When more than 100 students, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), occupied University Hall on April 9, 1969, only one Black student was in the group.

Harvard's Black students, politicized since the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. through the African and Afro-American Association of Students (commonly called Afro), largely avoided the radical, anti-war political groups such as SDS, centering their activism on the issue of an Afro-American Studies Department.

But even though the takeover of University Hall was the work of an almost all-white student group, the events of the days and weeks that followed saw the formation of a new coalition between the Black students and other campus radicals.

"Smash ROTC, No expansion," was the rallying cry of the SDS students as they took over University Hall. Days later, "Black studies" had been added to the demands by the vote of more than 800 SDS members.

In return, Afro pledged to support amnesty for the students arrested in the takeover and to back the anti-war and anti-Harvard expansion demands.

The result of the new coalition was to refuel an already heated faculty debate about the incorporation of Black studies into the Harvard curriculum.

"By the time it was clear that SDS was going to strike, the political climate became favorable for those who wanted to press for more," says Roderick J. Harrison '70, an associate professor of Afro-American studies and sociology.

Pressing for more in that context meant rejecting the terms of a report on Afro-Am that just two months earlier had received the faculty's approval.

In February, the faculty committee led by Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky had released a report advocating the formation of a Standing Committee on Degrees in Afro-American Studies, similar to the programs in History and Literature and Social Studies.

The Rosovsky Report also included several other recommendations--including a committee to increase course offerings in Afro-American Studies and a cultural center for Black students--which the faculty approved by a large margin in February.

Things seemed to be proceeding smoothly for Afro-American studies at Harvard; after gaining faculty approval, a formal Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies was set up to outline the new concentration's specific format.

But, as Rosovsky now says, the language in the original report was intentionally vague about how the concentration would be structured. Rosovsky says the intent was to allow the standing committee leeway in determining its future course.

The definition the committee settled on was that the Afro-Am program would be interdisciplinary, offering only tutorials and requiring students to fulfill the rest of their concentration in allied fields.

But the day scheduled for the announcement of the standing committee's plans was a poorly chosen one--it was on that day that the SDS-led students occupied University Hall and changed the entire political climate at Harvard.

Afro reacted with outrage to the Black studies plan, and, in the context of the day's other events, decided to act quickly against the faculty's program.