This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative student across the UCSB campus. The following creative nonfiction essay won Second Place in the prose category.
Instruments of Change: The North Hall Takeover of 1968
BY SHANNON JACKSON
The North Hall Takeover. UCSB El Gaucho Newspaper, October 1968.
A mural display at UCSB’s North Hall commemorates the North Hall Takeover.
In the breezeway of UC Santa Barbara’s North Hall, passersby are dwarfed by enormous black-and-white photographs on either side. In one, two young boys face each other, one Black and one White. Only the White boy’s face is visible—the Black boy’s fists are balled at his sides. Two other photographs parallel this interaction: a Black student and a White student separated by a window; a Black man walking past a White police officer. This is the A Vision of Change exhibition, a collection composed mostly of university artifacts curated by students, faculty, and staff in 2012. These moments, frozen and wall-mounted, capture within them the racial tension that permeates Black history at UCSB, something that, prior to 2012, the university had long ignored. A Vision of Change was born out of the Black Student Union’s desire to end the silence, to fill it with acknowledgement of past Black students’ contributions to the school. They knew what they were up against: a silence so dense and oppressive that to this day, the overwhelming majority of students, Black or otherwise, have never heard of the North Hall Takeover. Strategically placed at the site of the event, A Vision of Change is meant to change that.
So is this story.
Between 6 and 6:30 am on Monday, October 14th, 1968, members of the Black Student Union entered North Hall and made for the Computer Center. The main target? UCSB’s million-dollar IBM System/360 Model 65. In 1968, this computer was the powerhouse of the school, containing irreplaceable data such as student records, which made it the perfect hostage. During the two-week-long planning stage, several BSU members had agreed to take over the building. But that morning their number was only 12: James Earl “Rashidi” Johnson; Thomas “Tom” Crenshaw; Arnold Ellis; Murad Rahman (formerly Maurice Rainey); Dalton Nezey; Ernest Sherman; Booker Banks; Michael “X” Harris; Ryan Vallejo Kennedy; Stan Lee; Don Pearson; and Randy Stewart. They arrived armed—chains for the doors, hammers and wrenches for the technology. Having already conducted reconnaissance on the building, the men knew North Hall inside and out. The plan was simple: get in and don’t leave until their eight demands were met. Once granted, the demands —which ranged from opening a college of Black Studies to hiring a Black female Education Opportunity Program counselor — would be the first steps towards inclusion of UCSB’s Black population. With the element of surprise on their side, nothing stood in their way.
Except something did. Despite the early hour and the occupiers’ hopes, the Computer Center was by no means empty. Diligently tending to the equipment were student computer technicians who did not initially understand the gravity of the situation. When told by the occupiers that North Hall was being taken over, they shrugged their shoulders, undisturbed. “You don’t mind if we stay here, do you?” they asked. The occupiers very much did. But they remained cordial, calmingly requesting that the techs exit the building, until one of the 12 decided that enough was enough and informed them that if they did not leave, they “[wouldn’t] be doing science for anybody, anywhere.” The occupiers then escorted the technicians out with a fire extinguisher aimed at their backs. Once the doors were barricaded by chains and chairs, Phase One was complete. The building was theirs. Now all they had to do was wait for the public to notice.
On that Monday, standing amid an ever growing throng of onlookers in the North Hall courtyard, transfer student Cynthia George was very, very afraid. She knew, more than the average student, that the occupiers were BSU members just like her. But as the size of the crowd grew, so too mounted her fear. As she later recounted at a 2015 panel discussion commemorating the Takeover, George was riddled with anxiety as she considered what she might have to do if things turned ugly. She was not a large woman, nor a fighter in any capacity. But she knew, deep in her soul, that if she had to, she would fight to protect the men inside North Hall. As time ticked by, worry gripped the occupiers as tightly as it did George. Would law enforcement forcibly enter the building? Would the occupiers come out alive or on stretchers? Or, if for whatever reason the school did not respond with violence, would they be suspended?
News of the Takeover spread throughout campus by word of mouth. Like crows who’d spotted a generous handout, students flocked to the building in droves. Out of a second-story window, the occupiers hung a sign declaring the building’s interim name: Malcolm X Hall. One of the 12, Booker Banks, is remembered to have been instrumental in communicating to the public the occupiers’ intentions. Armed with a PA system and a spectacular command of argumentative language, he made clear why the occupation was happening. UCSB’s BSU was going on the offensive — it was their turn to take part in the battle that the rest of Black America had been fighting for a long, long time.
