Juniata Students in Mount Union, 1965 to 1967

On March 9, 1965, students and teachers at Juniata College held a meeting of what one student letter writer called the Juniata Civil Rights Movement. Four days later, 21 faculty members and students left for Selma, Alabama. The same writer said the campus group meant to do most of its work closer to home, in Huntingdon and the surrounding area, and that one proposal was a program to help needy families in Huntingdon and Mount Union.

By February 1966 the college paper, The Juniatian, was reporting on a tutoring program at Mount Union run by SCORE, the Students Committee on Racial Equality, a group of Juniata students and professors. The paper said the tutoring grew out of a social group that SCORE members and Black residents of Mount Union had organized together. It said Mount Union was chosen because of its large Black population and its lack of interracial cooperation and organization. The paper credited that group's efforts with the election of the first Black member of the borough council and with bringing pressure on areas of plain discrimination, though it did not give the councilman's name.

In May 1967 the paper reported rehearsals in Huntingdon, Mount Union and McConnellsburg for The Insurance Company, a musical work that SCORE planned to present at Oller Hall on May 14, with a 25-member chorus of Mount Union and McConnellsburg residents. The article also mentions members of a group called HOPE from Mount Union and does not explain the name.

That November the paper described the Community Action Center in Mount Union, a former Masons Hall that had been refurnished and painted a bright, cheerful yellow. Its student writer gave these figures for the community: 32.1 percent of families with incomes under $3,000, 30.9 percent of housing substandard, and 20.7 percent of people 25 and older with less than eight years of schooling. The writer also said that 50 percent of the people lived in what the government defined as poverty, in an area that included Mapleton, Union Township, Mount Union, Shirley Township and Shirleysburg. The project had set up a G.E.D. program that tutored people who had been denied the chance to finish high school, and residents had painted the center and opened their homes for instruction and tutoring. One third of the advisory board was made up of poor residents, the paper said, and a minister it interviewed told it, "This is a grass roots movement." The writer said Juniata students and professors were among the tutors, working with ten-year-olds through piano, drums and books like The Red Badge of Courage. The headline warned that spending on the war in Vietnam threatened the project, and the writer said it was still alive for now.

More than thirty years later, in April 1999, The Juniatian reported that the president of the Huntingdon County NAACP joined a discussion about racism at Juniata, attended by about 35 people, and urged students to go to the authorities when racial incidents happen.

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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