A troubling letter
Shortly after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, U-M President Robben W. Fleming received a troubling letter from the regional director of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission in the nearby city of Jackson, Mich. His name was Harry W. Wright Jr. Wright told Fleming he had been helping a highly promising Black high school senior apply for admission to U-M.
“She has drive and motivation,” Wright said, and “real ability, which is now ready to fully express itself.” But no one had urged her to take college-preparatory courses. Her grades were low. Her family was poor. She had decided late that she wanted to attend Michigan.
Wright had learned about U-M’s Opportunity Awards Program, which offered help to underprivileged students. But when he saw the admission requirements, he realized his young friend’s case was hopeless.
“The problem is enormously difficult”
President Robben W. Fleming at a student demonstration in 1969 (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)
Many Black students he knew had “great potential,” Wright told Fleming, “but due to a basically racist educational system, their creative possibilities are not fully realized . . . It seems to me that a public university has the responsibility to compensate for this, in ways beyond business as usual.”
Fleming investigated the girl’s case. His background was in labor law, and he tended to favor the underdog. However, he also was devoted to the meritocratic standards of prestigious universities like Michigan.
He replied to Wright: “Our present program is inadequate in a number of respects. We must, and will, do better. But our critics must also understand how thorny the problem really is.”
Wright’s young friend would likely fail in U-M’s demanding curriculum, he said, creating only “further frustration.” Remedial courses for such students, which U-M had considered, would put the students at risk of feeling inferior.
“I must repeat that the problem is enormously difficult.”
The strike begins
AM picketers form a crowd in front of Hill Auditorium at March 1970 convocation. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)
Two years later, in February 1970, U-M students calling themselves the Black Action Movement (BAM) presented Fleming with a list of demands, chiefly: A binding commitment to increase Black enrollment from 3.4 percent to 10 percent, comparable to the state’s Black population, by 1973; more financial aid for Black students; more Black faculty; more support for Black studies programs; and a center for Black students.
Fleming’s aides already had calculated that the University could reasonably hope to increase Black enrollment to 7 percent in the next three years, though not without finding considerably more money for financial aid. He and the regents told BAM they would aim for 10 percent as a goal, but not as a binding commitment.
With that, BAM’s leaders called students to join a boycott of U-M classes. It soon shaped up as the largest student protest in the University’s history.
What followed over the next 13 days was, at base, an effort to change Fleming’s mind about the position he had taken with Harry Wright. The president’s views, undoubtedly shared by most administrators and faculty, were:
a) African-Americans certainly ought to have greater access to higher education, but:
b) Most were badly taught in underfunded schools, so few could meet U-M’s admission standards, and:
c) If U-M changed its traditional standards to admit underprepared Black students, many would fail, thus defeating the purpose of admitting them, and U-M’s elite reputation would suffer.
Fleming and his allies believed the University could not, by itself, change the racist social structures that trapped Black students. They could act only in small increments — a response that many Black students (and a fair share of white ones) interpreted as no more than racist resistance to just demands for equity.
A shift in tactics
In the first days of the strike, most students kept going to class. Support for the strike was highest in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), the Residential College, and the School of Social Work. In other units, such as the Engineering College and the School of Business Administration, most students were attending class as usual.
Then BAM’s leaders and their white supporters became more disruptive. They interrupted lectures, banged garbage-can lids in classroom buildings, hassled students on their way to class. Five days in, attendance had dropped to 40 percent.
“It wasn’t just a Black strike or a white strike,” Madison Foster, a BAM member, told the journalist Alan Glenn years later. “It was a student strike.”
Behind the scenes, Fleming was staving off pressure from two sides.
Critics of BAM were demanding that he call in the National Guard to ensure that students could attend class if they wanted to. Fleming asked for patience. He meant to avoid the sort of police/student melees that had marred other campuses if he possibly could. At the same time, he demanded that BAM keep its picketing peaceful, and he privately asked Black leaders in the state to urge BAM leaders to keep things cool.
Gardner Ackley’s protest
Gardner Ackley (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)
Some faculty leaders were furious. The most outspoken was the economist Gardner Ackley, just back in Ann Arbor after service on the Council of Economic Advisers to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, then as U.S. ambassador to Italy. His credentials as an old-school liberal were well-known. But he was appalled by the BAM strike.
Ackley said that for student militants, “the desires of the overwhelming majority of students, who only want to learn — and of the overwhelming majority of the faculty — who only want to teach and investigate — count for little or nothing.” And now he feared “we will submit . . . to all the demands of the BAM. In so doing, we will admit, explicitly or implicitly, that we are indeed a repressive, racist institution. But that is still a lie!”
Privately, Ackley said he was less frustrated with President Fleming — who he said “confronted an almost impossible situation” — than with faculty colleagues who opposed BAM’s tactics but were afraid to speak up.
“A first substantial step”
BAM publicized a “Victory Dance” at the Michigan League. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library)
On Monday, March 30, with BAM dialing down the aggressive picketing, attendance in classes crept upward. Some professors relocated classes to churches, homes, or the Michigan Union, but they were teaching.
At 4 a.m. the next day, during another long round of negotiations, a BAM leader took Fleming aside and asked for his best offer.
The president repeated what he had said already — a goal (still not a commitment) of 10 percent; enough financial aid to reach the goal (more than the 5-7-percent funding promise he had made before the strike); plus a commitment to meet most of the lesser demands.
With that, BAM ended the strike and declared victory. In the Union ballroom, BAM leaders addressed more than a thousand cheering students. “That wasn’t the best agreement we could have settled on,” one of them, Dave Lewis, told the crowd, “but it was a first step, a first substantial step.”
The long aftermath
By 1973, the University had kept its promises to create a Black student center (which would become today’s Trotter Multicultural Center); expand Black studies; recruit more Black faculty; and provide enough funding to raise Black enrollment to 10 percent. But in 1973-74, Black enrollment stood at only 7.3 percent — the same figure the Fleming administration had considered a realizable goal, given the University’s admission policies.
More major protests followed in 1975 and 1987. In the latter year, James J. Duderstadt, then U-M’s provost and soon-to-be president, initiated plans that coalesced as a broad initiative called the Michigan Mandate. Its thesis — that cultural diversity and education were not antithetical but intimately linked — was an early forerunner of ideas that soon would be taken for granted in higher education and other spheres of American society.
Michigan drew national attention for its new commitments. By 1995, the new drive brought the total enrollment of Black students to more than 10 percent.
That led to a long series of legal battles that rose all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — a story for next time.
(Lead image of BAM picketers at the west doors of Hill Auditorium is courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library. This story is adapted from the author’s book, “Sing to the Colors: A Writer Explores Two Centuries at the University of Michigan,” University of Michigan Press, 2021).