Over the last few weeks, there has been broad discussion about the Straight Takeover of April 1969. The Straight Takeover was a protest by Cornell’s Afro-American Society (AAS) against the treatment of black students on campus, and April 19 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Takeover. The AAS students occupied the Straight for two days before ceremoniously emerging from the building armed as the Takeover officially ended. This is the source of the famous award-winning photograph of Eric Evans, a member of AAS, walking out of the Straight with a gun.

When Renee Alexander ’74 first set foot on campus in 1969, she was unaware that she would become part of an unbroken record at Cornell. Alexander’s graduating class had the highest number of black students to date — about 250 people.

“Back then we didn’t realize how significant that was,” said Alexander, who is director of Cornell’s Alumni Minority Programs.

As with many cases in history, it is difficult to pinpoint an exact date when black student leadership at Cornell began to take root. Alpha Phi Alpha, which was established at Cornell in 1906, was the first black fraternity in the nation. In more recent memory, the takeover of Willard Straight Hall in 1969 also goes into Cornell’s history books as a defining moment of the University’s black history.