Cultural Center

     Following a meeting between Carroll, Don Bell, president of the Society of Afro-American Culture (SAAC), and other student leaders with Chancellor Caldwell, Dean Banks Talley announced the university’s decision to allocate the entire first floor of the Print Shop to SAAC for a cultural center. In a letter to Bell, Talley declared that Bell’s cultural center proposal was “ambitious and deserving [of] an opportunity to [succeed].” In addition to the Print Shop, Talley announced that university employees would be assigned various tasks to help promote, staff, and develop the new center. Throughout the 1973-1974 academic year, student newspapers and magazines helped raise awareness of the proposed cultural center on campus as the articles sought to hold administrators accountable for students’ concerns. In 1974 African American students finally had a cultural center and a space to call their own. Terry Carroll’s request for SAAC’s use of the Print Shop was the only one of his four-points that university administrators fulfilled.

     SAAC’s struggle to obtain an African American cultural center demonstrated the difficulties and criticisms African American students encountered on NC State’s campus in the 1970s. With a population of approximately two-hundred and fifty students in 1973-1974, African Americans worked together to solve their problems and create a community on campus. The Quail Roost conference allowed African American students the opportunity to speak with white student leaders face-to-face and to air their grievances in the presence of administrators and counselors. It was this conference that changed the minds’ and attitudes’ of white student leaders to support the proposed cultural center. It is impossible to determine whether SAAC could have secured the use of the entire floor of the Print Shop without the support of white students or if white students’ support of the center influenced the university’s decision to create space for a cultural center. However, Jean Jackson’s March 13, 1974 Technician article “Request met: Talley gives black students first floor Print Shop” makes it seem as if Carroll’s four-point request served as a catalyst for the center’s approval.

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