Informative Response 400 words

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CHAPTER 1

Moving toward Blackness
The Rise of Black Power on Campus

The explosion of Black student activism in 1968 took many observers by surprise. Earlier in
the decade, the violence unleashed by whites on nonviolent protesters in the South riveted a
national television audience. Now, television news gave daily coverage to African American
college students assertively seeking social change, but the images were often unsettling: violent
clashes between Black students and the police in San Francisco; militant Black students
disrupting classes in Madison; Black students occupying the computer center in Santa Barbara,
the president’s office at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and the entire south campus of City
College in Harlem. This phase of the Black student movement was markedly different from the
sit-ins of the early 1960s, which had featured courteous young men and women in dresses and
suits and ties. Now students hurled a defiant vocabulary, wore African-inspired or
countercultural clothing, and otherwise pushed the line between Black bourgeois ideals and
revolutionary aesthetics. They wanted both upward mobility and an affirmation of African
American culture and history, inclusion as well as social justice. The students wanted to
expand Black access to higher education and make white colleges more responsive to the
needs of a diverse student body, but their confrontational tactics and rhetoric dominated news
coverage and shaped popular reception and understanding of their struggles.

Where did the new style come from, and how did Black students all over the country,
without formal organizational links, express such similar grievances and demands? Why did
the call for Black Power become increasingly popular among Black youth in the late 1960s?
And why were students at historically Black colleges also up in arms? In fact, this phase of the
Black student movement actually began on Black college campuses. Why? The explosion of
activism seemed abrupt to some, and many media accounts linked it to the anger and sorrow
over the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But the search for a new
approach to racial reform had begun to take shape in the early 1960s, and accelerated after
1966, when most Black student organizations were formed. The idea of Black Power spread
nationally as a challenge to nonviolence and integration and as urban insurrection became an
annual summer event. By 1969 these developments culminated in what many observers were
calling “a Black revolution,” and universities were on the front lines.

The burgeoning racial liberalism of the early post–World War II years had given rise to an
expectation that dismantling formal racial barriers would dramatically reduce racism among
whites and usher in rapid and meaningful social change. Even the discerning W.E.B. Du Bois
estimated shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that it would take about five

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years to implement integration, and this was likely a generous amount of time, in his view, for
states to obey a federal mandate.1 For a variety of reasons, education emerged as the terrain for
this national saga of racial transformation. The GI Bill’s expansion of higher education, the
long-standing emphasis within the Black community on higher education, and the Supreme
Court victories against professional and primary school segregation reinforced the belief that
education was the key to both Black progress and the creation of a new nation. At the same
time, the combination of cold war anxieties, a rapidly expanding social science literature on
“race relations” and the legal liberalism of the 1950s produced a narrative of the
underprivileged Negro American’s gradual and steady assimilation into the modern (white)
nation. As one student said of the relentless pressure to conform to white cultural norms: “We
didn’t feel we had a choice; the implication was plain that we were being let into the
university on the condition that we become white men with dark skins.”2 According to Edgar
W. Beckham, a 1958 graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, “We
believed in what you might call automatic assimilation. We thought the black students would
mysteriously merge into the white landscape.” This worked because “there were so few of us,
and Stokely hadn’t shouted ‘Black Power’ yet.”3 This feeling was widespread. “From 1948,
when George McLaurin became the first black student enrolled at the University of Oklahoma,
until the late 1960s,” writes pioneering Oklahoma professor George Henderson, “black
students at the University wished year after year that goodness would prevail and they would
be treated as people of equal worth to whites. But it seldom happened.”4

Southern students hoped that traveling North to college would provide a respite from insult
and indignity. The idea that the North and West were more racially liberal and tolerant than the
South was deeply ingrained in the national self-image and in many individual expectations.
Many Black southerners expected to encounter a liberal racial climate in the North, but found
instead a jarring disconnect between image and reality. Frank Monteith came to Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois, in the late 1950s from South Carolina, where his aunt
Modjeska Simkins was a nationally known leader of the state NAACP. From the airport, he
shared a taxi to campus with a white freshman from Iowa. She pestered him relentlessly,
asking, among other things: “Can I touch your hair?” Monteith worked with the Evanston
NAACP to try to remove the racial identification question from the Northwestern application
form, a question that was used by many colleges in the pre-affirmative-action era to enforce a
limit on minority student admissions. The university pressured Monteith to join the band so that
its lone Black musician would have a roommate on the road. “It was ugly traveling with the
band,” he recalls. In a sign of how widespread Jim Crow exclusions were across the Midwest,
the two young men had to stay in private homes because no hotel across Indiana, Illinois, and
Ohio would admit them. Madelyn Coar graduated from Northwestern in the early 1960s. She
hailed from a neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, called “Dynamite Hill” because of the
string of Klan bombings of Black homes there. “I chose a Northern school,” she says, “so there
would be no racism.” But Coar said she would not have made it through college were it not for
an African American family in Evanston who became a second family to dozens of Black
students at Northwestern in the 1950s and 1960s. Another student, Sandra Malone, says she
came “not expecting racism.” But within minutes of her arrival freshman year, her white

