The Path to Activism: A Qualitative Study of How Six Undergraduates of Color Became Activists While Attending the University of Michigan.

Abstract

This study chronicles the lives and times of six young undergraduates of color and the critical transformations in activist political identity they undergo during their attempts to change the University of Michigan into a diverse learning environment of greater equality, tolerance, and inclusiveness. The life stories of these individuals are rendered here as a means of exploring the enduring question of how college students become activists and the ways they learn to cultivate the commitment to work for social change. Grounded in a biographical and narrative-based research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with former student activists of color (three men and three women) representing three distinct eras: the 1970s, 1980s, and the early part of 2000. The student movements covered in this study include the first and third installments of the Black Action Movements, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa, the global movement to free Nelson Mandela, and the movement to end institutional racism at Michigan. The findings of this study suggest that no other event or person plays a more salient role in study participants’ activist development than the other undergraduates of color they befriend during their time at Michigan. Cross-case analyses of their stories also suggest that despite significant differences in age, historical timing, gender, and personality, participants’ underwent a similar process in becoming activists. Informed by the extant literature on social movements and activism, the process consists of the following steps: encountering threshold people and threshold organizations; the building of student movements based on particular mobilizing events; experiencing private moments of moral shocks; receiving open, non-coercive invitations to act; ultimately making a commitment to act; actively working to assume personal responsibility for the movement; learning to negotiate challenges; and in the aftermath of participants’ activism learning to endure the consequences of their actions and make peace with all that their choices have wrought, institutionally as well as personally.