Not a Moment, But a Movement

To make change sometimes you have to make people uncomfortable, and Walter Myles ’70 had a way of making white students at Santa Clara uncomfortable.

Walter was quiet as a rule, but if you gave him a microphone, friend Alvin Gay ’70 says, he got people’s attention. It was Walter’s convictions that made people listen. And that’s when tensions heightened.

“He told people the truth,” Gay, who served as the Black Student Union’s minister of information, says, “and the truth wasn’t always easy to hear.”

Campuses in the Bay Area were hotbeds for activism in 1969. American soldiers were still in Vietnam. A year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Black Panthers were active in Oakland, while police turned bayonets on protesters at San Francisco State. In October 1968, activist Eldridge Cleaver, who had been appointed (and blocked by Governor Ronald Reagan) to teach an experimental course at UC-Berkeley, was invited to speak at Santa Clara. He and his wife, Kathleen, had wine and cheese with the Jesuits before Eldridge delivered a speech in Benson proclaiming, “We are going to be part of the regeneration of the world or part of its destruction.”

Racism at Santa Clara wasn’t exactly the same as other parts of the country. It was more an underlying feeling, Peter Shiver ’70 says.

In 1965, Shiver was part of a group of seven Black students—six men, one woman—enrolled in an effort to diversify campus. Shiver had friends, but he never felt truly accepted. “As an African American I walk into a place, there are certain vibrations you get as to whether you are welcomed or you’re tolerated,” he says. “At Santa Clara, it was more tolerated as opposed to welcomed.”

The article was inaccurate—the program was for all students—but printed as more Black and Hispanic students were enrolling, the subtext was clear.

On Jan. 17, about 30 students—including Walter and Shiver and leaders from the BSU, Students for Democratic Action, and the Mexican-American Students Confederation—walked into Benson at dinner and set up a microphone. Each group spoke—David Bajada ’70 for SDA, Rudy Madrid ’71 for MASC, and Walter—declaring “non-negotiable demands,” including the right to review student newspaper stories about minority students, and Black and Chicano history courses.

In the weeks following, University President Thomas Terry, S.J., met with the students. Meetings weren’t always productive—Walter and other students walked out of one. In a letter to the student newspaper, the President wrote that “non-negotiable demands are out of place at Santa Clara.” The students won: An editorial assistant of color started at the newspaper, space and money were provided to the SDA, and a course on Mexican-America history was added to the catalog.

Conversations on race continued: Student government pledged $10,000 for minority scholarships. The Board of Regents hosted student panel discussions on racism and started the process to create an ethnic studies program. But “Walter felt, at that time, it wasn’t enough,” Alana says. Looking back, Shiver says protestors had the wrong focus to enact lasting change. They viewed the system as the enemy but systems can’t fix themselves, you have to change the hearts of leadership. “In 1961, Santa Clara decided to bring in women. In 1965, they decided to bring in minorities. Those were conscious decisions,” Shiver says. “The fact that this has not changed is because people have not decided to change. Somebody has to make the decision.”

Gay transferred to SCU in March 1969 from Xavier University in Cincinnati to escape often violent racism. After seeing palm trees and sunshine at a January conference, he abandoned a semester of credits to move west. Santa Clara lived up to expectations, he says. But it needed a leader to exceed them.

“You need an advocate (to make lasting change),” he explains. “You need somebody who can passionately embrace the initiative, have the vision, articulate it, and get everybody at the University to embrace it and practice it so they know what it means and it becomes part of that ethos. If you don’t have it, it just withers and dies.”

Campus was empty when Jose Martinez-Saldana ’85 discovered student cultural groups would trade the basement of Dunne for a cubicle and mailbox. It was winter break and Martinez-Saldana was working in the Office of Chicano Affairs when an employee in student life offered a tour of the construction in Benson’s basement.

At the time, groups like Latinx club MEChA-El Frente and Igwebuike were comfortably housed in a 6,000-square-foot space in Dunne, each with their own office and access to a large common area. Midway through the tour of Benson, Martinez-Saldana, who was co-chair of MEChA, entered a cramped room with cubicles and a small meeting room, which he was told would be home to all student groups.

