cc  >> Good afternoon and welcome  to another session  of History Sandwiched In.  Today we're quite lucky to have  Steve Kercher visit us and  speak.  Professor Kercher teaches late  American history, modern  American history at University  of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.  He is the author of the book  Rebel with a Cause: A History of  Satire in American.  Don't forget to read that.  Today, though, he's going to  talk about something else.  He's going to talk about what  happened 40 years ago at UW  Oshkosh.  40 years ago in the midst of the  commotion of the protests of the  era, the war and especially  racial injustice.  To please welcome to our museum,  Professor Steven Kercher.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you, Paul. 

 And thank you for coming this  afternoon.  It's really gratifying to see  such a good collection of  individuals who are interested  in this story.  Black Thursday refers to the day  November 21, 1968, when 94  African American students held a  demonstration in the  administration building on the  campus of what was then  Wisconsin State University at  Oshkosh.  That event, the demonstration  and the fallout that occurred  afterwards, has drawn the  interest of many students over  the years but has never really  been adequately researched.  In preparation of the 40th  anniversary, the commemorative  anniversary of Black Thursday  just a couple of weeks ago, I  led a project to try to research  this story and obtain the voices  of as many individuals who are  actors and participants in this  story as possible to try to  reconstruct what happened in  November 1968.  The result of Black Thursday  Remembered has taken several  different shapes.  One of them is an exhibit which  is currently open to the public  in Oshkosh at the Reeve Memorial  Gallery, Reeve Memorial Union,  I'm sorry, at the -- gallery.  It's called Black Thursday  Remembered: Race, Politics and  Campus Unrest in Northeast  Wisconsin in the 1960s.  This exhibit takes all of the  research that I've done in the  last 18 months.  Research into traditional  historical archival materials,  as well as newspaper and  magazine articles and what  really special about this  research is that I interviewed  with a colleague over 130 people  and the numbers are still  accumulating. 

 With all of these materials we  try to make sense of the  students' demonstration and  explain the conditions that may  have prompted them.  This exhibition sheds new light  on an important episode in the  history of race relations in  Wisconsin and contributes more  generally to historians' recent  explorations into the struggles  for racial equality north of the  Mason-Dixon line.  What Thomas -- in his long  anticipated book just published  last month, Sweet Land of  Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle  for Civil Rights in the North,  calls the most important and  still unfinished history of  race, rights and politics in  modern America.  I'm going to start by just  giving you a little background  on Oshkosh.  I trust that some of you in the  audience have been to Oshkosh,  Wisconsin, before.  Oshkosh in 1968 was undergoing  considerable change.  A half century following its  heyday as America's sawdust  city, Oshkosh with a population  of 50,000 was beginning to  recover of its post-war economic  doldrums.  There was a great feeling of  confidence.  The economy was beginning to  pick up.  Local manufacturers were  employing many people and  looking for even more labor and  there were ambitious plans to  build a new mall in downtown  Oshkosh. 

 One peculiar distinguishing  feature shared by Oshkosh and  many other cities surrounding  Lake Winnebago in the 1960s was  the relative absence of African  Americans.  The number of African Americans  inhabiting that region had  fallen sharply throughout the  20th century.  According to census data,  Oshkosh had a population of 100  African Americans in 1910 but  only seven in 1960.  Appleton north of Oshkosh with a  larger population had one  African American in 1960.  According to evidence collected  by historian James Loewen, the  dramatic decline in the number  of African Americans living in  Oshkosh and other sundown-towns  throughout the region was not an  accident but rather the result  of de facto segregation and  systematic racial intimidation.  Although African American  fisherman casting their lines in  the Fox River just within the  limits of Oshkosh were tolerated  during the day, it was common  knowledge that they were not  welcomed after dark.  I found this great clipping from  the Chicago Defender.  Here we have a veteran of World  War II who experienced some of  the racism that many African  Americans knew much about in the  early 1960s explaining his  experience there in Oshkosh.  So Oshkosh, like many cities in  the Fox Valley and throughout  the northern United States,  simmered with racial prejudice  throughout the 1960s.  That is quite clear. 

 Now contributing significantly  to the dynamism of Oshkosh in  the 1960s was the rapid growth  of the local university,  Wisconsin State University at  Oshkosh.  Founded as a state normal school  in 1871, it had transitioned  from a teachers college to a  degree granting state college  and by 1967 a university with  colleges of nursing, education,  business administration and  liberal arts.  Rushing to accommodate the  exploding population enrollment  of baby boomers and draft  eligible men seeking student  deferments, Wisconsin State  University at Oshkosh grew  rapidly.  Between 1960 and 1968, just to  give you some sense, student  enrollment increased from a  little over 2,000 to 11,000  making Wisconsin State  University at Oshkosh one of the  fastest growing universities in  the United States.  Inevitably there were growing  pains that accompanied this  transition.  There were pretty severe divides  and splits within the community  over whether or not the  university's growth was a good  thing for the community.  The growth of the university was  having a very large impact on  the city of Oshkosh.  And that would certainly be true  as the '60s went on.  Wisconsin State University at  Oshkosh was the jewel in the  crown of the nine-campus  Wisconsin State University  system, and I'll just ask you to  remember in the 1960s there were  two state university systems.  There was the University of  Wisconsin system and the  Wisconsin State system. 

 They merged in the early 1970s.  Believe it or not they were of  roughly equal size and each of  them were some of the largest  university systems in the entire  country.  In fact, I think the Wisconsin  State University system was the  fifth largest university system  in the United States.  Now Wisconsin State University  campus placed a great emphasis  on teaching and it rewarded  faculty with tenure after just  four years of continuous service  and operated under the strong  control of administrators and  conservative appointees of board  of regents of state  universities.  This was a much more topped out  model than the University of  Wisconsin system and that would  have implications as the story  that we'll see makes clear.  When the 1968-1969 academic year  commenced, the president of the  university was Roger Guiles and  Roger Guiles was overseeing  still an expansion in the  university's infrastructure.  There was evidence of growth  throughout the campus in the  mid-1960s and that continued  into 1968.  Roger Guiles is the gentleman  here for the far right and these  are his vice presidents.  One thing you'll notice  immediately of this group is  their age.  These men had long experience in  the Wisconsin State University  system. 

 Many of them had grown up and  advanced their careers within  the state of Wisconsin.  All of them were fairly  conservative, and I think it's  fair to say that none of these  five men, including Roger  Guiles, the president on the far  right were prepared to deal with  the vast changes that were  overtaking the campus and the  country in 1968.  Now Oshkosh lies 80 miles  northwest of Milwaukee but in  significant respects it was  worlds away.  If Oshkosh was relatively immune  from the racial crises that  griped the United States during  the early and mid-1960s,  Milwaukee had become engulfed by  them by the mid-1960s.  Like most large northern  industrial cities, Milwaukee had  been home to relatively few  African Americans prior to World  War II but in a process that has  caught the attention of a number  of historians recently the  African American population in  Milwaukee exploded after World  War II particularly in the  1950s.  It's called the late great  migration and a large migrant  stream coming from the south  came to Milwaukee and settled in  inner core neighborhoods  throughout the city and this  caused a number of very  difficult problems for the city  of Milwaukee.  And Milwaukee's reputation for  being a segregated city began to  really become known in the 1950s  and early 1960s.  Black Milwaukeeans by the late  '50s and early '60s faced police  brutality, crowded substandard  housing and a public school  system that was later called by  US district court judge George  Reynolds perpetuating a  consistent and deliberate policy  of racial isolation and  segregation.  Public schools in Milwaukee were  in a state of crisis in the  early and mid-1960s over the  issue of race.  And one of the individuals who  addressed this crisis was  attorney and NAACP president in  Wisconsin Lloyd Barbee. 

