On May 3, 1968, a group of Black students at Northwestern University made headlines when they occupied the university's main financial building and announced that they would not leave until their demands were met. Their demands, submitted to university officials in April 1968, focused on a wide range of issues, from campus conditions to the racism they faced at Northwestern. Over the course of two momentous days, the whole world watched as events on the campus unfolded. What seemed to many observers to come out of nowhere, the takeover was connected to a long history of both discrimination and activism on the Evanston campus. It was also a response to the complicated efforts to integrate Northwestern, a process that had begun just a few years earlier. The takeover took place within a wider movement for student power and political and social change that marked the 1960s. And its outcome would have long-term reverberations. The Takeover 1968 draws from contemporaneous accounts, archival and primary sources, and interviews with several of the takeover's key players, including Kathryn Ogletree, undergraduate leader of the takeover; Eva Jefferson Paterson, takeover participant and later president of Northwestern's student government; John H.

Bracey, Jr. and James Turner, graduate student leaders of the takeover; and Jack Hinz, former Northwestern vice president for student affairs and dean of students, who served as the chief negotiator for the university during the takeover. It also draws from interviews with Roger Friedman and Ellis Pines, two former Northwestern students who both played prominent roles in progressive politics on campus in the late 1960s. The book pieces together the events of May 3-4, 1968 as they unfolded, and it also takes a broader view, stepping back from those two crucial days to examine what led to the takeover and what transpired in its aftermath.