John R. Lewis College: A Legacy of Social Justice and Community at UC Santa Cruz

Introduction

Founded in Fall 2002, John R. Lewis College at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) stands as a testament to the university’s commitment to social justice and community engagement. Originally known as College Ten, the college was renamed in honor of the late Congressman and civil rights icon John R. Lewis in 2021. Consistent with UCSC’s founding vision, John R. Lewis College creates an integrated living-and-learning environment through engaging academic and extracurricular programs focusing on the theme of Social Justice and Community. The college is dedicated to empowering students as leaders and change makers.

A Theme of Social Justice and Community

John R. Lewis College’s theme is Social Justice and Community. Our corresponding motto is “justice for all.” The college’s core mission revolves around fostering an inclusive environment where students, staff, and faculty collaborate to explore the multifaceted dimensions of social justice. Through the frosh seminar, optional workshops, and co-curricular activities, we pay special attention to individuals and groups who are denied opportunities offered to more privileged members of society. Some of the issues we consider are racism, sexism, ageism, and other forms of discrimination. Other matters that are addressed include poverty, greed, ethnic hatreds, violence against the queer community, and environmental injustices. Community involvement is emphasized as a means of addressing social justice issues.

Location and Affiliation

John R. Lewis College is situated in a redwood grove next to the Social Sciences I and II buildings near the heart of campus. A nature preserve acts as John R. One of the relatively unique features of John R. Lewis College is that its academic administration is affiliated with the Division of Social Sciences. This unique affiliation allows students to engage with distinguished faculty and delve into social justice and community issues through various disciplines, including anthropology, coastal science and policy, community studies, economics, education, environmental studies, global and community health, Latin American and Latino studies, legal studies, politics, psychology, and sociology. Students will have opportunities to assist faculty with research for course credit and connect with them in small-group events through John R.

A College for All Majors

This does not mean, however, that John R. Lewis College students are only supposed to be majors in the social sciences. We welcome all majors. Indeed, John R. Lewis College students come from all majors in Humanities, Arts, Natural Sciences, and Engineering, in addition to Social Sciences. All students can benefit from John R. Lewis College’s partnership with the UC Santa Cruz Division of Social Sciences.

The Legacy of John R. Lewis

Representative John R. Lewis was a civil rights icon, and a leader in this country’s historic and continuing struggle for freedom, equality, democracy, and basic human rights for all. He was an organizer whose bravery and conviction helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He later served 30-plus years in the House of Representatives, where he became known as the “conscience of Congress” for his commitment to justice and equity. The naming of College Ten as John R. Lewis’ life and commitment to social justice, from the streets of Alabama to the halls of Congress, are legendary.

John Lewis’ example and impact transcend demography or geography - in this contemporary moment, he remains a beacon guiding us through difficult times.

The Endowment and Guiding Pillars

An endowment established in 2021 secures the future of programs, courses, and initiatives that reflect the college’s five guiding pillars:

Students are Change Makers
Commitment to Justice
Courageous and Interconnected Community
Empowering Engagement
Sustaining Oneself in the Struggle

Programs and Initiatives

John R. Lewis College offers a diverse range of programs and initiatives designed to foster student engagement, leadership development, and a deeper understanding of social justice issues.

