, 103 were black, and 104 were Memphis State students. The “BSA 109,” as the group became known, were suspended from Memphis State as a result of their arrests, but were given the chance to appeal this decision.Footnote ⁷⁸ In his statement on the situation, Humphreys cited his compliance with three “directives”: Section 39-1214 of the Tennessee Code Annotated, which stated, “any person who trespasses in the building of any public school and who there engages in any disorderly conduct is guilty of a misdemeanor”; the State Board of Education's 9 August 1968 directive that each institution it governed, including Memphis State, create policies against campus unrest, including “unauthorized occupancy of University facilities”; and Memphis State's own Student Conduct and Disciplinary Proceedings, which forbade “any interference with functions or activities of the University.”Footnote ⁷⁹

There was considerable local support for the university appearing strong against black student unrest, a common event in the late 1960s. More than 250 black student-led demonstrations occurred on campuses across the country during the 1968–69 academic year.Footnote ⁸⁰ Furthermore, by 15 May 1969, seventy-two university presidents resigned following that academic year's campus protests.Footnote ⁸¹ In a 29 April 1969 petition, the day after BSA members were arrested, some 870 Memphis State students signed in support of the university administration's actions.Footnote ⁸² Humphreys received dozens of letters from Memphis State students and Tennessee residents in support of his behavior, seen as a strong stand against student unrest and black radicalism. Humphreys, however, sounded a conciliatory tone. “I hope,” he remarked, “that everyone realizes that we don't need a strong polarization. I hope we all realize we are trying to present an educational opportunity for everyone.”Footnote ⁸³

When the Memphis State BSA sit-in protests occurred, Humphreys and other administrators knew of unrest at two historically black colleges in West Tennessee, where students at HBCU LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis and Lane College, another HBCU in Jackson, had held similar disagreements with their college administrations over the students’ role in institutional decisions. While the tenor of the protests was tenser than at predominantly white campuses like Memphis State or UT (as black students were an overwhelming majority of enrollees at Lane and LeMoyne-Owen), the issues these students raised mirrored the concerns black and white students voiced elsewhere in the state.

Following the merger of LeMoyne College, a four-year institution, with Owen Junior College, a two-year college, in 1968, students voiced resentment over the campus resources available to students.Footnote ⁸⁴ LeMoyne-Owen College students held a symposium, Inquiry Week, from 11 to 15 November 1968, which, according to their Student Government president, Charles Diggs, sought to “open the minds of the students.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The speakers referenced protests on black campuses across the country, and some urged students to report their grievances to their administration. Students subsequently listed nineteen demands for the university administration to address. These included a curriculum that was more tailored to black history and culture, additional work study options, opening of the campus gym to students, more student access to health services, and lower tuition costs. The students also wanted to be involved in the selection of the college's next president, as the current president, Dr. Hollis Price, was retiring at the end of the year. This final request, to have a say in the next president's hiring, foreshadowed similar demands by UT students in 1969.Footnote ⁸⁶ When the students felt that their issues were ignored by Price, a group seized the campus administration building, Brownlee Hall. Students held it for two weeks.Footnote ⁸⁷ Diggs argued that this protest was in fact carefully planned to increase their authority on campus. “Our particular grievances have always been here,” said Diggs. “You can ask any alumnus and he'll tell you that the problems he had as a student are still prevalent today. But before now there has never been the strength to change those problems. Now it's different.”Footnote ⁸⁸

A more violent incident occurred at Lane College in February and March 1969. A black power-influenced campus group unrecognized by the university administration, the Black Liberation Front, led protests over student rights, which resulted in the college's closure for ten days, and damage amounting to several thousand dollars.Footnote ⁸⁹ Three campus buildings were burned following the campus riot, which reportedly involved the entire student body.Footnote ⁹⁰ Several grievances that Lane College's black students raised with the college president, Dr. C. A. Kirkendoll, reflected similar demands for student autonomy on Tennessee campuses; they included extending the campus grill's hours, ending mandatory chapel attendance, allowing women to wear pants to class and all students to style their hair in Afros, and students gaining greater say in administrative affairs of the college.Footnote ⁹¹ Later on that month, when the science building burned down on 20 March, simultaneous with a visit to campus by the Black Egyptians, a militant African American group from East St. Louis, Jackson's mayor “declared a state of civil emergency.” The governor, Buford Ellington, called in 125 state troopers to restore order and seventy-five people were arrested and charged with various crimes, including disorderly conduct, violating the twelve-hour curfew that applied to a two-and-a-half-square-mile area around the campus, and attempting to incite a riot.Footnote ⁹²

