In 1969, Black students, including a future trustee, were arrested on campus for protesting their treatment as people of color. In the 2020s, students continue to march on Ferris’ sidewalks to remember the names of people who lost their lives at the hands of law enforcement.
Now, police cars block traffic in front of the FLITE library to allow protesters to march safely.
Ferris’ Department of Public Safety is currently led by the organization’s first Black chief. The university is also home to one of Niche’s highest-rated criminal justice programs in the state of Michigan.
The relationship between law enforcement and the Black community has gone through undeniable changes since the 1960s. Still, students say there is much work to be done.
Living history
Ron Snead was the second Black person and first Black alumnus to serve on Ferris’ Board of Trustees. He attended Ferris State College from 1968-1971 when he worked as the school’s NAACP president. His wife Deloris is a descendant of the Old Settlers. This is a group of families that settled in Remus and Mecosta County from a variety of locations, such as Canada through the Underground Railroad.
Due to interracial marriage, the Old Settlers were often light-skinned. Snead can recall times he was denied service at Grand Rapids restaurants because his complexion was so much darker than his wife’s.
Snead maintains that the race relations and law enforcement in the area were rarely violent in his experience. In May 1969, however, 14 students were injured and 12 were arrested for “unlawful assembly” on the west side of campus.
“There were no Black faculty or staff at all when I was a student, which kind of precipitated the riots,” Snead said. “There was a riot in the Rock parking lot, to be exact. I got my car turned over and put in jail after I was called to help break it up by the VP of Student Affairs.”
The over 200 students who were involved in the riots were confronted with police presence from campus security, the Mecosta County Sheriff’s Department, Big Rapids City Police and Michigan State Police.
This history is immortalized in a newspaper article titled “Whites, blacks clash; police nab 12 students.” The article and many others of its kind can be found with photos in the Ron Snead Scrapbook, an online database of Snead’s Ferris history first organized by his wife.
Leadership and law enforcement
Fifty-five years after the riots, the landscape has changed. Ferris State College became Ferris State University. The 2023 Ferris Fact Book reports that Black student enrollment has grown to 9% of the campus community, and 35 Black faculty members work at the school.
Snead is serving in his second term on Ferris’ Board of Trustees. Leadership is no rarity in his family, as his nephew Gary Green recently returned to Ferris as DPS’s first Black director and chief.
In 2017, Green took his first position at Ferris as an officer. He served as the interim director following Bruce Borkovich’s retirement in 2020. This began a tumultuous time for the organization, as DPS has seen three full-time directors retire or leave the position in the 2020s alone.
“The people that reached out to me talked about the need to repair some of what was referred to as the damage that had happened over the past year between our police department and the public,” Green said. “What was explained to me is that the relationship had really suffered after I left, and there was an opportunity for me to come back.”
Now back on campus, Green has a simple philosophy to repair relationships and deepen community engagement. Like the 1989 Spike Lee movie, it resonates with people to see someone “‘Do the Right Thing’ for the right reasons.” He believes he was able to instill some of this philosophy in DPS officers when he worked as the assistant chief.
“I was the day-to-day operations, however, I wasn’t the driving force for the university,” Green said. “I was under somebody who may have had a different philosophy going forward. But our guys that are hitting the streets, they have that mindset because I instilled it in them.”
To Green, doing the right thing takes more than mandatory diversity training. He believes that an officer can walk away from with the same biases they had before. He wants officers to interact with community members to get to know them on a personal level. By leaving behind the barrier of a police car to start a conversation or even pick up a game of foosball, both officers and students may find their similarities rather than their differences.
“That’s what Martin Luther King said, right? We don’t like each other because we don’t know each other. We don’t know each other because we never talk to one another. If you’re ever going to get past some of those biases that we have in life, it all comes down to talking to people and getting to know people,” Green said.
The next generation of leadership in law enforcement is alive in Ferris’ criminal justice program. Quartez Shah is a senior in the program and works as the secretary of Black Leaders Aspiring for Critical Knowledge.
“As a little kid, I just wanted to be able to help people,” Shah said. “I had a hard time really being a leader for myself. I had to deal with that leadership over time in order for me to even feel like I can help others.”
Shah’s desire to help others and wisdom from within his family guided his journey to criminal justice.
“There’s always been a lot going on in the past with police officers. One thing that [my grandfather] told me is, ‘If you feel like you have a problem with the police, join them. Get that experience and see what you would do in that situation.'”
After finishing a stint at Oakland Community College, Shah transferred to Ferris in search of on-the-ground work and networking opportunities.
Looking ahead
Shah echoed Green’s philosophy of doing the right thing by involving police officers within the community. Even with the effort he has made, he sees a long future ahead of the field with much progress to be made
“We’re not there yet, that I know for a fact,” Shah said.
On behalf of the police force, Shah is committed to building trust in his community. This comes in the form of real-life conversations and attendance at public events not to intimidate, but to integrate. For those who feel that they need to be protected from the police rather than feeling protected by the police, Shah encourages them to speak to people trying to join the field today.
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