College Nights: Monthly themed events that foster community through entertainment and shared meals. Whether it be celebrating the Olympics, exploring the Italian culture or ending the year with an Outdoor Talent Night Barbeque, College Nights definitely bring our John R. Lewis College community together!
Themed Floors: A housing option for students seeking deeper engagement with the college’s theme. The Rumi’s Field theme is Non Violent Community and students on this floor get the opportunity to take a 1-unit course and develop leadership skills through positions llike the Rumi’s Field Peer Facilitators. located in one of the John R. Lewis College Residence Halls.
Courses: Interdisciplinary courses provide hands-on learning opportunities to engage in discourse around social justice. In classes like CLTE85: Social Justice Workshops, students can apply to be the class instructor - a unique teaching opportunity!
Faculty Engagement: Opportunities for students to connect with faculty and their research, with many faculty members actively engaging in college programming and events. John R. Lewis College offers many opportunities for students to connect closer with Faculty and their current research. Many of the college’s associated Faculty actively engage with our community in both programming and events.
Alternative Spring Break (ASB): A program that allows students to spend their spring break working and learning in local or international communities. The Alternative Spring Break (ASB) program provides an opportunity for John R. Lewis College students to spend their spring break working and learning in either our local community or outside Santa Cruz. In the past our students have traveled to Mexico and New Orleans to partner with local organizations.
Social Justice and Community Leadership Certificate: Recognition for students who actively engage in the college community and build leadership skills related to social justice. One of the primary goals of John R. Lewis College is to help our students actively engage in the college community and build leadership skills that reflect our theme of Social Justice and Community. Students who take on leadership roles throughout various programs can be eligible to the Social Justice and Community Leadership Certificate upon graduation.
College Distinction: Recognition at graduation for academically qualified students who demonstrate outstanding achievement. To encourage outstanding achievement, academically qualified students will also be recognized at graduation with John R. Lewis College Distinction.
Practical Activism Conference: This student-organized annual event highlights pathways for change, from voting and civic engagement to nonviolent protest. Practical Activism Conference: This student-organized annual event highlights pathways for change, from voting and civic engagement to nonviolent protest.
Campus/Community Partnerships: The Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research, or (H)ACER, teaches students how to address injustices through research methods that facilitate the co-creation of knowledge. Campus/Community Partnerships: The Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research, or (H)ACER, teaches students how to address injustices through research methods that facilitate the co-creation of knowledge.

Courses Offered

John R. Lewis College offers a variety of courses that align with its theme of Social Justice and Community. These courses are interdisciplinary and aim to provide students with a deeper understanding of social justice issues. Here are some examples of courses offered:

JRLC 1 Academic Literacy and Ethos: Social Justice and Community: Teaches foundational concepts for intellectual exploration and personal development within an academic community. Reflects our college theme of Social Justice and Community, addressing topics such as identity formation, inequality, and environmental injustice.
JRLC 1A Introduction to University Life and Learning: Orientation to and exploration of the nature of the liberal arts, and of learning at research universities. Topics include: academic planning for upper-division coursework; enrollment processes; and understanding pathways to degree completion; UCSC resources that support health and well-being strategies for academic success; the cultivation of just communities; the prevention of sexual harassment and violence; campus conduct policies; awareness of risks associated with drug and/or alcohol use; and an introduction to traditions of community-engaged learning, ground-breaking research, and interdisciplinary thinking that define a UC Santa Cruz degree.
JRLC 20 Understanding Popular Music: Introduces students to the academic study of popular music, examining genres like blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul, funk, disco, punk, and hip-hop within their social contexts.
JRLC 30(H)ACER Undergraduate Community Internship: Student Internship through the Apprenticeship in Community Engaged Research (H)ACER Program at College Nine and John R. Lewis College. The (H)ACER Program joins community engagement with critical reflexive components of qualitative research to support transformative learning and strengthen community-university partnerships.
JRLC 35 Knowledge For Justice: Introduction to the (H)ACER program at College Nine and John R Lewis College. (H)ACER trains students in participatory research methodologies and creates opportunities for students to work in real-world contexts addressing issues such as social, economic, educational, and environmental injustice.
JRLC 45 Undeclared Scholars Discovery Lab: The Undeclared Scholars Discovery Lab offers a framework for personal and intellectual exploration to help guide thoughtful consideration of potential majors.
JRLC 55 Undeclared Scholars Program: Opportunities Lab: The Undeclared Scholars Opportunity Lab is intended to offset obstacles to student engagement opportunities by providing a framework to help students understand common obstacles, develop skills and strategies for overcoming them, and learn about many of the research and extracurricular opportunities available at UCSC.
JRLC 60 Understanding Sustainability: Researching Environmental Justice at UCSC: Through readings, discussions, and primary research on campus, course explores the following questions: What is sustainability at UCSC and what assumptions about the relationships between humans and nature are privileged in these definitions?
JRLC 66 Extinction and Justice: Examines histories of extinction, with particular attention to how human activity has contributed to species loss.
JRLC 70 College Nine and John R. Lewis College Community Garden: Students in this course design and build a new community garden at Colleges Nine and Ten.
JRLC 85 Social Justice Issues Workshop: Series of presentations, films, and workshops that address personal and cultural identity and examine social, cultural, political, environmental, and other justice concerns.
JRLC 86 College Leadership Development: Students newly appointed into leadership positions at John R. Lewis College explore the concept of leadership relating to the college’s theme of Social Justice and Community.
JRLC 92 Social Justice Issues Colloquium: Weekly colloquium on social justice issues with a different topical focus each quarter.
JRLC 95 Social Justice and Nonviolent Communication (Rumi’s Field): Nonviolent Communication provides tools for the work needed to bring our reality closer to the ideal of a world with dignity and equity for all its members.
JRLC 98 Alternative Spring Break: Provides students with the opportunity to conduct service-learning work in a local Santa Cruz community over spring break.
JRLC 105 The Making and Influencing of Environmental Policy: Explores how environmental policy is made and influenced.
JRLC 106 Expressive Arts for Social Justice: Students explore their own creative output in order to inspire community dialogue around social justice issues.
JRLC 110 Storytelling for Social Impact: Stories are fundamental to what it means to be human. This course introduces students to the history, social context and techniques of storytelling and takes students through the research, writing and performing process of storytelling from the personal to the communal, with an emphasis on social impact storytelling, purposeful stories that drive action on social issues.
JRLC 111 Joy In Social Movements: Focuses on radical joy, the feelings, and practices of freedom in social justice movements.
JRLC 115 Research Methods for Social Justice: Fosters a deeper intellectual engagement with the theme of John R. Lewis College through the design and implementation of community-based research projects developed in close consultation with community partners.
JRLC 120 Practical Activism Conference Planning and Development: Offers an applied experience of collaborative planning, production, and leadership.
JRLC 125ATranscommunal Peace Making: Explores the theoretical tenets and applications of Transcommunality, an outgrowth of the principles of Kingian non-violence, which works toward peace, tolerance, and mutual respect across difference and diversity.
JRLC 125BTranscommunal Peace Making: Explores the principles of community, guided by established texts, for inmates at the Correctional Training Facility (CTF) in Soledad, California.
JRLC 135 Apprenticeship in Community Engaged Research: Course takes a holistic approach in familiarizing students about how to effectively and ethically conduct community engaged research, from contextualized understandings of power and knowledge to hands-on training in various methodologies through a class project.
JRLC 136 Methodologies of Critical Praxis: Considers an ethic of engaging with communities that honors existing knowledges and integrates them into community-engaged action plans and research strategies.
JRLC 140 Secrecy, Knowledge, and Politics: Overview of definitions, history, theory.

