Jackie Robinson was a major league baseball player. Tom Bradley was mayor of Los Angeles. Ralph Bunche won a Nobel Peace Prize. And Arthur Ashe was a prominent tennis player. All of these men made very different contributions, but they have one thing in common: they are all black UCLA alumni.
Though these men entered the university when racial segregation was still present, they were able to accomplish much and have helped shape UCLA’s culture. Black activist groups such as the Black Panthers have also contributed in building the university into what it is today.
UCLA was more welcoming to black students than many other universities in times when racism was more prevalent, said Berky Nelson, director of the Center for Student Programming. He said many blacks used athletics as a way to get into the university, and once in, they used the resources the university offered to make contributions to society.
“Being an athlete was simply a means to an end,” he said. “Being an athlete, you received encouragement and immediate gratification because just studying didn’t necessarily mean you would get any reward for that because racism was so great.”
Not only was UCLA welcoming to black students, it was one of the first universities in the nation to have a black student body president, said Darnell Hunt, professor of sociology and director of the Bunche Center for African American Studies.
“If you think back to the period in question, when the U.S. was grappling with racism, UCLA was featuring some prominent people playing sports, holding leadership positions, things you didn’t see at other comparable universities,” Hunt said.
He said UCLA provided often-discouraged black students an opportunity to achieve their goals. For example, he added, Bunche was valedictorian of his high school, but since he was black, he was unable to deliver a speech. But when he came to UCLA as a basketball athlete, he saw many doors open for him.
“I think he felt welcome and felt hope that he didn’t feel in high school,” Hunt said. “UCLA played an important role in shaping his outlook.”
He was valedictorian at UCLA also, and this time was able to give a speech at graduation.
Bunche spent most of his life trying to unite people around the globe. His work with the United Nations was of key importance. He later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with relations between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
“A lot of it started at UCLA when (Bunche) saw that people can work together to solve problems,” Hunt said.
Blacks have affected UCLA’s culture through a variety of ways, including art and music, said Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, vice chancellor of the graduate division. She has been at UCLA for 35 years and is the highest-ranking African American in UCLA’s administration.
She said blacks have also helped contribute to student activism, which has its origins in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.
“Their actions led future generations to achieve a greater sense of empowerment on campus and in the world,” she said.
One such activist group was the Black Panthers, which was a prominent black activist national organization, and UCLA had a large group on campus.
Scot Brown, associate professor of history and Afro-American studies, said the Black Panthers’ purpose was twofold: to increase political activism and community outreach on campus.
“The impact of the Panthers and the black power movement was that it extended a high level of political consciousness to UCLA. … The group raised high levels of student consciousness along racial lines, not just in the U.S. with respect to war and poverty but also about world affairs, what’s happening in Africa, what’s happening in Latin America,” Brown said.
For example, the group influenced mainstream basketball players to protest the war in Vietnam, Brown said.
“Many felt they had the responsibility to make changes ““ this was a high point of political activism,” he said.
He said the Panthers also “heightened community activity” through programs such as the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, where they provided impoverished children with breakfast.
The group, however, had sometimes different goals than other groups, such as the black nationalist group Organization Us. Two Panthers were killed in UCLA’s Campbell Hall after a meeting to select a chair of what was then the black studies department in 1969.
“It had a very unsettling effect on students on the campus and on faculty, and it was an incident I think that slowed down the growth of the African-American Studies,” Mitchell-Kernan said. “It’s a very painful part of African-American history, but it is a part that lots of people take pride in, not in the fact that someone was killed but that there was a struggle here that achieved its goals.”
Brown said these shootings were unfortunate because it put the Black Panthers in a more violent light and took away from some of the “proactive activism” and community outreach the club stood for.
The activist groups and the athletes that UCLA has had are just some of the blacks who have shaped the university’s culture. Nelson said he believes that prominent blacks who attended UCLA helped the university receive much of its acclaim in earlier days.
“I think African Americans, in many respects, have put UCLA on the map. Before it became a renowned academic institution, it was known for some of the great athletes that went here,” Nelson said. “The fact that Jackie Robinson went here was just phenomenal.”
At UCLA, Robinson played an array of sports, including basketball and football.
After university, Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers helped end about 80 years of baseball segregation. He won many awards during his career and worked to help the Civil Rights Movement.
“All of the prominent alumni have forever changed the culture of UCLA. I think UCLA is a much more welcoming place because of them,” Hunt said.