A Visual History of Campus Protests
Time & Life PicturesAtlanta University Protests
A group of civil-rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., gathered in 1960 on the campus of Atlanta University to join thousands of students who marched and staged sit-ins at local businesses, from lunch counters to department stores. The non-violent student activists hoped to spur the city into integrating lunch counters and ending segregation throughout Atlanta.
Nat FarbmanBerkeley Sit-In
Police removed a student from Sproul Hall where students were holding an all-night sit-in at U.C. Berkeley in 1964. The demonstration was the culmination of one of the most seminal protests of the Free Speech Movement, after a student was arrested for handing out information on civil rights on campus. Nearly 800 students were arrested as part of the sit-in, but the university ultimately voted to end all restrictions on political activity.
1968/Daily News, L.P. (New York)Columbia University Vietnam Protest
Columbia University students waved the Viet Cong flag as they took a non-violent occupation of a campus building that lasted for close to a week in 1968. The students were calling for the university to stop conducting research for the Vietnam War, and after negotiations with the administration failed, more than 700 students were arrested and many were left injured.
Time Life PicturesHarvard Strike
Over the span of two weeks in April of 1969, Harvard students who were diametrically opposed to the Vietnam War and its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps presence on campus kicked up a string of demonstrations. Once students took over one of the college’s oldest buildings, University Hall, administrators called in police who used Mace and clubs to clear out the demonstrators.
© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.Kent State
Members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of thousands of anti-war protesters who had gathered at Kent State University in 1970. Four people were killed and nine were injured, after which, students and demonstrators were cleared off campus.
Apartheid Protests
As many students did all over the country in the 1970s and 1980s, Columbia University students took a stand against apartheid. About 150 student protesters blocked the entrance to Hamilton Hall, calling on the school to divest its investments in South Africa in order to put pressure on the nation to change its policy.
AP2011Occupy Wall Street
As the Occupy Wall Street movement took hold in 2011 and students began to join in at campuses across the country, riot-clad police officers pepper sprayed a group of peaceful protesters in the University of California, Davis’s quad.
U.Va. Vigil
Students gathered in late 2014 at the University of Virginia to raise awareness of sexual assault on campus, as an account of gang rape at a campus fraternity as reported in Rolling Stone was called into question.
2014 Getty ImagesEmma Sulkowicz Mattress Protest
Emma Sulkowicz, then a student at Columbia University, carried her mattress everywhere she went around campus, including to her graduation, in protest of the school’s inaction once she reported, in 2013, being raped as a sophomore on campus. She committed to carrying the mattress, often with the help of groups of fellow students, as part of her thesis project and vowed to continue until the school expelled the student she alleges raped her.
2014 Anadolu AgencyFerguson Rallies
Students stood for four minutes of silence at St. Louis University in October 2014, after months of rioting rocked the region in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. Brown, 18 years old, was killed by a police officer in the street just a few months earlier.
University of Missouri Hunger Strike
Jonathan Butler—the University of Missouri graduate student who became the face of campus protests related to racism on campus—addressed students once Mizzou’s president, Tim Wolfe, resigned. Butler, who went on a hunger strike until Wolfe stepped down in early November, gained support from a number of organizations on campus, including the football team.
Yale Protest
Students protested at Yale University in November after several incidents that they deemed racist and said made their campus feel unsafe, including a fraternity allegedly turning away students from a party because they weren’t white.