The Renaming and its Significance

The renaming of College Ten to John R. Lewis College marked a significant moment in UCSC’s history. UC Santa Cruz advances commitment to social justice with College 10 naming in honor of John R. The University of California at Santa Cruz announced today that College Ten-an undergraduate residential learning community founded on principles of social justice and community-will be named in honor of the late congressman and civil rights icon John R. Lewis was a renowned student leader in the civil rights movement who stood against racism with bravery, conviction, and organized action during many pivotal moments that helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive announced the naming in Washington, D.C., alongside Michael Collins. Collins was Lewis’s chief of staff for 21 years and is a representative of the John R. Lewis Trust, which granted permission for the naming. The announcement included live interaction with students, staff, and faculty gathered at College Ten. The official dedication of John R.

“This is a profound honor and a great responsibility for UC Santa Cruz,” Larive said, regarding the naming news. “Our campus community must strive daily to live up to the legacy of Congressman John R. Lewis and to answer his call to create a more just and fair society. Undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz affiliate with one of 10 residential colleges, each of which focus on different themes, including environmental stewardship, creativity, cultural identity, or in the case of College Ten, social justice and community.

“We have a wonderful opportunity to deepen the alignment between our community’s aspirational and lived values,” said Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Success Jennifer Baszile. “The endowment that will be created with this naming will allow us to advance the experiential opportunities for students to enact social change-making.

“This opportunity to name the college for someone as inspirational as John Lewis is deeply humbling, and it comes with a major responsibility,” said Flora Lu, who is provost of College Ten and College Nine and a professor of environmental studies. College Ten is the youngest and one of the most diverse of UC Santa Cruz’s residential colleges, and since its founding in 2002, it has been focused on offering programming and courses to help students become change agents for justice and equity.

“The naming of John R. Lewis College really advances our driving motivations as a division,” said Social Sciences Dean Katharyne Mitchell. “John Lewis was passionate about social justice, racial justice, civic engagement, and democracy, and we are too. The future John R. Lewis College will seek new avenues for social justice impact while building upon College Ten’s strong foundations.

