About

Analysis

Our project seeks to recognize CBS’s origins and the activism which make the organization what it is today. Black students at Grinnell formed Concerned Black Students (CBS) in the fall of 1967 after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the college. Not much happened that fall, but the need to “do something” intensified in the spring of ’68 when King was assassinated in April.  Before his assassination, multiple black students and faculty reported being verbally harassed and threatened with physical harm in town. Town-gown relations got so bad that a Grinnell College student was attacked and beaten up in his dorm room by a Grinnell townsperson. Murder was the final straw, and black students got serious about organizing. In 1971, black students chained the doors to Burling Library and locked themselves inside. The takeover lasted from 7:15 a.m. until 12:30 p.m., no white people, with the exception of a few administrators, including then-President Glenn Leggett, were admitted to the library. Leggett met with a group of about 10 black CBS members in the president’s office, which was inside Burling at that time. CBS presented him with its “black manifesto,” a list of 10 demands designed to improve campus life for black students and faculty. Demands included boosting black student enrollment to “no less than 200” and establishing a larger black cultural center, a black library in Burling, and black studies major. Many of the demands were not met and many that were met in the past currently do not exist; as of 2017.

For upwards of 50 years, CBS has served as a home for black students during controversies, big and small. It has also been a powerful vehicle for getting the administration and the Grinnell College community at large to consider a black perspective.

Sources and Access

• Library of oral & documented history; BCC Library  

• Black manifesto; Burling Archives

• Yik Yak; BCC Library

• Concerned Black Students Demands; BCC Library

We used Omeka as our digital archive source. Omeka is an open source content management system for online digital collections. We were interested in using this technical source because it allows users to publish and exhibit cultural heritage objects, and extend its functionality with themes and plugins. Our group created a gallery-like a website that uses the photo copies and descriptions as a visual effect to present an of the large volumes of data now available to humanities inquiry. The project is called Reviving the Dream: A Look into Grinnell and the Black Community.  A few items that the digital archive system holds are documents like the original Black Manifesto (1971), pictures from the Burling Take Over (1971), documents from Yik Yak incident (2014), and the Concern Black Students Demands (2015). The reason we choose these documents because they capture a continuous theme in the story of CBS and a snippet of what the black experience is on Grinnell’s Campus.

There were two challenges our grouped faced, and ultimately overcame. One, we wanted to do a larger project, which would include information like testimonies of student stories from recent years and alumni. However, we had to scale down our project and choose the documents, information, knowledge that best represented our end goals. Second, we experienced many difficulties with collaboration. This problem many stemmed for our group members having schedules that did not match in any way, other than class time. So, as an alternative, we utilized every minute we had in class to work on our project, and for the times our group could not meet we split the work into selections then evenly assigned jobs for everyone to do.

As for the future of our project, we know that it will continue. Intercultural Affairs specifically, Jordan Brooks, will we working with students to organize the information in the black library located in the Black Cultural Center. The important information will be archived over the summer and hopefully because our group started an archive system they will store the information there. Ty, Liz, and DJ plan to oversee the running of this archive for the remainder of their careers at Grinnell.