Black student protest also erupted at UT. Emphasizing a feeling of not belonging at UT which echoed Memphis State black student sentiments, the student handbook of the Black Student Union (BSU) issued in the autumn of 1969 referred to black UT students as “a fly in the buttermilk.”Footnote ⁹³ Frustrations over the black studies program at UT in fall 1969 resulted in the BSU considering a boycott of all black studies courses but one (a course taught by a professor of both UT and Knoxville College, the city's HBCU). Students were angry about the lack of consultation for the new program's curriculum, and the paucity of African American professors involved in the program. One BSU member argued that “a white man cannot possibly have an understanding of the black situation, so he can't very well teach a black studies course,” and later, “black students are fed up with the hiring of the Negro for purposes of tokenism and we will not tolerate inter-department racism disguised as an Afro-American Studies Program.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Members of UT's newly created BSU generated a list of further changes they wished to see at the university in the spring of 1969. The official request for university recognition of the BSU and black studies programs came on 8 May 1969 when fifty black students “peacefully picketed” UT's Administration Building for the whole day. The group listed seven “demands” for the university's administration to address. In addition to wanting reconsideration of a black cheerleader's application, they sought the funds they had applied for to the Student Activities Office to be paid to the group as a student organization, more black counselors, more scholarships for all students, black recruiters as part of the university's application process (for both students and staff members), and an investigation of classroom discrimination. Dr. Howard F. Aldmon, UT's vice chancellor for student affairs, responded to these demands by providing information to the demonstrators on how to move forward with their various requests through existing university administrative procedures.Footnote ⁹⁵ Peaceful demonstrations involving seventy-five students took place over the next few days.Footnote ⁹⁶ A lone reactionary counterprotestor, who held up a sign reading “White Student Union,” failed to goad the demonstrators into a fight.Footnote ⁹⁷ Following these demonstrations, BSU members met with university president Andrew D. Holt, Howard Aldmon, and Chancellor Charles Weaver.Footnote ⁹⁸

To further demonstrate that the administration took these students’ requests seriously, Aldmon wrote to the BSU president, Johnny Pierce, in September 1969 to follow up on progress towards the seven demands the BSU had presented in the spring. Aldmon listed numerous improvements in conditions for African Americans at the university: the university funds the BSU received, the five black students employed in dormitories as assistant head residents or resident assistants for the 1969–70 school year (three more than the previous year), the new black counselor hired to the admissions staff, and a promise from Dr. Lawrence Silverman, vice chancellor for academic affairs, to make a “concerted effort” to hire more black faculty. The university also declared openness to establishing a black fraternity or sorority, and agreed to stop playing “Dixie” (a Confederate anthem) at home football games. Finally, it had hired forty-two more black employees for university staff positions.Footnote ⁹⁹ The university clearly felt it was important to demonstrate its cooperation with the BSU's demands. The BSU continued to challenge administrative policy into 1970, with calls for new courses, a separate Afro-American library, and reorganizing the Black Studies Committee of the College of Liberal Arts to include appointing a black chairman, with a two-week deadline for these changes. BSU president Pierce remained skeptical of the administration's intentions. “Black students on this campus,” he noted, “have been continually told that the University and the faculty are sincere in their efforts to create a viable and strong Black Studies program. Well, it's time that some substantial results of this ‘sincerity’ are seen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

As the comparisons between Memphis State's and UT's black student organizations and programs demonstrate, many of the issues of student power were tied to concerns over racial inequalities. While both Memphis State and UT administrations cooperated with the BSA and BSU respectively, black and white students continued to feel underrepresented by the administrations. In light of the widespread campus protests across the country during the 1968–69 academic year, administrators took steps to accommodate student activists to prevent greater unrest on their own campuses. As the Memphis State and UT cases reveal, these measures were often limited and, in the minds of student radicals, did little to tackle the root issue – their feelings of not being heard by university administrations. With student disaffection having developed from small protests over student rights, and from mostly black demands for greater attention to racial inequalities on campus, by the 1969–70 academic year Tennessee's campuses seemed on the edge of all-out protest.

