Entering the 1960s, the University of Illinois typified “Middle America,” with its midwestern campus, middle-class enrollment, and midcentury quiescence—the unlikeliest of settings for protest, rebellion, and riots in the streets. But all of that came to pass. Born of free-speech issues in the Red Scare era and nourished by anger with an unpopular war, protests grew into a general antiestablishment frustration, climaxing in a student strike and days-long violent disturbances that shut down one of the nation’s largest land-grant universities. How could this happen, here? The story is one of sel ... More

Entering the 1960s, the University of Illinois typified “Middle America,” with its midwestern campus, middle-class enrollment, and midcentury quiescence—the unlikeliest of settings for protest, rebellion, and riots in the streets. But all of that came to pass. Born of free-speech issues in the Red Scare era and nourished by anger with an unpopular war, protests grew into a general antiestablishment frustration, climaxing in a student strike and days-long violent disturbances that shut down one of the nation’s largest land-grant universities. How could this happen, here? The story is one of self-important legislators, well-intentioned administrators, a conservative citizenry, and “outside agitators,” but mostly of a minority of confident, determined, somewhat naïve students. Virtually all white, relatively privileged, raised in a postwar economic boom, believers in and embodiment of American exceptionalism, they would confront moral questions around race, justice, war, life, and death that became existential as the body count rose in Vietnam. This is the story of how those Illini students responded. No one could have predicted rebellion would happen here. But it did. These young people helped bring down one president, shamed a second, and helped lead the nation to end a wretched war. By their agency they changed history. And if such a movement could happen in such an unlikely place, who is to say that another, equally unlikely, might not happen again?