 Lloyd Barbee obtained his law  degree here from the University  of Wisconsin and had moved from  Madison to Milwaukee and Lloyd  Barbee was on the frontlines of  leading the challenges to the  segregated school system in  Milwaukee.  He and other individuals created  an organization the Milwaukee  United School Integration  Committee or MUSIC dedicated to  eliminating citywide educational  policies that privileged white  students at the expense of  blacks.  One of the things that they  tried to address was this  absolutely, in retrospect seems  very hard to believe but  Milwaukee practiced what was  called intact busing whereby  they would actually bus entire  classrooms of black  schoolchildren from a black  school, there home school, to a  while school where they would  have their class in the white  school but not mixed with the  white students.  They would be bused back to  their black school for lunch,  bused to the white school for  afternoon classes and then bused  so that there would be no  intermingling of white and black  students.  These are the kinds of peculiar  forms of de facto segregation  that northern cities like  Milwaukee had perfected, if you  can excuse that use of the word,  by the '50s and early 1960s.  Joining Lloyd Barbee in the  fight against segregation in  Milwaukee, of course, a name  many of you are probably  familiar with, father James  Groppi.  A catholic priest whose  headquarters in inner-city  Milwaukee became one of the  movement centers of the civil  rights movement in Milwaukee as  it gathered steam in the  mid-1960s.  He had served as vice-chair of  MUSIC and in 1965 was elected as  advisor to the Milwaukee NAACP  Youth Council.  With the aid of youth council   commandos, young black men who  were organized in 1966 to engage  in direct action and military  self-defense, Groppi and his  comrades took up the cause of  open housing in Milwaukee in the  summer of 1967 where they  attracted a national attention  with their direct confrontation  with Polish white neighborhoods  in south Milwaukee.  And you probably are familiar  with some of these photographs,  some of you may even have  memories of the racial turmoil  in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s  and Father Groppi's role and the  NAACP Youth Council's role in  challenging segregation and  racism. 

 It's also important for us to  consider briefly that black  power ideology was beginning to  influence the actions of the  Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council  throughout these years '66, '67  and into 1968.  And this is significant because  a number of the black students  that would eventually  matriculate at the Wisconsin  State University Oshkosh had  come into contact with black  power ideology and actually had  engaged in direct action, direct  protest in their high schools in  Milwaukee in the spring 1968.  A seismic shift was taking place  in the new younger generation of  students in Milwaukee and at  schools like Rufus King, North  Division and others they were  engaging in direct confrontation  with school administrators,  challenging the use of all-white  history textbooks and all sorts  other things that as the  increasing or developing black  consciousness of the day would  have it weren't appropriate to  modern standards of African  Americans living in urban  America.  This is an example of one  individual.  Vada Harris, she's pictured  here.  They led a textbook turn-in  program at her public high  school Riverside in 1966.  She eventually became a student  at Wisconsin State University  Oshkosh.  So I think it's important to see  the continuity between the  experience of black students in  the high schools in Milwaukee  and their experience on the  Oshkosh campus shortly later.  Again visual reminders of the  confrontations in Milwaukee in  1966-1967.  These students then who would  come to Oshkosh would  matriculate in the city that was  itself engaging in a long,  bitter fight over the passage of  an open housing ordinance. 

 In the mid-1960s as Americans  continued pressing the cause of  racial justice across the United  States, residents of Oshkosh and  the Fox Valley were confronting  one issue integral to the civil  rights movement and that is the  cause of eroding or eliminating  housing discrimination.  Prompted by concerns of  landlords' systematic refusal to  rent to African American college  students and the expectation  that a small migration of black  would help alleviate the regions  labor shortage, local clergy,  educators and housewives banded  together in the Oshkosh Human  Rights Council and initiated a  grassroots movement to    incorporate open housing  ordinances in the city of  Oshkosh.  It wasn't easy.  It took months and months.  Now keep in mind this is 1968.  For years in the state of  Wisconsin the state legislature  had defeated bills to have a  statewide ordinance against  housing discrimination.  So on the local level, even  though there was a federal law  passed in 1968, a fairly  toothless law, it fell upon  local communities like Oshkosh  to address housing  discrimination through local  ordinances.  And this was a protracted fight  that lasted into the summer of  1968 and divided the community  of Oshkosh over this question of  whether it was indeed necessary  to have a local law to prohibit  discrimination.  Finally in early August 1968  these white citizen supporters  much the Oshkosh Human Rights  Council staged a dramatic  walkout within the City Hall of  Oshkosh and eventually were able  to convince a majority of the  city council members to vote in  favor of an open housing  ordinance.  But tensions remained for months  after and that would have a  consequence as well. 

