Last Sunday, the assistant pastor of the church I attend here in Dallas, Texas, preached a message that had the main tagline, “Don’t quit until you get what you came for.” He illustrated the story of Claudette Colvin, the young, dark skinned black girl from Montgomery, Ala., who inspired the people of the NAACP, Montgomery Improvement Association and the Women’s Political Council to start the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. He talked about how her tremendous resilience and tenacity was a part of a long history of black people in that city who refused to give up their seats to appease white supremacy and how ultimately all of those people’s work led to the transit system being desegregated.
I connected with Rev. Damien Durr’s message on several levels, but particularly because of what took place at my beloved alma mater the week before. When I spoke to D’Khorvillyn Tyus ’19 the Sunday before the Galpin Call-in, she explained to me the current campus climate around the issues of race and equity. What she told me deeply reminded me of the same feelings I felt my junior year at Wooster when I convened a small group of student leaders, from various justice-centered organizations, in the BSA lounge to discuss whether or not we should stage another major protest at the College about the issues that concerned us.
Earlier in my junior year, student leaders had met with Interim-President Georgia Nugent and then Chairman of the Board of Trustees Bill Longbrake and had presented a list of demands focused on bettering the College. The document listed demands about divesting from the prison industrial complex, requiring cultural competency training for faculty, staff and students and even protected housing for marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ folks. While a few of those demands were met and committees were formed to tackle the issues we listed, a vast majority of them were never brought up again. This caused frustration and pushed us to think of what could we do to fix the problems the College had.
I believe that the same spirit of frustration that I and others, now alumni of the College, had in 2016, is resting on the current students at Wooster. They are sick and tired of students being brutally beaten on Beall Avenue. They are sick and tired of professors teaching racially charged content with no concern for those who actually experience racism. They are sick and tired of facing housing disputes with the Office of Residence Life despite the issue being solved in 1989. Students saw no other way to remedy this sickness than to occupy the doctor’s office and demand that the doctor see them and fix it.
The demands brought forth by student leaders last week were not a surprise to the administration. They were not just told to them in the 2015-16 academic year but also by student leaders under President Grant Cornwell’s tutelage, and in 1989 during the Galpin Takeover, before that in 1971 during the homecoming boycott, and even stretching back to 1969 in the black manifesto. The spirit of discontentment with equity at Wooster has carried over several generations just like the spirit that existed in Montgomery, Ala.
The administration must know that the spirit of frustration and discontentment will continue to inhabit students if their top priority is not the priority of justice. Students must know that alumni are always ready to lend a helping hand in the fight for justice. As we saw last week, alumni were right there, alongside students, rooting for them to turn the system upside down. The last count I heard, over $400 was donated by alumni and friends of the College as they stood their ground in Galpin Hall. Lastly, as a collective, students, alumni, friends and faculty, must all realize that we must not quit in the quest to create a better and more equitable Wooster, we need to get what we came for.
Chadwick Smith, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at CSmith17@wooster.edu.