“This couldn’t be,” Martinez-Saldana remembers saying. “To say I was shocked is an understatement.”

While most clubs held monthly meetings, MEChA held dozens of meetings for hundreds of students each week. Each summer, MEChA ran a four-week, peer-led orientation program for local Latinx students. This space wasn’t nearly big enough.

Martinez-Saldana knew how important this work was. When he arrived at Santa Clara, he did not feel welcomed. In classes, his perspective wasn’t valued. Classmates said he hadn’t earned his spot. Hallmates in Swig said the music he played—The Time and Prince—was “jungle music” and “ghetto.” A month into school, he returned from a visit home to find his white roommate had moved without saying anything, switching with an African American student.

“This student decided they did not want to room with someone of color,” Martinez-Saldana says.

It wasn’t until MEChA that Martinez felt at home. “It provided that safe space,” he says, “to be around people who understand and accept you as you are.”

When he found out about the move, Martinez-Saldana told his co-chair Angela Gallegos ’87, Igwebuike President David Drummond ’85, and Jason Higa ’85 of Ka Mana’o O Hawai’i, who were similarly stunned. Inez Gomez, director of Chicano Affairs, wasn’t aware either.

What bothered students was the lack of communication. The University told student government representatives, but word never made it to these clubs. By not realizing the impact on students of color, the administration showed a fundamental lack of understanding.

In January, the clubs sent letters of disapproval to Senkewicz, then vice-president of Student Services. His reply said there was “no reason for them to be treated differently from any other student organization.” Knowing their space in Dunne would soon become computer labs and a gym, the students sought to build something better: a Multicultural Center.

They contacted leaders in all cultural groups, even those without space in Dunne, inviting them to join a coalition. In a memo to leadership, the six clubs announced the formation of Unity, a group that would provide a framework for three decades of activism at Santa Clara.

That spring, Unity submitted a 21-page proposal for a Multicultural Center, offering ideas for funding, floor plans, and a more visible location, Shapell Lounge. The response: More research is needed.

The SCU Sigma Phi Epsilon newsletter brings back vivid emotions for Anna Sampaio ’92—a former student activist who now teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She can riff a few representative examples of the garbage that was in it, none suitable for print now or then, but the specifics are fuzzy.

“It was the most racist, sexist, misogynistic thing you could possibly imagine,” Sampaio says. “It was vile.”

Traditionally the newsletter was a way to share information among fraternity members. This issue, however, had an annotated alphabet with a crude saying attached to each letter: A is for apple, but instead of apple, it was something racist. The newsletter was shared internally but the girlfriend of one member saw it and distributed it to an outraged campus. University administrators saw the newsletter on March 1, 1990, and four days later suspended the oldest and largest fraternity on campus.

While the incident still upsets Sampaio, the political scientist in her knows the newsletter itself doesn’t matter. What mattered is what it represented.

“These events give light to what is already a series of private violations and aggressions that have been stirring for a long time,” Sampaio says. “That public-facing incident allows for people to work on bigger conversations about these longstanding forms of racism and sexism on campus. The way that they’re co-constitutive. The way they feed off each other. The silence of the administration. The lack of faculty diversity, student diversity, curricular diversity.”

Sampaio is many times a Bronco: a student, a lecturer years ago, and now chair of ethnic studies. She has love for the University but knows its fundamental problems well.

The newsletter is often credited for reviving the Unity movement on campus, but thanks to students like Theo Gonzalves ’90, the group had been quietly working to improve the University’s curriculum for years.

It certainly wasn’t the first time Jim Winstead ’94 heard the slur and sadly not the first time he’d been called it; that happened before Santa Clara. But it’s not what he expected to hear on a college campus. “Particularly in California, particularly in the Bay Area,” Winstead says. “Maybe naively so.”

Santa Clara was going through a lot racially at the time, Winstead says. There were about 90 undergraduate Black students in 1991, many of them athletes. Affirmative action was a hot topic and talk of minority students taking spots from white students was abundant.