In the words of Murad Rahman, another of the 12 occupiers, 1968 was “the year that rocked the world.” That year, Black Americans in particular experienced a series of jarring blows, from the cold-blooded assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the FBI crack down on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. However, the killings of civil rights leaders did not smother cries for justice as the perpetrators had hoped. Instead, the cries materialized as righteous anger, indignation, and action. The UCSB campus, like many other UCs in the 60s, was a hotbed of youth-led protests and political activity. Anti-ROTC opinion pieces, as well as updates on sit-ins and picket lines at campuses like UC Berkeley, dominated El Gaucho newspaper’s front pages while articles on UCSB sports teams resided at the back. It was clear that students’ eyes were opening to the world around them, few more so than the Black student body.
In the spring of 1968, months before the North Hall Takeover, the Afro-American Student Union issued a document to the UC administration titled “Proposal For Establishing a Black Studies Program to the University of California.” This attempt to make the university recognize Black Studies as a legitimate field of study was part of the Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s, which emphasized Black self-determination and considered education on Black history a key component in achieving that goal. This attempt was ignored.
But racism at UCSB was not always as overt as that. The quieter, subtler ways in which it manifested during the years before the Takeover were arguably more insidious. Campbell Hall screened racist films such as the Our Gang (The Little Rascals) short “A Lad An’ His Lamp.” Cynthia George recalls her white hallmates at the Santa Cruz dormitory intentionally showering at the same time as her to find out if she had a tail. Black athletes were served meals after their White teammates had finished eating, had their luggage disappear during trips away, and were refused service at hotels, all while Athletic Director Jack “Cactus” Curtice not only turned a blind eye, but also engaged in casual racism himself. The ire that Black athletes felt towards Coach Curtice resulted in a petition accusing the athletic department of racism. It garnered 4,000 signatures and was swiftly ignored by the Intercollegiate Athletic Commission. This proved to be one of the final straws for UCSB’s Black population—something had to be done.
Cynthia George remembers that by noon, the crowd appeared to be at its peak. About 1000 students overcrowded North Hall’s courtyard, jostling and sweating beneath the hot Santa Barbara sun. Along with student activist Booker Banks’ steady voice explaining the reasons for the Takeover, music filled the surrounding area to placate the observers. Despite a lack of police presence, or any serious attempt to remove the occupiers, George could not shake a sense of unease. Not until she saw the grapes.
On the front page of the October 15th edition of El Gaucho and beneath Editor Jim Bettinger’s “Blacks Take North Hall: Sixteen Control Computer Center Throughout Day” article is a much shorter one: “Mexican-Americans Picket Over Grapes at Berkeley.” The story is about the 20-odd UC Berkeley students who picketed in front of Berkeley’s University Hall, publicly declaring their support for the then ongoing Delano Grape Strike. The local Filipino-American and Latino communities had united to demand better pay and working conditions for farm workers as a whole. It was not only a fight for farm labor justice, but the unification of minority groups that were stronger together than they were apart. To fight for one’s brothers and sisters is to fight for oneself; the Black community knows this all too well.
One of the most powerful tools of the strike was a five-year-long boycott of table grapes. At the time of the Takeover, the strikers were three years in. So, when lunchtime came around at UC Santa Barbara and spectators sent the North Hall occupiers a bag of groceries that happened to have grapes inside, George watched the fruit sail out of an upper-story window. All she could say was “Damn!” From that moment on, the tense atmosphere of the crowd shifted. In making their stance on the Delano Grape Strike known, the North Hall occupiers had also made clear that the Takeover was no longer only about Black justice. It was an act of solidarity against a common oppressor, a UC system that upheld the values of the Establishment, which shunned those who were not of it.
Shannon Jackson is a third-year UCSB student majoring in English.
In a word, the Takeover’s end was anticlimactic. Chancellor Vernon Cheadle elected not to use force to remove the occupiers, instead conceding to seven of their eight demands. He notably refused to fire Coach Curtice. After 12 hours of occupation, the 12 BSU members exited the building. Rather than receiving a real punishment, they were offered a “suspended suspension,” meaning they would be suspended only if something like the Takeover happened again. Think pieces written by students and faculty inundated El Gaucho’s editorial section in the days that followed. The largest point of contention about the occupation appears to have been its morality. Was it the right thing to do? Some argued that it was nothing more than a juvenile tantrum over unproven accusations of racism. Others were sympathetic to the occupiers’ cause, coming to the conclusion that it was high time for changes to be made at UCSB. Today, we can only take on the role of the observer, looking at the Takeover from the outside, just as Cynthia George had done.
Perhaps the question to be asked is not “Was it right?” Instead, it might be “Did it work?” For we see the fruits of their labor in more ways than one. The Department of Black Studies, the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, the Department of Asian American Studies, the Department of Feminist Studies—all of these exist because the North Hall 12 called attention to the need for ethnic studies programs. On the third floor of South Hall, their names hang on the wall in front of the Department of Black Studies main office, a testament to the instruments of change that all 12 proved to be.