Rejecting Apathy: The People’s University vs. Howard University
Founded in 1867 and named after Union general and Civil War hero Oliver Otis Howard, Howard University has long been celebrated as ‘The Mecca of Black education.’ Notable alumni like Kamala Harris, Taraji P. Henson, Marlon Wayans, and Phylicia Rashad have sung the university’s praises. Harris gave her concession speech at the esteemed HBCU, and Rashad served as the dean of the university’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts from 2021 - 2024. Year after year, Howard University has welcomed Black students, alluring them with the promise of an education and a home to truly be free as a young Black person. However, many students quickly find out that the Howard they were sold is a lie, something crafted and meticulously marketed. The Howard they experience lacks integrity and instead cultivates and encourages elitism, respectability politics, and a dissension of Black radical thought. In 1989, Howard students led a three-day protest and occupation of the university’s administration building. The occupation and protest were in response to the school appointing Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees. He resigned the following week, but the protests continued, with the students demanding better security, housing, and more Black people on the Board of Trustees.
In the 36 years since those protests, Howard students have carried out similar protests, refusing to accept Howard as it is and trying to push the institution to be what it truly claims to be. This push came to a head on April 16th, when Howard student organizers, going under the name The People’s University, created an encampment on The Yard; the social epicenter on campus and the backdrop for speeches from multiple U.S. presidents and other luminaries. According to The People’s University, the goal of their encampment was to “create a space of radical community, political education, creativity, and unity.” At 6:30 p.m., just 15 minutes after they had set up their three tents, Howard faculty arrived at the encampment and began questioning students, threatening them with suspension if they did not comply. 15 more minutes passed, and three police officers came by, taking videos and photos of the almost 40 students present. By 3 a.m., The Yard was crowded with protesters and police, with additional officers arriving equipped with zip ties, police dogs, and vans. The student organizers of The People’s University, along with all the protesters, fled the scene and made it home safely, without any brutalization or arrests.
A few days after the encampment, we spoke with a Howard student organizer from The People’s University who requested anonymity and chose to go by the pseudonym “Steel” for this interview.
How long have you been at Howard?
I've been at Howard for a year now.
What made you want to transfer to Howard?
Personal relationships with the school, the allure of an HBCU, on top of it being a place where I knew a lot of people who were going there already, and what the vibe was dealing with politics.
You go on Reddit and type in Howard University, and you find so many people talking about their experience there: the issues with financial aid, dorms, the school over-admitting freshmen, the culture. In 2021, Howard students organized a sit-in, protesting against the poor housing conditions on campus. What has been your experience at Howard thus far?
I think that’s been the most surprising thing. Despite all the reasons you would think to come to this school, once you get here, you realize they don't give a fuck about you. They demonstrate [it] through the way you interact with the admin and staff.. Housing is always an issue for Howard students—whether you're a freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior. Housing quality is also another big issue. As far as amenities and things we get as Howard students, those are constantly being cut and altered. Being at this school, you have access to a great network, and there's always great people here. But this “Howard runaround” when it comes to dealing with the admin and getting things you want out of the school…
That brings us to last week’s encampment. Could you clarify what the encampment was for? It was clear in the statement your organization released. But things got confusing with the statement Howard released, claiming y’all were “led by what appeared to be a pro-Palestinian protester that had no affiliation with the University.”
The encampment was originally intended to be an autonomous liberated zone. A space for politicization of the student body, encouraging community care, mutual aid, certain ethics of mutual assistance, and a rejection of apathy. For people engaging with the space to understand the political moment first and foremost, but [also] understand how, through community care and organization, we can overcome the demands of the political moment. That was the major intention of the space; that was why it was started. With the awareness of the organizers and the political framework of the space, we stood in solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, with all the oppressed peoples. It wasn't started with the intention of being a pro-Palestinian encampment– that wasn't the core tenets of the space.
I want to go through the demands your organization made; they all seem rational to me. Nothing that y'all are asking is outlandish. Two of the demands stuck out to me: demands two and three. Let’s start with Demand 2: We demand I.C.E. is banned from campus. No agents and no recruiters. Currently, are I.C.E agents allowed on campus??
A couple of months ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was tabling and recruiting on Howard's campus in the School of Business. And there was a student response to that. Recently, Howard released a statement directly concerning immigration and customs officers' presence on campus. Stating, first and foremost, they would not participate in the concealment or protection of undocumented students if I.C.E. arrived on campus to engage in deportation and detainment. The email was extremely pessimistic and implied that international students would be on their own. These developments were really what spurred that demand.
Demand 3: We want Howard University to protect ethnic studies programs (Africana studies, women, gender, and sexuality studies). That one made me laugh. Only because it’s wild but not surprising that at a historically Black university, students have to beg to keep these programs. Where do things currently stand with the ethnic studies programs?
Currently, the Africana Studies program doesn't even have a legitimate department.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. It doesn't what?
It's a department. But the faculty don't have offices. They don't have a space on campus that's designated for them. A lot of professors have to meet with their students for office hours off campus. It’s quite a neglected field of study at a Black university. And then with Howard's message, sort of implying that they would be capitulating to Trump's agenda…the assumption seems to be that these programs are next on the chopping block. And so part of that demand was sort of preemptive, just given Howard's previous behavior. Like you said, we’re begging these people to retain these fields of studies at a Black university. What does D.E.I. mean at a historically Black college?
Zora Neale Hurston, Kwame Ture, and Amiri Baraka went to Howard. So many Black radicals who have been instrumental to Black liberation went to Howard. At the same time, Kamala Harris went to Howard. It seems like Howard wants more Kamalas. They don’t want more Kwames, Tures, or Zoras. They had Joe Biden give the commencement speech in 2023. How do you reconcile being at a school that produces radicals but is not inherently a radical institution? Howard upholds white supremacy.
It's difficult because Howard has completely ingrained itself and immersed itself in being the institution that produces Black faces of empire. They're very proud of that, and the entire culture on campus almost conceals the Black radical tradition that has existed and currently exists on campus. Part of it is trying to engage the student body to reject the things that Howard presents to us, as you know, quote, unquote, Black excellence–the things that we should be aspiring to. Trying to expose the contradictions in those things. How is it possible that the election was lost on the basis of Kamala’s Blackness? And not the fact that the entire campaign capitulated to Republican policy and did not take a stance against genocide? Rejecting these narratives that try to build up Blackness as something that is so inherently subversive that we can be in positions of power and brutality and still be acting as revolutionaries, simply because we are Black and in those spaces. Trying to reject that narrative is crucial.. It's not just being Black in these spaces that makes you subversive, revolutionary, or radical. It is the content of what you're doing and trying to expose that is crucially important. Using the contradictions within Howard as an institution is also crucially important. You can't claim to be trying to build up a student body of Black excellence and achievement when you don't care about your student body or their well-being or the resources they have access to.
Y’all held that space for nine hours, and then they called the police. Did y’all expect that to happen, and were y’all prepared? Or was it a matter of, hey, we’re going to be out here until we can’t anymore?
The intention with the space was certainly to be out there until we couldn't. We didn’t anticipate that level of oppression; we only expected that it was a possibility. The programming that was planned wasn't initially in direct opposition to the school, and there wasn't an initial drive to try to alter the institution or try to get anything from the school. It was really in reaction to that level of oppression that we realized that would be necessary, given the moment, and especially given the eyes that were beginning to be on the encampment. As early as around 10:30, that initial police presence came, and it came in full force. They had lined up all down Sixth Street with squad cars–this was MPD. And this was after being threatened by the faculty. In response to that, we realized that to maintain the space, to maintain its legitimacy, we'd have to have a more concrete goal or demands in mind.
They called the police, and then more police came, and then even more police came with dogs and police vans, and zip ties. Y’all ended up safely dispersing. Have y'all heard from the university since the encampment?