In October, Winstead left Benson, walking down the quad side behind McLaughlin-Walsh Hall, when the sophomore heard someone yelling from a window above. “Out of nowhere someone, I assume a white male, screamed ‘You ain’t nothing but a n***er and you need to go home,’” Winstead says. “It wasn’t even face-to-face, it was very cowardly.”

Winstead reported the incident to campus police to no avail. He continued to push, finding dead-ends in conversations with leadership before speaking to University President Paul Locatelli, S.J., who Winstead recalls didn’t offer him much assistance.

Organizing a protest is not without risk and Elias Portales ’00 had plenty to lose. Just two years earlier, he was a student at San Jose City College. Now he was a year away from becoming the first in his family to graduate from college and preparing to apply to law school.

“My father kind of warned me,” Portales remembers. “He’d said, ‘Hey, you’re doing so well…’”

But the risk was worth it. Since moving into the basement of Graham in 1985, conditions in the Multicultural Center had deteriorated.

With a web of pipes for a ceiling and no natural light, the room was known to flood and suffered infestations of bugs and rats. “It was our space,” Portales, who is a professor at San Jose City College today, says, “but, whether it was intentional or not, the feeling was, ‘You guys are kind of outcasts.’”

Requests for a central location went back to Unity 1 but in 1999, talks intensified. Reviving the Unity name from earlier movements, Portales, Christina Guzman ’01, Travis Walker ’00, Venezia Mojarro ’00 and others lobbied for a new location for MCC, as well as additional resources and department status for ethnic studies. The administration was open to the move to Shapell but only if MCC shared it with the Center for Multicultural Learning. This was a red flag for students. MCC was student-run and merging it with CML threatened their autonomy.

“We had meetings with administration and key faculty of color that were quite tense,” Guzman says. When talks stalled, students drafted a letter outlining demands. “When they didn’t get met, we decided to protest.”

The plan was to camp out between Shapell and the bookstore. Portales wasn’t sure who would show the week before exams, but students from all parts of the MCC attended, holding rallies in front of the fountain and marching around campus banging a three-foot drum.

“It was a powerful protest,” professor of theatre Aldo Billingslea says. “Students who didn’t want to support the movement or wanted to pretend it didn’t exist couldn’t do that. The protestors claimed their space and said, ‘You must navigate around us a little bit.’”

Students camped out for three days before an agreement was reached to review demands and end the protest. However, what felt like a clear victory at the time was a bit more nuanced. Ultimately, ethnic studies didn’t get department status but added a faculty position. The MCC moved to Shapell without CML but still lost some autonomy, as Shapell was often used for University events on the weekend.

“We fought for what we believed in, but the execution was a lot more challenging than we expected,” Portales, who went on to Georgetown Law, says. “I look upon it fondly but I also learned you can come so close and feel good, but sometimes it’s that final mile.”

What Jasmyne Gaston ’18 remembers best is how amazing the night was until it wasn’t. The start of college had been tough for Gaston. She struggled to find community on a primarily white campus and classes at Santa Clara were challenging initially. But by May, she’d found her people.

Gaston and a dozen or so women of Igwebuike were waiting outside Swig to deliver invitations to male students for a Black appreciation event. “We were rambunctious—and happy—and we hear yelling from windows, telling us to shut up,” Gaston remembers. That’s when one of the women pulled up YikYak—a now-defunct app that allowed users to post messages anonymously—and saw a post from someone on campus: “Can the monkeys outside Swig please shut their watermelon-eating mouths?”

Just like that, the night was over. Specially crafted invitations weren’t delivered. Alana Hinkston ’16 screenshotted the post and another student called campus safety. But since the post was anonymous, nothing could be done. “It felt like an extra slap in the face, after all, we’d done to make each other feel uplifted and special,” Zipporah Ridley ’17 says. “It was the anonymity of it. I didn’t know who wrote this, they could be sitting next to me smiling to my face every day.”

The event confirmed quieter instances of racism. That night, students shared stories of racism they encountered during walks to Safeway or on their way to The Hut. Others remembered being asked to show SCU ID to prove they were students before entering parties, while white students were let in without question.

