Occupy Allen Building students should have left school in 1969

I would have liked to recommend what would have been a more effective course of action for the black student protesters in 1969: You should have refused to pay tuition, receive financial aid, attend classes, stay in on-campus housing or partake in any activity that implicitly supports Duke as a segregated university. Namely, to preserve the sanctity of their message, they should have left campus and not returned until Duke ceased to be segregated.

Duke’s financial backing largely comes from the very institution that the occupiers criticize. Washington Duke, the namesake of our University, was an American tobacco industrialist, and his son was the president of the large and powerful American Tobacco Company. The tobacco industry required the use of slaves before the Civil War. After the war, segregation and unequal treatment of blacks continued to allow the tobacco to be grown and processed at extremely profitable prices for philanthropists like the Dukes. Interestingly, a statue of James B. Duke overlooked the Allen Building occupiers.

In 1969, the University was similarly dependent on racial segregation. The majority of the students were rich and white, and many would not have been comfortable with the implementation of the goals vocalized by the Allen Building occupiers. The University received the majority of its revenue from the tuition and donations of white students, which subsidized some of the black students’ tuition. Duke simply would not exist without segregation. And anyone who attended this school is accepting a sizable financial support—courtesy of white donors who believe in segregation.

If you truly believe that “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” then you should have stopped accepting their charity as equal treatment. I presume that continuing to grace Duke with your impressive talents would only have encouraged these evil segregationists.

Yajing Gao
Pratt ’09, third-year Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering