Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 23, 2014

UNIVERSITY PARK Late on a Monday afternoon in May 1968, half of Penn State University's black student population marched from College Avenue and up the campus mall to Old Main. Numbering about 100, most were members of an activist group called the Frederick E. Douglass Association. They planned to present 12 demands to Charles Lewis, Penn State's vice president for student affairs.

The previous month, a sniper had shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr. on a Tennessee hotel balcony. Protests were erupting on campuses throughout the country.

That was a time for expressing pain and just a time to express your deepest feelings and general vulnerability about the whole country and state and city, says Frederick Phillips, a 1968 graduate who founded the Douglass Association.

The students were dissatisfied with the treatment of the black community at Penn State. They wanted course offerings with black literature and an African culture study program. They wanted more black students, more black athletes and more black professors, and they wanted black coaches.

Less than 1 percent of the student body was black, and the school had a handful of black faculty. As for black coaches, Penn State didn't have any.

Today, James Franklin, hired in January, is Penn State's first black head football coach. Mr. Franklin isn't necessarily more than a football coach, but this story is about more than football.

Penn State today is trying to be a diverse university and is as diverse as it has ever been concerning race, ethnicity and religion in an area defined by homogeneity (a 90 percent white population in Centre County). Though its black student population, 4.1 percent at University Park, is lower than the University of Pittsburgh (5.3 percent) and Temple (14.7 percent), the graduation rate for black students has improved from around 40 percent 30 years ago to 67 percent now. Its percentage of minority and black faculty is in the middle of the pack nationally for a state university.

Into these contradictions, the hiring of Mr. Franklin is another benchmark of progress. Penn State is the flagship institution for the commonwealth, and the football coach is the school's most visible leader.

Football here has the power to unite. It has the power to make people riot. It has the power to make people donate, cry and rejoice. As Penn State's vice provost for educational equity Terrell Jones says, Penn State football games are church.

Mr. Jones says the highest-growing number of minority students he sees at Penn State are those of mixed race. Mr. Franklin's late mother was white, from Britain, and his late father was black. He was a first-generation college student and he needed financial aid from football and a Pell Grant to attend East Stroudsburg University.

The rest is here:
Franklin's hiring a benchmark for Penn State

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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