 So not surprisingly only a  handful of African Americans had  attended Wisconsin State  University prior to the  mid-1960s.  But as the size of the  university and the athletic  program began to grow, coaches  such as Russ Young, head coach  of the football team, started to  recruit talented black athletes    from cities like Racine.  The passage of the Higher  Education Act, part of Lyndon  Johnson's great society  programs, provided another  incentive for universities like  Wisconsin State University at  Oshkosh to recruit African  American students.  In the fall of 1964 the new  director of admissions at  Wisconsin State University, a  man named Don Jorgenson,  enrolled an unprecedented 18  black students.  Far more consequential to the  growth of the African American  student body were the actions of  the men like Richard Alcama a  Methodist minister who had  gotten his start in the civil  rights movement across the  street over at the state house  in early 1960s protesting with  Lloyd Barbee and actually had a  mixed congregation that got into  a lot of trouble.  There was a lot of controversy  surrounding the sale of his  congregation of his church to a  congregation with blacks and he  later went to the south, as many  people became involved in the  northern civil rights movement  did.  He was at Selma.  He participated in civil rights  demonstrations.  He returned to Milwaukee, had a  mixed congregation and did what  he could to advance the cause of  African American education by  opening what was called the  Milwaukee Equal Opportunity  Center on Third Street in  Milwaukee.  There, through a federal grant,  Richard Alcama and several of  his colleagues provided young  black men and women with the  kind of counseling and support  that was often lacking in inner  core high schools. 

 Black students at high schools,  some of them we've learned  through the oral histories, had  no idea there was a possibility  of going to college through the  support of scholarships and  federal aid.  The MEOC, under Richard Alcama's  guidance, provided the very  necessary jumpstart for many of  these students to become  enrolled in schools like  Wisconsin State University.  Now through the interventions of  Alcama, the MEOC and through  these federal programs, the  black student body at Wisconsin  State University at Oshkosh  numbered 77 by the end of the  '67-'68 academic school year.  One of the great accomplishments  I think of oral history project  is that we've interviewed so  many of these students who came  up to Oshkosh.  And many of these students have  very compelling stories.  Many of them have very  interesting backgrounds.  Among the students who I find  most fascinating was Vada  Harris.  You saw Vada Harris' picture  before.  This is Vada Harris who won the  best dressed coed award on the  campus.  You talk about integrating the  Wisconsin State University  campus. 

 Vada Harris was encouraged to go  to Oshkosh by Father Groppi, she  was very close to Father Groppi  and when she came to campus she  distinguished herself with her  ability to get right into  student life.  But she never relinquished her  firm commitment, her steady  commitment to civil rights.  And she did it in a very quiet  way working always behind the  scenes to put pressure on the  city of Oshkosh and the campus  administration to bring much  needed change to the  circumstances for black  students.  That's a good story.  Unfortunately, there are many,  many bad ones.  Many stories of resistance that  they faced from professors,  administrations and from the  townspeople at Oshkosh.  Indeed, as the number of African  American students continued to  grew so did these instances of  unfavorable treatment in and the  oral histories revealed in  staggering detail the kinds of  insults that they were subject  to on a daily basis.  Responding to the threats and  the taunts and any number of  other challenges that they  faced, the black students on the  campus organized into the first  black student union in the state  of Wisconsin in February 1968.  Faculty and staff who worried  about the abysmal attrition rate  for black students and mounting  racial tensions on and off  campus came together in the  summer of 1968 to form an ad hoc  advisory committee for the  culturally disadvantaged  student.  If that title makes you a little  uncomfortable, it should, right?  That wasn't a very good choice. 

 They later changed in the name  to the Committee for the  Culturally Distinct, slightly  better but still falling into  many understandings of black  life in the 1960s.  So the university was doing  something to address the needs  and concerns of black students  but it wasn't nearly enough.  So tensions increased within the  black student body and when the  student body increased to over a  110 in the fall of 1968, black  students on the campus at  Oshkosh began to notice a vast  change and they began to be  heckled, black students were  denied service in restaurants in  Oshkosh.  A black female student was hit  in the head by a stone and  knocked unconscious on the  street, bleeding.  They were heckled continuously.  It was getting very, very ugly  for a period of time.  This is Donald Jorgenson, I'm  sorry that skipped very quickly.  This is Don Jorgenson on the  left.  The university also hired two  young black men to act as  intermediaries or liaisons.  These young men had a lot of  responsibility placed on their  shoulder and clearly their  experience did not prepare them  for the kind of challenges that  they would face with students  who had the kind of complaints  that the black students at  Oshkosh did. 

