Reflections of an MIT Student Activist
Part II: Political Activism at the Institute
By Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih, MIT ’72, SM/EAA ‘73
This four-part reflection on being a student activist during a time of social upheaval and transformation at MIT and nationwide is written by Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih with parts adapted from his 1999 interview with Clarence G. Williams in Technology and the Dream: Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT, 1941–1999 (MIT Press, 2001).
“I was a non-political nerd /athlete from Indianapolis when I came to MIT in 1968.”
In the fall of ‘68, I pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) as a freshman and lived on fraternity row on Beacon Street. I played intramural football for SAE and also ran indoor track for the Institute.
I didn’t start attending Black Students’ Union (BSU) meetings until the spring semester of 1969. This was right after MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January, during which I had immersed myself in black literature, reading about three books a week.
Two of the books that had the greatest effect on me were The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley (Grove Press, 1965) and A Hundred Years of Lynchings by Ralph Ginzburg (Black Classic Press, 1962), a book that still bring me to tears.
“A Hundred Years of Lynchings got me so upset at white people that I couldn’t eat at my fraternity and started to lose weight.”
I decided that I couldn’t be a part of a white fraternity anymore. I disaffiliated from SAE even after I and my pledge class crossed. I moved out into an apartment on St. Botolph Street near Symphony Square in Boston with three other MIT black students and former Pi Lambda Phi frat brothers Henry Tucker ’71 (aka Hakim Abdallah), Mike Hicks ’71, and Steve Carney ’71. During a 1969 summer vacation back in Indiana — my last — I joined the Black Panther Party and would later join the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).
The Black Students’ Union
The Black Students’ Union (BSU) at MIT was founded in the spring of 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that April. The founding members were Charles Kidwell ’69; Shirley Jackson ’68, PhD ’73 (today RPI’s 18th president); Ronald Mickens (then a post-doc in physics); Sekazi Mtingwa ’71 (formerly Michael Von Sawyer); Jennifer Rudd ’68; Nathan Seely ’70; Linda Sharpe ’69; and James Turner PhD ‘71.
By the fall of 1969, the BSU had expanded and diversified. There were seven black students in my class of 1972 and about 44 in the class of 1973. This huge increase in numbers was largely a result of efforts by BSU co-chairs Shirley Jackson and Jim Turner, as well as Fred Johnson ’72. Together, they had issued demands to the MIT administration in 1968, including:
● an increase in the number of black students and staff, as well as support for these students;
● the formation of a pre-freshman summer program (Project Interphase); and
● the development of a Task Force on Educational Opportunity, headed by then Chancellor Paul E. Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60 (MIT president, 1980–90).
The diversification included more radical students like me, Hakim Abdallah (Tucker), Balogun (Meekins), John Lee ’74, and Larry Dean ’76. All of us were more into confrontation than just protest. The more moderate members of our organization, such as my roommate and BSU co-chairman Warren Shaw ’72, Shirley Jackson ’68, James Turner, and BSU attorney general/secretary Linda Sharpe ’69, primarily participated in discussions with the MIT administration and attended meetings with the Task Force on Educational Opportunity (TFEO) and the MIT admissions committee.
I remember participating in numerous discussions with other Black students at Burton House or East Campus or McCormick Hall, sometimes after BSU meetings concerning strategies of dealing with the MIT administration. These discussions would often widen to include analyses of the problems facing black people in America and throughout the world:
- Is the primary problem one of race or class? Should we allow sympathetic white students to help us?
- Should we adopt the peaceful protest strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)?
- Should we adopt the strategies of Malcolm X and the Black Muslims who preached separation versus integration, or the strategies of the black nationalists who believed in forming an independent nation? What about tactics such as violence versus non-violence?
The answers to these questions came to a head during my first term as BSU co-chairman, when we determined that the administration was dragging its feet about the financial-aid issue. The original BSU demands of 1968 had included a call for more black students and black staff, as well as full scholarships for all black students. A critical question emerged:
Did this mean full scholarships regardless of need, or simply that black students shouldn’t have any loans and that each student’s need should be completely covered by scholarships and grants?
Two years later, this issue remained unresolved. The MIT administration seemed more willing to agree to the latter (a need-based financial aid policy) than to the former (a policy granting full scholarships to black students regardless of need). We decided that what we needed was a way to push them to our way of thinking.
To that end, we decided to do what a few groups of black students had already begun doing at schools around the country , including Harvard, Brandeis, Tufts, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Cornell, and Duke: a building takeover!
