Black to the Future

Nearly three decades ago, two dozen angry black students stormed the university president’s office at then-San Fernando Valley State College and held 34 people hostage for four hours.

The act of rebellion--a call for black history classes at the predominantly white, suburban campus--would lead to criminal convictions for some participants and, like so many violent demonstrations of the 1960s, change the campus forever. For in response to the students’ demands, the administration created a black studies department that in turn helped increase the number of black students more than tenfold.

On Tuesday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a broad challenge to California’s Proposition 209, black professors and students at the campus--now Cal State University Northridge--celebrated the 29th anniversary of the infamous takeover of Nov. 4, 1968, and contemplated its significance in an era of affirmative action repeals.

Their conclusion: The work of the activists is far from finished, and is greatly under-appreciated.

“If you sit in a class and think you got there on your own merit then you are mistaken,” Tyrone Fox, public relations director of the Black Student Union, told the crowd.

“In the ‘60s, they barely allowed black folks in college. Many of those students put a lot on the line, including jail, their careers and even their safety, for you to be here.”

But the fire of that era seemed lost on many of the high school and CSUN students gathered, most of whom weren’t even born when the takeover took place.

Of the 200 participants in the anniversary celebration in the campus Performing Arts Center--most of them visiting high school students--many seemed more concerned with scooting off to lunch or getting class credit for showing up than with a sense of history and their place in it.

“A lot of them are more concerned about partying and hanging out,” said Cherise Charleswell, 17, a senior from Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.

“Parents just don’t encourage us to get to know our backgrounds and the things that happened before we got here,” said Shanice Harris, a 16-year-old student at Kennedy. “I am always learning about good stuff that black people did.”

Many of the older African Americans at the event cited that breakdown between generations and a “lack of values among young people today” as the main reason why political apathy seems so rampant today among students.

During a panel discussion about reviving student activism, professors from what is now called the Pan-African studies department noted the irony that the anti-affirmative action measure Proposition 209 had just been upheld.

On a day that was supposed to mark how far African Americans had progressed since 1968, the panelists instead talked about possible ways to fight back against the decision, which clears the way for enforcement of the country’s first across-the-board repeal of affirmative action hiring in state and local government.

They also recalled what college and the country were like before the civil rights movement, and the direct effect the movement had on their sense of identity as African Americans.

“It was a time of great self-discovery for me,” said Pan-African studies professor Barbara Rhodes, who was one of the founding members of the black studies faculty at Valley State.

“Every day back then we were growing as people. We had been isolated from our own history for so long. There was a 24-hour commitment to the cause of civil rights and freedom. Even now I look at it as the central defining time in my life.”

Building on the momentum of the civil rights era has been problematic, said some of Rhodes’ colleagues, who had helped lead several months of demonstrations after the Nov. 4 takeover.

But with the High Court’s green light for Proposition 209, those same former students insisted on Tuesday that 1997 may be an even more crucial time to revisit the fervor and passion of the 1968 protests.

“There are more educated black people today than ever before,” Pan-African studies professor James Dennis said to the audience.

“Yet our communities are in the worst conditions they’ve ever been in a long time. You have an awesome responsibility to make sure that 100 years from now, we are not talking and whining about what they took away from us.”