*photo from Museum of the Grand Prairie
For some, the lessons of 1968 are ones learned through the study of history.
For others, the knowledge comes from having lived through that time period.
Three panelists — Izona Burgess, Stan West and Candy Foster — in the Museum of the Grand Prairie’s 1968 Exhibit Speaker Series: Civil Rights in Champaign County program, not only remember 1968, but also believe there are similarities between life then and life now.
Burgess and West came to the Champaign-Urbana area from Chicago through the University of Illinois’ Project 500.
Project 500 was established in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., when students and community residents urged the university to enroll students traditionally underrepresented on campus.
In 1967, only 372 of 30,400 students were black. In 1968, 565 newly admitted African American and Latino students entered the student body.
Foster, who was born in Danville, began to take off in his career as a musician when he was called upon as a resident of Champaign-Urbana in the 1960s to perform for military personnel during the Vietnam War.
With 2.2 million American men drafted between 1964 and 1973, Foster traveled with his band all around Illinois, and then later the country, playing for the soldiers.
“A lot of those kids had just got out of high school and had never been away from home,” he said.
While many entertainers at that time were country and western musicians, the military recognized the need for soul musicians that would lift the soldiers’ spirits, too. Foster’s band traveled four to five nights a week to different bases to play for “soldiers coming in and going out.”
While soldiers of all backgrounds were going off to Vietnam, Americans were making strides at home.
American public schools began to move away from a segregated system.
Burgess, whose parents moved to the west side of Chicago to escape the Jim Crow laws of Arkansas, attended an all-black school where white teachers were employed.
“I think because my parents experienced so much in the Jim Crow south, they shielded us from a lot of things,” Burgess said.
“If you got discriminated against, it was because you were misbehaving,” she said. “I didn’t see the other (types of discrimination) until we started integrating.”
Burgess showed a photo of the high school she attended in 1964. The entire student population was white.
When she showed another photo of the same high school in 1968, the entire student population was black.
“Once we began to integrate the school, all the whites left,” she recalls.
“Even changing laws, you can’t change hearts,” Burgess said.
Burgess remembers feeling like everyone hated the black students.
“My teacher did start to teach me a certain way when she got my transcript from my other school,” she said.
In Danville, Foster witnessed a hard-working black community which had to make it “our own way,” support each other.
The Elks organization in town raised money for needs throughout the community.
“Sometimes we were last on the totem pole to get chairs at the centers; (the Elks and Masons) would raise money and do what was needed to be done in the community,” he said.
“That’s why I became an Elks member, that’s why I became a mason.
“I was very, very happy and proud of that. That was one of the most important things I’ve seen done around here in a long, long time.”
Foster said, at the time, the black community had its own shops and halls where they would patronize just to support each other.
“They knew the families and would help each when they couldn’t pay the bills,” Foster said.
Living in the housing projects, Burgess said that the ‘Dick and Jane’ books she read as a child showed her a different life outside of the situation her family was in.
That life, in some ways became a reality for her family as they moved out of the projects in 1968.
“It was the worst of times, but it was also the best of times for me,” she said.
“I really had some serious questions about where we were going in this world.”
West, who attended South Shore High School, with a predominantly Jewish student population, recalls King’s assassination, saying it was “a pivotal event for everybody throughout the nation.”
He played a part in closing down his high school when students organized a peaceful walkout and marched down the streets of Chicago.
“We were determined to make sure this youthful anger was very much in play, and it had to be demonstrated as such,” West said.
Until his arrival at the University of Illinois in 1969, West volunteered to sell a Black Panther newspaper in Chicago, worked in the free breakfast program and at the free health clinic.
“It really informed and framed my ideas about civic journalism,” he said.
Burgess said that the time was full of uncertainty.
With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 and Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, Burgess felt like the nation was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
West said lately he has been writing about the similarities between 50 years ago and today.
“Not much has changed structurally,” he said.
West said that although 500 black and brown students were recruited to attend the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, many were not given financial aid or housing they required to be a student.
In 2013 West learned that the trend may continue today.
According to West, in 2013 he learned that while nearly 25,000 black and brown students have graduated from the University of Illinois in the last 50 years, less than 400 black and brown students who are recruited through Project 500 actually enrolled in the school and even less receive financial aid.
“There have been changes, but structurally and institutionally, not that much,” he said.
Foster also remembers tough times in the heart of Champaign, and sees similarities to today.
He said before 1968, gangs took over the Douglass Center.
“One way or another, wrong or right, every one had to put their heads together to figure out what to do about this,” he said. “People like that need to be educated. They need to be educated and made to realize there are other more important things in life than gang-banging.”
“Now in 2019, they are gang-banging, shooting and killing each other.”
While there are more black leaders in many communities, Foster said many young people still need help.
“For every one that gets through, it seems like five or six fall by the wayside,” he said.
“You pick up the paper and see some of these people that could be scholars, then you flip the page and they are getting 30 years in prison.
“Then you get someone on TV telling you we had a good year, but you still go out there in public, and you see people standing around doing nothing, able-bodied people not working.”
Growing up in a family where his mother worked two jobs during the 1930s and 1940s to put food on the family table while his father was serving in the military, Foster is surprised that many Americans are still living paycheck to paycheck today.
“These are the types of things I thought we were past, but it seems like we are still there,” he said.
“Life is pretty much still the same when you get down to it. No matter how much things change, they stay the same.”
In some ways, Burgess agrees.
“There’s still just so much anger,” she said. “In 1968, there were a lot of angry black people and in 2018 there are a lot of angry white people.”
Full of cultural revolutions whether social, sexual or civil, the 1960s and ’70s were full of rage, according to West.
He sees the same rage in today’s Me Too movement.
West pointed out that 40 congresswomen wore suffragette white to President Trump’s nationwide address as a way to promote continued women’s rights.
“I feel like I have an ethical responsibility, women are treated as fringe elements, when in fact, they are the majority,” he said.
Through anger or hard times, Foster said people can rely on one thing.
“I can’t think of a year in my lifetime when things got bad, people have a way of coming together,” he said. “They don’t really understand each other until something bad happens.”
Foster said that’s what makes America great.
“I would hope that everybody knows what a wonderful country we have despite all the differences we sometimes go through,” he said.
“In hurricanes and tornadoes, people come from miles around to help,” he said. “That’s America. That’s what people do. When that happens, they don’t care about who was black, orange or yellow.”
Foster witnessed this in the moments and days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Taking his lunch break during his work day at a furniture store in Champaign, Foster saw his wife and her friends crying at the kitchen table. He said the community gathered at their local churches in the days afterwards to find comfort.
“The churches were very instrumental in the neighborhood. People went to church. That’s the thing to do, you cry, and then you have to go somewhere you can be together,” Foster said.
“People have to come together in crisis. You don’t have to be alone when you go through this.
“You don’t have to be angry, but you are going to be angry. You’ve got to be strong. That’s what (Martin Luther King Jr.) was preaching. He wasn’t preaching violence. We thought the right thing to do would be to go to church, spread our feelings, cry, be angry, whatever it was. We share all that together.”
Foster believes that it was on the backs of the whole community of black, white and brown people that opportunities for equal rights were afforded.
“Black people weren’t the only ones in that movement,” he said. “All walks of life. We should never forget that.”
“It was a hard time, but I think we got stronger for it.”