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
Created from usf on 2018-01-26 11:03:37.
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roommate requested a transfer.5 A Wellesley freshman from St. Louis echoes these memories,
recalling her arrival on campus in 1965: “This was Massachusetts, the home of the
abolitionists. I thought I was escaping segregation.” But she soon found herself embroiled in
protest against the conservative culture at Wellesley.6

The turmoil of the 1960s profoundly altered the liberal and colonialist conception of race
and racism that had been forged in cold war America. Notwithstanding the strength of
conservative resistance to racial reform in the United States, the civil rights struggle brought
the limits of American racial liberalism to the fore, sparking a crisis that pushed many activists
to consider more radical strategies and philosophies. Year after year of beatings, shootings,
and murders of civil rights workers made growing numbers of African Americans question the
morality of the nation and the veracity of its claims to liberal democracy. At the same time,
rising unemployment, police violence, and segregation in the North made many Black
Americans lose faith in the call for integration and in the sincerity of northern white allies,
many of whom continued to counsel patience and gradualism. In 1963 Malcolm X offered a
critique of integration: “It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of
Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another
dozen places in the South. It has been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing
segregated schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South are in
integrated schools. That isn’t integration, that’s tokenism!”7

This critique of token integration would spread rapidly among late 1960s college students
who began to pay close attention to numbers and the actual scale of integration. Malcolm X
convinced them of the failure of old modes of change, and they would rise up en masse to
demand new ones. “Color blindness has led to blacks coming out on the short end of the
academic stick,” two campus observers wrote. Universities are “seas of whiteness,” and
student activism is forcing this out in the open. “What the universities have failed to realize in
almost every case,” they declared, “is that the American educational experience is a white
experience, an experience based on white history, white tradition, white culture, white
customs, and white thinking, an education designed primarily to produce a culturally
sophisticated, middle class, white American.”8

Many collegiate activists of the late 1960s were first exposed to Black studies as high
school students, especially in large cities like New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and
Oakland, where Black nationalist ideas were already in wide circulation and where large-
scale school boycotts and demonstrations had begun to move beyond the call for integration
and now called for community control of schools, Black history in the curriculum, and more
Black teachers. In 1968 in New York, for one example, community control advocates ran a
demonstration district in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn and built on a rich
local history of alternative education. Keith Baird was the director of its Afro-American and
Latin American studies programs. A veteran public school teacher, son of a Garveyite and
longtime Black nationalist, Baird taught in the church-based “freedom schools” during the
1964 New York City school boycott. And from 1965 to 1968, he taught alongside legendary
Harlem historian John Henrik Clarke in a youth heritage program in Harlem. Baird taught
lessons on freedom fighters Denmark Vesey and Sojourner Truth, and institution-builders

Carter G. Woodson and Mary McLeod Bethune, as well as one comparing Caribbean calypso,
U.S. jazz, and African music. He taught about precolonial African societies and exposed
Harlem youth to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, J. A. Rogers, Melville Herskovits, and Basil
Davidson.9 These experiences, as well as the introduction of Black history courses in many
urban high schools in these years, demonstrated to young people that Black studies programs
were imaginable and possible. A handful of colleges in the country offered Black history or
literature courses, but the overwhelming majority did not, and none offered a degree-granting
program in African American studies.

Notwithstanding gradual gains in mid-decade, Black student enrollment in public or private
white universities in the late 1960s was still small. A nationwide survey of major state
universities found that “black Americans are grossly underrepresented in higher education,”
but noted that many state universities in the North and West, but not the South, had launched
special admissions programs. In 1969, white universities in the South had an average Black
enrollment of 1.76 percent; in the East, the figure was 1.84 percent, in the Midwest it was 2.98
percent, and in the West it was 1.34 percent—a strikingly homogeneous national portrait.10