About a week later, the University issued a statement condemning the YikYak comments, but the terms weren’t strong enough for the students. “It never mentioned what occurred and never called it by its name,” Ridley says. “I was like, ‘OK, if you don’t want to talk about it, we will.’”

In the three weeks following, dozens of the busiest students on campus—from MCC, Igwebuike, Together for Ladies of Color, and more—worked on a plan to address race relations at Santa Clara.

Others remembered being asked to show SCU ID to prove they were students before entering parties, while white students were let in without question.

They called in Lester Deanes, then the assistant dean for student life, and ethnic studies faculty for advice. They were angry but also solutions-oriented. “What we wanted was systematic change,” Hinkston says.

Kennedy Myers spent much of her senior year thinking about who comes next. The battles of future students of color and how she could make it easier. She has Bob Senkewicz’s speech to thank for that. “It was my rallying call,” Myers says. “I tried to make that the focus, how do I want Santa Clara to look in 10 years?”

Myers had plans for a quiet, productive spring. Then COVID-19 hit; campus shut down; and George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minnesota. While white students grappled with finishing college remotely, Myers offered support for students of color—sending out messages, serving on the search committee for the new vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, until the search was postponed. “As director, you end up dreaming about MCC,” Myers says. “It’s always in your thoughts.”

But the biggest project, one she wanted to finish, was establishing an MCC library. Myers asked each member organization to recommend 10 books. She hopes the library will serve white students, too, so the burden of teaching about racism won’t always fall on students of color.

When Myers thinks about who comes next, Isaac Addai ’21 is one example. As the University renewed efforts to improve diversity after the killing of George Floyd, Addai is one voice that emerged, speaking at a vigil for racial justice and helping create the Black Excellence Scholarship.

Like many Black students, Addai got involved in Igwebuike quickly and will be co-chair this year. He’s experienced racism on campus and is eager to make change. His goals are no different than Walter Myles’ 50 years ago. He wants a more inclusive curriculum and more people of color in classes and in leadership. He wants to see the University make a strategic and financial commitment.

“We need more than symbolic gestures,” Addai says. “We need to be adamantly focusing on decolonizing our education and address issues head-on, not beat around the bush.”

Margaret Russell, associate provost for Diversity and Inclusion, spent a lot of time with students this year. Their frustration felt familiar from her time as a Black student on primarily white campuses in undergrad and law school. Russell says campuses without thriving diverse communities often feel like an island of whiteness. “I remember (as a student) smiling at every Black person because there were so few,” she says. “I wanted to make a point of saying, ‘We belong here.’”

In June, Eva Blanco Masias M.A. ’11 was named vice president for enrollment management, adding a voice of color to an important role. And, when filled, the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion position will report directly to President Kevin O’Brien, S.J. Until then, he asked Russell to sit on the President’s Cabinet.

“Recruitment and retention of students and faculty are so important, but it’s not just about numbers, it’s about elevating voices,” Russell says. “Listening to them and making them more central to the community.”

Much of this change in attitude is student-led, Russell says. Semi Williams ’20, chair of the Inclusive Excellence Student Advisory Council, was frustrated with a lack of productivity at Diversity Forums and helped create action items and a buddy system with administrators to increase communication. She also challenged Fr. O’Brien to invite members of the President’s Cabinet to the next Diversity Forum. He did, and all attended. Khiely Jackson ’20 and Sydney Thompson ’20 worked with ethnic studies faculty Jesica Fernández and Allia Griffin to create an anti-racist teaching website. Their work will be used in faculty training.

“I’m so impressed by how thoughtful our students are,” Russell says. “Hearing those voices has to be central to change.”

Addai has seen increased support in recent months. He calls himself a skeptic but volunteered his time to improve SCU. He’ll continue to hold the school accountable, he says.

At the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013, President Barack Obama said, “The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.”

For more than 50 years, student activists of color have carried the University toward that progress—and students like Addai intend to keep bending that curve.

“People get upset with me, that I’m too hard on people,” Addai says. “I disagree. Letting symbolic gestures win you over is what keeps us in the same place. So yes, I’m going to be demanding.”