Background Knowledge And Content
Student Protests in the USA: A Very Brief Overview
Students and young people protesting in the United States of America is not a new idea. Students mobilized for suffrage in the early 1900s and eventually won the vote for women. Student protests in the 1960s are among the most famous examples of the young showing up for what they believe in. Students all over the country, along with other young adults, got up and out to protest for civil rights. Led by major organizers like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and other student movements, young folks spoke out for equal rights and especially voting rights for everyone. The fight was messy, bloody, and the death toll was high. Students, Black and white, died fighting for rights for all regardless of race and skin color2. This content is covered for current students in their African American History classes in grade 10 and United States History in grade 11, and should be familiar enough to my students that we don’t spend more than a day or two discussing and analyzing that history.
Students protested in the mid-1960s for rights to free speech in terms of political organizing, starting in California and inspiring sit-ins all over the country for students wanting to be civilly engaged in their communities. This led right into student protests over the Vietnam war and the military draft, which ended with the tragic Kent State massacre when 4 unarmed students were killed. Students across the US protested and shut down campuses to the extent that President Nixon had to establish guidelines on “Campus Unrest,” which outlined how campuses could and could not handle protests on campus. At the same time, and for years after, college students protested apartheid in South Africa3. They set up encampments and picketed for boycotts and divestments. Sound familiar? This set up models for protests that continued and still continue on campuses across the country. Locally, at the University of Pennsylvania, these protests and more took place all over campus.
History of the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania, which had already existed for over 100 years in downtown Philadelphia, moved west across the Schuylkill River to West Philadelphia in 1872 to a spacious farm area. The college began to rapidly expand; the dental school opened in 1878, the Wharton school in 1881, the School of Veterinary Medicine in 1884, and the School of Fine arts in 1890. The School of Education followed shortly after in 1914. UPenn experienced a major transformation in the 1940s during the Second World War, where they received copious amounts of federal dollars. Following the war, thousands of students attended the university on the GI bill and the UPenn population exploded. The University had graduated 301 students in 1890, and in 100 years that number boomed to 5,634 students graduating in 1990.
More students means more space; the university has been expanding since the 1870s and hasn’t stopped yet. When a university expands, it needs somewhere to go. Once the mid-20th century rolls around, Philadelphia is a developed urban space with residential homes and small businesses. At this point in time, a university expansion means displacing those people and places to make room for more buildings for the university. Philadelphians, in their standard cynicism, have dubbed this process “Penn-trification.”
The University of Pennsylvania drives out West Philadelphians
Penn decided in the late 1950s that they needed a science center, and they had already identified a local swath of city for this great plan. The Black Bottom, an area spanning 34th to 38th Streets, Market St to Lancaster Avenue (about 4 blocks), was the chosen “declining” neighborhood for this project. The brains behind this operation used strategic language when discussing this land, such as “blight” and “slums.4” The Black Bottom neighborhood was a mixed use space, a combination of industrial, commercial, and residential, which at the time was not a desirable kind of neighborhood for most people. The university plan was to create a science research park, modeled on Stanford’s research park, but in the middle of a city.
Several “crime sprees” (read: murders) occurred on the borders of the university neighborhood, which spurred the planning commission to proceed with their work. The Urban Renewal Act was also rewritten at this time to provide funding for university projects, which made this the perfect time to expand the school. The city, the federal money, and the interests of UPenn and Drexel University all lined up. This planning was going great for the larger university community (lovingly labeled “Eds and Meds,” for the schools and the hospitals), until the people who lived there found out5.
Town hall meetings were set up to appease the people, but it was all a show and nobody got any answers. The West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC), the conglomerate wanting to redevelop the area, promised help with relocation for all the residents, but they weren’t buying it. The people of Black Bottom staged a sit-in in the mayor’s office demanding to be a part of the planning for their own neighborhood. They even filed a lawsuit to try to prevent the redevelopment from going forward. The WPC used diplomatic backchannels to block the plans of the Black Bottom residents, and the land was indeed razed and approximately 600 low-income and Black families were displaced6.
By the time the funding for the science center finally comes through, the US is involved in the Vietnam War. Students get wind that the planned science center is going to be used for defense research and they are mad. They held a sit-in in the college president’s office over 6 days in February of 1969, and the outcome was described by a member of the Faculty Advisory Council as “a strange war in which all sides won.” The university president at the time, President Gaylord Harnwell, didn’t particularly want to be involved in military research, so that wasn’t a huge concession for him. The other result of this sit-in was the quadripartide commission, made up of community, students, faculty, and the board of trustees of the university, which would come up with new plans for the Black Bottom area which by this time had already been completely razed.
