{"id":2377,"date":"2021-11-23T12:55:38","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T16:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/?p=2377"},"modified":"2022-01-19T13:07:55","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T17:07:55","slug":"battered-and-beset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/battered-and-beset\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Battered and beset’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

All over the country, buildings have been burned and dynamited. The business of the colleges has been disrupted and ignored.<\/em> Rights, other than the claimed rights of students, have been repeatedly violated. The (public\u2019s) anger \u2026 and chicanery of political leaders have grown. The end of the academic year found the nation\u2019s universities \u2026 battered and beset.\u201d<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

—<\/em>John T. Williams, July 30, 1970<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those remarks, made in the closing days of  John Taylor Williams\u2019<\/a><\/strong> <\/a> 23 years as the only president of Maryland State College, were a big-picture assessment of the turmoil America faced as the turbulent 1960s ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1970 Hawk yearbook image<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Like many colleges during that time, Maryland State was not immune to civil disobedience and Williams was the focus, or at least seen as an impediment, to change students were demanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawrence \u201cDuke\u201d Acker<\/strong> (’70) led students in a series of demonstrations protesting conditions at the institution. While mostly peaceful, the protests were strategic and well-planned.\u00a0To aid their cause of securing additional resources and a better campus environment, Acker,\u00a0the Student Government Association president, and his \u201clieutenants\u201d cultivated support from the students, their parents and Black residents of Princess Anne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having watched previous SGA leaders frustrated in seeking redress from the administration, Maryland State students traveled to Baltimore, Philadelphia and Annapolis to meet with parents and political leaders to express their displeasure and demand their college be treated with respect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 1969-70 school year, the students repeatedly demanded Williams\u2019 resignation. In the spring of that year, they staged a sit-in and filled the halls of the administration building only to be denied an audience with Williams. Unflappable, the students took their protest to the president\u2019s home that same night and eventually took over the administration building, which now bears Williams\u2019 name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joanne Johnson-Shaw (\u201972), a sophomore at the time, recalled that as tensions increased that night, the state police and the Army National Guard were called in. Using helicopters and armed guards, some 180 students, including Johnson-Shaw and Acker, were taken into custody and\u00a0transported to two locations \u2013 the Princess Anne police station and the National Guard Armory in Salisbury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While students were detained at the Armory, some UMES administrators brought food and some even paid the fines to gain their release from custody.\u00a0 Like their contemporaries during that era, the UMES students were found guilty of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, but wore their involvement in\u00a0demonstrations as a badge of honor, believing their efforts had ignited change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By late spring, Williams, then 65, decided to retire. Some of the reasons he cited included \u201cthe unbearable condition created in the office of the governor (Marvin Mandel<\/em>) of the state of Maryland,\u201d\u00a0 \u201ca board of regents, which has been unresponsive,\u201d and \u201cthe extensive campus unrest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, newspaper clippings show that Williams had no problem with publicly challenging state leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a May 27, 1970 article about his retirement announcement, The Baltimore Sun quoted from a letter Williams sent to Maryland Secretary of State Blair Lee 3rd, with whom he had clashed: “Your utterances in connection with the present and future status of the chief administrator of the college constitute a dangerous precedent in higher education.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an\u00a0ironic twist, Williams called\u00a0Acker to his office, where the two adversaries agreed\u00a0the SGA president\u00a0would\u00a0deliver an address at the May 31st spring commencement\u00a0and say\u00a0students’ primary concerns rested not with Williams, but with the Board of Regents. The day’s program, however, does not formally list Acker as a speaker at the event where state Sen. Sen. Verda Freeman Welcome delivered the commencement address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the summer of 1970 drew to a close, so did the era of John T. Williams and Maryland State College, paving the way for what would become the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, a fully integrated part of the University of Maryland system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All over the country, buildings have been burned and dynamited. The business of the colleges has been disrupted and ignored. Rights, other than the claimed rights of students, have been repeatedly violated. The (public\u2019s) anger \u2026 and chicanery of political leaders have grown. The end of the academic year found the nation\u2019s universities \u2026 battered and…Read more ‘Battered and beset’<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-2377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=2377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}