New Collections From the CUNY Digital History Archive
By Stephen Brier
The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), created in 2013 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, is committed to preserving and presenting on an open publicly accessible website the history of the City University of New York. Over the past eight years, a number of CUNY faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni have created a series of curated collections of primary historical sources materials on key moments in CUNY’s rich history. The CDHA’s more than thirty collections are especially focused on the role of CUNY’s faculty, staff, and students and members of the city’s diverse urban communities in fighting to protect and expand CUNY’s unique role as the nation’s premier urban public university system.
Three Urban Education doctoral students at the Graduate Center — Juliet Young, Gisely Colón López, and Lucien Baskin, working with myself and Chloe Smolarski, the CDHA’s Project Coordinator and Collections Manager — recently developed three new CDHA collections on CUNY activism. Two collections center on the Open Admissions era in the late 1960s-early 1970s, a period that witnessed the dramatic expansion of CUNY, and the third highlights activism from the 1990s and early 2000s, an era in which CUNY faced intense austerity measures visited upon the system by state and city politicians. Each of the collections that follow describe innovative strategies deployed by CUNY faculty, staff, students, and community members in these years to extend and expand CUNY’s democratic possibilities. Taken together, the three collections reveal the intense commitment and innovative efforts exhibited at critical moments in CUNY’s history by CUNY’s most fervent supporters.
The Community College 7 Collection
By Juliet Young
From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, youth, parents, educators, and academics as well as civil, business, and government leaders in and surrounding Bedford-Stuyvesant advocated for and struggled with CUNY to establish a college that would be led by, located in, and serve their community. Although not everyone who was involved in this effort shared a common vision as to what the college should be, they did share two common goals: that the college would be accessible and relevant to young African Americans and Puerto Ricans, opening new educational and professional opportunities for them and helping to rectify the systemic discrimination and exclusion they faced in public schooling at all levels in the city; and that the new college’s governance and curriculum should be controlled by the local community where it was based.
The Community College 7 collection, drawn from the papers of Donald Watkins, a Brooklyn College faculty member and administrator involved in this struggle, documents the activities of an extensive network of Bedford Stuyvesant’s education advocacy groups and organizations during a key period from 1967 to 1969, a struggle that culminated in the establishment of Medgar Evers College in 1971. In 1963, CUNY officials and city politicians had chosen to site a new CUNY community college in Brooklyn (Kingsborough Community College) in the geographically remote, largely white neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, drawing ire and vigorous criticism from civil rights leaders because of the new campus’s inaccessibility for Black and Puerto Rican central Brooklyn residents. Five years later, when CUNY announced plans to establish a new “Community College 7 in or near Bedford-Stuyvesant… oriented to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Community and operated in consultation with the community,” youth and other activists and leaders responded immediately and forcefully and with decided frustration. “Responsible Community Leaders,” wrote Ulysses Jordan, Chair of the Education Committee of the Bedford Stuyvesant Youth in Action Network “… were not consulted by the Educational Structure on both the state and local levels, in respect to programming and the planning stages for the development of this college.” A February 1968 flyer by Youth in Action (YiA), a Bedford-Stuyvesant-based anti-poverty organization, invited Bedford Stuyvesant’s young people to “[s]peak out now,” and “[h]ave your say in planning your community college” at a mass, open meeting at which New York political leaders and CUNY officials would be invited to clarify their plans for the new college and respond to the community’s questions.
In the days and months that followed, those groups and organizations joined forces as the Bedford-Stuyvesant Coalition on Educational Needs and Services (B-SCENS), appointing representatives who would meet with CUNY officials to argue for and collaborate in planning a college that they hoped would fulfill their community’s shared vision of an institution addressed to the priorities and potential of Black and Puerto Rican youth, as this June 1968 Draft Statement for the Bedford-Stuyvesant Coalition on Educational Needs and Services (B-SCENS) reveals. The statement outlines and explains one of B-SCENS’s principal demands: that the new college be a “senior,” four-year degree granting institution, rather than a two-year community college as CUNY had originally planned.
