In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (2024)

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Students have established encampments and occupied campus buildings to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, roiling college campuses across America. Many of them say they’re inspired by the long – if often turbulent – history of university activism in the United States.

Asuniversities grapplewith how to address the protests, some have called instate and local authoritiesto disperse participants and take down their encampments — resulting in tense confrontations with police and mass arrests.

Students, often joined by faculty, remain adamant that they will not abandon their encampments until their schools meet their demands— saying their actions in support of Palestinians follow a tradition of student-led social movements.

In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (1)

Black students wait in vain for food service at this F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, on April 20, 1960.

Civil Rights protests and sit-ins

While student protests for racial equality gained the most traction during the 1960s, some of the first demonstrations took place decades before the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1943, student leaders at Howard University Law School began practicing what they called a “stool-sitting technique” where students would go to restaurants in Washington, D.C., that denied Black people service and remain seated, according to a historical account from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Pro-Israel demonstrators clash with each other on the campus of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on April 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images Related article Why this campus turmoil story is so complex

One notable example was in April of that year when student activist Pauli Murray led classmates to a “Whites only” cafeteria and requested service.

“They requested service, and when they were refused, took their seats and pulled out magazines, pencils, pads and poetry books,” the SNCC article says. Managers closed the cafeteria within 45 minutes.

The following year, while protesters demonstrated outside, 55 Howard students staged a sit-in at another local restaurant. They sat and read books as employees refused to serve them. After losing 50% of its service that day, the restaurant’s headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, ordered management to serve the students, according to the SNCC.

The Howard sit-ins didn’t immediately lead to an end to racial segregation in the nation’s Capital, but they were later emulated by Black activists across during the civil rights movement.

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Policemen in riot gear enter the San Francisco State campus in a show of force during student demonstrations that were meant to shut the college down during a strike December 4, 1968.

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A Black Students Union leader rallies a crowd of demonstrators at San Francisco State College in December 1968. The union had gone on strike after racial strife between students and administration.

In 1960, a group of four Black students from the university now known as North Carolina A&T,made historywhen they went to a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat at a lunch counter that was reserved for White people, according to the North Carolina Museum of History. They became known as the “Greensboro Four.”

Sit-ins at the restaurant grew in the days to follow and six months later the Greensboro Woolworth’s began serving Black people at its lunch counter.

Segregation wasn’t the only issue that college students protested during the Civil Rights Era.

In 1968, the Black Student Union at San Francisco State University led a strike that shut down the university and forced the administration to cancel classesover three months,according to the university’s Special Collections and Archives website.

Students were demanding racial equality in admissions practices, curriculum that reflected diverse perspectives and more people of color on the faculty. They staged rallies across campus with some protests turning violent, resulting in students being arrested or beaten by police.

The university eventually agreed to meet the demands of students by establishing the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies and Black Studies Department, increasing admissions slots for underrepresented students and committing to hiring more Black and brown faculty.

The efforts by students paved the way for other universities to create curriculum that focused on the perspectives of marginalized groups.

The Vietnam anti-war protests

The Vietnam War that began in 1955 and saw an increased presence of US troopsa decade laterprompted widespread protests across American college campuses by the mid-1960s.

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Police use tear gas and night sticks to break up anti-war demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Oct. 18, 1967.

The US intervened in an effort to halt the spread of communismin South Vietnamthat had alreadyexpanded to North Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries.

College students demanded the war’s end and spoke out against the military draft that put them at risk of being sent to fight after graduation. Thousands of students went on to protest the war in whichmore than 58,000American troops were killed.

On May 2, 1964, around 400 students from Columbia University, New York University and other colleges protested US involvement during a march through New York City, calling for withdrawal of troops from South Vietnam and theend of military aid, the New York Times reported.

The University of Michigan hosted the nation’s first Vietnam War teach-in on March 24 and 25, 1965.Students, faculty members and others attended the12-hour event,which includedrallies and seminars focused on protesting the US military’s role in the war, according to the University of Michigan.

