UF Alumni Reflect On Black Thursday And The Black Student Experience By Audrey Mostek April 14, 2021 Betty Stewart-Fullwood was among the 100-plus Black students who left the University of Florida after the administration’s response to their demands for better treatment in 1971. “It was the principle of the matter,” Stewart-Fullwood recalled Tuesday during a virtual panel discussion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the campus protests commonly known as Black Thursday. “I needed to walk out, even though I came back.” Three times on Thursday, April 15, 1971, groups of Black Student Union members entered Tigert Hall in an attempt to speak with then-UF President Stephen C. O’Connell. The BSU wanted, among other things, UF to enroll and hire Black students and faculty, create a minority affairs department, and “the fair and equal treatment of our Black brothers and sisters” on staff at the university.