Developing Their Minds Without Losing Their Soul: Black and Latino Student Coalition-Building in New York, 1965-1969 (Essay‪)‬

This essay focuses on late-1960s African American and Latino student coalition-building on two New York City campuses: Lehman College in the Bronx and City College of New York in Harlem. Based on oral histories, archival documents and printed sources, the two case studies show parallels, contrasts, and linkages between New York City student activism and student movements in other regions. A tentative framework emerges for explaining why the black and brown student movements happened and why they became confrontational. In addition, these case studies provide an understanding of how black and Latino students worked together to fight institutional racism within and beyond their college campuses, the conditions that made these coalitions successful and the reasons they faltered. Black and brown students' class backgrounds and racial-ethnic identities played an important role in shaping the outcome of many late-60s campus radical initiatives, especially those that sought Black-Latino unity. In the late 1960s, young blacks and Latinos both shared impatience with the institutional racism of educational institutions and the resulting cultural marginalization of minority groups. The City College and Lehman College case studies indicate how interethnic political relationships on campuses tended to be strongest, and campus radicalism most impactful, when it was among younger African Americans and Latinos who shared the same class status and ethnic-group identity. (1) Black Power and Brown Power politics, as well as international liberation movements, linked together several different factors that defined late-1960s African American and Hispanic campus radicalism: local campus protests and demonstrations for the establishment of programs in Black and Latino American Studies; increases in black and Latino student admissions, and an increase in the number of black and brown faculty members. In New York, these student movements illustrated the explicit tensions rooted in the limitations of Black Power ideology when it came to inclusion of and sensitivity to Latino perspectives and objectives.