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Historically, when students protest at American universities and colleges – from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter – there was a typical claim that “external agitators” are responsible. University administrators and elected officials have often noted that community members have joined the protests to reject the demands of student protesters.
Experts say it is a convenient way for officials to delegitimize the motivations of some political movements and justify calls for law enforcement to stop direct actions which might be largely nonviolent and limited to constitutionally protected speech.
“This tactic shifts the focus away from real grievances and portrays radical movements as orchestrated by opportunistic outsiders,” said Shanelle Matthews, a professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies on the City University of New York and former communications director for the Movement for Black Lives.
In recent weeks, students have arrange camps, occupied buildings and led protests on campuses across the country to call out colleges and universities hand over their foundations from corporations that profit from it Israel-Hamas war. Several college and city leaders have cited the threat from outsiders when describing the protests — and a few have responded by canceling or postponing plans for commencement ceremonies.
Here's what it is best to know in regards to the term “outside agitators” used during historic student movements.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (Nineteen Sixties-Seventies)
Protest movements typically consist of area people members and organizers from other parts of the state or country working together toward a typical goal. In the Nineteen Sixties, state and native officials often focused on this hallmark of community organizing, suggesting that civil rights protests were organized by people outside a specific community.
In 1960, a gaggle of black college students took out a full-page commercial in Atlanta newspapers entitled “A Call for Human Rights,” expressing solidarity with students all over the place protesting for civil rights. Segregationist politician and then-Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver suspected it was created by foreigners, calling it a calculated try and “stir up discontent, discontent, discord and evil.”
“It didn’t sound like it was prepared in any school or college in Georgia; In fact, even in this country it didn’t read the way it would have been written,” he told the press.
The concept that outside agitators were involved in civil rights protests became so widespread that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the label in his 1963 letter from Birmingham Jail.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow-minded, provincial idea of 'outside agitators.' Anyone living within the United States can never be considered an outsider within its borders.”
Former President Richard Nixon hoped to link the 1970 shooting of Kent State students by the National Guard to outside agitators, however the FBI was unable to make such a connection. The students had protested against the Vietnam War.
During the civil rights movement, the label was used as a weapon against community members who spoke out or supported protesters and organizers, said Dylan C. Penningroth, an creator and historian who teaches law and history on the University of California, Berkeley.
“It delegitimizes internal dissent against the status quo. Anyone who speaks out against the status quo, whatever that is, is by definition an outsider,” he said.
It also ignores the incontrovertible fact that local civil rights activists often take cues from other protest movements, Penningroth said, and constructing solidarity with others across the country is commonly a crucial a part of implementing change.
BLACK LIVES MATTER (2013-present)
Nearly half a century later, the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked widespread protests against police brutality.
Here too, external agitators were often brought in and held answerable for the destruction, looting and burning of buildings.
The same language was used to explain protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, which resulted in over 10,000 arrests nationwide.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz suggested that 80% of those that took part in the following riots in Minneapolis were from other states. However, an Associated Press evaluation found that 41 of the 52 people cited for protest-related arrests had Minnesota driver's licenses.
PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTS (2024)
The number of individuals arrested in reference to protests on college and university campuses against Israel's war in Gaza is now over 2,800. The Associated Press has counted no less than 70 incidents at 54 schools since protests began in Columbia on April 18.
Officials have used the rhetoric of out of doors agitators in just a few examples across the country. After dozens of scholars were arrested during demonstrations on the University of Virginia on May 4, a senior police official suggested that outsiders had “megahorns to direct protesters on how to flank our officers.”
“We are receiving information that outside agitators are beginning to engage in these protests on campus,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares told Fox News on May 6.
At anti-war protests on the campuses of Emory University in Atlanta, Northeastern University in Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, school officials and law enforcement have made inaccurate claims in regards to the presence of non-students.
On April 30, New York law enforcement officials in riot gear entered the Columbia University campus, cleared an encampment and arrested greater than 100 people. New York Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly cited the presence of “external agitators” to justify the usage of police force.
“There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I will not wait until it is finished and suddenly acknowledge its existence,” Adams said at a May 1 news conference.
But pressed for details, the mayor and police officials had little to say. Adams has repeatedly said that he decided police intervention was essential within the demonstrations in Colombia after learning that the husband of an “agitator” had been “arrested on federal terrorism charges.”
But the girl mentioned by the mayor was not on Columbia's campus this week, was not among the many protesters arrested and has not been charged with any crime.
Nahla Al-Arian told the Associated Press that she visited town last month and stopped by the campus to examine out the protest camp. She also said Adams misrepresented the facts about her husband, a former computer engineering professor who was indicted twenty years ago for illegally supporting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties.
Students involved within the Columbia protests told the AP that it was true that some people unaffiliated with the university were on campus and played an energetic role within the demonstrations, but that they had vehemently denied that these allies had led or “radicalized” the scholars.
“While it is true that people with nefarious intentions break up protests, that is the exception rather than the rule,” Matthews said. “Given that, people should be wary of this narrative.”
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