Rallies at State: African American Students React on Campus

This rally at NCSU was inspired by the UNC Chapel Hill Black Awareness Council rally and also called for a free-standing African American Cultural Center.

Within two days of the Technician’s printing of Steven Crisp’s and Jeffrey Rom’s columns, African American students gathered in the Brickyard to protest the Technician and burn copies of the newspaper.  The Brickyard burning of the Technician was one of two student protests inspired by the BAC rally at UNC Chapel Hill to happen at NC State.  On September 22, 1992, another 250 mostly African American students protested at a student government meeting calling for their own free-standing African-American Cultural Center in the mode of the UNC Chapel Hill protests.  In addition, these protesters wanted the Cultural Center to take a more active role in addressing current racial problems on NC State’s campus, rather than focusing its programming on African American history and culture.[1]

The activism of students at both the Brickyard protest and the African American Cultural Center protest represented a growing sense of racial consciousness among African American students at NC State University.  While these students’ activism happened on a smaller scale than the Black Awareness Council rally at UNC Chapel Hill, their protests must still be seen as significant because NCSU was known as a much more conservative campus than UNC Chapel Hill, and one that did not have as rich a history of African American student protest.  These students demanded to have a voice on campus and they stood in direct opposition to the paternalistic, post-racial and sometimes unknowingly racist views of more conservative students on campus.

The reaction to the BAC Rally and to Steven Crisp’s inflammatory column was not limited to student protests on campus alone, but it also played out in an editorial war in the pages of the Technician itself.  While the Technician desperately tried to deny allegations of racism by hiding behind the supposed freedom of columnists to write what they wished, students writing letters to the Technician escalated an already fraught racial climate on campus, with mean-spirited satirical letters, racial name calling, anger, and fear.[2]