As the Bed-Stuy community’s negotiations with CUNY officials continued in 1968, the group’s leaders also convened and facilitated wide-scale public meetings to engage local leaders, educators and youth expressing and framing demands for the college, and to create a system and structure for active community engagement with and control over the new college. After a year of active negotiations with CUNY officials, the Bedford-Stuyvesant community’s delegated representatives reached an impasse over the community’s demand that Rhody McCoy, a prominent Black educator and leader of the local Community Control movement, be appointed president of the new college. In a Progress Summary to the Community, Al Vann, Chairman of the Bedford-Stuyvesant community’s appointed “Negotiation Team,” responded to community members who had called for compromise with CUNY, detailing his argument that doing so would undermine the community’s right to control their new college.
The Community College 7 collection, curated from the Donald Watkins papers, includes records of educational coalitions and committees that convened to represent Central Brooklyn in the negotiations with CUNY following the announcement of Community College 7. The collection complements the Medgar Evers College collection on the CDHA, curated by Florence Tager, which is drawn largely from the papers of Albert Bowker, Chancellor of CUNY from 1963-1971. Where the Medgar Evers College collection primarily documents CUNY officials’ discussions and actions in planning and establishing the new college, the Community College 7 papers illuminate the Bedford-Stuyvesant community’s influence over and involvement in key elements of those plans. Among these was their successful advocacy for the proposed new college to be established as a four-year degree-granting institution, and for the college’s curriculum to be focused on professional studies programs in healthcare and education. The Community College 7 collection also reveals the diversity of Bedford Stuyvesant’s community leaders’ priorities and aspirations for a college in and for their community, and their perspectives on whether Medgar Evers College had fulfilled their visions.
The Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College Collection
By Gisely Colón López
The CDHA’s Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College collection illustrates the struggle to create one of the first Puerto Rican Studies departments in the United States. Mass student-led mobilizations occurred on university campuses and some high schools during the 1960s and 1970s that contributed to the formation of the multiple academic disciplines we now refer to as Ethnic Studies. Puerto Rican students at CUNY’s Brooklyn College organized and collaborated with mostly African American students to demand admissions policy changes that would more fully integrate the mostly white and middle-class student population at Brooklyn College. While mass protests were happening at Brooklyn College, similar mobilizations also occurred at several CUNY campuses including City College, Hunter, and Queens College. The Young Lords Organization and Black Panther Party were also supportive of the struggles at CUNY.
Pioneering student-activists strategized and organized, often engaging in acts of civil disobedience to demand the creation of what was first an institute and then a department of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College. Puerto Rican and African American student-activists were members of the Puerto Rican Alliance (PRA) and the Brooklyn League of Afro-American Collegians (BLAC) and were supported by a handful of faculty and staff at the college. Student leaders of PRA advocated for their demands during faculty council meetings in an effort to have their demands met by the college administration. The CDHA document “Brooklyn College President’s April 18, 1969, Response to Puerto Rican and African-American Students’ 18 Demands” details both what the students were struggling for and provides context for what students were rebelling against. The first demand, to admit all “Black and Puerto Rican students” who applied to the university, is part of the early student-led movement at CUNY that resulted in the implementation of CUNY’s Open Admissions policy in 1970.
Puerto Rican and African American students attended a Black Panther-led conference in California during the late 1960s. Brooklyn College BLAC and PRA student attendees including Antonio “Tony” Nieves used the information exchange from that conference to help develop both Afro-American and Puerto Rican studies departments at their East Coast campuses. Audio and transcripts from oral historical interviews with Tony Nieves and Dr. Orlando Pile discussing the conference are included in the Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College collection. The oral history interviews were recorded for a documentary film, Making the Impossible Possible (2021), directed by Tami Gold and Pam Sporn and produced by the Alliance for Puerto Rican Education and Empowerment (APREE), an organization founded by several of the pioneering Brooklyn College student-activists.
