The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History by Brian Jones (review)

Reviewed by: The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History by Brian Jones Alexandra Pasqualone The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History. By Brian Jones. New York: New York University Press, 2022. ix + 253 pp. Hardcover 75. 00, paperback 22. 00. Likening the South's freed people to a ship lost at sea, Booker T. Washington implored Black Southerners to prioritize participation in the industrial South and to avoid the "folly" of questioning social equality in his 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" address. That message helped the Tuskegee founder cultivate white support for his institution's emphasis on vocational training and political conservatism. This well-known perception of Tuskegee is a far cry from assertions of the institution as a future "center of Black Power" less than a century later (119). Illuminating Tuskegee's complicated history of activism, The Tuskegee End Page 335 Student Uprising reveals how postsecondary students, faculty, and administrators came to understand Black Power of the 1960s. The 1966 assassination of a Tuskegee student at the hands of a white man incited calls for a "Black University, " a concept that combined requests for institutional change alongside concerns for the global Black freedom movement (141). Less than two years later, student demands culminated in a standoff between nearly three hundred students, twenty-five trustees and staff, and Alabama National Guardsmen. Centering contestation over Black Power and politicized Blackness during the late 1960s, The Tuskegee Student Uprising contributes to scholarship examining relationships between educational institutions and activism, including Ibram Rogers' The Black Campus Movement, Stefan Bradley's Upending the Ivory Tower, and Shirletta Kinchen's Black Power in the Bluff City. The opportunity to reconsider Washington's legacy is not the only reason Tuskegee is a rewarding site for study. Tuskegee also complicates the meaning of Black Power within educational spaces, revealing the irony of a Black Power movement emerging within an institution whose founding relied heavily on the sympathies of white elites. Boycott threats, the creation of university committees pushing for institutional reform, and the 1968 occupation of Dorothy Hall propelled student appeals for updated academic offerings, more effective professors, and additional scholarships. Yet alongside such efforts to keep pace with white society, students demanded a new collective system built by and for Black students. Black Power at Tuskegee, Jones argues, merged these "disparate impulses" (18). Using a "telephoto lens, " Jones situates campus activism amid local tensions, national civil rights efforts, and global anxieties around communism, the Vietnam War, and international liberation movements. Chapter 1 covers early activism at Tuskegee in the eight-year period from 1896 to 1904. Jumping forward in time, Jones condenses his temporal focus in subsequent chapters, from 1960 to 1966, then to the years 1966 and 1967, and finally to a detailed examination of heightened student activism in 1968. Seeking to understand how and why tensions resulted in a standoff, Jones reveals that by 1968 Tuskegee experienced "less than cautious political thought and action" as students pushed to transform it from "a 'White' university to a 'Black' one'" (3). Jones draws upon an exhaustive list of sources encompassing local, national, and global newspapers, administrative files, student writings, and more. Most impressive are the twenty-one interviews Jones conducted with former Tuskegee students, administrators, professors, and residents. A consistent figure in Jones's narrative is Gwen Patton, Tuskegee's first female elected student government president. Yet despite Patton's centrality to the narrative, the author says little about how gender affected activism among End Page 336 Tuskegee students. This is curious given the gendered dynamics expounded by prominent figures of the Black Power movement and Jones' mention of the masculine language used in activist organization leaflets dispersed across campus in March 1968. Why, readers may wonder, did Black Power resonate so strongly with female students such as Patton? If nothing else, attention to gender, or possibly its lack of significance, might further support distinctions Jones makes between Black Power nationally and Black Power among Tuskegee students. The strengths of Jones's narrative are many. His work is well-written and attentive to the multitude of perspectives that comprised the university. As an example, Jones presents student critiques of their school alongside the careful balancing act performed by Tuskegee leadership. . .