After visiting campuses in Nashville for a Congressional investigation into campus unrest, specifically Fisk, Tennessee A & I, and Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania Congressman Lawrence Coughlin wrote to Tennessee Republican William Brock about the Congressional participants’ impressions of campus dynamics in May 1969. According to the Congressmen, many of the college administrations had “very poor communication with their students, if any.” To resolve this problem, Coughlin noted that “where there is ample communication, the problem of violent confrontation appears considerably reduced.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Contrary to Coughlin's suggestion to communicate more with disaffected students, and fearing significant funding cuts if administrators appeared to coddle student protestors, the major Tennessee state university system response to campus unrest became less compromising.Footnote ¹⁰²

When UT president Andrew D. Holt announced his retirement in June 1969, many students on campus felt they should have more input in the board of trustees’ choice of a successor.Footnote ¹⁰³ Demands for greater student and faculty influence over the presidential appointment grew louder amid speculation that the board of trustees favored Edward J. Boling, vice president of development, whom many students and faculty did not respect.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Many students and faculty wanted an academic as university president; Boling's previous work in the university development office was deemed insufficiently scholarly.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Tensions rose throughout the autumn semester as students and faculty heard rumors that Boling was favored for the presidency. Despite administration-led efforts to include students and faculty in the decision-making process, students and faculty grew increasingly concerned that their opinions were not taken seriously. One article in the Daily Beacon in August 1969 addressed the board of trustees directly, calling for “this damn monkey business to stop,” and asserted that “students are not little children, and faculty members are not intellectual day-dreamers.” The article concluded with the demand to “give students and faculty a significant voice, not token toleration, in selecting UT's new president. You may be sorry if you don't.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While the article's author may have been angrier than most students about this issue, the article and the tension on campus impacted university administrators’ preparation for and later reaction to the announcement of Boling's appointment in January 1970.

Students called for a demonstration on 15 January 1970, where some 2,500 students attended a five-hour protest as participants or spectators. Classes continued throughout the demonstration. At the demonstration, protestor Peter Kami challenged President Boling to a duel. It was to be an arm-wrestling match, but the choice of the term “duel” was significant.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Though many students present that day viewed the challenge as a joke, largely due to Kami's thin shape and small frame, the university administration interpreted it as an advance warning of trouble.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ One student activist who knew Kami then even described him years later as “the frail Brazilian,” as students believed – erroneously – that he had been born in Brazil.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Despite efforts by administration officials and protest leaders to negotiate, with mediation help offered by an American Civil Liberties Union representative, Harry Wiersema Sr., after several hours the university and Knoxville police arrived. Following Knoxville police threats to use teargas, they arrested twenty-two protestors, an incident Chancellor Weaver termed “most distasteful.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ UT Young Americans for Freedom members, a conservative national student organization, and policemen in plain clothes assisted in the arrests.Footnote ¹¹¹ Those arrested became known as the “Knoxville 22.” An FBI memorandum filed on the event described the participants as a group of “discontented students” and “hippie-type individuals.”Footnote ¹¹²

Jimmie Baxter, SGA president, told students at the demonstration that he would call for a general student strike the next week if the administration did not approve the demonstrators’ proposed reforms.Footnote ¹¹³ Baxter did not articulate what these particular suggestions were, but he stated that if these demands were not met, UT students would have “to prepare to shut the system down” with the strike. “If we play this game – the game of violence – then I'll start taking bets on who will win,” Baxter said, explaining that he believed the police would triumph.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Almost a month after the January protest, sixty students gathered in front of the university's administration building in support of the Knoxville 22 then being charged with felony to incite a riot. Some five hundred spectators watched.Footnote ¹¹⁵ While the student newspaper, the Daily Beacon, seemed to congratulate the campus on the peacefulness of this demonstration, the student–faculty strike later that spring revealed that the major disagreements between the students and faculty and the administration remained unresolved.