Many students who entered college in the mid-1960s narrate stories of social awakening,
budding activism, and transformed racial consciousness. Initially, according to a member of the
class of 1969 at Wesleyan, “they wanted us to pretend we were just like them.” But then “we
began to see that the whites weren’t supermen. They were just ordinary cats with ordinary
hang-ups. That’s when we stopped assimilating.” Like many colleges, Wesleyan had dispersed
Black students in the dormitories. The “official policy was to keep us apart,” one student
remembers. “But it didn’t take us long to find each other.” In contrast, at Wellesley, the six
African American students who arrived in 1965 were given separate rooms away from white
students: “You began to realize that racism was alive and well,” one of the students recalls.
According to Francille Rusan Wilson, “We were these nice little Southern girls, who had
probably even brought white gloves with us. This was a period where, literally, you started off
as a colored girl and ended up four years later a black woman.”11

Ramona Tascoe entered San Francisco State College in 1967 after twelve years of Catholic
school. Born in Baton Rouge, she moved with her family to San Francisco in the early 1950s
because her father had gotten a job at the San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard. Despite the
California migration, her cultural roots were firmly in Louisiana. Her father was “a dark-
skinned Creole,” her was mother was light skinned, and the children were “not raised to be
black.” Her parents taught her not to speak about race and to “assimilate.” She remembers that
they were “not permitted to acknowledge our ethnicity, except in the pejorative.” Her parents
instructed her to “identify white folks who set the standard, and then do all you can to mold
yourself in that model.” Entering college, she felt like “a dry sponge, ready to absorb all that
was missing,” and took a Black studies course at the student-run Experimental College,
“something I had never been exposed to.” A freshman with “long, straightened hair,” she
“converted to an Afro quickly” and began to question the whole process of assimilation.
Tascoe became a leader in the Black Student Union.12

Wesley Profit entered Harvard in 1965 right after the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles, his
hometown. The son of a Southern University graduate, Profit had attended boarding school and

considered himself fairly sheltered. Part of a cohort of forty Black students, the largest group
by far to enter Harvard at the same time, Profit says, they “were made to feel insecure in a
thousand different ways. . . . We were an experiment of sorts, and a lot of us had experiences
that were discomforting and a little bit alienating.” Few whites believed they were actually
Harvard students. Clerks in campus and town stores would not accept their checks or charges,
questioning their affiliation with the school. One night Profit and a group of fellow Black male
students were departing a Radcliffe dormitory at the close of visiting hours, and were asked
for identification by a Harvard security officer. They were reaching for their wallets, but upon
noticing that a group of white males had not been similarly stopped, one student instructed the
others: “Put your cards away!” This slightly older Army veteran announced, “I fought for this
country and marched at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and I am not going to be treated this
way and submit to a discriminatory request.” And in a story that shows both the anxiety
triggered by the presence of Black students, and the burden placed upon them to perform
integration, a Harvard dean called a group of Black students into his office to object that they
had been sitting together so often in the cafeteria and urge them to sit with white students. Profit
recalls their effort to educate him, explaining that “the kids from Phillips Andover are all
sitting together but you don’t see it. You notice us.”13

The small number of Black students at Columbia University in New York in 1966 and 1967
encountered daily acts of suspicion regarding their status as students. “From day one our life
on campus was political protest,” says Leon Denmark. Every time he entered a building, he
was asked for identification. Angered at this selective treatment, he and a classmate confronted
the guard at Ferris Booth Hall: “We’re gonna stand here for half an hour and see if you ask
every white student for an ID.” But the harassment faced by Black students was even more
explicit. “People actually called us nigger on campus,” Denmark recalls, and says that Black
students were “naturally politicized by these things.” Columbia student Al Dempsey, who was
raised in the South and became a judge in Georgia, insists that “the worst racism I have seen is
here at Morningside Heights.” Coming together as Black students became a critical means of
coping in a hostile environment. Denmark describes how important it was to them to form a
chapter of the Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi, and to form study groups where they taught
themselves the Black history absent in the curriculum.14

Increasingly, Black students had to contend with the charge of separatism—that they were
undermining progress toward integration, that they were afraid of competing with whites, or
that they were practicing reverse racism and unfairly rejecting association with all whites.
Students had a range of reactions to this charge, depending upon their social and political
perspective. But those who did reject the assumptions underlying integration did not reject
equal access to the rights and resources of the society. Rather, most students wanted to redefine
integration—as multiculturalism rather than assimilation into white culture. They roundly
rejected the notion that they were in retreat. As one observer put it: “They were not running
away from whites, but moving toward Blackness.”15 To be sure, some students vigorously
critiqued integration as part of a larger critique of the ills of white American society. In a 1969
essay, “Separatism and Black Consciousness,” a Black female student wrote, “The perversion
of integration is that Black people are expected to give up a strong, healthy lifestyle, for one

that is sick, dying and rotten. . . . What can living with white people teach me that is good?”
she asked. Finding that “the white man’s days of domination are numbered,” she saw no point
in trying to integrate. “I am an Afroamerican and I want to maintain my ethnicity and humanism.
I never want to be an All-American.”16

