This exhibition was installed at the Independent Media Center in Urbana between May 5 and 15, 2015. From August 2015, different sections of the exhibit will be placed in the custody of the American Indian Studies Program, the La Casa Cultural Latina, and the Student Life and Culture Archives of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drawing on various archives of social movements in Champaign-Urbana, the exhibition opened up multiple points of dialogue between students and the community around ideas of democracy, solidarity and struggle. All images are courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Student Life and Culture Archives, African Activist Archive, eblackcu.net, Erlantz Ortiz, and the American Indian Studies Program archives, curated in collaboration with Noah Lenstra, Anna Trammell, John McKinn and Cristina Lucio. We would like to thank the archivists and staff at each of these institutions for their assistance.
Struggle and Solidarity: A Democratic History of Champaign-Urbana
Last year, the campus and community of Champaign-Urbana confronted several political realities – corporatization of education, carefully motivated attacks on free speech, discrimination against Palestinian and Indigenous scholars, lack of enrollment of students of color, anti-Black police brutality, and militarization of law enforcement.
Such realities are ongoing forms of structural inequality and injustice. In the past, when faced with the severity of injustice, whether here in town or elsewhere in the world, the diverse democratic and progressive people in Champaign-Urbana have responded by organizing collectively. In that process, they have confronted various forms of power, as well as their own internal differences in ideas and approaches. The cultures of protest that emerged here over time, irrespective of ultimate outcomes, contributed to one key thing – the expansion of democratic expression on the ground. Protest has a way of momentarily unifying multiple people and ideas. The clearest outcome of protest, however, is the expansion of the space available for new ideas, and the greater willingness of ordinary people to engage with dissent.
This exhibition invokes some moments in the past when the campus and community responded to political injustice with equally political forms of protest. This exhibit invokes such a history of democratic struggle and solidarity, which we, as members of the Transnational Solidarity Initiative, came to learn a lot from. The movements covered by the exhibit are by no means exhaustive. For example, the activities of various organized labor unions in town, the campaign against imperialism in Central America, the C-U Iranian Student Association’s support of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, or the first attempt to plan a National March on Washington for LGBT rights at the Illini Union in 1973 are all examples of the immensely diverse stories that C-U has been a part of but which we could not cover, for lack of time and resources. However, the exhibit covers a lot of ground between 1965 and 2006, beginning with the Civil Rights movement, and ending with images from the anti-Chief mobilizations in 1991-94 and 2004.
Exhibit A, curated with Cristina Lucio, shows images from the pages of La Carta. La Carta was a student newspaper run by Latino/a students which rallied in solidarity with Native students against the Chief, and campaigned for increasing Latino/a student enrollment, besides reporting regularly on various people’s movement and struggles of Indigenous peoples in Central America. Attempts are underway to revive the newspaper today.
Such realities are ongoing forms of structural inequality and injustice. In the past, when faced with the severity of injustice, whether here in town or elsewhere in the world, the diverse democratic and progressive people in Champaign-Urbana have responded by organizing collectively. In that process, they have confronted various forms of power, as well as their own internal differences in ideas and approaches. The cultures of protest that emerged here over time, irrespective of ultimate outcomes, contributed to one key thing – the expansion of democratic expression on the ground. Protest has a way of momentarily unifying multiple people and ideas. The clearest outcome of protest, however, is the expansion of the space available for new ideas, and the greater willingness of ordinary people to engage with dissent.
This exhibition invokes some moments in the past when the campus and community responded to political injustice with equally political forms of protest. This exhibit invokes such a history of democratic struggle and solidarity, which we, as members of the Transnational Solidarity Initiative, came to learn a lot from. The movements covered by the exhibit are by no means exhaustive. For example, the activities of various organized labor unions in town, the campaign against imperialism in Central America, the C-U Iranian Student Association’s support of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, or the first attempt to plan a National March on Washington for LGBT rights at the Illini Union in 1973 are all examples of the immensely diverse stories that C-U has been a part of but which we could not cover, for lack of time and resources. However, the exhibit covers a lot of ground between 1965 and 2006, beginning with the Civil Rights movement, and ending with images from the anti-Chief mobilizations in 1991-94 and 2004.
Exhibit A, curated with Cristina Lucio, shows images from the pages of La Carta. La Carta was a student newspaper run by Latino/a students which rallied in solidarity with Native students against the Chief, and campaigned for increasing Latino/a student enrollment, besides reporting regularly on various people’s movement and struggles of Indigenous peoples in Central America. Attempts are underway to revive the newspaper today.
Exhibit B, curated with Noah Lenstra, invokes a heterogeneous history of African-American struggles in Champaign-Urbana by connecting images from Black Power mobilizations in town along with Civil Rights campaigns around Black participation in elections, desegregation and issues of labor discrimination in businesses like J.C. Penney’s, and better housing for the urban poor by the People’s Poverty Board.
