Finally, a list of eleven demands was submitted to the administration:

Ten per cent black enrollment by fall, 1963.

900 new black students by fall, 1971 (450 freshmen, 150 transfers, 300 graduate students).

An adequate supportive services program including financial aid to finance black students' education.

Graduate and (nine) undergraduate recruiters to recruit blacks.

A referendum on the March Student Government Council ballot to have students vote on assessing themselves $3.00 for one year for the Martin Luther King Scholarship Fund.

Tuition waived for minority group students who are residents of the State of Michigan and admitted under special programs.

The establishment of a community-located Black Student Center.

All work of a permanent nature on the Black Studies Program is to be halted until a community-university forum and effective input is established.

The creation of a university-wide appeal board to rule on the adequacy of granting financial aid grants to students.

A revamping of the Parents' Confidential Statement.

One recruiter for Chicano students to assure 50 students by fall, 1970.

These demands seem quite moderate, but there are special circumstances at Michigan which must be kept in mind for an understanding of the conflict that followed. The University of Michigan is a state school, supported and run by state taxes and tuition charges, which are higher for out-of-state students than for residents of Michigan. The governing body of the university is a Board of Trustees, an eight-member body elected by the voting public of Michigan on a state-wide basis for staggered terms of four years each. The Regents are mostly businessmen, directors of corporations; seven are white and one, as a young faculty member explained, is colored, not black.

Although considered liberal among Big Ten schools, Michigan's student body is largely infected by Midwest conservatism. There are 36,700 students, with about 20,000 of those undergraduates, primarily in the college of Literature, Science and Arts (LSA). There are seventeen other schools and colleges in the University of Michigan.

Black students from the various schools joined together to form the Black Action Movement (BAM) in order to present their eleven demands to the university administration. After receiving vague responses from university president Robben Fleming, BAM presented the list of demands to the Regents at their bi-monthly meeting on Thursday, March 19. The Regents' response was very unsatisfactory. They promised an admissions goal "aimed at ten per cent enrollment of black students and substantially increased numbers of other minority and disadvantaged groups" by 1973-74. The problem with this promise was that the Regents allotted only three million dollars to the program at the end of four years, an amount which would allow, as Fleming admitted, five or six per cent black admissions. Other additional funds to reach the "goal" of ten per cent were to be solicited from outside sources. In other words, the university had committed itself only to five to six per cent black enrollment while superficially announcing a goal of ten per cent. Most of the other BAM demands were left unanswered; they were to be referred to a committee which would be set up under the Regents' decision.