The Princeton Filibuster, which I helped bring to D.C., was selected by Mother Jones magazine as the protest of the year: “The 384-hour gabfest wrapped up with a ‘fili-bus-tour’ to Washington, D.C., where guest bloviators Senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) joined in.”
Also making the list of notable campus activism: anti-Coke activism, a living wage protest at Wash. U, and protests of Bush’s commencement speech at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The most striking sounds like this protest at U-C Berkeley:
Invisible Freshmen Last November, 250 African American UC Berkeley students staged a daylong “Blackout” to protest the precipitous decline in black student enrollment since Cal banned affirmative action a decade ago. Out of last fall’s 3,600 incoming freshmen, only 3 percent were African American. Dressed in black, the protesters silently interrupted classes to distribute fliers demanding the school step up its efforts to recruit black students. “It’s hard being the only black person in the class,” said senior Raniyah Abdus-Samad. “It’s not a good feeling.”
3% ?! The same thing could happen at Michigan if the “Michigan Civil Rights Initiative” (also a project of anti-civil rights activist and University of California Berkeley Regent Ward Connerly) passes. Check out the website of the folks leading the opposition: Citizens for a United Michigan.
Finally, they also selected the hard work of many people I know in Ann Arbor registering people to vote:
That’s Why They Call It the Blues University of Michigan students gave new meaning to their school’s rallying cry, “Go Blue,” by registering 10,000 voters in a monthlong registration drive in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential vote. The effort produced record youth-voter turnout in Ann Arbor, keeping Michigan in Kerry country, even though unprecedented numbers of college-aged voters across the nation failed to turn the crimson tide.
Oh god, Ward Connerly is a thorn in the side of every UC student. It really was striking how few black students there were at UCLA. For as big a school as it was, it was overwhelmingly white and Asian, although latinos were certainly much better represented than blacks.
I participated in helping to write a lot of editorials against Connerly at the Daily Bruin, like this one.
Don’t forget that Citizens for a United Michigan are officially now known as “One United Michigan.”