Founded in 1854 as the Ashmun Institute, Lincoln University in southern Pennsylvania is the nation's oldest historically black university. Classical rhetoric and canonical literature were taught at Lincoln since its founding. Lincoln's writing program emerged fully and autonomously in 1978 and grew roughly at the same time that the discipline of "Composition" was itself becoming autonomous, and although concurrent, Lincoln's program emerged from a discourse instigated a decade before by external political events. This discourse was the 1960s civil rights struggle. This paper focuses on the events between 1969 and 1974 when the Lincoln University community became acutely aware of specific external politics, and recounts what happened on campus. The paper explains that the violent police brutality directed at African Americans in Augusta, Georgia, caused the Lincoln faculty and student body to open up a new kind of dialogue, one concerned with both internal administrative politics and larger national issues. In 1971, it states, a new writing intensive course called Freshman Humanities was launched in the wake of discussions about student writing (in)abilities. The two political threads at Lincoln, a conservative scrutiny of problematic grammar under the warning cries of "reparation standards" and the progressive alliance (faculty and students), were never mutually exclusive. The paper notes that from 1969 to 1974 a concurrent repressive attitude toward student writing began to emerge at Lincoln and in the country at large. It states that an opening or disrupture in the traditional heritage of faculty/student hierarchy, an opening which reinvigorated the university, allowed for a profound discussion about language use by African American students. (NKA)