Brian Murphree came of age as a college student in a divisive election year. Protests raged. A presidential candidate was shot. An overseas conflict dominated the news as the gulf between the political left and right grew wider by the day.
As familiar as this scenario may seem to our current troubled democracy, this was 1968 when Murphree was a campus activist at then-Memphis State University.
“It wasn’t always easy. There were some pretty violent people on the other side of those picket lines,’’ said Murphree, now 79, who was involved in a chaotic and iconic 1960s demonstration that inspired years of student activism in Memphis.
For all the similarities between 1968 and today, much has changed. Memphis State is now the University of Memphis. And the unrest and turbulence that once gripped the campus are long gone.
On the eve of what many consider the most consequential presidential election in decades, political activity among the UofM’s 20,000 students seems almost invisible. Where rallies and protests once roared, now there is just the chatter of students pacing to and from classes, the gentle bubbling of the fountain outside University Center and the whistles of freight trains rumbling along the south edge of campus.
“I don’t think anyone on campus cares about politics. I don’t really see why we should,” said Joe Roman, who graduated last spring.
The activism of the 1960s triggered a long and rich history of student political involvement at the UofM. Recently retired Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland was active in politics as a student here in the ‘80s. So was current Congressman David Kustoff. Tennessee Treasurer David H. Lillard Jr. and Secretary of State Tre Hargett found their political start at the UofM too.
The Student Government Association that gave rise to numbers of political careers remains a vital institution. Yet to many observers it, like other campus-based political organizations, is just a shadow of its former self.
“We’re seeing that across the board,” said SGA President Samuel Warren. “Fraternity and sorority life is down. The admission groups like FROSH are down. Political clubs and organizations are down. It’s everybody.”
Consider:
- Among more than 300 student organizations registered at the university’s main campus, just 10 are categorized as “political.” Only half of these political organizations have hosted an event or have an event scheduled this semester, records show. One organization that claims a direct party affiliation — the University of Memphis College Republicans — has not hosted an event in two years.
- Student chapters of the Democrat and Republican parties, vibrant for decades here, show little sign of activity. Both the Democrat and Republican student chapters have Facebook pages, and the Democrats maintain an Instagram page as well. Their posts, however, are few and infrequent. The Republicans have posted just a handful of times since July. The student Democrats’ most recent is from Instagram — way back in September 2019.
- Depleted by losses in revenue, the student-run Daily Helmsman newspaper is in decline too. The Helmsman once ran front-page pieces about local and national politics along with advertisements for College Republican and College Democrat meetings and intensely opinionated letters-to-the-editor about political candidates and policies. Now the paper sticks mainly to sports and entertainment coverage.
“One of the reasons it’s so hard for people to talk about (political issues) is the atmosphere around politics to begin with,” said Quinlan Culver, a 21-year-old nursing student who says the highly polarized and often hostile political climate in the U.S. at large has moved on campus, cultivating fear that keeps many students from speaking their minds or getting involved in politics.
“I don’t know how to combat that on campus,’’ she said. “Maybe just (create) a safer space in general.”
Political observers generally agree that our polarizing times have created a chilling effect that silences many young people who fear ridicule, threats and intimidation. Other factors contribute to the political disengagement at the UofM, experts say, including disillusionment with politics in general and the isolation of the Internet age, which leads many members of Generation Z to retreat onto social media platforms and avoid face-to-face interactions.
“I think that the students have become too complacent,” said political analyst and former UofM journalism professor Otis Sanford, who also serves as advisory board chair for the Institute for Public Service Reporting. “They’re more inward. They spend most of their time on social media, looking at their cell phones, and I just don’t think there’s an appetite for a lot of activism.”
Rich history of activism
Complacency hasn’t always governed student behavior at the UofM.
In 1965, a disaffected group of students created an “underground” mimeographed publication called “Logos” that featured articles opposing the Vietnam War and generating support for the civil rights movement. The group’s activism triggered an investigation by the FBI, which viewed members of the law-abiding group as subversives who posed a threat to national security.
Conservative pushback led to a violent confrontation the following spring as the progressive students distributed copies of Logos on campus.
“We weren’t expecting to be welcomed with open arms, but we didn’t expect almost being lynched either,” former activist Murphree recalled in a phone interview last month.
According to newspaper accounts, six students including Murphree were passing out copies of Logos when they were surrounded by an angry mob comprising as many as a thousand people.
The activists “were pushed and shoved and then chased to an off-campus religion center where several of them were struck’’ by counter-protesters, The Commercial Appeal reported.
“There was a priest that was trying to protect us, and they were saying, ‘Hang the priest,’ and all that kind of stuff,’’ said Murphree, who still remembers the exact date of the incident — May 2, 1966 — and how it shattered the calm of an otherwise perfect sunny spring day.
By 1968, many in Memphis and the U.S. felt the country was coming apart. Divided over the Vietnam War, civil rights and the culture wars separating rich and poor, old and young, Black and white, the nation witnessed one tragedy after another: The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. The Tet Offensive and the devastating loss of life in Vietnam. The riots that erupted in urban centers.
At the UofM, the fledgling Black Student Association faced bitter resistance. The first Black students had integrated the school in 1959, but ten years later there still were little more than a handful of African Americans on campus. Investigated by the FBI as an extremist organization, BSA protested for equal rights, briefly occupying the administration building in 1969. More than 100 students were arrested.
“When I enrolled we had no Black teachers, no Black secretary, no policemen, no nothing African American or Black but the people picking up the garbage and cutting the yard,’’ former BSA president David Acey said in a 2009 interview recalling why he and his fellow campus activists pushed so hard for change in the late 1960s.
