A Tribute

For those quoted in the following pages-and for the thousands of other participants we did not reach-Feb. 13, 1969, must seem like yesterday.

For the rest of us, we can only imagine the outrageous ambition of those 49 students cramped into the back of a rented van on their way to-to WHAT?, their parents demanded-storm the Allen Building. Or the astonished amazement of the 1,000 students who, just 12 hours later, found themselves fleeing for nearby building as the Durham police deployed tear gas into the crowd.

The Duke of 1999 is certainly a different world. The 11 demands posed by the Allen Building protesters have not all been met, but the political climate of the University is radically changed.

The current occupants of the Allen Building's second floor are highly attuned to today's race issues-and the cleansed, limiting language one must use to address them. But we're still groping for solutions; the campus remains divided and the climate often tense.

Academia's efforts to overcome our pernicious legacies are probably no longer best waged through open confrontation, but through research, programs, scholarships, talk, time-none of which easily grab headlines.

Less then a week after the Allen Building takeover's 30th anniversary, Duke will host another event in this ongoing effort: on Feb. 18, former Princeton University president and affirmative action scholar William Bowen will visit Page Auditorium, the site of many of the fiery speeches in the week that led up to the Allen Building takeover.

The academic tone that night may be what we need to make progress today, but it would have been impossible without the fiery passion of a generation ago.

The Chronicle offers "The Allen Building Takeover: Thirty Years Later" as a tribute to those who participated in it, and as a resource to those who might be learning about it for the first time. We hope you enjoy the pages that follow.