They Demanded Courageously

[0:00:00]

OVERLAY:                  “…I thought small size undergraduate environment is what I’d like to do…”

PITTS:                          So I grew up in a neighborhood that was a hotbed of basketball. And I grew up with star – George Wilson, who was the star. When he went to Marshall, everyone knew that there was a high probability that Marshall would become the state champion. The way we saw it is that the West Side would do what the South Side, Du Sable, was unable to do.

And so, it was sort of like if I were a fish, then basketball was the water. And the excitement and the anticipation of being the best basketball team – high school basketball team – in Illinois was already there. It was in my family. It was in the neighborhood. with George Wilson that I had gone to elementary school with.

So, in my senior year, my plan began to work out. We were defending state champions trying to repeat. We only got to third in that year. But, still, schools like Davidson [College] and Northwestern [University], and [University of Michigan] Michigan and [The University of] Iowa, and [University of] Illinois approached me.

And at the beginning of that year, I had no favorites, I was just focused on being a student and being a better basketball player. But halfway through that year, Michigan and Northwestern became more visible, and I could see that those two institutions were the most impressive of those who were interested in me.

So, eventually, it came down to picking between Michigan, Iowa, and Northwestern. Northwestern was more like the University of Chicago Lab School than the others, and that made a difference. Because at the University of Chicago Lab School, I had serious conversations with a couple of teachers.

And as I looked forward toward college, I thought small size undergraduate environment is what I’d like to do. I mean, I’d like to be in that rather than a massive, you know, thousands of students, undergraduates. So the Lab School prepared me to recognize the value of going to Northwestern.

[0:03:02]

OVERLAY:                  “Is that what ultimately made you choose Northwestern?”

PITTS:                          Yes. Yeah. Because I could have gone other places, but quality and a more personalized education that Northwestern offered is really what persuaded me and my family.”

[0:00:00]

OVERLAY:                  “…So it became a congregation, a community, for the Black students…”

[0:34:31]

PITTS:                         What was changing, of course, in 1966, was that the university had decided to drop that old pattern and to go after Black students who were not necessarily athletes. And they had already committed to recruiting fifty or sixty of them from the Chicago area and northern Illinois.

So I was present to find out, “[wryly] Gee, there’s that many of us here. Twenty-six, that many? I thought there were only twenty-two.” But like I said, I knew just about all of them who were on campus.

[0:00:52]

OVERLAY:                  “What was it like just being a student there as far as community? Other than your teammates, there weren’t many Black people there.”

PITTS:                         we were separated from a broader Black community, and we went into Evanston and to some smaller extent into Chicago to carry out what was normal for us.

Most of us came from Black communities. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. And so we went into Evanston, and in particular to a home known as the Glass Family, Charles and Helen Glass. Helen passed away just a few years ago at almost a hundred years old.

We called Charles Glass, “Doc”, and in the late fifties, mid-fifties, Doc Glass had befriended a Black athlete after a track meet. He had gone to Dyche Stadium and saw there weren’t many Blacks around when the guy won his dash and started talking to him. And with the support of his wife, he began to invite Blacks to come to their house to relax.

And so Doc Glass and Me – we called her “Me”, M-E – Helen Glass, were the basis of our Black community off campus. And so, you could call up and find out if their home was available, and we’d walk across campus. We could walk across Evanston to sit and relax.

Black males got their hair cut. Doc would get out his clippers. And that was our normal.

[0:02:57]

OVERLAY:                  “Where was Doc Glass’ house?”

PITTS:                         Yeah, Doc Glass was – his home – his family lived at 1829 Brown Street.

[0:03:09]

OVERLAY:                  “When you say that, there’s a sense of – it’s almost like it was your house, the way you said that address right there.”

PITTS:                         Doc and Helen Glass allowed us to become part of their extended family. We got haircuts there, we met girls from National College of Education[1], Black girls.

There were even fewer Black students over there. So it became a congregation, a community, for the Black students, the Black athletes in particular, before 1966.

[1]. National Louis University, “National Louis University: Our History,” Accessed on July 22, 2022, https://nl.edu/about/history/

[0:00:00]

OVERLAY:                  “…And that led to a large demonstration by Black students…”

PITTS:                         I, and then a year later Don Jackson, became the first Black males – or indeed Blacks at all – to go into the all-white fraternity system at Northwestern University.