 One of the recreational  activities of black students,  some black students on the  campus was to collect these  black lawn jockeys.  Emblems of the racist south that  adorned many porches in Oshkosh.  This photograph was taken at the  Oshkosh police station where  they confiscated many of these.  They had accumulated in one  black student's home and they  were taken away.  But many stories from the  students about various ways in  which they encountered racism  and tried to do something about  it when they were on campus in  1967 and 1968.  This article published in  October of 1968 gives us some  sense of the impending trouble.  Very clear this article written  by a young black woman named  Sandy -- gave some evidence of  tensions and the possibility of  some outbreak which indeed would  occur a short while later.  Dick Gregory came to the campus  in October 1968.  Dick Gregory was an out spoken  activist, comedian turned  activist, who gave a very  inspiring talk on campus and  told the black students who  assembled in the bleachers that  it was their responsibility to  engage in direct action.  It was their responsibility to  respond to the circumstances  that they faced. 

 And I don't want to say that  there's a direct line between  his speech in October but  clearly from the recollections  of many people who we've  interviewed Dick Gregory's  speech did have some influence.  Black students drew up this, I'm  sorry the resolution on this  isn't sufficient, you really  can't read it.  This is the first set of demands  that black students and the  black student union drew up in  response to their challenges in  the fall of 1968, October 1968.  They presented them through the  official challenges, Don  Jorgenson and the Committee for  the Culturally Distinct.  But the black students mainly  from Milwaukee didn't understand  the slow process through which  bureaucracies operate.  They were given assurances that  things were being done, but very  little progress, if any, was  demonstrated and frustration  continued to mount.  I think the best way for me to  share what I consider to be one  of the unique contributions of  this oral history project is to  give you some sense of the  voices that we've collected.  So I'm going to play for you a  five minute clip using some of  the voices describing the actual  day, November 21, when black  students assembled on the street  outside of the administration  building and decided to bring  their demonstration, their  complaints to the university  president Roger Guiles.  So if I could just play this for  a minute, you'll hear a  collection of voices.  These are the voices of some of  the people who were there in  Dempsey Hall on that morning of  November 21. 

 [INAUDIBLE]  >> I remember the expressions  on everybody's face of shock,  and get out of here.  You don't belong in here.  You want to see President Guiles  you have to make an appointment  and we're laughing like we're  not here to make an appointment.  I don't think any of us expected  the response that we got of just  total, you're criminals it's  like you don't belong here.  Get out.  >> We just wanted to -- why we  all came.  And that's what we kept telling  him.  We all came because we all have  these problems.  [INAUDIBLE]  We have a problem.  >> But he was extremely angry. 

 >> The attitude that he had was  we invited him to sit down first  and he said no I'm not going to.  So everything was contrary.  If we wanted him to sit down,  I'm going to stand up.  I'm going to make a phone call  so he takes the phone out of the  wall.  And it became more and more  pretentious because of his  attitude.  We tried to do it in a  respectful way and all of that  but he wasn't respectful to us  and we thought that we deserved  some respect.  >> His mood set our moods and  the mood of the people who were  there because they were like  angry which I'm not saying they  didn't have a right to be but I  think it could have been handled  a little bit differently.  >> He didn't immediately  understand what was going on but  he was a strong man and not  easily --.  I would say he stood his ground  despite of the fact that it was  easy to sign off on the thing.  [INAUDIBLE]  >> We made the  principal stand courageously or  foolishly under those  circumstances that he was not to  sign anything under duress. 

 I understood that.  So time just dragged on.  And I guess I was just not being  consistent enough.  Now keep in mind.  I did not want to be there.  I did not want to be there.  I did not want to be involved in  anything like that.  That was not my idea.  I had enough of that in Vietnam.  Confrontation and that kind of  stuff in the military. 

 That's not what I came to school  for.  >> I went outside.  [INAUDIBLE]  And he still  refused.  >> He was so nonresponsive.  This was fascinating.  It was like fighting a man in a  room filled with dynamite.  The man was so inaccessible.  So uncommunicative.  So shocked.  So distant. 

 >> Roger wasn't a very  personable person.  [INAUDIBLE]  A little more  remote.  >> We had the spectrum of people  participating and some said hey,  this is the last straw.  It's either now or never.  We'll take this to the man.  And some said he's not ready to  sign so let's go on.  And so in that moment of  indecision, we left as a group.  While we were leaving, we saw  there were demonstrations  outside.  >> We looked out the window and  it was like there were signs,  there were students with signs  at the -- was the black student  union and I'll never forget when  he turned around I was sitting  in a pivotal place in the room  and when he turned around and he  looked outside the building I'll  never forget this man's face.  He turned from white to red. 