Other UT campuses besides Knoxville protested Boling's appointment. Prior to the 15 January Knoxville demonstration, there was a large-scale protest at the satellite Chattanooga campus when the university's board of trustees scheduled its meeting there in early January 1970. Amidst about thirty protestors screaming “Fascist pig” at security policemen guarding the building where the meeting was taking place, the student government president, Russell King, told the trustees that they had “disregarded student rights and ignored the feelings and opinions of students across the state.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Governor Buford Ellington was so frustrated by the public animosity towards the administration that he “expressed fears that their juvenile behavior might result in great harm to the institution” to a local Chattanooga newspaper. The article reporting on the incident cited “some [university] officials” who feared that the students’ improper behavior could lose the institution more than $1 million in state funding for the next year.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Subsequent events at UT in May 1970 “struck deeper into the emotions of the people of the state more than anything [else] that's happened” and “hurt the image of the University” deeply, according to Chancellor Weaver. He was referencing the student and faculty strike which followed the news of the deaths of students at Kent State University during a 4 May 1970 antiwar protest.Footnote ¹¹⁸ During the nationwide student strikes precipitated by the Kent State shootings, nearly half of the undergraduate population participated nationally.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Students at other Tennessee campuses used the strike as a tactic in reaction to Kent State, including Knoxville College and Southwestern, and classes were canceled at Sewanee and Maryville.Footnote ¹²⁰

Speaking at a rally of around three thousand students after the UT memorial service for Kent State, Baxter said, “Yesterday four students were killed because they were in the process of protesting something we probably should have been protesting long ago … We have an obligation to speak out … we can't wait until it comes to UT.”Footnote ¹²¹ The three-day strike of classes resulted in a 50 percent drop in class attendance. Many professors joined in. In reaction to the strike, the Army Reserve National Center and the Music Annex Building on campus were firebombed as “mass demonstrations” occurred across the campus.Footnote ¹²²

On 14 May 1970, a week after the post-Kent State student strike and just before Billy Graham's anticipated crusade on campus, the civil rights activist and lawyer William Kunstler spoke at UT to a reported crowd of fifteen hundred students. Kunstler was famous for his widely publicized defense of the Chicago Seven, antiwar activists charged with conspiracy to incite a riot in the aftermath of the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.Footnote ¹²³

The news that UT students intended to invite Kunstler to speak on campus enraged conservatives across the state. With Kunstler's larger-than-life personality, his public statements that students should organize against oppressive campus administrations, and his committed defense of the Chicago Seven (whom many Americans saw as ridiculous and disrespectful of the justice system), many of the state's leaders would not support funding his visit. The governor and ex officio chairman of UT's board of trustees, Buford Ellington, said he would “put up a strong fight to see that no state funds or student fees go into financing speeches by men like Kunstler.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Knoxville mayor Leonard Rogers and Republican Congressman John Duncan Sr. joined Ellington in opposing Kunstler's visit.Footnote ¹²⁵ The local paper's editorial section mocked the event for weeks leading up to the speech; one state resident even suggested that Kunstler give the speech at the city dump rather than the UT campus. “It shouldn't be too hard to provide him with a soap box,” the man argued, but if it should take place at UT, the campus “should be fully fumigated following the long hair and hand waving affair.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Kunstler's speech at UT's Circle Park concerned the UT administration by encouraging the students to continue their protests until the university met their demands. A report on the speech filed by the local branch of the FBI included the following underscored sentence: “He [Kunstler] stated students should not worry about getting jobs, getting degrees, getting into law school, but should worry about rights and, if necessary, occupy buildings and destroy property.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In his speech, the lawyer urged UT students to strike for greater student political power and in solidarity with the antiwar movement. While Kunstler claimed not to advocate rebellion per se, he contended that “we're beyond the point where conventional protest is called for.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Kunstler's words did nothing to assuage the already apprehensive university administration's fears of further student protests. Following Kunstler's speech, Carroll Bible, a UT student activist, led an impromptu march, where students chanted “Strike” with raised fists as they walked across the campus to the Humanities Plaza.Footnote ¹²⁹ With two UT professors in attendance, a group of seventy-five students debated the idea of a strike later that evening in the University Center.Footnote ¹³⁰ As UT students had just held a strike the week before, the leaders of the earlier strike did not feel another one so soon afterwards was viable.Footnote ¹³¹

