"African American life is like all the truest stories of the human condition: it is a blend of the marvelous and the terrible, the joyful and the painful, the ugly and the beautiful."
—John S. Wright, BEE ’68, MA ’71, PhD ’77

What year did you come to the University of Minnesota and what brought you here? I came as a freshman in the fall of 1963, at age 16. I had graduated from Robbinsdale High School, then the largest high school in the state with more than 3,000 students. I was the only Black student in a graduating class of 800. Because I was fortunate to be part of an accelerated cohort, I graduated early. But I was not the first generation in my family to come to the University. My father, Boyd Wright, and his younger sister, my Aunt Martha Wright, had come to the University in 1934. He entered the School of Mortuary Science, and she what was then called the School of Technology. 

My aunt was the president of the first Black student organization at the University, the Council of Negro Students, created in 1936 and '37 to confront the Jim Crow policies of [then-President] Lotus Coffman and his administration and members of other staff and faculty and student organizations on campus at the time.

Because my childhood education was so isolating, I really deeply wanted to become part of a much more diverse community.

Because my childhood education was so isolating--we left the city in 1954 to move out to my grandparents' farm in Robbinsdale--I really deeply wanted to become part of a much more diverse community. I gave serious thought to going to one of the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). And my family had ties to those as well. But none of the HBCUs had an engineering program that could compare with that here at the University. So, I followed my father and my aunt, who had been here a generation earlier.

Was there something that nevertheless surprised you when you got here? Well, I had come thinking that I was going to encounter Black folks on a significant scale. Instead, there were just a handful of Black students on campus—fewer than 100 that we could count at the time. I was the only Black student in all of my engineering classes.

Outside my classroom experience, the small group of Black students was really critical for me in terms of the social and socialization processes of coming to campus. And I early on became strongly attracted to the group of Black athletes who were on campus.

The University had broken the color bar in the Big Ten in terms of intercollegiate athletics just a few years earlier when [head football coach] Murray Warmath began recruiting Black athletes from the Deep South to join the University's football program. That brought Sandy Stephens, Carl Eller, Bobby Bell, and a long list of others here, and in 1960 and ‘61 brought the University Rose Bowl appearances and a national championship.

Lou Hudson, Archie Clark, Don Yates, and others, were the stars of the University's basketball team in those days.

Let’s go forward to the events of 1969. What was it like for you at that time to be maroon and gold, and Black? I have a hard time making that jump you just made, because those were tumultuous years. One of my signal memories from my freshman semester in the fall of ’63, of course, was the assassination of John Kennedy in Dallas. In April of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave an address on the St. Paul campus to a crowd of over 4,000. Our student organization, called STRAP—an acronym for Students for Racial Progress—brought Dr. King here. The following month we brought Stokely Carmichael, one of the most charismatic leaders of the Black Power Movement, to campus and he gave an address to a packed Williams Arena.

The years in between had been filled with the battles that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965. And because of the pervasive influence of the Vietnam War, we—we young men, anyway—all lived under the shadow of the military draft and the specter of being drafted into that onerous and, for me, unconscionable war in Southeast Asia. Those were also years in which the old imperialist colonial system was crumbling, and newly independent nations were emerging all across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Third World. So, our consciousness was being forged by events occurring off campus, which were channeled into our campus experience at the same time.

The 1969 occupation of Morrill Hall led to the creation of the Department of African American & African Studies, one of the first in the U.S.
Photo courtesy University of Minnesota Archives.

How has that changed, or not changed, in the 50 years since the Morrill Hall takeover? The specific genesis of the Morrill Hall takeover lay in the assassination of Dr. King on April fourth in 1968, a Friday. The country exploded and there were major urban rebellions in over 100 cities. The National Guard and the Army had to be called out because the country was in turmoil.

Our Black student organization met early that following week to decide what kind of response we could make that would be constructive—that would both honor Dr. King and contribute to progressive change at the University. The group asked me to draft a response, which I did. It was in the form of seven demands that we presented to the Malcolm Moos administration at the end of that week. 

