By Elissa Branum
In 2025, student protest rights are in jeopardy. Given the crackdowns at state and secular institutions, students at evangelical colleges are even more at risk to lose First Amendment rights to speech and assembly.
On October 31, 2024, a coalition made up of the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International sent an open letter to American university presidents and administrators. This letter raised serious concerns about threats to student constitutional rights and the terrifying police repression of student protests in support of Palestinian rights.
At Baylor University in Waco, Texas, students already faced limits to their constitutional rights—in 2023, the Office of Civil Rights granted Baylor the broadest religious exemption from Title IX protections in the nation. For trans and queer students, the continued suppression of protest rights means even fewer opportunities to raise awareness about their experiences of discrimination and organize for change. After Baylor’s president issued a statement in support of Israel in October 2023, students calling for a cease-fire held a demonstration at the city hall (because they were not allowed to organize on campus due to Baylor policies). Baylor’s Student Activities department monitors students’ “expressive activities” and students working to raise awareness of genocide in May 2024 had their materials “heavily censored.” Baylor’s policy on public demonstrations broadly defines “disruption” of their academic mission and requires adherence to conservative ideas about “the Christian mission” with consequences for protestors that include arrest, citation, and internal disciplinary processes.
Despite institutional attempts to silence them, many students at Baylor and other evangelical colleges care deeply about genocide and about rights for queer and trans students. The Baylor student newspaper still includes opinion pieces discussing the United States’ complicity in preventing a ceasefire in war-torn Gaza.
To offer some hope for today’s activist students fighting for LGBTQ equality and other causes on evangelical campuses, we can look to the history of student protests at Christian colleges. Even colleges with religious exemptions should not forget the important work done by student activists to fight for racial integration on their own campuses. At one religious college in Texas, the fight for students of color to be admitted began almost 100 years ago in the 1930s—and it was led by a queer student.
Though we may be more familiar with student protest history beginning in the 1960s, this blog tells a story about student protests before World War II. Students bravely faced surmountable obstacles, while presidents and boards took anti-democratic legal action to squash protests. The history of southern religious colleges reveals deep connections between repressing student protests and bolstering Christian educational nationalism.
At Texas Christian University of Fort Worth in 1937, students protested the segregation on their campus and called for Black students to be admitted. They continued this activism until at least 1940. A leader in this movement, a gay student named Morris Kight, remembered that the radical group had nearly made it to the college board with their proposal when the college president stepped in and stopped them through legal repression.
Kight and his fellow students who protested segregation at Texas Christian were accused of communist behavior and investigated by South Texas Congressman Martin Dies. Dies was the first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was supposedly investigating communism but would devastate the careers of many activists and political leaders who challenged conservative power. By the late 1940s, queer employees in public service were terrorized by the Lavender Scare, which used fearmongering about communism to fire gay workers. Kight was an early target of the Lavender Scare but did not give up on activism.
Even during his time at TCU, Kight organized an “Oscar Wilde study group.” This gay group may have been mostly underground but still represented queer students gathering in the late 1930s on a conservative Protestant campus. After he moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s, Martin Kight provided community services out of his home for the LGBTQ community. He went on the found the Gay Community Services Center—now called the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which serves more queer and trans people than any other organization. Kight also led the LA Chapter of the Gay Liberation Front and planned one of the first LA pride parades.
Like today’s queer students and graduates of evangelical colleges, we might expect Kight to have complicated feelings about his alma mater. TCU would not integrate until 1964 or recognize an official LGBTQ group until 1995. However, Kight was always proud to be a Texas Christian University graduate and his friends remembered him frequently wearing a purple TCU baseball cap.
What can we learn from student protests at Christian colleges that happened almost 100 years ago? First, there is power in student protests, even if change is slow. For the past several decades, Texas Christian has been embracing change and correcting past injustices. Today, TCU has protections in place for LGBTQ students. Many queer students at Christian colleges around the country want to be proud of their alma maters and deserve to see progress on their own campuses.
Second, we must protect students’ rights to protest. The choice to enroll at an evangelical college is a complicated one, and should not involve signing away constitutional rights at the door. LGBTQ students of any faith should be protected in their protest rights and allowed to demand presidents and administrators be more just and equitable.
Although Texas Christian became a much more progressive religious college, their past presidents and board members still helped build conservative legal power for Christian nationalism in education. This power haunts today’s students at places like Baylor. In the face of student protests, even leaders of coastal elite and state institutions have been acting like conservative education strongholds by limiting student free speech. We must remember the history of student protests and advocate for continued protections for all students, especially those on religiously exempt campuses.
Elissa Branum (she/her) is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research examines race, gender, and use of the law on evangelical higher education campuses in Arkansas and Texas from 1860-1969.
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