Immediately after the encampment, the following morning, the university released a statement about the events that took place, essentially just lying. They had claimed, initially, that the protest was both started and attended by mostly non-Howard students, which was not the case. They claimed that the protests were anti-Semitic, hateful, and engaged in derogatory speech. This was not the case, and all of this was them manipulating the narrative of what happened to serve their interests, to conceal the fact that they called several dozen police on a bunch of students. The reality was that this was organized and facilitated by Howard students, and that in response to the police presence, the DC community and outside orgs came to support and to defend the students against arrest and repression. The university's statement was completely false.
The encampment was started by Howard students, and the surrounding community came out to support and protect you all, the students. Can you talk about the importance of that kind of support? Because obviously, y'all can do a lot, but at the same time, we're all in community, and we need to be there for each other.
It was crucially important. Given the development of the night, it seemed that they wanted to separate that crowd of off-campus supporters from the Howard students, as a way of singling out the members of Howard participating. But there is a dynamic, of you know, the realities of this being a Black university, this being an encampment started and facilitated by Black students, then the large presence of non-Black people on the campus: that was a big part of why Howard was able to spin that narrative. But I think a big part of that is recognizing that these people put their bodies and their safety on the line for Black students, and that should be recognized above anything. It's also important that Black people are showing up for other Black people. There are certain dynamics, too, where none of the organizers or anybody involved holds that against people who answered the call to action as urgently as they could. There's no bitterness. The support was appreciated, it was necessary, and it was so crucial to the broader idea of what we're building.
Source: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System
Out of the 30 schools that are the most reliant on federal funding, 18 are HBCUs, including Howard. Federal funding accounted for 37% of Howard’s 2023 endowment. Trump will be president for the next four years. This will be a long battle. How are you taking care of yourself and preparing for this fight?
It's important to be smart and strategic about everything we do as organizers. But, it's also important to be quite pragmatic and realistic about what's happening and what's happening to people right now. People are being sent to concentration camps in El Salvador, people are being taken off the streets and put in detention centers in the South, and nobody knows where they are. People are dying all over the world in the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, with American bombs and American tax money. I think in this moment, it's important to be worried about your own safety, but it's also very important to understand what's demanded of us and what is required of us to risk. And it is quite literally everything, in service of a better world; a society where you can move past these forces of fascism and repression. In rejecting apathy, we have to understand that we're not as comfortable as you may have thought we are, and that it's only going to get worse. The longer we stand by and do nothing, the more people are going to get hurt. As much as it's important to stay safe, nobody is safe, and that is the reality of the political moment.
Before this, did you have any experience organizing in radical liberation movements?
I've been an organizer for around five years. I've been a member of the Communist Party for quite a long time. Organizing through these channels has allowed me to bring my experience to Howard. But, it's a matter of the collective and the capacity of the people you organize with and alongside. None of this would have happened without that collective. On an individual level, my experience complements the experience of my comrades and all the people I'm in community with and organizing with. That is how these things are becoming possible: through the work of the collective, through the growth of the collective, and the more people realize the power they have in the collective, the stronger we will all get.
The encampment was shut down. What is next? How are y'all going to make sure that Howard does not keep spreading the propaganda and throwing in these buzzwords like “anti-semitism” in their statements to try to thwart the movement? How do y'all keep the fight going when you know Howard has shown their hand?
That's a big part of it. Howard has shown their hand, and that works in their favor and ours. We have an example of the kind of repression Howard is willing to unleash on their students, in service of fascism. Part of what's next is controlling the narrative, making sure that people understand what happened that night, what is happening at Howard, and what's happening in the world. Constantly flooding the airways with that information. Campus, organization, outreach: all these things are crucially important.
What can people who are going to read this do to support you and your organization?
The most immediate way is to amplify the happenings at the university, and keep an eye on the developments at the university. The People's University has a telegram that we are encouraging people to join to remain updated and cognizant about what's going on. That's the channel where things will be coordinated, as far as donations, if they might be needed, and supplies. Those sorts of needs will become clear, and there will be more direct channels for that support. The Youthrev Community on Instagram is where a lot of updates about the Howard and Shaw community are being posted.