In 1969 a researcher visited fifty colleges to assess Black student views, and found
idealistic expectations of campus life. “Large numbers of Black students believed that all they
had to do was present themselves and they would be accepted.” But their disappointment was
giving rise to a determination to assert greater control over their education. He reported a
“generalized suspicion and distrust of educational authority figures” and a strong desire for
student participation in campus decision-making. They were “tired of having to prove their
humanity again and again to every white they met” and of “living in a fishbowl.” They resented
the pressure to assimilate into the white majority on white terms. According to this researcher,
the students’ “whole conception of integration changed.” It should be a two-way process.17

A Yale sophomore reinforced this rejection of racial ambassadorship. “I came here to be a
student, not to educate whites about blacks. I’m tired of being an unpaid, untenured professor
teaching these guys the elementals of humanity.”18 A Wellesley student describes the college’s
conception of integration in the mid-1960s: “It was very much a one way street, in that there
was no recognition of the African American experience. This was our opportunity to become
like them, not for Wellesley to become more like us or learn from us. That kind of idea just
didn’t exist.”19 Moreover, students in this era were increasingly coming to believe that it was
white racism, not a deficiency in skills or preparedness among African Americans, that
explained racial inequality in society. This new perspective moved Black students to embrace
a Black identity, actively reframe Blackness in a positive fashion, push back against white
conceits, and organize new, Black-identified social, cultural, and political spaces on
campuses, with Black student unions being the most prominent and well-known example.
“They never let you forget you were black,” a Berkeley student observed in 1967, so “we
decided to remember we were black.”20

In a study of Black student outlooks, political scientist Charles Hamilton, who coauthored
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, found that students had begun to explicitly critique
integration, seeing it as synonymous with racial assimilation. “Integration has traditionally
meant that blacks should try to be like whites. It has implied that black people were being done
a favor by whites. This is part of what the black students are rejecting, and they believe that the
institutions of higher learning have been and are insensitive to this.” They expressed, he found,
a “profound distrust of national government institutions as well as the schools of higher
education that they attend.” He expressed surprise at the pace of their politicization. These
students, Hamilton wrote, “have formed judgments about the nature of political and economic
and educational systems much faster than previous generations of activists—especially civil
rights activists.”21

FIGURE 1. Political scientist Charles Hamilton coauthored Black Power: The Politics of Liberation and pioneered the
concept of a Black university.

Students expressed this new consciousness in powerful, forceful terms, and they did so on
campuses large and small, all over the nation. A recurring theme in the students’ activism was
a desire to show their loyalty to poor Black communities and not let their entrance into white
academia be seen as a rejection of their culture and communities. “They talk of the university
being ‘relevant’ to the needs of the black community,” Charles Hamilton observed after visiting
sixty-six colleges. “They have in mind the university as a place where not just a few black
students come and graduate and move up and out (to the suburbs), but where new ideas and
techniques are developed for the political and economic benefit of the total black community.
In other words, they look to the university, naively or not, as a beginning place for social
reform or ‘revolution.’ ”22 Protesting Black female students at Vassar wrote this preamble to
their demands: “We refuse not only to waste four years of our lives, but to jeopardize four
years of our lives becoming socialized to fit a white dominant cultural pattern. For the Black
student to be asked to submit to such acculturation is to ask the student to willingly accept his
own deculturalization—his own dehumanization. We refuse to have our ties to the black

community systematically severed; to have our life styles, our ambitions, our visions of our
selves made to conform solely to any white mold.”23

Along with the critique of cultural assimilation, the turn toward Black Power affected the
rhetorical style of Black student leaders. Stokely Carmichael, coauthor of the influential text
Black Power and longtime leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), was pivotal in the rapid spread of revolutionary rhetoric and a confrontational style
among students. Because SNCC was unraveling in the late 1960s, and because Carmichael
moved to Africa in 1969 and disappeared from the American media radar, his popularity has
been underappreciated. In many ways, he picked up the mantle left by the slain Malcolm X,
whose posthumous Autobiography of Malcolm X was a similarly influential text. Also pushing
this generation to feel that they were part of a seismic change was the urban unrest, especially
the uprisings in Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967 that rocked the nation, unnerved the
establishment, and made many young African Americans feel and understand the power,
danger, and threat of widespread Black rebellion. This turn toward militant rhetoric and Black
Power not only unsettled and alarmed whites but also divided African Americans. “To be
authentically black became highly subjective and depended very much on the eye of the
beholder,” one scholar found. And militancy raised the stakes, serving “as a means of
disciplining black students as a whole and policing the boundaries of blackness.” The
“scathing epithets ‘Tom’ or ‘Oreo’ kept less-militant, less-separatist black students in line.”24