In addition to his oral history, Tony Nieves contributed to the CDHA collection several black and white photos that he captured during his time as a student at Brooklyn College in 1969. The images capture multiracial and multiethnic expressions of solidarity at the college campus commemorating and celebrating the life of Malcom X. Images such as “Student Activists standing guard at the 1969 flag raising ceremony during Malcolm X Day and Memorial at Brooklyn College'' depict student members of PRA, BLAC, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) standing guard at the flagpole at the Brooklyn College campus protecting the Black Liberation and Puerto Rican flags that were raised as part of the ceremony. Nieves’s photos are also archival footprints connecting the story of Brooklyn College to international struggles such as the movement to decolonize Puerto Rico. The image “Professor Carlos E. Russell with Brooklyn College Students” shows former Brooklyn College student Dylcia Pagan, a Puerto Rican Nationalist who was held as a political prisoner until she received clemency from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Pagan would continue to influence members of the Puerto Rican Alliance more than five decades after its establishment at Brooklyn College.
While dominant narratives about the struggle for ethnic studies around the nation often focus on African American and Mexican/Chicano student movements, the statistically smaller Puerto Rican diaspora in the Northeast was an equally formidable and transformative student-led movement that had a profound impact on US society and on public higher education. Puerto Rican and African American students attending Brooklyn College during the late 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the development of ethnic studies and bilingual education, and were instrumental in integration efforts that created more racially, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse student, faculty and staff populations in the City University system.
The Story of SLAM!
By Lucien Baskin
The Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!), was a student organization active at CUNY in the 1990s and 2000s. SLAM! was founded out of the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts, which was formed in opposition to New York State budget cuts and which organized the 25,000-person strong Shut the City Down protest in March 1995. Students-of-color organizations working on and off campus, including the Student Power Movement and SOUL, also significantly contributed to the political climate out of which SLAM! emerged. SLAM! was active at campuses across the CUNY system, most notably at City College and Hunter College, where SLAM! activists gained control of student government, turning the Hunter student government offices into a hub for organizing in the city.
SLAM! was committed to opposing budget cuts and tuition hikes, and defending CUNY’s open admissions policy; however the organization’s politics extended well beyond a critique of the neoliberalization of CUNY. SLAM! was involved in the abolitionist organizing of the era, helping to plan the 2001 Critical Resistance East conference in New York City and sending busloads of students to Philadelphia for protests in support of freeing political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The organization encouraged leadership of women of color, organized in support of feminist and queer struggles, and stood in solidarity with the Welfare Action Committee at Brooklyn College which supported students on welfare in the wake of welfare reform. SLAM! took part in anti-imperialist struggles in support of Palestine and against the war in Iraq, and students traveled to Chiapas, Mexico to support the Zapatista movement there.
The collection consists of fifteen oral history interviews, all of which were conducted by Professor Amaka Okechukwu, a sociologist at George Mason University, as part of the research for her book, To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019). Professor Okechukwu graciously contributed these oral history interviews to the CDHA. To Fulfill These Rights documents struggles over open admissions and affirmative action at universities across the country, including a chapter on SLAM! and the dismantling of open admissions at CUNY. The oral histories reflect the breadth of SLAM!’s work, as Okechukwu interviewed organizers from multiple CUNY colleges with a diversity of political perspectives, identities, and occupations. For example, Okechukwu interviewed Kazembe Balagun, who has continued to play a critical role in the New York City left since his time in SLAM!, doing important political education work with organizations including the Brecht Forum and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
These oral history interviews capture an important period in the history of CUNY, as activists navigated an increasingly policed and privatized university with hostile administrations and changing student demographics. In this struggle, the vision of the student-led movement for Open Admissions in 1969, and arguably even the original mission of the Free Academy (founded in 1847 and which would become City College), came under attack in the Giuliani administration’s plan for the city. The history of CUNY in the 1990s exemplifies the contested nature of democracy in the city as seen through a public institution filled with radical potential. However, this era of student organizing at CUNY and elsewhere has received too little scholarly attention, despite important recent and forthcoming work by a number of scholars including Anna Zeemont and Joshua Myers. As CUNY continues to face severe racialized austerity, it is critical that histories of CUNY be made accessible to students, workers, and organizers. The story of SLAM! and CUNY in the 1990s is particularly relevant today, and to the work of current campus organizations such as CUNY for Abolition and Safety and Free CUNY which are building a different path forward for our university.
Stephen Brier is a faculty member in the PhD Program in Urban Education, who serves as CDHA Project Historian and Project Director.
Juliet Young, Gisely Colón López, and Lucien Baskin are doctoral students in the Urban Education program at the CUNY Graduate Center.