The teach-in format became popular among several other American colleges over thenext several years.

Then,President Richard Nixon, who was elected in 1968 partly due to his promise to end the war, announced in the spring of 1970 that US troopshadentered Cambodia.The incursiontriggeredlarge-scale protestsamong the anti-war movement.

In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (6)

The Ohio National Guard is called in to disperse a rally on May 4, 1970. Shortly after the protest began, guardsmen fired tear gas at the students.

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President Richard Nixon addresses the nation in April 1970 to explain the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Anti-war activists all over the country, including at Kent State, saw this as a betrayal by the President, who promised to end the war when he was elected less than two years earlier.

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Students at Kent State staged their first campus protest on May 1, 1970.

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A night of violence in downtown Kent was followed by a student march to the campus ROTC building the next day. Some students tried to burn the building down. While the protesters claimed they left the building intact and in the hands of campus police when they returned to their dorms, the building was destroyed. It's still not clear who burned it down.

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The burning of the ROTC building brought the Ohio National Guard to the campus. Some students described their presence as "frightening" and called it a military takeover. Others said the guardsmen were congenial and chatted with the students, with no sense that violence would soon overtake the grounds.

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Guardsmen patrol the area around the burned-down ROTC building.

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A student throws a tear-gas canister back at guardsmen during clashes on May 4, 1970. After several standoffs, the troops headed back up a hill in the direction of the ROTC building. As they reached the top, they turned toward the demonstrators and opened fire.

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In this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, taken by Kent State photojournalism student John Filo, Mary Ann Vecchio can be seen screaming as she kneels by the body of a slain student.

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Students run for cover after the National Guard opened fire. Twenty-eight guardsmen fired into the crowd for 13 seconds, wounding nine students and killing 4.

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Kent State students gather around a wounded student.

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Guardsmen patrol the empty Kent State campus on May 6, 1970. The school was immediately closed, and a nationwide strike followed that involved more than 4 million students.

In photos: The Kent State massacre

On May 1, 1970, students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, hosted an on-campus anti-war rally. Later that evening in downtown Kent, another protest that began peacefully escalated to a breakout of violence among police and demonstrators, prompting the city’s mayor to declarea state of emergency,CNN previously reported.

The mayor requested the Ohio National Guard’s presence over the next two days. Around 3,000 people gathered on Kent State’s campus on May 4, 1970, to protest the war and the National Guard’s on-campus presence.

After the crowd refusedto leave, guardsmenlaunchedtear gas at protestors and later fired shotsinto the crowd, killingfourstudents andinjuring nine others. The protest became known as the “Kent State Massacre.”

After Kent State,hundreds of colleges and universitiesshut down as a wave ofstudent and faculty strikes and protestsspread tomore than 1,300 campuses.The anti-war protests ultimatelyled to the US withdrawing troops from Cambodia less than eight weeks after the invasion started, according to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 marked theend of US involvementin theVietnam War,andmarkedthe end of the draft in the US, according to theAssociation of the US Army.

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This May 8, 1970, photo shows the New Mexico Army National Guardsmen with unsheathed bayonets during an anti-war demonstration at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The South African apartheid divestment movement

Between the 1960s and 1980s, US student activists led a nationwide movement to pressure their universities to cut financial ties with companies that supported South Africa’s apartheid regime.

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An anti-apartheid protest by students at the entrance to the Hamilton Hall building of Columbia University, New York City, 4th April 1984.

South Africa operated under asystem of apartheidfrom 1948 until the early 1990s, during which the country’s White minority governed over the non-White majority through a series of racist andoppressive laws, including prohibitions on marriage between Black people and White people.

Laws divided the population by race, reserving the best public facilities for White people and creating a separate, and inferior, education system for Black people. Non-Whites also endured humiliating work policies, forced relocation and arbitrary treatment by authorities. One of the laws, the Group Areas Act, forced Blacks, Indians, Asians and people of mixed heritage to live in separate areas, sometimes dividing families.

