Only one generation ago the number of football players at Eastern dwarfed the number of blacks.

In 1967, the university enrolled 35 black students and counted two black professors among its faculty. Back then, off-campus housing was segregated forcing black students to live in the same old, rickety apartments year after year. Some people here questioned why inner-city students traveled south and didn’t attend Chicago State University instead. Once in the early 1970s, men with guns chased black students on motorcycles.

And so, while millions will remember Sunday as the conclusion of the 2003 National Football League season, Feb. 1 also symbolized the beginning of Black History Month. At Eastern, the month-long celebration is called African American Heritage Month.

The keyword this month is remembrance. The names of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks will be mentioned in the newspapers and on television, but the same struggle and battle for equality was fought here at Eastern.

“What’s Black History Month to me?” asked Zelda Gardner, an academic adviser with the Gateway Program, who was in charge of the movies shown for the month. “It’s an opportunity to celebrate a great culture that has contributed to America in several ways.”

Through panel discussions, movies and other programs during African American Heritage Month, organizers hope previous generation efforts and stories will not be forgotten.

“We all wanted to graduate and get out of Charleston,” said Mike Jeffries, now an associate dean of students at the University of Illinois and a 1973 graduate of Eastern. He represented the Afro American Association (now called the Black Student Union) when the Faculty Senate decided to name the student union after Martin Luther King Jr. in 1970.

“It was a tough time walking down the streets sometimes,” Jeffries said. “We had friends and supporters, but it didn’t feel like there was enough.”

But things changed while Jeffries attended Eastern, which he said now retains black students better than any state university. Promising to meet demands to increase black students, faculty and curriculum laid out in a protest by the community in the spring of 1970, President Quincy Doudna told students if he didn’t meet the requests by the fall, he “would leave and let someone else try it.”

In just a few years, black enrollment ballooned to more than 400. The university organized for busloads of prospective students to visit campus. Jeffries remembers recruiting trips with university administrators to predominantly black high schools near Chicago.

The university also established the state’s first African American studies undergraduate major and minor in 1970, according to “The History of African American in Coles County, Illinois,” compiled by Wilson Ogbomo, the director of the African American studies department.

“Sometimes I wish that it wasn’t just this month that we remember and recognize those who contributed and made contributions every month of the year,” said Elmer Pullen, a graduate of Eastern in the late 1960s who was hired in the Financial Aid office where he remained for 32 years.

Equal housing a major struggle

Jeffries remembers being one of three black students in Thomas Hall. The residence halls were open to any student at the time, but off-campus housing presented another problem. The university in the late 1960s and early 1970s had to approve off-campus housing, thus limiting the possible options.

Pullen said it was cheaper to live off campus. On several occasions, he said, students would inquire about an apartment’s vacancy only to be told: “Sorry, this had just been rented.”

“And we thought it was due to the color of our skin,” Pullen said.

To counter this, students would tell the Housing Office that the apartment had no vacancies and the apartment was taken off the available housing list. Also, a few white families in Charleston would rent apartments from the discriminating leasers and then rent them to black students.

Student union sign stolen twice, vandalized

Now, the sign showing that the cream-colored brick building on 7th Street across from the University Police Department suspends high in the air, like the ones seen in front of a high school. Its existence, however, was anything but elementary.

The Student Senate in 1970 recommended that the University Union Building be renamed after Martin Luther King Jr. and the Faculty Senate agreed. Jeffries was at that Faculty Senate meeting.

“They wanted to ask me, ‘Did the students want this?’ and I said … ‘Yes, yes we do,’ ” Jeffries said with a laugh.

But despite the two representative body’s consent, some students resented the building’s naming. The steel sign was stolen twice and when it was held in place by two concrete pillars the sign was smeared with yellow paint and beaten by a large instrument.

Further controversy occurred three years later during homecoming week. While Kelly Edwards was celebrated as the first black Homecoming Queen last fall, Diane Williams in 1973 received the highest number of votes. A white student, Karyl Buddemeier, protested her title, however, after campaign materials supporting Williams were found in close proximity to the voting area, according to Ogbomo’s compilation.

“Miss Williams’ supporters claimed the campaign material could have been placed there to hurt her candidacy and the sponsors of Miss Buddemeier were of the view that whether the rule was unfair or not it existed before the election,” according to the compilation.

Williams’ vote total was subsequently decreased and Buddemeier was then named queen. More protesting ensued and university officials eventually decided 1973’s homecoming would go without a queen.

“That was a time in the nation with a great deal of unrest,” remembers Bill Ridgeway, a zoology professor at Eastern from 1966 to 1994, who also became the university’s third African American studies professor.

Similar stories and experiences are shared at many universities.

Eastern, in terms of student diversity, is striving as well as any other state university, Gardner said, but administrators list increasing minority enrollment as a top priority. The number of black faculty, however, was given the lowest grade by Illinois Board of Higher Education.

“The lessons I learned were to help monitor and prepare students,” Jeffries said. He was a Computer Science major, who served as the Afro American Association’s vice president and since has served as the alumni representative on the search committees for former President David Jorns and the search for the late Johnetta Jones, the director of Minority Affairs.

“It provided a training ground for me in higher education and administration helping students to make it,” Jeffries said.