“Our goal is to teach our students what it means to be a social change agent,” said Sarah Woodside Bury, senior director for college student life at College Ten and College Nine.

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John Lewis's Path to Change

John Lewis’s own path to becoming a change agent began when he was a student at seminary school and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He learned nonviolent civil disobedience from Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. and helped to organize the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 with the Nashville Student Movement. The success of those early nonviolent direct action campaigns convinced Lewis of the need to get into what he called “good trouble, necessary trouble,” in order to drive change. Lewis was arrested 40 times during the 1960s as he continuously put his life on the line to push for civil rights. His success in demanding change came not only from his personal courage, but also from his dedication to organizing. Drawing inspiration from Ella J. Baker and others, Lewis was one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was elected chair of the organization in 1963. In that role, he became one of the “big six” civil rights leaders who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lewis was 23 years old at the time, and he spoke before a crowd of more than 250,000 to deliver a message of his own about the urgent need for action on civil rights. “We must say, ‘Wake up, America! Wake up!’” Lewis called. “For those of us who were young people at the time, he spoke directly to us, and it had a deep impact,” Childs said. “John Lewis was inspiring to me because he deeply believed in the reality of nonviolence and that, whatever we had to struggle for, the struggle must go on. As the leader of SNCC, Lewis played an instrumental role in organizing the Freedom Summer of 1964, which sought to register Black voters across Mississippi. UC Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus of Sociology Hardy T. Frye, who passed away in June, was volunteering for SNCC in Mississippi at the time. At one point, he was arrested and spent several hours in jail alongside John Lewis. Lewis and Hosea Williams also famously led the first march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers were waiting at the other end of the bridge and began beating the peaceful demonstrators. Afterward, Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull, called on President Johnson to take action. The marches continued, and the movement grew. It became a major turning point that rallied public support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the years that followed, he took his struggles for justice inside the halls of government. House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th District, where he remained a constant guardian and advocate for civil rights and voting rights. As a legislator, Lewis never lost sight of the value of direct action. He set an example for other elected officials by standing up for what he believed was right. He was arrested in Washington on several occasions, including for protesting against apartheid in South African and genocide in Darfur and advocating for immigration reform. Lewis passed away on July 17, 2020, but before his death, he reached out across generations to lend his support to new waves of activism around the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change and environmental justice, and other struggles for the future. Lewis always hoped and believed that today’s young leaders would carry the fight for liberty forward, in their own way. “Freedom is the continuous action we all must take,” he wrote. Michael Collins, Lewis’s former chief of staff and a representative of his trust, hopes the students, faculty, and staff of the future John R.

“On behalf of the John R. Lewis family, we are deeply grateful for this distinguished honor and tribute to the legacy of Congressman Lewis,” he said. “It is our hope that through the naming of the John R. Lewis College, we will inspire a future generation of ‘good trouble’-makers that our country and world deserve.

Good Trouble Academy

Using a term coined by Lewis, students learn to trouble, she said, as the Good Trouble Academy takes flight at the newly renamed college. Sarah Woodside Bury: Our hope and goal is that the Good Trouble Academy elevates what students [already] participate in. The idea is that they would have a menu of options of how to get into good trouble - how to continue the learning and growth that is necessary for the kind of trouble we need to make in John Lewis’ name. We would give them some ideas that they could get involved in during their first year, second year or third year. And this Good Trouble Academy would codify and give credit to things the students are doing that often don’t get credit. They’re not appearing on a transcript or a formal document. So students have to go out there, when they’re doing job interviews and say, “Yeah, I did all these things.

UCSC's History and Civil Rights

Ethan Davis: I think what’s important to realize is that civil rights were fought everywhere across America. For example, the Black Panthers started off, and a lot of their programs started off in Oakland, California, like People’s Breakfast. That is literally an hour and a half away from here. Huey P. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, graduated from UCSC, in [the] history of consciousness [program].

In addition to that, UCSC was founded around 1966. And historically, if you look at 1966, a lot of stuff was happening in terms of civil rights and the anti-war movement. And that also ties into the history and the work of the Black Student Union. Historically, the Black Student Union started originally in San Francisco State. The union then spread to other colleges and universities.

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