The US anti-apartheid movement gained momentum through student-led protests on campuses where students demanded their universities divest from all South Africa-related investments. Students successfully pressured multiple universities nationwide, including in New York, California, and North Carolina to sever financial ties.

Among the earliest student-led protests against the South African apartheid regime came in 1966 when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstrated at the South African Consulate to the United Nations.

Students marched in solidarity with renowned anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, who had been sentenced to life in prison in June 1964. Mandela would ultimately spend 27 years in prison for opposing the apartheid system in South Africa, accordingto the African Activist Archive.

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University of Pennsylvania students burn mock passbooks, like those carried by Black South Africans, at a rally to demand the university divest from South Africa's apartheid government on Feb. 10, 1986.

The SNCC also cosponsored a demonstration with Students for a Democratic Society and the Congress of Racial Equality at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, demanding that the bank stop financing apartheid by giving loans to South Africa, accordingto the African Activist Archive.

Decades later, the calls to divest from South Africa’s apartheid regime continued at Columbia University where, in 1985, students chained the doors to an administrative building shut and blocked the entrance for nearly a month.

The university threatened to expel students and sent out disciplinary notices, as community leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Desmond Tutu expressed their solidarity with the students, according tothe Global Nonviolent Action Database.Immediately after the blockade ended, university trustees agreed to consider divestingthe university’s $39 million portfolio of stocksin US companies doing business in South Africa.

Later that year, Columbia became the first Ivy League schoolto divest holdings in companies that supported South Africa.

In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (20)

Some of the 400 students occupied the Old Student Union at Stanford University in San Jose, California, on May 9, 1977, to protest the school's investment holdings in companies that do business with apartheid South Africa. Later scores of students were arrested.

Thousands of University of California Berkeley students also held protests in 1985, demanding the university withdrawfinancial holdings in companies doing business with South Africa, according to theUniversity of California, Berkeley Library. The following year, the universitydivesteditself of $3 billion in South Africa-related stock holdings.

Students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill also launched an anti-apartheid movement in 1985 that ultimately influenced their administration to divest from their holdings in 1987, according tothe University of North Carolina libraries.

The actions of studentsacross the country contributed to a growing international movement to isolate South Africa’s apartheid regime and pressure it to abandon its racist policies, which it ultimately did through a series of steps – including the release of Mandela in 1990. Four years later, Mandela won the country’s first democratic election, making him South Africa’s first Black president.

Students and the Black Lives Matter movement

College students across the country have played a key role in the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement which stemmed from protests following the deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014.

The demonstrations demanded an end to police violence against Black men and spilled over onto college campuses.

In December 2014, some 200 students atHarvard University protested Brown’s deathafter a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the White police officer who killed him. Some students wore red X’s on their backs to symbolize Black people being targets. Others, staged what they called a “die-in” by lying on the ground near the feet of the campus’s John Harvard statue.

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Students stage a "die in" at Washington University to draw attention to police violence against unarmed Black men on December 1, 2014, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Then, in 2020, the police killing of George Floyd sparked racial unrest in Minneapolis and beyond.

Floyd’s death came during summer break for most colleges and at the height of the pandemic when many students were in lockdown at home.Many students joined the protest movement that swept the nation that summer andsome universitiesalsofound ways to organize.

On June 5, 2020,more than 400 medical students, faculty and medical professionals at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine kneltfor eight minutes and 46 seconds – the length of time that police held Floyd down –in a silent protest of his death. One protestor held a sign that read “Legalize being Black,” in a photo shared by the university.

But the Black Lives Matter protests were about more than just the ongoing fight against police violence in Black communities and groups that aligned with Black Lives Matter successfully rallied for more nuanced issues.

In 2015,Columbia University became the first college in the US to divest from private prison companiesafter student protesters demanded it. That same year, Georgetown University protests resulted in the administration agreeing to rename two buildings that were named after college presidents who sold slaves.

Notably in the fall of 2015, Black students at the University of Missouri at Columbia began protesting the racism and discrimination they were experiencing on campus.

