My group’s focus for the University’s “History and Context Committee” is on the nature of campus protests. Our task for this project is to research and inform the public of the history of student protesting from the earliest years of the Harrisonburg Normal School to the present setting at JMU. In order to reach a general audience, our team has decided to create and Adobe “Glideshow” page that incorporates how JMU students and other residents of the Shenandoah Valley area were involved in protests and strikes. Some of these will include politics on campus between students and administration to movements on global and national politics. We are hoping to find various types of primary and secondary sources from newspapers, yearbooks, oral interviews and other methods of record keeping from JMU Special Collections in order to lift this “silence” of this institution’s past.
My individual involvement in the team’s topic involves the Anti-War protests of 1973 that occurred on Madison College campus. The background of this event is the opening ceremony of the Godwin Gymnasium and the special guest speaker being Senator Harry Byrd, a strong pro-war advocate for the War in Vietnam. His views seemingly outraged a portion of the student body into turning to protest, marching around campus and demonstrating outside of the new gymnasium, in order to voice their views against Senator Byrd and the Vietnam war. Though simply exercising their first amendment right, the motion was exaggerated and silenced by JMU Administration and the SGA by attempting to press charges against the protestors.
The image shown above is a first-hand account (photograph) from the 1973 edition of Bluestone, Madison College’s/JMU’s student run yearbook picturing the anti-war protest that occurred against Byrd. In this picture, four to six students are protesting Senator Byrd’s opinions on the war. In the photograph, there are two students leaning/standing against a wall with two picket signs. The one sign that the woman is holding reads “Byrd Votes For Death”, translating that they view that the Senator from Virginia approves of the actions of the war, even though it means that many American soldiers and even local Vietnamese bystanders are killed in the process. The other sign reads “Vote for Life” with a peace symbol, which also speaks against the Senator, but focuses more on the goal to end the war itself, rather than solely calling the senator out for his views. All students in the photo are simultaneously holding up their index and middle finger, demonstrating the sign for peace as they protest outside of the ceremony.
The goal of these sources is to inform the general public that public campus protests were common and impactful like on other campuses across the country. Demonstrations like these show that students at this institution are raising their voice and expressing their opinions on the political issues and values of their time. My group hopes to find why protests like these are silenced pasts of the history at James Madison University.
WC: “Senator Byrd Protest”, 1973 Bluestone, Harrisonburg, VA, JMU Scholarly Commons
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