Time And Place With Alicia Barber

This fall, there’s been a lot of talk and media coverage about the campus climate at the University of Nevada, Reno in light of several incidents of hate and bias on campus. Those have included graffiti of swastikas and flyers for a white nationalist group. A visit to campus by controversial conservative speaker Charlie Kirk also created an emotional stir . This week, for KUNR’s segment of Time & Place with Alicia Barber, we travel back to 1971, a period of the university’s history that was fraught with racial tension, when a group of students took a stand by sitting down. Only 33 Black students attended the University of Nevada, Reno prior to 1960. That number more than doubled in the sixties thanks to new federal support for minority and out-of-state students, and increased recruitment of Black athletes. Inspired by the founding of Black Student Unions, or BSUs, at other universities, a group of Nevada students formed their own BSU in 1968. Over the next few years, they brought