In a typical building takeover, predominantly black male students (sometimes accompanied by non-black supporters and sometimes bearing arms) would enter a campus building, allow the some staff members (e.g., secretaries, custodians, etc.) to leave, and then hold the administrators hostage for as long as it took to get an agreement to the students’ demands.
Students who chose not to enter the building planned protest activities outside of the building or in other campus locations to provide a distraction for the police. Black student groups from other schools — such as the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), an umbrella organization of about 15 Boston-area BSU’s — would also be invited to join the protest or to hold supporting press conferences.
While these activities were intended to be nonviolent, we were also prepared to defend ourselves if attacked. Female students supplied the male students inside of the building with food and water, communicating via walkie-talkies.
MIT Faculty Club Takeover
In November of 1970, a group of black MIT students decided to conduct a building takeover by disrupting a meeting of the Board of the MIT Corporation and an associated party being held at the Faculty Club. The goal was to: 1) reiterate the BSU demands, and 2) to support the MIT kitchen workers in their dispute with the MIT administration over their pay and working conditions, including an illegal race-based pay differential.
The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — a largely white anti-war group — was not allowed to participate in the takeover, but concurrently broke into the I-Labs (MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory). This drew the police to the north end of campus, allowing us to enter the MIT Faculty Club unopposed. There were many important people at the MIT Corporation meeting — MIT president Howard Johnson, chancellor Paul Gray, provost Jerome Wiesner, as well as the presidents of Du Pont and U.S. Steel, and the governor of Puerto Rico.
I later found out — by reading his interview in Technology and the Dream by Clarence G. Williams — that James Bishop PhD ’69 (Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean for Student Affairs), along with Assistant Provost Paul Gray and Provost Jerome Wiesner (MIT president 1971–80), had intervened to keep the local police out of our takeover.
By the middle of the following day, the MIT administration had agreed to all of our demands, including, among others:
1. Full scholarships for all black students regardless of need;
2. A promise to admit more black students, with a BSU representative on the MIT admissions committee having voting power and access to the files of all black admissions candidates;
3. A promise to increase the numbers of black professors and administrative staff, with the BSU having input on candidate selection;
4. The ability to take black studies courses at any school in the greater Boston metropolitan area and receive MIT credit;
5. The establishment of a committee with the power to forgive loans (with a BSU graduate or representative chosen by the BSU as a voting member);
6. Acknowledgement of our support for the dining staff in their pending strike for higher wages; and
7. Amnesty for all students and their supporters involved with the takeover.
The building take-over was covered by The Tech, ‘MIT’s Oldest and Largest Newspaper’: “MIT warns 28 BSU members,” 20 November, 1970.
The BSU’s takeover of the MIT Faculty Club also made the front page of The Tech: “MIT, blacks near informal settlement,” 9 February 1971.
Unfortunately, the MIT administration gradually reneged on all of these promises by 1976 — by which time we had all left the Institute or had graduated. Recently, I found out that some of the participants were put on probation and had scholarships rescinded in spite of the agreed-on promise of amnesty.
While I have not compiled the numbers of black students admitted during the last two decades, I do know that some of these same issues continue to be raised by black students at MIT today.
A lot of black students paid a high price for their activism. Some graduated late, others didn’t graduate at all. I was willing to sacrifice and I would do my activities, but on Friday or Saturday night, I’d go back to my room and study.
I wasn’t going to let my grades slip.
Note
This article is Part 2 of a four-part series. To learn more about Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih’s story, read Part 1 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Warren Shaw ’72 and Inez Shaw ’73 (formerly Hope), Beverly Morrow ’73 (formerly Dalrymple) and Curtis Morrow ’73, Larry Dean ’76, James Clark ’74, Mae Wesson ’75 (formerly White), Clarence Williams, Elliott Borden ’73, and David Lee ’76 for their help with jogging my memory about key dates and events. Also, thanks Nelly Rosario ’94 and Elaine Harris ’78 for inspiring me to share this story.
About Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih
Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih was a student activist at MIT who later became an engineer and then a physician. He holds SB (1972), MS (1973), and EAA (1974) degrees, each from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT; an MS (1977) in Biomedical Engineering from Stanford University; and an MD (1985) from the University of California at Irvine. Prior to his medical practice, Dr. Salih worked for several years as an engineer with various aerospace companies in Massachusetts and southern California. As a board-certified emergency physician, Dr. Salih has worked at multiple facilities — from small community hospitals to academic level-1 trauma centers — during his 28-year medical career. In 1995 and 2005 he served as a diplomate of the American Board of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Salih retired in 2015 and lives in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
