This Is the Rat Speaking

by Todd M. Mealy

Author of Aliened American: A Biography of William Howard Day, 1825-1900; Legendary Locals of Harrisburg; and Biography of an Antislavery City: Antislavery Advocates, Abolitionists, and Underground Railroad Activists

The demise of the so-called Jim Crow laws in 1964 and 1965 and the victory of the civil rights movement rang hollow in the ears of most African Americans. While segregation was practiced in many places of the South, systemic forms of racism permeated northern society. As distrust pervaded African American communities after 1966, the maligned Black Panther Party filled the void, especially among baby boomers who moved the African American liberation movement further to the left.
During this difficult time, when the country was torn apart by issues of race and poverty, as well as the escalation of the Vietnam War, unrest seemed to prevail at a myriad of colleges and universities across the United States where newly formed Afro-American societies and black student unions pressed for pedagogical change suited to the liberation doctrine coming from the black left. Spring 1969 was a particularly explosive semester as African American students occupied administrative buildings and common areas at both historically black and predominantly white colleges on the East Coast.
In This Is the Rat Speaking, author Todd M. Mealy reconstructs the May 22, 1969, black student uprising at Franklin and Marshall College. Using Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Franklin and Marshall College as his setting, Mealy revisits the role and influence of the Black Panthers and delves into how activism for black studies curriculum emerged within the black power movement of the 1960s. Based on oral history testimony, investigation reports, and judicial records, Mealy provokes discussion from different perspectives.

238 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2017

About the author

Todd M. Mealy is a historian and biographer of books and articles about the intersection of civil rights and education, including This Is the Rat Speaking, which tells the remarkable story of the black campus movement of the late 1960s; Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State’s World War I Era Sports Hero; Displaced: A Holocaust Memoir and the Road to a New Beginning; and the much-anticipated Shades of Brown: The Official Biography of Jane Elliott and the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise. A specialist in 19th and 20th-century antislavery and civil rights history, Mealy is worked an adjunct professor in the History Department at Dickinson College and has more than two decades of experience teaching American history and academic writing at urban and rural schools in Pennsylvania. The founder and Executive Director of the National Institute for Customizing Education, Mealy is a sought-after curriculum designer whose work includes the K-12 Nonviolence365 curriculum for The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mealy attained a Ph.D. in American Studies from Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg, where he received the institution’s Sue Samuelson Award for outstanding academic achievement. He lives with his family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It's an interesting telling of the 1969 campus unrest at F&M but is extremely zoomed in on this local experience while talking about how it links to broader trends of Black campus politics in the late '60s but rarely delivers the connections or analysis needed to make these comparisons meaningful. Needs more analysis and a wider lens to live up to its potential

[Aaron Saylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

From an interview I watch, the writer was tone death on how racist the black power and the panthers were. MLK Jr was not adorable for either of these groups.