In the end, the quadripartide commission only really got 2 (really 1.5) of the things they wanted and only for a short time. They eventually got low-income housing built; finally in 1983 they were built at 39th and Market streets. This contract was for 40 years of low-income housing, and in fact the housing unit was demolished in 2024, forcing the residents to, once again, relocate. The other concession was supposed to be a magnet high school for the sciences, modeled on schools like NYC’s Bronx Science High School. The neighborhood got a high school, University City High School, but the school was a standard neighborhood school that shuttered in 2013 amidst mass school closings that targeting failing schools7. So in 2026, as this unit is being written, neither of the concessions awarded for the utter destruction of a thriving neighborhood still exist.
Back to the 1990s, UPenn experienced another series of murders on the borders of their campus. University staff and faculty get mad; they want a safe place to live near campus so they can get to work more easily than driving from the suburbs. UPenn president Judith Rodin, in collaboration with the School District of Philadelphia, decided to build an elementary school on the campus for the neighborhood. In 2001, Sadie T.M. Alexander Elementary School opened (referred to by most of the Philadelphia community as “Penn Alexander.”) This school was built on land that already belonged to UPenn, but a different kind of displacement occurred as a result of this new school. This school, funded by both the local school district and the university, was very popular and everyone in the catchment area could send their students there8. Early on, the demographics of the school were diverse and had many students of color in addition to some of the white students who were mostly children of Penn faculty. By law of supply and demand, real estate prices skyrocketed and many long-time residents of the neighborhood were quickly priced out of their own neighborhood. Real estate prices have doubled and tripled since the school began operation. The school was 57% African-American in the first year of operation, and that statistic had fallen to 21% in 2018.
And it doesn’t stop there. In 2018, one of the last low-income housing buildings in the school catchment was sold and residents were issued lease termination notices. Building residents and neighbors had meetings to try to prevent the sale, but failed to save their housing and had to relocate9. In 2026, Sadie T.M. Alexander public school's student body is 46% white, 25% Asian, and 12% Black. The University of Philadelphia builds, and the effects ripple further and further west in the city every time10.
Loss of Third Places and Spaces
What do we, as a society, lose when neighborhoods are destroyed or redeveloped? Not only are we losing housing (which is a really big deal) but communities lose their businesses and their third places. A third place is a space that is not home or work (or school for students) in which one can spend time. With the loss of the Black Bottom neighborhood, barbershops and bars were lost along with porches and stoops as places to gather and be social. When patrons of a business get priced out of an area those businesses rarely survive, so even when gentrification is happening those spaces are being lost. And those spaces that aren’t lost become heavily policed, which still means that some people have lost access to the space because of how they look to the authorities.
The over-policing of Black and Brown teens (and adults) is, sadly, not a novel concept in today’s Philadelphia. Policing of folks who aren’t white started in the United States as early as slavery days, morphing into Jim Crow laws at the end of the Civil War. Even when these laws were illegal, people still believed that African Americans were up to no good and looked a little closer at where they were going and what they were doing. Black teens are subject to more discipline at school, and fatal police shootings happen most often in Black communities. 11 Black teens are subject to “adultification” where they’re treated like adults because they look like adults, rather than being treated like the children they are. Please see the annotated bibliography for further research and information on this topic, as this is an extensive topic with the potential to take over this entire paper.
Philadelphia’s Chinatown Wins
Philadelphia’s Chinatown is another hot topic when it comes to third places and loss of community autonomy. Philadelphia’s Chinatown began in 1871 with one man and a laundromat, and had its big boom in 1943 when the Exclusion Act was repealed. Multi-generational families stream in and create a large and vibrant community. Of course, the city of Philadelphia decides that this space is perfect to plow through to create a multi-lane highway. The residents rallied together, and although the highway was still built, some major landmarks and places were saved through that activism and protest.
However, several massive building projects were defeated by the residents of Chinatown and their allies. Oftentimes, students were involved in these protests to avoid massive neighborhood construction. A federal prison, a casino, and two sports stadiums were among the proposed projects to be built in the heart of Chinatown that were never built because the protests of the neighborhood and the city at large stood up and said no12. In the most recent attempt to build a basketball stadium, high school students in downtown Philadelphia banded together with the Chinatown community and organized walkouts and protests all over the city to rally support13.
Where this leaves us now
Philadelphia hasn’t had time to slow down after winning the battle over the most recent stadium. Philadelphia students and residents are up and ready to protest for themselves and their families as ICE terrorizes their neighborhoods. Local authorities keep a close eye on public spaces and chase away anyone they think might have potential to be up to no good (read: Black and Brown teens and young adults) with reckless abandon14. Schools make choices in rule enforcement that objectifies curvy young women, and the students are responding with peaceful protest in and out of the classroom. We are so lucky in Philadelphia that we haven’t had any intervention as far as book bans and interventions in our libraries or classroom yet, but I believe in the community and the students if we ever face folks who want to control what we read. Today's students are, for the most part, smart and angry, and with some guidance they are capable of inciting major changes in their communities and beyond.
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