University of Minnesota Moment: Black History Month

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. Every February, Americans celebrate Black History Month, an opportunity to reflect on and learn about black history. Keith Mayes, assistant professor of African American and African studies, sheds some light on the contributions of African Americans, in particular soldiers returning home from World War II, who he says were the force that led to the Civil Rights Movement.

[Mayes]: The sense of African Americans coming back to a country that denied them certain political, social rights that they fought for in Europe—so they died on the battlefields of Europe to at least stop fascism and Nazism from spreading, and this sense of this global racism that was so much on the minds of Americans and wanting to contain that—they come back to a country that was still Jim Crow; that racism—U.S. racism—was rampant, and it affected their lives in really meaningful ways. So they kind of looked at themselves and said, you know, wait a minute.

[Moore]: The University of Minnesota was not immune from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1969 African American students took over Morrill Hall, where the University's administration is seated.

[Mayes]: The AAAC, that was the main black student group in '69 that took over Morrill Hall. They demanded a number of things, but principally, a black studies department, a Martin Luther King program—that was a scholarship program—and also an advising program.

[Moore]: That's Professor Keith Mayes for the University of Minnesota Moment.