According to Chicago Maroon managing editor Avima Ruder, a staffer at the student paper, found a copy of the university budget, and "we discovered that the University owned a lot of segregated apartment buildings...It was really bizarre because our student population at that point was largely white, but there was no segregation, there weren't separate dorms for African American students—if someone had suggested that, people would have been appalled.

On January 17, 1962, the Maroon broke the story on the paper's front page with the headline, "UC Admits Housing Segregation.

"We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments," Sanders announced at the protest.

From January 23 to February 5,[2] Sanders and the other civil rights protesters pressured Beadle and the university to form a commission to investigate discrimination.

[3] Beadle met with 300 students in the Ida Noyes Hall theater to announce that further sit-ins would be banned and that a committee would be formed to investigate CORE's charges of racial discrimination in University-owned buildings.