Gaza, Student Protest, and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

Looking at the images might make you feel as if you’ve stepped back in time.

Late on Tuesday, New York City police clad in riot gear entered Columbia University and removed dozens of peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators, leading them away with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.

Over the past week, hundreds of college students calling for Palestinian rights at universities across the U.S. have been arrested, as city police and state troopers have moved to disperse protesters and dismantle their encampments.

The images of these clashes, which come as a new survey from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that most Black Americans support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, not only recall the unrest that followed the police killings of George Floyd and Michael Brown in 2020 and 2014, respectively. They also bring to mind Black student-led opposition to civil and human rights abuses at home and abroad in the 1960s and ’70s, and the sometimes brutal crackdowns that those young demonstrators faced.

When it comes to social justice movements, you can detect sonorous echoes between our past and our present. And as the Israel-Hamas war, which has claimed more than 34,000 lives, enters its seventh month, President Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis is increasingly enraging younger Black voters, who see the situation not merely as a political issue but as a moral one.

Read More: Planned Biden Morehouse Visit Angers Black Student Gaza Supporters

Capital B spoke with Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, about these historical similarities. He’s also the author of a widely read paper on Black protest and public opinion.

At least in part, Wasow explained, these different waves of protest are alike in the way students “occupy a space to push an issue onto the national agenda.”

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: What parallels do you see between the student protests of today and those of the past, such as student-led opposition to racial segregation and the Vietnam War?

Omar Wasow: My mind immediately goes to the sit-ins at lunch counters that were initially led by students from historically Black colleges, and then were later joined by white students. Those are similar in the sense that it was really college students at the forefront of a movement.

If we fast-forward a little bit, Occupy Wall Street is another example of where there was a kind of encampment to take up space — a strategy or a tactic to create a confrontation that then pushed an issue to the forefront of our politics.

In the context of Capital B, it’s worth thinking about not only the shootings at Kent State [where in 1970 the Ohio National Guard fatally shot four college students who were protesting growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War], but also the shootings just days later at Jackson State, a historically Black school where two students were killed when police shot into a dorm [tensions between police and students grew after a rumor starting spreading that a local civil rights leader and his wife had been assassinated].

So, I do see echoes of Jackson State and Kent State in what’s happening at the moment, and that’s partly because we’re seeing very heavy-handed tactics being used against students when the protests themselves are nonviolent and don’t seem to merit such repressive tactics. Of course, at Jackson State and Kent State, students were killed. Thankfully, we’re not seeing that, at least not yet.

The images of students facing off with law enforcement conjure images of the confrontations we saw following the deaths of George Floyd and Michael Brown.

One interesting way to think about all of this is that we’re seeing an evolution not only in protest tactics but also in police tactics.

In Ferguson, police basically rolled up in tanks, and even people such as U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were taken aback by that level of militarized policing being brought to bear on American citizens engaging in nonviolent protest.

While the current situation hasn’t been quite as extreme as that, more generally, as this one writer, Radley Balko, has described it, we’ve had the rise of the warrior cop. And that, I think, isn’t only a modern trend. It’s also partly in response to the perceived disorder of the protest movements of the 1960s.

How do today’s student protests, some of which Black students are leading, fit into a broader history of Black solidarity with global human rights movements?

An overlooked element of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements was the sense of solidarity with other independence movements around the world.

For example, there’s this great 2013 book called Black Against Empire [by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.] that details how the Black Panther movement saw itself as something of an anti-imperial project that wasn’t only concerned about what was happening here in the U.S. but was also concerned about the Vietnam War, and it took inspiration from independence movements in Africa and Asia.

At one point, the Panthers even had an embassy in Algeria, after Algerian independence. They thought of themselves as a Black colonized people in the U.S. fighting for liberation. There was very much this kind of cross-national conversation that informed the politics of groups such as the Panthers.

You could also see this in the work of Bayard Rustin, who was a huge influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and who in the 1940s went to meet with disciples of Mahatma Gandhi to study their ideas of noncooperation and to bring those ideas and tactics back to the U.S.

There’s a cross-national conversation — a sense of shared mission — that goes back decades, and I think that what we’re seeing today is a continuation of that.

What role does social media play in energizing recent student protests?

I want to step back a little bit. I think that there’s a through line from Emmett Till’s mother publishing the photo of her son’s body [in 1955] through to the video documenting the beating of Rodney King [in 1991] through to Darnella Frazier documenting the murder of George Floyd [in 2020], where these powerful images of injustice become calls to action.

In that sense, even though the technologies have changed — photograph, video camera, smartphone — the way these images work to mobilize people is quite similar.

That said, I think that what you’ve keyed in on is a really important change. In the 1950s and ’60s, in order to get some of those images out into the world, a news outlet needed to be there to document and to bear witness to what was happening. Now, through smartphone cameras and social media, it’s possible for anyone to be a citizen journalist and do what Till’s mother did, which is to reveal suffering that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

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