The University mounted a task force, as might be expected. But over the next eight months, the task force worked in the labyrinthine, serpentine ways that Universities do. And when we again met with the administration in January of ’69, it was clear that little progress of any substantive, satisfactory sort had been made. That’s when we decided that we had no alternative but to employ non-violent direct action in the spirit of Dr. King and take over the administration building, which we did in mid-January of ’69.
Looking back now, after over half a century, that event helped transform the University in a variety of ways. Looking back now, at over half a century, that was an event that helped transform the University of Minnesota campus in a variety of ways. A series of new academic programs all came in the wake of the takeover: the first Department of American Indian Studies in the country, the Department of Women's Studies, the Department of Chicano Studies. The creation of the very first admissions and recruitment programs to deal with the needs of Black students, students of color, and the economically underpriviledged emerged. The MLK program in the College of Liberal Arts. All these things helped transform social and academic life at the University. 

Where do you think the University is today, seen through that lens? We have made significant progress. But most of the programs and departments that came out of that process are still understaffed and underfunded. The ambivalent and sometimes schizophrenic response of Minnesotans to the issues of race and cultural diversity and economic disadvantage still affect public life broadly across this state, and on the University campus as well.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, what do you think, or hope, the lasting impact will be? Ultimately, statutory reforms to eradicate the legal impunities and longstanding courtroom exonerations of police misuse of deadly force against unarmed citizens. And more humane police training. The fact that two of the four officers involved are graduates of the University's criminal justice program suggests that the University training in that regard is still inadequate to prevent such atrocities from taking place. If police officers can continue to justify acts of murderous atrocity simply because they can say they are afraid or feel threatened, there will never be an end to such horrors. 

What is something members of the Retirees Association could do to help make Minnesota a better place for all? One of the warmest memories that I have, in terms of my extra-classroom activities during my undergraduate years, involves my participation in a student group called the Panel of Americans. It brought together students from different racial, religious, ethnic, and national backgrounds to talk about issues of American pluralism, which we did both on campus and with off-campus communities. We’ve got to find ways now to create some kind of context in which young people can have programmatic and protected arenas for those kinds of exchanges. 

One of my passions in high school and college was chess. And while I didn't become a member of the University team, I played with members of the chess team on a regular basis during those years. And table tennis. We had some marvelous table tennis players, Olympic level. Those were joyous, recreational worlds that were a counterpoint to the vestiges of Jim Crow on campus. Another of my recreational pastimes, or vices, depending on how you see it, was playing pool. I won the University pocket billiards championship four times during my undergraduate career. And I played world and national champions on four occasions for public audiences. Twice I played Willy Mosconi. He was the greatest pool player who ever lived and who, in the film, The Hustler, racked the balls for Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. 

Those were playful, joyous, recreational worlds that were a counterpoint to the moments when the vestiges of Jim Crow on the campus reared their ugly heads.

Too often discussions of the experiences of students of color, of African Americans in particular, get mired in the mistaken notion that these stories and experiences are all “sackcloth and ashes”—endless misery and pain and suffering. That's a gross distortion that denies the ongoing resourcefulness of the human spirit and imagination.

African American life and history is like all the richest stories of the human condition. It is a blend of the marvelous and the terrible, the joyful and the painful, the ugly and the beautiful—always in a complex and ofttimes contradictory mix. That’s the essence of the blues tradition at the root of so much American popular culture, of learning to laugh to keep from crying or, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, how to “hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.” 

If this audience is looking for varied, empathetic guidance about African American life that will open that worldview to them, I heartily recommend a wonderful book published years ago by QBR: The Black Book Review called Sacred Fire: 100 Essential Black Books.

The story of Jack Trice
Jack Trice was the lone Black football player on the Iowa State team back in the early 1920s. In October 1923, Iowa State played the University of Minnesota here. Minnesota was vastly favored, but Jack Trice was such a tremendous player that he had the Cyclones toe-to-toe with the Gophers. 

Well, the Gopher football team tried to get Jack Trice out of the game and managed to break his collar bone early in the game. But he refused to be taken out. He continued to play until he tried a somewhat dangerous defensive maneuver, and the Gopher football team trampled him. The Iowa State players would later say the Gophers trampled him to death. Jack Trice died two days later. There was, of course, an uproar. But the story was lost over the years until the Black student groups at Iowa State revived the Jack Trice Story, and in 1997 the Cyclone Stadium in Ames was renamed in his honor.

One month after the 1923 game with Iowa State, Minnesota’s Homecoming Parade included a Ku Klux Klan float. That story is still unresolved. But it appears in This Free North, a half-hour TPT documentary on the history of Black folks at the University of Minnesota.

—John Wright