There was more to the 1960s than great music and psychedelia. A student-faculty panel, in conjunction with a library archival photo exhibit, will illuminate the era’s historic civil rights movement for the University community.
University senior Daniel Keller assembled a Knight Library exhibit, on display since week two of spring term, entitled “Civil Rights at the University of Oregon: Past and Present.” On Thursday, the exhibit will be extended into a panel discussion including members of the faculty, administration and student body. Keller will moderate the discussion.
The discussion is meant not only to reflect on the past University environment, but also to explore contemporary campus racial relations. The timely scheduling of the panel coincides with the Diversity Plan’s progress toward implementation.
The Diversity Plan in fact directly addresses one 1968 occurrence Keller encountered while sifting through the library archives for photographs: a number of students of the Black Student Union called for a more ethnically heterogeneous faculty to address diversity issues on campus.
Keller said he hopes the exhibit and panel will assist the Diversity Plan’s progress, because while apparent that campus social progress has been made because of the plan, in a lot of ways outlooks have remained static.
“The Diversity Plan says things that people were saying 30 or 40 years ago,” Keller said. “That was the real thrust of the exhibit. (To) take some really interesting historical info and relate it to the University’s current efforts with the Diversity Plan.”
“The more we can talk about it and move it from being sort of a stigmatized issue, the better off we are,” Keller said.
The discussion, which features three faculty who worked at the University during the civil rights movement, will be a useful event in tracking progress the University has made during the last 40 years. While preparing the exhibit and in the time since, Keller has found differences as well as similarities in the campus environment.
One parallel, he said, was a lack of support for marginalized students enrolling at the University. These low-income or minority students often face the same problem today.
Keller’s minority status partly inspired him to take on the project, but he was also itching to make up for a past decision by the University to not hold a campus celebration on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
“When this opportunity arose in class, I thought it would be really hypocritical of me not to do something with this opportunity,” Keller said.
English professor Suzanne Clark, along with University Archivist Heather Briston, taught the research class for which Keller created the exhibit as a final. Clark, a member of the panel, said Keller’s ambitious research is important to the University community and will shed light on something that should be, but isn’t, fully understood.
“I think they will be amazed at what there is to learn about civil rights on this campus,” Clark said. “Do people know about the Black Panthers here? Do they know about what happened to students of color during the Vietnam protests? Do they know who’s come here to speak on campus? … There’s just so much we don’t know – it’s just absolutely stunning.”
“Anything whatsoever that we can do to advance our knowledge, which is minuscule, about Civil Rights history is beneficial,” Clark said.
Indeed, some student reception of the exhibit shows the ignorance still existent on campus and in the world today. Keller said that ignorance has been a powerful emotional trigger. He told one story of a student who drew a swastika in the exhibit’s log book, a sketch which was juxtaposed with insightful student and faculty commentary on pressing diversity issues. Keller said the swastika was not particularly surprising; rather, it confirmed the need for education on the issue.
Daniel Pope, associate professor of history, has worked at the University since 1975 and hopes to bring a comparative perspective to the panel.
“I’ve been here a long time,” Pope said. “I’ve been concerned with questions about equal rights and diversity and multiculturalism pretty much as long as I’ve been here.”
In the end, Keller hopes the project is successful in ushering in a new era of cultural acceptance and diversity awareness.
“I am … pleased to make a small, yet hopefully fruitful contribution to our campus’s effort toward attaining proficiency in the cultivation of mutually beneficial interracial and interethnic relations,” Keller said.
“I understand how this can be awkward for a community that doesn’t deal with diversity on a daily basis,” he said, “but (it) probably needs to.”
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