Martin Luther King’s speech came at a time when Westwood may not have been as friendly to the Civil Rights Movement as activists on campus were.
While Westwood in the 1960s had businesses and landlords who refused service to students of color, UCLA was struggling to include the burgeoning diversity in its campus community, said Eric Hall, an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University who wrote a book about the life of tennis player Arthur Ashe, who attended UCLA in the ’60s.
In an attempt to test landlords and prove discrimination against black students, groups of black students would go to Westwood to apply for apartment leases, Hall said. If they were denied service, a group of white students would follow up with the same request and report discrimination to then-chancellor Franklin David Murphy if their lease was accepted. In response, the UCLA administration would remove that landlord’s name from the available housing list posted by the university.
As the student movement grew, activists began to challenge the Westwood businesses they thought violated black students’ rights.
“(Black) students would go into these barbershops and demand service,” Hall said. “If they were not served, they would go back to (Chancellor) Murphy and make their voice heard.”
Many in the school’s administration helped students facilitate their protests against proprietors, Hall said.
“They would come down hard on landlords and make students fully aware that these landlords did not accept people of color into their properties,” Hall said. “(Racial discrimination) just didn’t do anything for the university. It didn’t help them and they didn’t believe it was the right thing.”
This belief led UCLA to project an image that it was different from some other large public schools, Hall said.
“I think one of the things UCLA did well, at least in terms of its marketing, in the ‘60s was putting out this idea that UCLA was this beacon of equality for black athletes,” he said.
But despite the civil rights activism on campus and the administration’s efforts, critics of UCLA have argued that the university publicized its recruitment of black athletes to avoid addressing ongoing discrimination in Westwood apartments.
“I think (UCLA was) fairly typical of the way a lot of the major universities were in the 1960s,” he said. “There were very large white student bodies, very small numbers of African American students.”
Many of the black athletes at UCLA whom Hall spoke to for his book often complained about not having a black studies curriculum or enough black staff, trainers or faculty, he said.
“I think for Ashe and others, you hear this tale of California … of this land of milk and honey that doesn’t suffer from some of the same racial issues,” he said. “And then they get there and they realize it’s actually quite similar.”
Compiled by Ian Stevenson, Bruin contributor.