“We didn’t have sororities. We couldn’t participate in any homecoming activities. We couldn’t do anything but go to class,’’ said Acey, who later served as a longtime professor of African American Rhetoric and Interracial Communication at the UofM.
Even outside the radical “New Left” politics and civil rights activism that dominated attention on campus through the ‘60s and ‘70s, political activity thrived.
Old yearbooks reveal the bright, smiling faces of scores of students involved in political clubs. More than 40 students assembled in 1964 for a portrait of Young Democrats while 20 more proudly posed for a group photo of the Young Republicans. “They believe that the people of this country and state can best be served by having two strong political parties which offer voters two distinct philosophies and two slates of candidates,’’ read a description below the Republican photo.
The campus political scene remained vibrant deep into the 1990s. Years after his involvement on campus, where he served as SGA president in the 1980s, Mayor Strickland recalled the valuable lessons he learned about political networking and organizing, particularly his hard-fought campaign as a sophomore when he won a seat in the student Senate.
“I stood outside the business school, Fogleman Business School, where there was a ballot location, and I shook hands of people going in,” Strickland, now dean of the UofM law school, said in a 2020 interview with local lawyer Alan Crone.
“It taught me the lesson of, really, retail politics,” Strickland said. “…Those are great learning areas for students: How to coalesce people and work together. And (navigating) different views. Some leadership training.”
UofM alum Stacey Crockett recalls a mixture of apathy and intense political activity on campus surrounding the pivotal 1992 presidential election when Democrat Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush.
“I remember there being a lot of talk and a lot of concern around how things were going to proceed, things that we needed to change,” said Crockett, now chief communications officer for the City of Germantown.
Apathy and political disengagement have always been challenges for activism on campus, she said: “I think (young) people feel like, ‘There’s nothing I can do. There’s not a lot that you can physically participate in.’ ”
Current challenges
Despite the decline in visibility of campus activism here in recent years, one event stands out: the visit last March of Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative activist who gained national attention in 2020 when he shot three men — two fatally — in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Later acquitted of all charges, Rittenhouse became a much-in-demand celebrity speaker in rightwing political circles. So, when the UofM student chapter of Turning Point USA invited Rittenhouse to speak on campus, it triggered intense backlash from students and non-students alike. Hundreds of people gathered in protest, swarming around Rittenhouse’s motorcade and at one point pursuing his police-protected entourage on foot.
The more intensive attack came virtually, through social media.
The then-president of the Turning Point USA chapter received death threats after activists posted his full name, phone number, and address online in a venomous practice known as “doxxing.” Posted below his personal information was a call to action: “Let him know how you feel about his decision to provoke black students by inviting a racist murderer on campus.”
The student has since left Turning Point USA.
Anne Marie Durgin, editor-in-chief of The Daily Helmsman, said the threat of violence is one reason the paper shies away from covering political issues. The Helmsman’s Oct. 23 edition, for example, featured what’s become a routine mix of sports, entertainment and social gathering coverage: A cover story on finalists for the “Mr. and Ms. UofM Homecoming” competition. Two stories on Tigers football. An article on Halloween activities. Two more on basketball.
“We don’t want to publish somebody’s name in the paper saying, ‘I’m voting for Trump,’ because if somebody then reads that paper they can go out and attack them,” Durgin said.
“I want people to feel comfortable having their own beliefs, but I feel like we’re in a city that is very much dominated more towards one side,” she said. “I think with how violent the city is there’s just too much risk with having that right now.”
Undeterred by the pushback from last spring’s Rittenhouse event, members of Turning Point USA hosted another event last month featuring Brandon Tatum, a conservative political influencer who invited students to debate him in a public forum.
The three-hour event drew about 50 students, most of whom looked on timidly from the sidelines. When conversations were had, they seemed lackluster; neither side wanted to change their minds. Turning Point leaders aren’t commenting on plans for any further political events.
“We have some things in the works right now but I can’t discuss them at this time,” current Turning Point president Benjamin Shedd said in an email interview following Tatum’s visit.
The Student Government Association remains an active force on campus, though its campaigns don’t receive the wide attention of the past. The Daily Helmsman did not report on the SGA elections last March, a stark contrast to the intense coverage of the ‘60s. SGA president Warren, however, said the lack of student engagement is a challenge he’s working to overcome. SGA is working to produce a podcast to reach a wider audience and plans to host a town hall meeting before December.
“We’re here to serve the student and that has to change over time as the student body changes,” Warren said. “For the most part we have the support of the administration. I think things will be just fine.”
Information tables encouraging voter registration and education have appeared on campus several times this fall, including one hosted last week by the UofM Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research’s diversity committee.
“Are you registered to vote?” committee member Ashley Messina asked students as she handed out voter educational materials outside the University Center.
Messina, a second-year doctoral student in counseling psychology, said about half the students she encounters are interested in her message and the other half aren’t.
The half not interested poses lingering concerns, said colleague Kourtnie Belcher.
“It’s kind of like a refusal — I refuse to learn,’’ said Belcher, a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling.
Considering the growing rift between the political left and right, general apathy on campus, and threats of violence, former professor Sanford said it may be tough for political activism to rebound at the UofM.
“I do think (the apathy) is going to continue. I think a lot of young people have just tuned out,’’ Sanford said.
“I think the majority of college students, doesn’t matter where you are, don’t like Donald Trump. But they also don’t like the political process period. They don’t feel like it’s speaking to them. So they tune it all out. And that’s one of the reasons, in my mind, why we don’t see as much political activism on campus.”
Marc Perrusquia contributed to this article.
