On 5 December 1968, 65 of 85 total Black students from Brown and Pembroke marched from University Hall to the Congdon Street Baptist Church to protest the University’s lack of diversity. The protesters wanted the university to commit to a racial admissions quota for Black students and increase financial aid. They planned on staying in the church until the university made those commitments.
The university eventually did. It committed to raising the number of Black Students at Brown and Pembroke to over 11%, the percent of the general populace that Black people comprised at the time. The university also pledged just over $1 million dollars towards scholarship and recruitment efforts targeted at Black students.
One of the reasons the university accepted the protesting students’ demands is because of coverage from student newspapers that alerted the rest of the student body towards their cause. Other students organized speakouts and signed petitions to support their peers, all of which was covered in the Brown Daily Herald and the Pembroke Record. This project places the coverage from those two student newspapers in a comparative lens to see if the way they approached this walkout differed in any way.
To explore the timeline below, click on the arrows to move between articles and click on images to read them.
It is difficult to compare the two papers’ coverage because they were published on different schedules—the Herald was daily and the Record was semi-weekly—but a few differences emerge in support, gender, and race.
In terms of support, the Herald published an editorial arguing against the walkout on 3 December, saying that it was “a lot of commotion about very little.” Throughout the entire event, the Herald doesn’t ever adopt a tone in support of the protesters. On the other hand, the Record writes an editorial supporting the protesting students, saying that they “applaud the efforts of the Black students in the University, and hope that the demands are answered.”
Support closely intertwines with the idea of gender, which emerges in both publications’ coverage. The walkout was originally spearheaded by Pembroke students, and the Herald writes somewhat disparagingly about this. In its 3 December editorial, it writes, “The girls should have looked into the issue a little more deeply than they have.” Meanwhile, the Record refers to those same protesters as the “Black Women in Pembroke College.” In a sense, the engagement of Black Brown students with the Pembroke protest may have added some legitimacy to the movement as a whole for other Brown students. After they joined in, the Herald wrote no more negative comments about the walkout.
The Herald also focuses more strictly on racial issues than gender. On 9 December, it ran a letter to the editor arguing for a poor White quota in addition to the Black quota. It also ran independent articles about a speakout on the same day as the walkout, which was organized by White students, and a White petition in support of the protesters. Perhaps by virtue of its limited publication schedule and print space, the Record does not dedicate separate articles to those events, and instead opts to either mention them in passing or describe in greater detail the dialogue between the protesting students and the university.
About this project
The original goal of this project was to take student activism related events in 1968 and compare how the Brown Daily Herald and Pembroke Record covered them. After looking at just how many episodes of student activism there were, I decided that analyzing one event would be more practical. The 1968 Walkout stood out for two reasons: it was well covered and it is relevant. Between 3 December and 10 December 1968, both publications published a combined 13 pieces on the walkout. That makes it simpler to find differences in rhetoric and messaging. One direct result of the walkout was new Brown University commitments to broadening diversity on campus. On 4 December 2024, Brown similarly announced a slew of admissions recruitment initiatives to increase diversity. I thought it would be interesting to look at how other diversity measures were advocated for in the past.
The Brown University Library has digitized all past issues of the Brown Daily Herald and Pembroke Record. To research for this project, I read every issue of both in December of 1968 and compiled every article about the walkout to put in the timeline. Then I looked for overarching themes of difference in both publication’s coverages.