More on Student Activism

Following up on the previous post "Is Student Activism Dead?":

For an article in our April 2006 special 35th Anniversary edition of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, reporter Shawn Chollette interviewed several African-American college students from diverse backgrounds, regions, and institutions around the country about the scene on campus and the concerns of the peers.

While the two-part Today's Black Collegians feature was not specifically about political / social activism, Chollette did ask his subjects about political concerns on campus. We were interested to hear students describe just how powerfully Hurricane Katrina -- in patricular, the fiasco in responding to the devastation in New Orleans well after the storm -- had motivated their peers even on campuses that were not in the affected Gulf region.

The disaster seems to have reawakened a national consciousness of race and class disparities that, as author Anne Rice observes in her own commentary, were always a part of life in multicultural New Orleans. The effect, however, seems to have been particularly pronounced among African-American students everywhere, especially as they have had opprotunities to interact with peers who had been displaced and found accommodations on their campuses.

The impulse to provide community service or charitable donations to assist in Hurricane relief and rebuilding, though commendable, is not the same as activism. One question we hope to explore in a series of upcoming readings later this year is whether or not current events -- including the Gulf disasters -- have had a widespread, lasting effect on students' interest and engagement in the political sphere.

Could Katrina be contributing to social seachange that we will look back on later and recognize as a distinct generational Movement?

We don't have the answers, but again the editors will be inviting feedback from our readers and site visitors.

"Is Student Activism Dead?"

TBC's editors have been pleased this summer to be working with our new editorial intern, Alexia Robinson. A promising young journalist with a degree from Florida A&M University, Alexia was selected to serve as our first intern through our new special arrangement with Black College Wire.

Alexia has been helping us with a host of tasks related to our comprehensive summer site redesign project, but we're also excited about a planned series of articles she will launch next month examining the state of activism among African American college students.

The series homepage will be here, at Series: Activism and Today's Black Collegians, and will explore the question: "Are today’s students less committed to important social, political and world concerns than were past generations?"

The idea for the series came about in reaction to specific campus demonstrations Alexia observed while a student at FAMU, as well as discussions with her peers about different types and levels of political commitment shown by different generations of Black students. Specifically, her studies of African American history and recent anniversaries of a number of civil rights landmark events left her wondering if some of the older folks who criticize her generation were right. Are today's students too materialistic and media- and gadget-obsessed to be concerned about politics and social justice? Or, is it just that today's students have eschewed sit-ins and rallies for more subtle methods; do they just express their concerns and passions in a different way?

In any case, we're looking forward to the series, and invite interested visitors to stop by and tell us what you think on this issue.

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