For Women’s history Month 2025, we honor Kathryn Ogletree, the often unsung undergraduate leader of the May 1968 takeover of Northwestern University’s Bursar’s Office. As president of the campus group, For Members Only (FMO), 18-year-old Ogletree played a leading role in designing and executing the peaceful protest action that would result in substantial institutional changes at Northwestern University.
A straight-A student at Harrison High School in Chicago, Ogletree had been recruited to Northwestern in 1967. She was an award-winning editor of her school newspaper, a top-ranked student, and, like the other Black students Northwestern would recruit at the time, she earned college board scores in the top two percent of all Black students who took the SAT or ACT tests.
Kathryn Ogletree, Harrison High School Yearbook, 1967.
By the spring of 1968, a total of 124 Black students were enrolled at Northwestern (out of a total of 8,900 students). While the number was small, it was, at the time, the largest number of Black students the university had ever enrolled, the result of an official undertaking to integrate the university.
Historically, the university admitted only a very small number of Black students. In 1964, it was revealed by a Daily Northwestern reporter that admissions office personnel categorized applicants on the basis of race and religion. After an outcry against this policy, university administrators launched an effort to increase Black student enrollment, spurred also by the passage of the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Once Ogletree and other Black students arrived on the campus, however, it was clear that integration involved far more than bringing more Black students to the university. In 1966-1967, Black students on campus experienced a number of racially motivated threats, insults and harassment; they faced a campus that employed almost no Black faculty or staff; and they found a lack of resources and support for Black students. The students also felt isolated: Black students were not allowed to room together.
Thus began efforts by Ogletree and others to meet with university administrators to express their concerns and ask for specific changes; after months of empty promises and inaction, the students decided to undertake a peaceful takeover of the university’s Bursar’s Office at 619 Clark Street in Evanston. Ogletree not only took a leading role in the discussions that preceded the takeover, but she also took the lead in writing, rewriting, and fine-tuning the students’ official demands and helping orchestrate the nonviolent action.
From May 3 to May 4, 107 Black Northwestern University students staged a peaceful takeover of the Bursar’s Office. Under intense media spotlight, they remained in the office, stating that they would not leave until their demands were met. Graduate student, James Turner (1940-2022) served as the group’s spokesperson.
Fears of arrest, expulsion, and violence directed at the students were woven into the experience of the peaceful occupation. In a 2018 interview with the author, Ogletree expressed her intense anxiety at the time, saying she would feel “responsible . . . if it went awry.” But the students also believed in the justness of their action; they were engaging in a peaceful protest as the only way to be heard and to make positive changes on campus.
While the takeover was underway, 10 of the occupying students took part in negotiations with university administrators. Those lengthy and arduous talks would ultimately end the 38-hour-takeover and culminate in the “May 4 Agreement.” Ogletree was the only woman to take part in the negotiations.
May 4, 1968: Ogletree, center left, sits next to James Turner at the negotiations held with university administrators. The Daily Northwestern, May 6, 1968.
The “May 4 Agreement” was a thirteen-page document that addressed all aspects of the students’ demands. University officials promised to increase the recruitment of Black students, increase scholarships and financial aid for Black students, hire more Black faculty members, add Black studies courses to the curriculum, ensure greater representation of Black students in student government, enact changes in housing policies to allow Black students to live together, and create a space for Black students’ social activities.
Kathryn Ogletree (left) with James Turner after the peaceful resolution of the takeover. The Daily Northwestern, May 6, 1968.
The end of the takeover was only a beginning. Ogletree and other student leaders worked tirelessly in its aftermath to help ensure that the university upheld the terms of the agreement. All was not smooth sailing, however, and there were numerous and extensive roadblocks, disappointments and setbacks along the way.
The takeover and its resolution received national media attention. While Northwestern’s willingness to negotiate with the students was severely criticized by many, others saw the university’s ability to resolve conflict and address the needs of the Black student body as a model for others to follow. Ogletree’s own critical role in the takeover, however, was not highlighted in the vast majority of the coverage.
This Chicago Tribune story identified Ogletree (left) as “a companion.” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1968.
Additionally, Ogletree’s own campus leadership role was soon sidelined. Although she would continue to work to implement the May 4 Agreement, in the fall of 1968, FMO members restructured the organization and as a result, no women were part of the new leadership structure. Despite her hard work and successes, Ogletree was no longer among the group’s leaders.
In the spring of 1971, Ogletree graduated from Northwestern with a BS in psychology. She worked as a mental health specialist at Garfield Park Community Mental Health Center, a community mental health center in Chicago’s West Side, and she later earned a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Northwestern.
After earning her PhD, Ogletree joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She taught at Florida Memorial College and, in 1992, she was recruited to Ohio Wesleyan University where she was appointed Director of Minority Student Affairs, a position she would hold for many years.
“I actually can trace it,” Ogletree said of the impact the takeover had on her life. “Almost everything that I’ve done has its roots in my experience at Northwestern as an activist student.”
Almost all the positions Ogletree held throughout her career had “something to do with playing a role as a person that I needed” as a student at Northwestern, she said. Through her work, she has continuously focused on offering students the “things that we were looking for and needing when I was a student at Northwestern.” She became, in many ways, the very person she had been looking for, the person she needed as a seventeen-year-old student arriving on campus in 1967.
For many years though, she was “reluctant to accept the role as leader.” She acknowledged that “people actually give me more credit than what I actually give myself.”
But in later years, as she reflected on the events of 1968, she began to see things differently. “I kind of think I was actually kind of frozen in time a little bit,” she said. “I’ve kind of been pushing it off when people would say that you have to talk to Kathryn Ogletree. She was the leader at the time. And I would always say I wasn’t the leader. And I don’t really like the term leader. I do feel I was the representative, but we had different roles that everybody played and I played a critical role, but people do attribute me to being more the leader than I have accepted up to this time.”
In 2018, Ogletree was invited to Northwestern University to take part in the Women’s Center’s 30th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of 1968 Takeover. She was awarded the Women’s Center’s Gender Equity in Action Award.
Looking back on those momentous days in 1968, she summed them up this way: “We did what we had to do for our own survival at Northwestern and in anticipation of the needs of the Black students coming here after us. We were trying to make this place a better place.”
For her courage, her intellect, and her tireless work to make Northwestern University “a better place,” we honor Kathryn Ogletree.
Written by Jenny Thompson, PhD
Many thanks to Northwestern University for permission to use images from The Daily Northwestern and the Northwestern Syllabus Yearbook.
Parts of this essay were adapted from The Takeover 1968: Student Protest, Campus Politics, and Black Student Activism at Northwestern University (2019) by Jenny Thompson.
To learn more about the takeover, visit Northwestern University’s site: https://www.northwestern.edu/bursars-takeover/