In the summer leading up to entering Northwestern, I had contacts – or kind of what they call rushing or recruiting contacts – from Theta Delta Chi and trying to encourage me to think about joining them.

That evolved also out of a Marshall High connection. The graduate advisor for Theta Delta Chi fraternity was a guy who graduated from Marshall High School in 1940 something, and he knew of my oldest brother, Bill. And so, as I and Don were coming to Northwestern – I with all the publicity and everything – he urged his fraternity to recruit me.

And his fraternity had been attempting to recruit Black members for a few years in the fifties, but the blackball system kept preventing that. There was always one person who could say no to any new member.

And so, it didn’t happen. And then I came along. And I was momentarily a local celebrity with this kind of inherited connection between Ev Miller and Bill Pitts. And so, they started trying to persuade me that they were a good fraternity to join. I didn’t immediately say yes, because being a freshman in college, being an athlete is enough of a challenge.

And let alone being a pioneer in racial integration. I wasn’t immediately attracted to that…

…We had been roommates. We had both come from Marshall High School. And so, we were off into a new experience of having fraternity brothers who were not Black.

[0:02:55]

OVERLAY:                  “We’ve learned of a story that happened in one of the fraternity houses…”

PITTS:                         There was an altercation between Black students and white students at one of the fraternity houses at Northwestern, one that had no Black members. Most did not have Black members.

That occurred while I was a graduate student, and I had been a member of Theta Delta Chi for four or five years before that. But I believe it might have been Sigma Chi, but it doesn’t really matter. A Black student or students had been invited into the house by a member.

And then other members, recognizing that they [the Black students] were not members and they “don’t belong,” started to put them out. And that led to a large demonstration by Black students, including me and some graduate students as well as quite a few undergraduates.

[0:04:13]

OVERLAY:                  “So that happened when you were in grad school at the time?”

PITTS:                         Yeah, I was. But the Black students were probably – I’m not certain whether it was 1966 – it was probably in 1967 when the numbers of Black students had grown.

[0:00:00]

OVERLAY:                  “…We had to get the university’s attention, because they don’t take us seriously…”

PITTS:                         Throughout the month of April, the undergraduate and graduate student leadership was persuaded that we had to get the university’s attention, because they don’t take us seriously.

So, the choice of the bursar’s office came later in that process. I didn’t help pick where we were going to take over a building, but I was part of a process where none of us felt surprised that we were going to do something.

[0:00:49]

OVERLAY:                  “Do you remember any specific responsibilities that you had as far as preparing or getting ready for the sit-in?”

PITTS:                         My role – and it may have been spoken to me – was to help keep the group together as we moved forward. So, there were certain members of our group who were involved in negotiating with the university. And I and some others would meet with them, and then we would communicate with the larger group.

And so, we were mindful that whatever we were going to do out of a negotiation that was not going well had to be communicated fully and explained to the larger group.

[0:01:50]

OVERLAY:                  “…There were rules that Northwestern put into effect: No two Black students could be together at the same time…”

PITTS:                         We were together in University Hall the night before we took over that building. So, I don’t know who made the rules and whether they were– Somebody else may know.

I don’t know whether they were local Evanston police or whether Northwestern were breaking up small clusters. But I know that we gathered together the night before, and at that point we shared with them that we were going to do X at the bursar’s office. Prior to that meeting, it didn’t make sense to have something that could get disclosed, disrupted.

[0:02:49]

OVERLAY:                  “…Walk me through the beginning of that day if you could.”

PITTS:                         Well, we had determined the evening before the takeover of the bursar’s office that we would come together in the back hall of the Northwestern apartments…

…I remember a squad car that followed me as I walked to that building, and I went into the building. So, there was some awareness amongst law enforcement, maybe university [police], that something was going to happen…

…We conferred there about what we’d observed. We’d observed that there was – in the turnstile door to the bursar’s office – that there was a university employee. And so, the question is, what are we going to do about that…

…So Black students rushing up [Rebecca] Crown [Center] Plaza shouting “Black Power!”…

…And then the rest of us, a series of a set of males, had started down the alley. And we were into a jog, so that as he came out of the door, we hit the street, crossed the street, [in] a big stream. So, I think he was sort of surprised to see a stream of Black males followed by males and females approaching that door…

…Then it just kept rotating until almost 100 of us went in.