Student Protests Cont'd....

Charles Holley, were on hand to discuss their experiences. And in subsequent phone interviews, they talked about these times with The Capital City Hues.

Brown was a transfer student from DePaul University in Chicago and received her undergraduate degree in 1988 and a UW-Madison law degree in 1993 after taking off a couple of years to work. Tyhe environment was not conducive to attaining an education.

“What we found was a general lack of diversity on campus and the Madison community, but also what we found out later were pockets of hostility outwardly expressed towards Black students and contempt for Black culture,” Brown said.

Holley came to UW-Madison via the Academic Advancement Program and was in his last year as an undergrad when the Black student protests errupted. He would later go on the UW-Madison Law School.

“I was in my last year of undergrad,” Holley recalled. “It’s always an interesting set of circumstances. Geneva and I were co-presidents of the Black Student Union. As a result, you get invited to a lot of different functions. We got invited to a function at Chancellor Shain’s house. We started talking about some of the racial issues on campus. He seemed to be stunned and perplexed. He told us that he didn’t think there were any racial issues on campus. And so we said, ‘Okay, next time we see something we think is an issue, we’ll let you know.’ That might have been on a Thursday, probably towards the end of spring semester.

Little did anyone know that the issue would come and slap Black students in the face in the form of an effigy.

“We were wrapping up the 1984-1985 academic year when it was noticed on Langdon Street that one of the fraternities had a really descriptive depiction of what they called a ‘Fiji Islander’ for a themed party,” Brown recalled. “But what it really was a caricature of a Black man with the classic lips and dark skin. It basically had stereotypical African or tropical depiction. It obviously didn’t reflect the Fiji Islander population. It was more a caricature of African and African American ancestry. We protested in front of that frat house, just me, my roommate, and a friend. There were just three of us. And we got on the local news station. And that triggered a larger response from the general Black student community. And we had a larger group of students protesting the following day. But what we also had was a lot of unmentioned or not paid attention to issues that other Black students were dealing with.”

“We were going to have the Black Student Union picnic,” Holley added. “I forget the name of the park that is right off of Langdon where the Edgewater Hotel is. The Phi Gamma Delta had their Fiji House. And outside the house, they had this huge — probably 30 ft. — rendering of a Black man with a bone through his nose and all of the stereotypical features white people think of as African. This was an homage to the Fijis and their Fiji Island Party they had the night before. We saw this and Geneva, myself, David Wright and Solomon Ashby, who was our de facto chief of staff for the Black Student Union, had a protest outside of the house. Being taken a back with how well students do with technology today, we had the good sense to recognize that Sunday was a slow news day. So we started calling all of the news outlets for coverage. That’s how things started to progress.”

The initial protest — and the resulting news coverage — hit a nerve with Black students on campus.

“It was phenomenal,” Brown said. “In a short period of time without social media or the internet, the word got out. I was overwhelmed by the response of the other Black students.”

At least one protest was held on Bascom Hill in front of Chancellor Shain’s office. They got the chancellor’s attention.

“I think the chancellor called us because by the time it was on the news that night, it got to be an issue,” Holley said. “At that point, we had a couple of things going on. One was an organic protest that started and took on a life of its own. I don’t think the chancellor or anyone else could have stopped it quite frankly. But also now the media is feeding into it and everything else that was going on. The other thing we were dealing with was it was towards the end of the spring semester. People were getting ready for exams and graduate.”

Through the efforts of the Black Student Union in which Brown and Holley were officers, Black student organizations started to coalesce around the issue.

“The Black Student Union had been there,” Brown said. “We were also working with the Black Greek community. We had sororities and fraternities and Black students. It covered a lot of the diversity of the different groups. They came together and coalesced around the issues of Black student treatment, the lack of diversity and other things that we took on at that point.”

The Black students decided to hold a forum on the issues that Black students faced.

“Before the forum, we rallied students,” Holley said. “I think that was a pretty big turnout. And then the forum at the Memorial Union was even larger. We were dealing with students who were having the opportunity to voice their frustration and a university administration that was caught off-guard by the notion there were issues of race that had to be dealt with on campus.”

“The original forum was with Dean Ginsburg,” Brown said. “And it was held at the Memorial Union. Student after student would stand up and express the individual treatment that they had received in the community or in the classroom. This was something had not happened probably since the Black Student Strike where you had an open forum for Black students to describe what was going on.”

The university administration was caught off guard and, in Holley’s view, they did the usual things large institutions do.

“First they try to stall things, especially recognizing that students were going to be leaving in a few weeks,” Holley mused. “‘Let’s act like we are really concerned about this issue. Maybe we’ll ask some of the students to come and talk to us about this issue.’ There is the typical hand wringing that you see in instances like that followed by the, ‘Let’s have an ad hoc committee together to study this.’ And so they made the announcement that they would have a committee that the university put together that was going to study the issue and make some recommendations.”

During that era and before, when the university said it was going to study something, it meant that faculty and staff would look into it. The Black Student Union would have none of that.

“We found out about the meeting,” Holley said. “We always took the approach — all three of us — that it is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. So we crashed the meeting. The press was there. And we said that they couldn’t have any sort of realistic report or study without involving the students. We said that the students should be in the forefront of the study. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Helper since you think you are so smart, why don’t you lead the committee.’ And so that is what we did.”

The students got what they asked for.

“Paul Ginsburg was the chair, Holley said. “I want to say that Mary Rouse may have been on there. We basically told them they were illegitimate. There is a friend of mine, Stacey Singer who was a reporter for The Daily Cardinal was in the meeting. I think she was the only student in the meeting because she was a reporter for The Cardinal. And she wrote about what happened that day. We basically told them they couldn’t possible address this issue without students at the table. Even today, my thing is that when the university addresses issues, they have to have students in meaningful roles. You can’t just appoint a bunch of moms and people who do business with the university and somehow they are going to get honest assessments on what the issue is.”