Exhibit C extends the connections between Black Power struggles and emerging coverage of US imperialism in Cuba, Vietnam and South America between 1965 and 1975. When the realities of the mishandling of Project 500 became a political issue, students actively debated how to improve the project, end racial discrimination on campus, and hold the University accountable for its actions. After 252 students were arrested, majority of whom were Black, for protesting the inadequacies in Project 500, the Student Congress and Black Student Association came together to strike, leading to cancellation of classes with demonstrations by over five thousand students, on October 15, 1969. Depicting the rise of the New Left and the political campaigns of the Peace and Freedom Party, the Students for a Democratic Society and the Radical Union, through newspapers like Walrus, Free Prairie Press and The Geek, this section shows the connections created between opposition to imperialist actions overseas, and the military draft and racist police brutality inside U.S. borders. The ways in which students reported on struggles in Urbana as well as those in nearby cities like Carbondale and Danville suggest a vibrant culture of reportage, reading, and solidarity work on campus. A poem by M.P.L.A. revolutionary Agostinbo Neto and the invocation of the Kent State University student uprising in the same frame as Vietnam and Champaign also signal the diverse genealogies of this historical moment.
Exhibit D, curated with Anna Trammell, pays more attention to the struggle against the Vietnam War and the Free Speech movement from the late 1960s, when the effects of the anti-communist McCarthy era Clabaugh Act of 1948 were most harshly felt. After the ROTC lounge at the university was firebombed in February 1970, and two firebombs were found in Altgeld Hall, it was clear that radical left-wing student activism was becoming more militant. The images here capture the campaign to remove the ILLIAC from campus, and the opposition to the recruiting of students by General Electric. Student activism also became more electorally engaged, as the Free Speech movement which began in Berkeley took on different local iterations. The SLATE campaign in Champaign-Urbana took positions against racism and increasing tuition alongside demands for democratically run cooperatives. After the Air Force recruiting office was bombed on March 9, 1970, the National Guard intensified its presence on campus. Curfews imposed by 700 National Guard were broken by students organizing peacefully, and students circulated pamphlets of dos and don’ts in the case of police brutality. Boycotting businesses working with corporations invested in imperial war, besides strikes and petitions, became a popular strategy of students. Besides the images of Freedom Parades and Anti-War demonstrations on the Quad and in the streets of Champaign, the exhibit also shows an article analyzing Palestine in the context of then contemporary post-67 Zionism, written by Muhammed Ibrahim, who taught Linguistics at the university, and a collage from a Women’s Liberation special issue of an underground newspaper that engaged with the radical ideas emerging from within the second wave of feminist activity in the U.S. Ed Pinto, member of the Radical Union, won the Undergraduate Student Association elections in 1970, and wrote a damning and cynical response to the University on the cover of Free Prairie Press, which closes this exhibit.
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Exhibit E connects two different forms of engagement that the campus and community has had with legacies of settler colonialism. In the case of apartheid South Africa, the Champaign Urbana Coalition Against Apartheid and other anti-apartheid groups campaigned strongly to force the university to divest from companies which were working in South Africa. This involved calling the Board of Trustees ‘allies of apartheid’, an allegation that rings true even today. This vibrant campaign made connections with the Pan-African Congress – Mzonke Xusa of the PAC spoke on campus on 6th October 1978. March 1979 saw Michael Mawema of the Zimbabwe African National Union talk at Gregory Hall, and Dumisani Kumalo of the American Committee on Africa addressed a massive divestment rally on the quad in 1984. As South Africa approached the end of apartheid in 1994, another campaign around the caricature and cultural discrimination of Native American lives took off on campus. The figure of Chief Illiniwek, an appropriated and caricatured mascot of the University of Illinois, which perpetuated white supremacy at the expense of the death and displacement of Indigenous communities due to settler colonialism, was criticized and openly opposed by students and faculty. This coalition, led by Native scholars as well as students and faculty of color, faced deep opposition in the years spanning 1991 and 1994, when the Illinois state senate voted to keep the Chief as a mascot. During that time, students chose to start boycotting businesses which sold Chief merchandise, and the University of Iowa refused to allow the Chief to accompany Illinois sporting teams that visited Iowa. The campaign found support from Native American activist and Illinois alumnus Charlene Teters as well as Indigenous scholar Beverly Singer who termed the Chief a “wolf in sheep’s clothing…who dances like an android cheerleader” in a speech on campus in 1991. In a profound act of solidarity, Black students staged a play called ‘They Landed at Plymouth’ that connected the colonial pasts faced by Indigenous, Black and Latino students at the University. The closing images, provided by John McKinn, show faces from the demonstrations in 2004 which, combined with pressure from the NCAA, finally led to the "retirement" of Chief Illiniwek. Nonetheless, the Chief continues to be an everyday presence in UIUC campus life.
And finally, here are some of the images from the archives that did not make it to the exhibition!
And here are more documents from the struggle against Apartheid South Africa by the C-U Coalition against Apartheid.
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Finally, we would like to note that the exhibit, as a whole, does not assume either coherence or equivalence between different struggles and campaigns. It is a slice of the past that frames and connects the larger struggle to expand space for dissent and democracy on the ground. It is at once an invocation, an inventory, a repertoire and an act of critical remembering.
We hope you enjoyed it. Please share with us any thoughts on how you interpreted this exhibit at [email protected]
We hope you enjoyed it. Please share with us any thoughts on how you interpreted this exhibit at [email protected]