 >> He could barely see us let  alone hear us.  It struck a match in the room  filled with dynamite.  And we decided let's go to the  top, maybe he'll understand.  We saw there was no way in hell  that man could understand our  response.  It was a mound of despair.  >> It was a moment of release  too.  I know I'm not going to be  coming back here.  If they mess me up, they did  this to me, they invited me here  and I'm in this predicament.  I might be going to the army so  let me get this out of my system  right now.  I wasn't the only one feeling  that. 

 Everybody felt like that.  And I saw pictures coming down  off the walls in the halls.  I saw a glass being broken.  Offices being broken into.  Desks over turned.  >> It was like oh, my god what's  going on here.  And at that time we had a  discussion about all the things  that have happened to our  people.  [INAUDIBLE]  You just can't take  it anymore.  You've got to do something about  it.  And obviously that was a  collective moment when the  betrayal there that morning that  I can't even explain. 

 >> Okay, just so we're clear  what they were describing, these  different voices coming from  many different perspectives, was  the moment when 94 of the 116  black students converged in the  president's office or right you  outside the president's office  presenting him with a list of  demands in this desperate  attempt to get him to pay  attention to their concerns.  He refused, it was a standoff  and you heard the escalating  tension in this moment of  ultimate release.  How many of the individuals  there engaged in this vandalism?  It's hard to know exactly.  There were no investigations.  No formal inquiry was ever made  over who did what.  But we would think it's probably  a little over a dozen.  About 15 students.  But all 94 were there when this  damage took place and all 94  soon heard the police.  The police came from all over  northeast Wisconsin.  Communities like Fond du Lac,  Oshkosh, Appleton, all over. 

 And converged on this university  administration building to deal  what they considered to be a  outbreak of a riot and a violent  takeover of the university.  It was panic.  Absolute panic.  We have stories of students who  were at the university having  their parents come with pickup  trucks with guns fully loaded to  rescue their children from the  black people taking over the  university.  Some of the young women were  clearly not engaged in anything  but a sit-down, peaceful  sit-down demonstration and many  of them were just bystanders to  what had been happening.  We understand that not everyone  understood what was going to  happen.  They all decided to come  together as a group and to make  their demands heard.  This is the point at which they  realized that the police were  assembling in the hallway  outside the administration  building and the students  fortunately didn't put up any  resistance.  They were all peacefully  arrested and taken down and  loaded into rented Hertz trucks  like cattle.  Thrown in and taken down to the  courthouse where they were  formally arrested and charged  and thrown in prison. 

 This is a very telling moment  when one of the students you  heard a veteran from the Vietnam  war who is a freshman and the  designated spokesman for the  group, you see the look on his  face.  This is an example of an  individual who was very much  scarred by this incident.  The white woman in front of him,  incidentally, was a reported who  broke the law by being in the  president's office.  She was never arrested and got  off scott free.  Two weeks ago she came to  California and testified that  she always wondered why she  wasn't arrested, she knew why  because she was white.  She broke the law with the  students by being in the  president's office and nothing  ever happened to her.  The same cannot be said for the  94 black students herded into  these trucks and then were sent  to scattered prisons throughout  northeast Wisconsin.  Father Groppi came up from  Milwaukee to gather bail money  as did the NAACP Youth Council  commandos in Oshkosh.  Oshkosh was in a state of  turmoil.  White students for the first  time had been sparked to engage  in demonstrations against the  administration. 

 And the melee that was taking  place on the campus forced the  president, Roger Guiles, to  close the university down  prematurely in advance of  Thanksgiving break and shortly  thereafter he decided to suspend  the students, all 94 students.  And thus began the next phase of  this controversy when the 94  students were suspended from  campus and then expelled and  then a procedural hearing, taken  over by the the Wisconsin State  University system, denied them a  hearing, denied them common  understandings of due process of  law and summarily expelled them  from the university system in  December, December 20th 1968.  All 94 black students who were  in the building that day were  expelled.  Not only were they expelled,  they were black balled.  They could not enroll in any  other university in the state of  Wisconsin whether they did  anything or not.  There was never a hearing to  determine the individual guilt  of people in that administration  building.  And this caused an outrage in  the black community, as you can  imagine.  In Milwaukee amongst parent  groups who banded together to  support these students, and I  should say, importantly here,  amongst white students on  campus.  For the first time white  students on campus had found a  cause to motivate them to engage  in direct confrontations against  the administration.  I want to say one other thing  very briefly here. 

