The photographs in this collection document the library sit-in and forced removal of black students and other protestors at the University of Connecticut in April of 1974. Black students staged the protest to pressure the University to meet a number of demands, including establishing an Afro-American Cultural Center and supplying better support for black and minority students on campus. Over two hundred students occupied the library and forty-five policemen were sent in to forcibly remove and arrest them. The following night, white students and faculty held an identical protest which ended again with removal by law enforcement. The decision to use force caused immediate uproar on campus and throughout the state. The library sit-in illustrates the powerful response of students and staff to the social and racial tensions that reverberated across the US in the early 1970s.
