Authors in Conversation: Brian Jones on The Untold Story of A Student Movement

In The Tuskegee Student Uprising, you argue that the Tuskegee movement is a forgotten part of the story of the broader 1960s movements. By forgetting this story, what have we been missing?

The Tuskegee student uprising is a story that helps us see that Black students have been at the forefront of the struggle for democracy in this country and that the Black Power movement was an extension of the movement for democracy in the U.S. South. Tuskegee student activists can equally and accurately be described as civil rights and Black Power activists. Tuskegee students were involved in the southern struggle against Jim Crow segregation, fought for voting rights, and stood against the U.S. war in Vietnam. They also campaigned to elect candidates in rural Alabama on the platform of a new party that used a black panther as its symbol before it was brought to Oakland and other places. And, amazingly, Tuskegee students successfully campaigned for the first Black sheriff elected in the South since Reconstruction.

That’s why, when two leading lights of Black Power, Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) sat down in 1967 to write a definitive book on that movement, they devoted an entire chapter to Tuskegee. They believed the protests could be a model of humane, democratic governance.

We have other popular associations with Tuskegee – the Tuskegee Airmen, the fateful syphilis experiment, and its founder Booker T. Washington – but this book helps us see something less commonly known: how a powerful student movement emerged in a dramatic series of events, including the off-campus murder of a student activist, student strikes, the occupation of the Board of Trustees meeting, the reaction of the Alabama National Guard, and the temporary closure of Tuskegee’s doors. That’s a different Tuskegee Institute than we usually hear about.

How does the story of Tuskegee student movement connect to what’s going on in schools and colleges today?

The Tuskegee student uprising was not just an off-campus movement. When Tuskegee students turned their attention to their own school, they thought that it also needed to change. Everywhere you look, that is still true. Black students have always been at the forefront of fighting for access to and equity in school at all levels. One of the things I’m doing in this book is showing how the Tuskegee student movement has its own long history that goes back to the school’s founding in the late nineteenth century and is connected to the long Black student movement. It’s about recognizing the way that our schools have been shaped and, in some cases, transformed by students. Black Studies, which paved the way for Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, was a major curricular innovation led by Black students.

The Tuskegee story reminds us of the role that students play in shaping school. Black students in particular have been and are still fighting for change in their schools, at many levels. That doesn’t mean Black students always get things right, or that they’re beyond critique, but it does mean that what today may seem like Black students’ unreasonable demands just might be the outlines of official policy on those same campuses tomorrow.

The Tuskegee students were fighting, among things, for curricular reform. How does that connect to the kinds of debates we’re having today about CRT, book banning, etc.?

Tuskegee, like many schools for Black people, had always been subjected to the kind of extreme book banning and curricular censorship that we’re seeing across the country right now. After the Civil War, Black people sought education as a means of liberation, but when Reconstruction was overthrown, the dominant paradigm became education for socialization, education to teach Black people to stay in their place. Tuskegee Institute attracted funding from northern industrialists and from the State of Alabama because they thought it could “solve” the “race problem” by teaching Black people to be loyal to the post-Reconstruction social order in the South.

My book shows that students can break out of such restrictions. You can try to set up schooling along whatever ideological lines you like, and censor books, but when students show up in numbers, they bring their own ideas with them. They talk to each other, develop their own ambitions and agendas, and, sooner or later, act on them. The first recorded student strike at Tuskegee wasn’t in the 1960s but in the 1890s. They struck in 1896 over not being given enough to eat. Students struck again in 1903 in a challenge to Tuskegee’s curriculum, which they thought wasn’t academic enough, and they complained that their daily schedule didn’t allow enough time for study.

Historically Black colleges and universities have a reputation of being conservative, but they also have produced generation after generation of activist leaders, and that is in part due to the fact that, in the face of dominant white supremacy and anti-communism, HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in the twentieth century preserved a space for freer thinking. For example, HBCUs hired Jewish intellectuals fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe. HBCUs were some of the only spaces in the whole country for interracial intellectual exchange, and open communists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were welcomed as speakers and performers.

The Tuskegee Student Uprising shows us that school isn’t just defined by the leaders or politicians or people who impose an agenda on it. Tuskegee cannot just be defined by the ideas and agenda of Booker T. Washington. Tuskegee students throughout the institution’s history played a role in shaping it. Likewise, all schools are in part defined by the students who show up, and, one way or another, try to make the institution live up to their ambitions. So, while we should oppose the banning of books and curricula, we should understand that such acts aren’t the end of the story. The process of contestation and struggle persists.

What’s your personal connection to this story? What got you interested in Tuskegee’s history in the first place?

I first became interested in Tuskegee because of my experience as an elementary school teacher in Harlem. I started teaching in 2003, right when the movement to privatize public education experienced renewed energy from a philanthropic push to promote charter schools. I found it odd that Black students seemed to be particularly central to the ideological rationale for this effort and that my colleagues, many of whom were also Black, seemed to be demonized as the enemies of Black children. Trying to understand why philanthropists suddenly seemed to care so much about the fate of Black students led me to Tuskegee – the epicenter of similar philanthropic energy after the overthrow of Reconstruction. It seemed to me that there was a way in which these two moments, separated by more than a century, rhymed with each other. The bootstrapping, “grit”-oriented ideas of the most corporate wing of the charter movement bore a certain similarity to the market-oriented, “cast down your bucket” ideas promoted in the South by Booker T. Washington and by extension the Tuskegee Institute.

Reading through the extensive literature on Washington, I saw Tuskegee student protests, letter-writing, petitioning, and even student strikes sprinkled like breadcrumbs everywhere I looked. So, instead of seeing criticism of Washington coming only from someone in the North like W. E. B. Du Bois, it seemed to me important to know more about what students on campus were saying.

Now, it turns out that my dad went to Tuskegee. This was never a major topic of conversation between us. The coincidence only occurred to me after I went down the rabbit hole of reading about Tuskegee. Later, my dad and I decided to take a road trip to Tuskegee, which allowed me to visit the campus and see it through his eyes. I went back to the archives on my own, but that first trip to the Tuskegee archives was with my dad. My plan was to study the student strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those strikes left a mark in the historical record, but it’s quite faint. Then I discovered the explosive events of the Tuskegee student movement in the 1960s. My dad graduated too early to really be a part of that, so the story that we saw unfolding in the pages of the student newspaper together was a surprise to both of us.

How have political struggles changed on campus since the time you write about? Do you think that Black students – or any students – are more or less politically active and engaged today than they were on Tuskegee’s campus in the 1960s?

This history helps us see the present more clearly because it shows us how difficult organizing actually is. The core of any social movement is always small, but there are unique moments when their perspectives and ideas can move larger numbers of students. The Tuskegee student movement is an example of a small number of people who in certain moments are leading nearly the entire student body in protest, but not always. What’s amazing is how often writers in the student newspaper, at the height of the struggle, leading mass marches, complain about how apathetic and apolitical their classmates are.

There is a tendency to look back on previous eras with rose-colored glasses and conclude that people were more united back then or that the problems and solutions were clearer. That kind of nostalgia is very powerful, but ultimately disarming because it makes it harder to figure out what to do in the present when we look around and see so much disunity and despair.

Making our way out of a crisis is always difficult, always requires taking risks, is rarely popular or obvious to most people … until it is. The Tuskegee student movement faced similar obstacles and challenges and setbacks that student activists face today.

---