Abstract
The situation at Texas Southern University (TSU), Houston, was well beyond control by the time Rev. Frederick D. Kirkpatrick arrived after midnight on May 17, 1967. Police cars were backed up along Wheeler Street, at the campus entrance. Scores of officers were gathering, carbines in hands, white riot helmets gleaming in the moonlight. Nearby, a Channel 13 outside broadcast van was stationed at the roadside. On the corner, the Mayor’s people were huddled with Chief of Police Herman Short and his commanding officers. This was a politically explosive moment. A block away, a group of black students—no one knew how many—were holed up on the third floor of Lanier Hall dorm, armed with pistols or rifles, or possibly both. For over an hour, they had traded shots with police officers. One detective was in hospital, a .22 bullet in his hip. The police had peppered the side of the dorm with gunfire. No one knew if any of the students had been injured, but it was clear they were not going to be dislodged easily.1
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Notes
Lance Hill, The Deacons For Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 2004), 31–48, 63–65, 103, 110, 162, 168–172.
Field Research Report, Civil Disturbance in Jackson, Mississippi, Spring 1967, Part I, 1–12, NACCD, series 13, box 69, LBJ Library. Hereafter, Jackson report. For Ben Brown, Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1995), 397–398.
John J. Sloan III and Bonnie S. Fisher, The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower: Campus Crime as a Social Problem (Cambridge and New York: CUP, 2011), 19. For examples, see Time: “Epidemic,” June 2, 1952; “Education: The Rites of Spring,” May 11, 1953; and “Youth: The Riotous Feeling,” July 16, 1965 (http://www.time.com, June 30, 2011).
For context, Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 105–107;
Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: U California P, 2004), 7–10, 20–30, 178, 195.
For Orangeburg, Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: Morrow, 1973), 206–219.
For Kent State, Scott L. Bills (ed.), Kent State/May 4: Echoes Through A Decade (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1982), 1–61.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), 45.
Gil Scott-Heron, The Nigger Factory (New York: Canon Gate, 1972), 45–46.
For context, Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” in Peniel E. Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006), 251–277;
Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975 (Urbana and Chicago: U Illinois P, 2003).
My understanding of the process of student radicalization draws, comparatively on Robert M. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975–1990 (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1991), 203. I owe another South Africanist, historian Jeremy Krikler, thanks for drawing my attention to Price’s work, and for suggesting the scope for comparison.
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: U Illinois P, 1995), 226. For “hot-bed,” Jackson report, Part I, 51.
Testimony of Walter S. Davis: (90) S1869–1-B, Riots, 627–628. See also Bill Carey, Chancellors, Commodores, and Coeds: A History of Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN: Clearbrook, 2003), 284.
Blair Justice, Violence in the City (Fort Worth, TX: TCU Press, 1969), 36–37.
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© 2014 Malcolm McLaughlin
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McLaughlin, M. (2014). Southern Campus Rebellion. In: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269638_4
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