More than 400 students occupied University Hall on April 9, 1969 But only one of them was Black.

While the protests of the late 1960s mobilized most of the campus, Black graduates say they were not part of the masses crusading for causes such as the abolition of University ties to the Reserved Officers' Training Corps. Black students, say they had their own, personal mission.

Black students campaigned for the creation of an Afro-American studies department. They advocated increased recruitment of Black students and asked for the University's support of students who felt dislocated from the Black community.

These issues mattered to Black students. White students protested, too, but their causes that direct bearing on their daily lives.

The issues pursued by the Black community had immediate and direct impact on the lives of the approximately 120 Black students who attended Harvard and Radcliffe in 1969.

"I don't know what you do at University Hall to stop Vietnam," says Charles J. Hamilton '69, former editor of The Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs, of the issue most important to white students at the time.

The causes pursued by Blacks affected their day-to-day existence on campus. "One didn't leave these issues at the gates of Harvard," Hamilton says.

Hamilton says the activist efforts of Black students had a clear focus. At the center of these efforts was a set of concrete demands.

"I think that the Black students at the time had a very, very clear focus," Hamilton says. "A very large portion of the Black students on campus felt that things had to change."

Despite their distinct agendas, some Black students sought support from activist groups that were primarily white. The African and Afro-American Association of Students (AAAAS), the forerunner of the Black Student's Association (BSA), appealed for help from the predominantly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The two groups, despite their different goals, shared the same cynicism of authority. "What came through in the 1960s was that those in charge had no right to tell those not in charge what to do," says Lee A. Daniels '71, who is Black.

But AAAAS, the primary Black student group on campus during the '60s, always remained--at root--a lone operator.

Without any concrete pledge for help other than an SDS stamp of approval, Black students forged their own movement.

Daniels, who was an editor of The Crimson, says Black students believed that they had to make their presence felt at Harvard. "We had to show [that] we're not here as figments of someone's imagination," he says. "We needed to feel that this was our home too, that it was our college, too."

The Rosovsky Report--a product of the demands the Black students made for an Afro-American studies department--tried to make the Harvard experience a more satisfactory one for Black students.