‘Black on the Banks’ Conference Remembers Black History at Rutgers University
Rutgers University held the “Black on the Banks” conference on Nov. 6 and 7 as part of the institution’s 250th anniversary, and to examine the history of African-American students at Rutgers-New Brunswick in the 1960s.
During this decade, Busch campus was slowly growing, Livingston campus was nonexistent, Douglass campus was Douglass College and accepted only women, and Rutgers College was exclusive to only male students.
Additionally, less than 1 percent of Rutgers and Douglass students were African-American. Today, 8 percent of the students at the New Brunswick campus are African-American, according to the university’s most recent ethnic breakdown statistics.
“This is the moment when all kinds of things that…now we take for granted about Rutgers got changed,” Douglass Greenberg, a distinguished professor in the Department of History and Black on the Banks organizer, told the Daily Targum.
The two-day conference kicked off on Friday, Nov. 6 at the Neilson Dining Hall on Cook Campus, with two panel discussions about the environment that entering African-American students faced at Rutgers College and Douglass College in the 1960s. The panelists were doctors, lawyers and professors who not only represented black “firsts” here at the university, but they also created organizations central to the black community at Rutgers today.
They noted, however, that it was not easy. As each panelist shared stories on their time at the university, a major theme found in every narrative was isolation.
“I want to share the Invisible Man prologue, just a paragraph. Every now and then I go back and read this because it describes this feeling of loneliness here (at Rutgers),” said panelist Frank McClellan, graduate of the Rutgers College class of 1967. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.”
The panelists said they were constantly searching for blackness in their studies and a black community to call home, both of which were nonexistent. This loneliness coupled with the racial turmoil in the country during the 1960s encouraged the panelists to read whatever they could find about black history and share it with one another. These actions influenced the protests and rebellions that led to the transformation of Rutgers and Douglass, a topic discussed at the second day of the conference at Voorhees Hall on the College Avenue Campus.
“What changed us and made us become political was the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated,” said panelist Dr. Leon Green, graduate of the Rutgers College Class of 1971.
Classes were canceled the day of King’s funeral, and during the week that followed, numerous actions were taken by administrators and black students. Special meetings of the Rutgers Student Council and Government Association at Douglass were held to discuss the demands of black students at the colleges. A meeting of the Board of Governors was held to provide a dialogue between student groups and administrators, during which certain demands were made for changes in university admissions, faculty representation, course offerings and minority programs.
“This was an alien environment. We had to change it. They had to understand our culture. They had to understand we had something to offer,” Green said. “And they had to understand we were their intellectual equals. So that’s why we put forth some demands.”
The demands put forth led to the eventual creation of the Africana Studies Department, the Education Opportunity Fund, and the erection of the Paul Robeson Center.
“I learned from these courageous people of color that you must be willing to risk it all to obtain everything,” Waggeh said. “I commend them because if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t be at this institution.”
The 250th anniversary celebration will continue until the university’s 250th birthday on Nov. 10, 2016. In honor of the celebration academic programs, symposiums and commemorative events focusing on Rutgers history will be available to students, faculty and alumni throughout the year. Richard Edwards, Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and Chancellor of the university’s New Brunswick campus, also announced the formation of the “Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History” to examine the role enslaved blacks played in the formation of the university.
“Black people have played such a crucial role in the formation of what Rutgers is today and Black on the Banks is just the tip of the iceberg. We have to talk about a lot more, like Livingston College, Conklin Hall and slavery,” said Dionne Owens, a School of Arts and Sciences senior. “And we have to make sure the black narrative isn’t removed from the Rutgers 250 celebration.”
Waheedah Walden, a senior at the university, agreed.
“The program was nice, and the stories of blacks here at the university need to be told every single year,” Walden said.
The University is asking anyone who wants to get involved on social media to use the hashtag #Rutgers250. For more information on the Rutgers 250 celebration, interested people can visited 250.rutgers.edu.
