In the 1960s, as news of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. dominated headlines, the small number of black people living in Utah dealt with quiet forms of racism.
At Weber State College, where the Black Students Union was created in 1968, “a lot of [students] felt a certain amount of bigotry, especially when they would try to find housing in the community,” recalled Byron Warfield-Graham, one of the group’s founders. “… It wasn’t set up where they had it in the law. It’s just that people would discriminate.”
In Salt Lake City, black people and their allies “discovered that the racism that was so clearly identified with the American South was alive and well in the Intermountain West,” said Ronald Coleman, professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah — who was a star running back at the U.