Cornell William Brooks was a Yale Law student in 1990. He remembers when students scribbled out their grievances with racism then posted them on a campus wall.
26 years later, Brooks is now President of the NAACP, and a new crop of Yale students still describes ‘a culture of exclusion’ on campus. They’re part of a national movement of schools that erupted in protests against campus racism late last year.
Brooks knows that, now, many students head online to write statements or petitions and challenge Yale on social media, but he said it’s not just the tools that have changed since he was on campus, it’s also the complexity of the demands.
“It’s an impressive generation. When I was at Yale Law School, we were protesting for the inclusion of an African American woman on the faculty,” Brooks said. “And if you noticed in the recent protest on campus, what struck me was, the students weren’t merely talking of the math, the arithmetic of faculty diversity. They were talking about diversity of viewpoint, voice, investment in the university and the community. They were talking budget as well as faculty members. A very sophisticated conversation and protest.”
Among other things, students at Yale have asked for more financial aid. They’ve also said they want to see mandatory ethnic studies classes in the curriculum. And they want the school’s Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program to become its own department.
Brooks said college students today have seen progress in combating racism but they’ve also seen disenfranchisement and racist violence.
“They grew up with an African American President in the White House and many of them will cast their ballot in the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “They have come of age in which concealed weapon permits are honored as valid civic proof of identification sufficient to vote in Texas but college IDs not being honored, so they understand the perverse ironies of this Democracy and the need to respond by not merely casting votes, but lifting up protest.”
Brooks will be in New Haven at 5:30 on Wednesday. He’ll be speaking from the pulpit at Yale’s Battell Chapel — the same chapel where Martin Luther King, Jr preached in 1962.