 Another important part of the  story that I'm, unfortunately,  having to glide over very  quickly here.  What caused this reaction?  Why the fuss in Oshkosh in  October 1968?  Because you have to remember  that the politics of law and  order was everywhere in 1968.  Especially in Oshkosh,  Wisconsin.  The calls for law and order were  very loud and very clear  throughout that fall campaign  year, and I'll also tell you  something that I bet very few of  you know.  That George Wallace, the  southern segregationist governor  from Alabama, was actually an  invited guest and a favorite son  of Oshkosh.  Believe it or not, it's because  of an Oshkosh couple, the women  seen here, Dolores --, the  Phyllis -- of Wisconsin, who  actually gave George Wallace his  political career in 1964 by  putting him on the Wisconsin  ballot, and when Wallace did  well in the Wisconsin primary in  '64, through the intervention of  this Oshkosh couple he was  encouraged to expand his  political fortunes in a  nationwide campaign.  So in 1968 George Wallace  returned to Oshkosh, was  welcomed.  George Wallace's central message  in that campaign year in 1968  was law and order.  As it was a for Spiro Agnew,  Richard Nixon's vice  presidential campaign, when he  kicked off his vice presidential  campaign at the Oshkosh airport  in September.  I could go on and on but it's  all in the air. 

 The spirit of retribution, of  punishment, is very much a part  of the political atmosphere in  Oshkosh.  Part of our research is at the  find many, many letters like  this exerting pressure on the  state legislature and on the  Wisconsin State University Board  of Regents.  You'll see the paragraph.  It would be a cruel hoax on the  Wisconsin taxpayers to expect  them to pick up the cost of the  incident.  Citizens of Wisconsin were  outraged and to be very frank  and to be very, to summarize  very quickly the students never  had a chance.  Their punishment was  foreordained.  There was no chance that these    students would ever be given a  fair hearing.  Every bit of evidence that we've  collected points to a very  simple conclusion that the  students were going to be  expelled and punished and made  an example of in November 1968.  Student protests occurred in  Madison and in Oshkosh as a  result of these hearings and the  what many considered to be the  injustice of this affair.  White students on the campus in  Oshkosh banded together. 

 The local STS and the young  socialist alliance took this as  a major cause asking Guiles to  resign and protesting the unfair  treatment.  So this was a galvanizing  incident on this small  Midwestern university's campus,  or growing in size Midwestern  university campus.  This wasn't Berkley, this wasn't  Ann Arbor, this wasn't  California but here in 1968  because of Black Thursday the  '60s were definitely coming to  Oshkosh.  Students protested and  threatened to engage in a  strike.  They planted these 94 black  crosses on the front yard of the  administration building.  Professors, another chapter of  this history involves the fight  over academic freedom.  Liberal professors on campus  protested against the  administration and they paid for  it with their jobs.  Some of these individuals were  fired point blank by the  administration.  Again this is a very top-down  administrative hierarchy.  And they put out this satirical  magazine that lampooned the  administration. 

 I'll just mention one individual  in particular.  This is David Roth an assistant  professor of political science  who, more than else in the  faculty, took up the cause of  these black students and was  fired from his position, and in  his case went to the Supreme  Court and still stands to this  day as case law regarding  university's treatment of  employees, firing untenured  faculty members.  That's how far his case went.  Unfortunately, his interventions  and the interventions of other  people weren't enough to prevent  the students from being expelled  and being black balled.  I'll just mention one other  thing, I'll close on this  because I see I'm out of time  and then perhaps if you have any  questions I can go in other  directions that interest you.  In February of 1969, the cause  of the Oshkosh students became  one of the major causes of black  students on this campus, UW  Madison.  In February 1969 black students  on this campus engaged in a wide  scale demonstration that  required the national guard to  come to Madison and clear the  streets.  These are pictures from Madison  in February 1969.  These scenes weren't totally  unfamiliar, right, to Madison in  the late 1960s.  But this was a noticeable campus  demonstration and one of the  demands for the black students  here in Madison was to reinstate  the Oshkosh 94. 

