Another Light on the Hill Black Students at Tufts

George Cox

George Cox A70 already had organizing experience before he joined the Afro-American Society and SCAR at Tufts. The Boston native was part of the local Black Panthers and helped organize a Stokely Carmichael speech at Tufts during his sophomore year. He continued that activism as a member of SCAR and as co-chair of the Afro-American Society, including during one of biggest confrontations over racism at Tufts.

In 1969, Tufts contracted with Volpe Construction, a local construction company that hired very few Black workers, to build Lewis Hall. Cox wrote an editorial in the Observer about how, by contracting with Volpe, the Tufts administration was not living up to its supposed standards of fair employment; he even pointed out that the Nixon administration had a better record of hiring Black construction workers than Tufts did. The editorial called on the university to work with the Afro-American Society to create fair hiring standards and increase the number of Black employees across all aspects of student life and to investigate contractors that did not meet those standards.

After Volpe refused to negotiate in good faith and the administration did not take action, the Afro-American Society organized a work stoppage. On November 5, 1969, 200 Black students from Tufts and other area schools blocked entrances to Lewis Hall and forced Volpe to call a no-work day. Tufts University then filed restraining orders against protest leaders, including Cox. In response, 900 students at Tufts voted to go on strike. Negotiations between the administration and the Afro-American Society continued until November 14, when President Hallowell and Afro-American Society leaders released a memorandum of understanding, ending the strike.

Following his time at Tufts, Cox became an elementary school teacher in Boston Public Schools, where he continued his legacy of fighting for Black students and their families. When BPS created the Department of Implementation to address a court order to fully desegregate, Cox was chosen to develop the department’s policies and procedures for over 15,000 BPS employees. He also worked for the Boston Housing Authority, assisting in addressing issues of discrimination and racism within the city’s housing policies. By 1986, Cox was promoted to BPS’ Office of Human Capital, where he served as Director of the Center for Leadership Development and was an advocate for Black students, teachers, and other educational professionals before retiring in 2014. Cox also was part of the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts for nearly fifty years, and was active with Boston’s NAACP and the Urban League.

In April 2019, Cox and other Afro-American Society leaders returned to campus to share their oral histories of the Lewis Hall protest and their leadership on campus. Just a year later, on May 28, 2020, Cox passed away in Boston at the age of 72. In lieu of flowers, his family asked for donations to the Bruce-Griffey Leadership and Diversity Internship Fund to support Black and other students of color with funded internships while at Tufts.


Biography written and researched by Cat Rosch.