Write a People's History of Student Activism for Your School

As the school years winds down for most students, now is an opportune time to think BIG.

You should consider writing a history of student activism at your school!

Having this history puts your efforts in the context of a forty year (or longer) struggle for social justice at your school. It reduces the problem of turnover. As students turn over at a higher rate than administrators, they suffer from a loss of institutional memory. Students need to remember what goals they have fought for in the past to ensure that these issues are never forgotten (and the school doesn't backslide on you). Students need to remember what strategies were successful and which ones failed. Students need to know who their allies were and who their opponents were.

By putting your activism in the historical context, you can show how student activism has been effective in making changes that you can see in your school today.

Your school already has a history - written by the administration. You need to write a people's history.

You can do so by digging up school newspaper and magazine articles, and possibly doing several interviews.

Short of doing an entire history, if you are graduating, you can at least write a detailed history of the time that you were active.

Once you have this history you can make sure that it will stand the test of time by uploading it to CampusActivism.org. This will allow future students at your school to read the history for decades to come!!! It will also inspire other students to write their own histories.

...

Ten years ago, I camped out by a photocopier in the Notre Dame library and skimmed through the past thirty years of a weekly magazine (Scholastic) - copying everything I could find about activism. I also consulted our daily newspaper (The Observer) looking at the index for information on specific campaigns - and copied the articles from the original microfiche!

I sorted the material - and wrote a history of Notre Dame student activism (which you can download from campusactivism.org).

If anyone tells me that Notre Dame is a conservative school - I can tell them that the student body went on strike in May 1970 (along with 2-3 million US students) under the leadership of the student body president, who was not just the only black student body president, but was also a supporter of Black Power. And you can still see "STRIKE" spray painted in the science building. So there =) Since the Sixties, the activism has continued.