The university’s leadership, the students said, had not done enough to address the tense racial climate of campus. Theirlist of demandsincluded additional Black faculty, racially inclusive curriculum, more resources for social justice centers, and the removal of then-president Tim Wolfe.

Their demonstrations gained the support of the university’s Black football players who refused to participate in activities until Wolfe was removed. In November of 2015, Wolfe resigned.

In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (22)

Students cheer while listening to members of the black student protest group Concerned Student 1950 speak, following the announcement that University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe would resign Monday, Nov. 9, 2015.

CNN’s Clint Alwahab and Harmeet Kaur contributed to this report.

In pictures: A lookback at student protest movements in the US | CNN (2024)

FAQs

What was the largest student protest in history? ›

Some of the biggest student protests in history were held in opposition to the Vietnam War across the US in which more than 50,000 Americans were killed and 300,000 wounded over the 20-year war.

What is the student protest movement? ›

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.

Why did college students protest the Vietnam War? ›

In 1968, student protests against the Vietnam War spread across American university and college campuses as a result of television reports exposing the public to the horrific atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians.

How is the example of the student protest described on pages 3 and 4? ›

Explanation: The example of the student protest described on pages 3 and 4 supports a main idea of the passage by exemplifying the complicated interpretation of the First Amendment, specifically concerning the freedom of speech.

When did student protests start? ›

History. 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.

What is the most famous protest in history? ›

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.

Why are students protesting on campus? ›

Students across the country are calling on their universities to divest their endowments from Israeli companies or defense companies supplying weapons to Israel. Asking colleges to divest for political or ethical reasons isn't new.

Do students have right to protest? ›

Public universities are bound by the First Amendment – which protects freedom of speech and the right to peacefully assemble – while private institutions are not, experts say.

What was the first student protest? ›

Peaceful sit-ins at segregated lunch counters were some of the first protests during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In 1960, four Black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College planned a sit-in at Woolworth's.

Why are students protesting in America? ›

Campus encampments have become tantamount to riots as anger grows over Israel's war on Hamas. Pro-Palestinian activists want their colleges to 'divest' Student protests over the Israel-Hamas war have spread across more than 60 university campuses in the United States, resulting in more than 2,000 arrests in two weeks.

What did students protest in the 1960s? ›

Among many causes, student activists sought to further the goals of the African American Civil Rights Movement, to end United States military involvement in Vietnam, to abolish ROTC programs on college campuses, and to protest police brutality.

Did college students have to fight in Vietnam? ›

Although students could avoid the Vietnam War by remaining in college until they were too old to be drafted, there was always the danger they would flunk out and then be drafted. Fear of the draft fed the ranks of anti-war protestors. By 1968, SDS had grown to 100,000 members.

How did Tinker v. Des Moines affect the First Amendment rights of high school students? ›

The court found that the First Amendment applied to public schools, and school officials could not censor student speech unless it disrupted the educational process. Because wearing a black armband was not disruptive, the court held that the First Amendment protected the right of students to wear them.

What were the goals of the student movement? ›

How did the student movement change between the years 1960 and 1966? The students were initially concerned about resolving civil rights, poverty, and campus issues and later about the escalation of the Vietnam war.

Does the First Amendment protect student protests? ›

The First Amendment does not protect unlawful conduct. If you engage in conduct while protesting that violates the law — such as violence, assault, vandalism, or underage drinking — you can face arrest and/or campus disciplinary proceedings.

What is the biggest riot in history? ›

1947 – Partition riots, India and modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, the hardest hit region was the densely populated state of Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan), death toll estimates between 500,000 and 2,000,000, the deadliest riots known to humankind.

Why did students protest in 1970? ›

They followed an announcement in April 1970 by President Nixon that he had authorised the US invading Cambodia to fight the Viet Cong there, thus signalling a major widening of the US war effort. One of the protests against this took place on the Kent State university campus, Ohio, on 1 May.

Why did students protest in 1960? ›

Student activism reflected broader cultural conflicts surrounding issues such as Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture of the 1960s. As the decade progressed, these conflicts grew increasingly divisive and violent.

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