"[2] After the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, students protested against the University of Michigan administration for lack of support for minorities on campus.
[1] Accepting an invitation to dine and discuss with the university president in February 1970, the groups staged a demonstration on his lawn and demanded that by the beginning of the 1973–1974 school year, the balance of African American students and administrators proportionately reflect the 10% balance in the state at the time.
[1] The campaign closed the University of Michigan for 18 days[4] through strikes, protests, picketing, blocking of buildings and streets, and interruption and shutting down of classes.
[6] The final reason was the university's rejection of a Regent-approved candidate for deanship in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
[7] Led by a "coalition of Black, Chicano, Asian-American, and Native-American student group representatives," they presented six demands calling for representation of the Chicano, Asian American, and Native American communities as well as the reinstatement of the expelled Black nursing student.
[8] The occupiers elected to leave voluntarily after receiving word, from University of Michigan President Robben W. Fleming, that discussions/negotiations would take place the following week.
The university's vice president for Student Services stated that too few high-school graduates from large cities were academically qualified for admission.
Despite black people making up only 4.1%[12] of the freshman class at the time, the hashtag and stories garnered national attention.
[23] This incident and the lack of response from administrators prompted the student organization Students4Justice (S4J) to occupy the Michigan Union until administrators met their demands, which included meeting with students, improving the bias incident reporting protocol, fulfilling the remaining demands of the #BBUM movement, such as affordable campus housing and increasing Black enrollment to 10%, and creating an activist space on campus for students of color to organize for social justice.
This activist space would be modeled after an earlier building discontinued by the university called the Ella Baker - Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education.