 To finally give them the justice  that had been denied them  earlier.  I'm going to close it there and  then as I promised answer any  questions if anyone has  anything.  Sure?  >> How many of these students,  the ones, the 94 were you able  to contact?  And what was the result,  obviously I think of Oshkosh I  know this is too long of a  question to answer individually  but collectively how do you  think they did after that?  >> I interviewed, my colleague  and I, Jeff -- , interviewed 33  out of the 94 which we  considered to be quite an  accomplishment because many of  them have dispersed all over the  country.  The long-term effects of Black  Thursday is hard to gauge.  Very clearly though I can tell  you this: that there are members  of the Oshkosh 94 who never  really recovered.  Who dealt with this, the  experience of being expelled  from a white institution, the  indignity of being arrested and  being treated this way and never  went back to college, and these  were individuals who came up to  me two weeks ago in Oshkosh when  they came and visited the  exhibition and saw the video  that I showed you a clip from,  with tears in their eyes saying  thank you for telling the story  for the first time.  I can tell you that the impact  has been, for some individuals,  very, very negative.  Because they really feel like  they never had a chance to ever  get justice.  And that's a hard thing for  people to take.  Any others?  >> Thank you for coming and  saying this to us. 

 It's very enlightening.  I was not aware of this.  >> Very few people are.  >> So I really appreciate your  efforts.  Are you going to be in this area  again presenting this?  >> I would be happy to.  This is a really important  Wisconsin story and I'm not the  only one working on the civil  rights moment in Wisconsin.  Patrick Jones, I don't know if  any of you know Patrick Jones,  is publishing a book with  Harvard University Press, which  is big-time, in February on the  civil rights moment in Milwaukee  and I think that will set the  bar for the civil rights  movement in this state.  But there is a lot of interest  in what has really essentially  been an untold story of what was  happening in communities like  Oshkosh.  >> Can we get in touch with you  by --?  >> Absolutely.  >> [INAUDIBLE]  >> Sure it's  Kercher, KERCHER@UWOSH. 

 EDU.  I would be happy to correspond  with you.  >> Thank you.  >> Yeah?  >> Can you take another one?  >> Sure.  >> Going back to that busing  issue to Milwaukee was that  consistent with state and  federal laws or against state or  federal laws being carried out?  Do you know?  >> To my knowledge, I don't have  a knowledge of legal details but  obviously there were sufficient  loopholes.  The whole history of segregation  in this country is all about  exploiting every possible  loophole in the legal code.  So the law never stopped  segregation from happening.  There were various means through  which all of this could be  circumvented.  So I can't answer that question  directly but I don't think there  was any local or state or  federal laws that precluded  intact busing at that time.  >> In your research did you find  it possible to gauge the white  response at the university?  You mentioned STS in support of  that piece I saw on the sign but  you also mentioned black  students --. 

 [INAUDIBLE]  Did you find a way  to gauge sort of?  >> That's a good question.  It's tricky.  I'll tell you this, immediately  after this demonstration  occurred the majority opinion of  the white student body was expel  them.  They were very conservative like  many of their parents.  But what I do notice is the  shift in opinion so that by  February of 1969, after the  story began to leek out in  newspaper accounts, opinion did  begin to change.  But I still think the campus was  deeply divided.  Some people argued that the  campus at Oshkosh has never  really recovered from 1968.  I think that might be going too  far.  But clearly these divisions that  worked their way out into the  student body but even more  importantly the -- never quite  healed.  Was there a question here in  front too?  >> I was just curious as to how  long if you know much about when  changes were made at Oshkosh  that would have reflected the  kind of demands that the  students were asking for in  1968. 

 >> They were made relatively  soon thereafter.  I think there were efforts made  by a number of the  administrators to at least give  the appearance that they were  serious about, in fact, a black  cultural center was opened  shortly thereafter.  Black history was soon taught.  Black English or black  literature was soon taught.  So the change of incremental.  Some would say that the real  proof in the pudding would be  the hiring of black faculty and  the radically increased number  of black students; that never  occurred.  It's a complicated subject.  >> Right.  >> Great.  Well, thank you so much for  coming. 

 I invite all of you to contact  me.  [APPLAUSE]