In the 1980s, he led student protests. Now, he's a college dean (2024)

FAQs

What was the first student protest? ›

In the West, student protests such as strikes date to the early days of universities in the Middle Ages, with some of the earliest being the University of Oxford strike of 1209, and the University of Paris strike of 1229, which lasted two years.

In May 1970, the national week of student strikes was one of the largest protest movements and act of solidarity throughout the country as well as at the UW. These strikes did not bring an end to the war or racial inequality.

Overview. The student movement arose to demand free speech on college campuses, but as the US involvement in the Vietnam war expanded, the war became the main target of student-led protests.

The student strike of 1970 was a massive protest across the United States that included walk-outs from college and high school classrooms, initially in response to the United States expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Nearly 900 campuses nationwide participated.

Among the most famous protests in U.S. history is the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organizers described this event as a “living petition.” The day is perhaps most remembered for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Kent State University shooting. Protests against the Vietnam War persisted through the 1960s, many of them led by students. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, he promised to end the war, but in 1970, the US invaded Cambodia.

Black Student Union & Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State College. The student and faculty strike started on November 6, 1968 and lasted until March 21, 1969, making it the longest strike by students at an academic institution in the United States.

The strike at San Francisco State College lasted five months, longer than any other academic student strike in American higher education history, and, miraculously, was less violent than any that were to come. Why did this strike happen in San Francisco, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, known for its tolerance?

Initial demonstrations at Columbia University in April 1968 started with the threat of violence between radical students who wanted to end the university's ties to war research during the Vietnam War and terminate a university gymnasium construction project and mostly white athletes who wanted to push forward with it.

It was over the issue of race that student protest began in 1960. Although racism was not new to American society in the 60s, students became less tolerant of it and the institutions which seemed to perpetuate it.

Who were the leaders of the student movement? ›

Members of the Nashville Student Movement, who went on to lead many of the activities and create and direct many of the strategies of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, included Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, Jim Zwerg, and others.

The East Los Angeles Walkouts represented a call to action for civil rights and access to education for Latino youth in the city. Even with the rejection from the Board of Education, the event remains one of the largest student protests in United States history.

They marched by the thousands, on campuses from coast to coast. At different times they chose different targets: the Pentagon, Presidents Nixon and Johnson, the draft, Dow Chemical. But the students all acted from a common belief that the Vietnam War was wrong.

Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against Vietnamese independence or an intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable.

Student anger mounts over Vietnam war

Anti-war protests in the U.S. also began around this time. A socialist group called Students for a Democratic Society, which opposed U.S. imperialism, played an active role within this anti-war movement that grew as U.S. military operations in Vietnam continued in 1966-68.

Opposition to the Vietnam War had been building on college campuses for years when, on Oct. 18, 1967, UW–Madison students amassed to protest the recruiting efforts on campus of the Dow Chemical Company. The company made napalm, a flammable gel used on the battlefield by the U.S. government.

The Boston Tea Party was the first significant act of rebellion by American colonist against the British.

The spark that ignited DPN was the announcement on March 6, 1988, by the University's Board of Trustees that a hearing person had been selected as Gallaudet's seventh president.