As students on many college campuses express solidarity with Palestinians during the latest war in Gaza, the parallels to other student and youth-led protests are apparent — including in St. Louis.
Today, student protesters are calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and for universities to divest in companies such as Boeing, which supplies munitions to Israel. In decades prior, protesters have taken to college campuses to support school desegregation and oppose the Vietnam War. In more recent years, the Occupy SLU encampment nearly a decade ago came in response to the police shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson.
Chris Tinson, a history professor and chair of African American studies at St. Louis University, told St. Louis on the Air that it’s natural that students are attuned to social and global issues — and that they congregate and participate in civil disobedience.
“I think that young people are trying to find out, ‘What is going to be the course of my life after I graduate?’ Many of the issues that people deal with in college, some people are able to discard them,” Tinson said. “But many more people find ways to incorporate that work into their lifestyles as they go on [after graduating].”
Tinson said the way college students in St. Louis protest is particularly noteworthy.
“You see a more assertive, more nuanced and a more intersectional discussion of the conditions that led to Mike Brown's killing. I think that many people not just reacted to the moment but studied how we got to this point, and I think that that's an important inflection point to think about where students are now,” Tinson said. “Because during that time, and during the protests, you had a lot of very dark moments of police responding negatively to protests, and also a lot of public disruption, which is the point — to call attention to the issue.”
Tinson shared his hope that university administrators across the region find ways to engage with student protesters with less force and more dialogue, even if they don’t see eye-to-eye with the students they serve.
“Institutions never forget how they responded [to protests] the first time,” Tinson said of the institutional memory that often guides the way administrators respond to subsequent protests. “Unfortunately, it doesn't inform better practices automatically. You’d wish that institutions would have an understanding that maybe we didn't respond the appropriate way the first time so rather than beefing up our relationship with the police, we need to beef up our relationship with negotiators and people who were in spaces of support and ombudspersons.”
A key question, Tinson said, would be for college administrators to ask how they share the campus with students and with the community.
For more on the history of student and youth-led protests in St. Louis, including one caller's personal experience protesting the Vietnam War, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Ulaa Kuziez, Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Roshae Hemmings is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
