Events since last November may lead many of us to suspect that we are living in an America free from racial tension. A black family has been living in the White House for 10 months and a Latina woman was appointed to the Supreme Court. People of color are succeeding in positions in our society that never would have been available to them 40 years ago.
Many Americans have used Barack Obama's election as an excuse to pat themselves on the back, believing it finally makes up for the country's history of race relations. The President's inauguration and the honeymoon that followed were full of references to the civil rights era, sound bites from John Lewis and footage of Oprah crying. But the confrontation between a white policeman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. this summer and, even closer to home, the fallout from In-Goo Kwak's poster show that America is not the utopia we would all like to think it is.
This November marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most striking racial incidents on the Tufts campus. On Nov. 6, 1969, over 200 students from Boston-area colleges, along with Tufts' Afro-American Society, staged a work stoppage on the construction site that is now Lewis Hall. The group was protesting "alleged discriminatory hiring practices" by the construction company that was contracted to build the dormitory.
In a letter to the Tufts administration, the Afro-American society "expressed its serious concern about the de facto exclusion of Blacks and Third World People from many departments of Tufts University, and about the apparent absence of clear, forceful policies commanding equal employment opportunities in the University."
When its calls for "concrete and immediate action" to ensure equal job opportunity on campus were not answered, the group took matters into its own hands.
"It was a totally different place," Daniel Coleman (A '73), a founding member of the Tufts Afro-American Society, said. "The United States was heavily segregated, and we were heavily affected by that. It was the period where Martin Luther King was marching and the freedom rides. People were awakening from 400 years … of deep segregation and policy that was not pro-black. It was very anti-black."
According to the Princeton Review, approximately 31 percent of Tufts students are minorities. With mostly need-blind admissions, the school tries to reaffirm its commitment to diversity with every new class.
"It shouldn't just be about statistics," said sophomore Jibade Sandiford, the treasurer of Emerging Black Leaders (EBL), a group that works to "expose the campus to black issues" and serve the black community beyond Tufts. "It should be trying to foster understanding of customs and cultural understanding in general among different groups on campus. It shouldn't just be bragging about numbers in brochures, it should be concrete and evident in the student body."
Groups like EBL, in conjunction with the Group of Six (Africana Center, Asian American Center, International Center, Latino Center, LGBT Center, Women's Center), give traditionally underrepresented groups a voice on campus. Freshmen are welcomed by peer leaders from the Africana House and Latina Centers and invited on retreats and socials.
"I feel like students here are really receptive or open about ethnicity," freshman Erica Satin-Hernandez said. "I've only been here a month, but I see white people, black people, Latino people at the Asian center. It's not limited to only hanging out with your own race."
Although there have been many notable changes to the makeup of the Tufts student body since 1969, old issues remain and are compounded by modern complexities.
"Forty years later, when I look at Tufts today, for all the talk of diversity, for all the well-intended recruitment efforts, to me the real divide is now by economics, and not by color," said Phil Primack (A '70), who was editor-in-chief of the Tufts Observer during the work stoppage.
While the Tufts admissions Web site highlights "the university's efforts to attract students of varying socioeconomic backgrounds," current financial issues prevent the university from providing need-blind aid to students of every class.
Coleman, an active member of the Alumni Association, explained that despite Tufts' efforts to create socioeconomic diversity, the university doesn't have an endowment comparable to "some of the places down the street," and has therefore become very "tuition-oriented."
"The element of the student body that was white and working-class has declined, and it's truly a school now for the elite, not just of the United States, but of the world," Coleman said.
All of this makes for a very different Tufts than the one of 1969. There are still more hurdles facing the school, however.
"Most of construction workers are still white," Sandiford said. While the term "post-racial America" is often thrown around, there are still major socioeconomic discrepancies in America that are related to long-standing racial issues.
"The true legacy of the work stoppage was that it married traditional social protest with economics," Primack said. "Political rights, social [advancement], while wonderful and important, mean little, absent of economic opportunity."
The question then becomes whether or not a protest like that of 1969 could happen again on this campus.
"I think it would be difficult, because times have changed," Coleman said. "People like Charles Yancey, George Cox [co-chairs of Tufts Afro-American Society] — [they] were prepared to sacrifice everything. What we were fighting for was really a community of color who were looking for work so that they could have a better life. Some of us were coming directly from those communities. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot fewer black students on campus are coming from inner cities."
"I would argue that it would add more to the quality of life at Tufts, to the student experience at Tufts, to have six hillbilly white kids whose families worked in coal mines on this campus than twenty-five blacks whose parents are neurosurgeons, in terms of adding perspective, in terms of adding real diversity, in adding context to the real world," Primack said. "Even if we're post-racial, we are clearly not post-class."
