The beginning of the 1990s marked a continuation of the struggles and triumphs of student activism in the 1980s. In 1990, after an anonymous hate letter and derogatory graffiti circulated around the Law School, Yale students organized a two-day long protest. According to the students, the hate letter and graffiti were only the most concrete manifestations of pervasive racism on campus. They sought to call attention as well to the less blatant examples of racism at Yale, such as the pushing aside of minority studies and the naming of Calhoun College.
The anti-apartheid protests from the ‘80s also carried over into and came to a close in the ’90s. In 1991, the wall built in 1988 by members of the Coalition Against Apartheid was dismantled. Though students were promised a permanent structure to replace the deteriorating wall, this turned out to be an empty promise by the Yale administration. Once again, student action was met by administrative inaction. However, members of the Black Student Alliance reiterated that they were “dismantling the wall, not their efforts.”
Not all activism in the 90’s was met by such inaction by the administration. In 1997, Yale established the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program—long anticipated evidence of the success of student activism on campus.
The end of the decade marked a period of continued awareness and pressure for change, as well as the advent of more administrative progress, all under the umbrella of collective action for members of a broad Yale community. When alleged hate crimes against Asian American students were committed on campus in 1999, students came together to discuss a rash of hate crimes that had gone unreported against a range of groups. In the same year, students joined community activists to rally against police brutality in memory of Malik Jones, a 21 year-old black New Haven resident who was fatally shot by a white East Haven police officer. Finally, students took action to support the administrative expansion of faculty diversity support.