The most public manifestation of student frustrations over Kent State occurred during President Richard Nixon's surprise appearance at Reverend Billy Graham's evangelical crusade in Knoxville. The Graham Crusade Committee of Knoxville had secured Neyland Stadium, UT's 65,000-seat football venue, for the event, planned for 22–31 May 1970.Footnote ¹³² Prior to Nixon's visit, a rumor spread throughout the campus that Nixon's administration had chosen UT as a reliably friendly venue for his first public speech on a university or college campus following Kent State.Footnote ¹³³ This frustrated students, faculty, and administrators alike at UT. Administrators like Chancellor Weaver feared the potential for campus protest with the announcement of Nixon's appearance, particularly given the presence in Knoxville of journalists from around the country and the three major news broadcasting networks (CBS, ABC, and NBC) to cover both the crusade and Nixon's speech.Footnote ¹³⁴

On 28 May, a small yet vocal group of students and faculty protested Nixon's presence inside Neyland Stadium. Student and faculty protestors carried signs stating “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and attempted to enter the stadium for Nixon's speech.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Secret Service and local law enforcement standing outside the stadium confiscated these signs but members of the group were still able to enter Neyland Stadium, some with their signs hidden on their persons.Footnote ¹³⁶ The protestors numbered between three hundred and five hundred, and were outnumbered by between 100–1 and 250–1 by crusade attendees.Footnote ¹³⁷ Protestors interrupted Nixon's speech enough that at one point he stopped speaking and gestured to them. Chants of “One-two-three-four we don't want you anymore” could be heard at times until the crowd drowned it out with either cheers and clapping for Nixon or with boos towards the protestors.Footnote ¹³⁸ National media also analyzed the event, and highlighted his domestic agenda of appealing to southern and youth voters.Footnote ¹³⁹ In the ABC News report on the event, which unlike NBC and CBS focused on the presence of antiwar demonstrators rather than Nixon's speech, reporter Charles Murphy stated that within Neyland Stadium “the antiwar demonstrators were a small minority, but the fact that they were even here, on a conservative campus in a conservative state illustrates the deep division even here.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Chancellor Weaver defended the university's position soon after the event. “The University of Tennessee is not now and will never be a sanctuary of any sort for those who break the law … There is never any excuse for the disruption of speakers on any platform at the University of Tennessee.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Photographs of protestors taken during the event assisted with the arrests of over forty people for violating Tennessee Code Annotated 39-1204, which criminalized the disruption of religious services.Footnote ¹⁴² Several of the participants in the January 1970 demonstration against Edward Boling's appointment as university president were also present at the crusade to protest Nixon's speech. Many UT student activists believed that those arrested in January had been unfairly treated by the administration and local officials; the charges against their peers for disturbing a religious service at the crusade seemed to be yet another example of the system's injustice.Footnote ¹⁴³

The operation of Tennessee colleges and universities changed significantly between 1968 and 1970, as leftist students and faculty sought greater control over university policies and their personal lives, while administrators sought to limit student protest, and occasionally student complaints. The reformation of university administrative policies occurred on campuses across the country, catalyzed by increased student enrolment in the 1960s. Throughout Tennessee, demands for greater student autonomy often overlapped with concerns over racial inequalities, as the push for greater sensitivity to black students’ academic and extracurricular lives on campus demonstrated. As disputes over university speaker policies showed, disagreements between students wanting greater control, and administrators who worried about losing funding and enraging local white politicians and community members, proved intractable. Fearing student unrest, many universities devised policies for dealing with student demonstrations, although with few exceptions these approaches sought to contain protest, rather than resolve the causes of student dissatisfaction. For Tennessee student activists, protest crested in 1970 as demands for power and concerns over the Vietnam War brought the state's most significant campus clashes. Rather than being a point of no return, 1968 was just prologue.