Alongside this process of politicization, social pressure, and rejection of older paradigms
was the search for new ideologies. Students were rejecting fundamental pillars of American
society but did not have a clear replacement. In Hamilton’s view, they were “almost frantically
searching for new ideas and ideologies to explain society” and engaging in “endless hours of
ideological discussion.”25 Capturing their attention was a new breed of revolutionaries. Fidel
Castro, the socialist president of Cuba, had defeated a U.S.-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs
and pledged Cuban support for national liberation struggles in Africa. Castro was also a
staunch supporter of the African American struggle, and famously stayed at the Hotel Theresa
in Harlem during a visit to the United Nations. Robert F. Williams is another figure whose
early 1960s radicalism impressed Black students later in the decade. An NAACP leader in
North Carolina, Williams advocated and practiced armed self-defense, faced down the Klan,
and fled first to Cuba and later to China. While in Cuba, his radio show, Radio Free Dixie,
reached listeners in the United States, and Negroes with Guns, his account of his use of armed
self-defense in North Carolina, inspired the founders of the Revolutionary Action Movement,
an underground Black organization that for a time in the mid-1960s attracted a coterie of
college students.26

The phrase Black Power may bring to mind ghetto uprisings and incendiary rhetoric, but the
rise of Black Power on campus had a strong intellectual dimension. Campus study groups were
extremely significant in shaping new racial identities and consciousness. Coinciding with the
Black arts movement, whose poetry, painting, and performance deeply stirred students, an
outpouring of new journals, manifestos, newspapers, magazines, and radio and television
programming featured debates and discussions of the new ideas percolating through the Black
Power movement. Black students across the country read and debated the ideas of Frantz

Fanon, Harold Cruse, Melville Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nathan Hare,
Karl Marx, and Malcolm X. The students were passionate about finding ways to translate
theory into practice. Their models were wide-ranging: Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of
Algiers gave Northwestern students a strategy to maintain secrecy in planning their building
takeover; at the University of Oklahoma, the Afro-American Student Union applied the ideas of
Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. But “if Alinsky was our tactician, Fanon was our
fire,” remembers the students’ faculty mentor, George Henderson. “His books were widely
read by black collegians throughout the United States. It was not a far stretch,” he notes, “for
most of the black students at the University of Oklahoma to identify with the colonized people
of Africa.”27 This identification and solidarity with others struggling in Africa, and in Asia and
Latin America too, grew in the 1970s. A key distinction between civil rights and Black Power
was internationalism—seeing the past and present of Black Americans as inextricably linked
to colonized and formerly colonized people worldwide. Study groups encouraged this new
consciousness, and later, overseas travel would as well.

For some, the most startling aspect of the radicalization of Black students was their
consideration of the idea of armed struggle. I write idea because this development should not
be exaggerated and it proved to be more posture than practice. Moreover, it is important to
note that, during the long Black freedom struggle, violence was used overwhelmingly against
Black people, not by Black people. Nevertheless, militant rhetorical strategies by student
leaders and widespread admiration for the tradition of armed self-defense as exemplified by
Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party influenced the media’s depiction of student activists—
sometimes unfairly and inaccurately—and shaped outcomes. The larger social context is
critical in understanding the skepticism, especially among young males, toward the rhetoric of
nonviolence and the practice of turning the other cheek that is most associated with Martin
Luther King Jr. and the southern civil rights movement.

Many factors propelled this skepticism. Young people in the late 1960s witnessed a sharp
escalation in American involvement in Vietnam and very high casualty figures, all for an
anticommunist rationale that they increasingly came to reject. For them, Dr. King’s statement in
a 1967 speech that the United States government was “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the
world seemed true, and it heightened the hypocrisy in the government’s urging of nonviolence
on protesters. Moreover, eighteen-year-olds in 1968 had spent their childhoods watching
television news footage of racist violence inflicted on nonviolent Black southerners, including
children. The rioting that broke out in cities beginning in the summer of 1964 and peaking in
1967 and 1968 led to hundreds of deaths, mostly of African Americans at the hands of police
officers, but the violence also seemed to shake up political establishments and spark efforts to
placate restive urban centers. Moreover, many Africans had embraced armed struggle in the
fight to overthrow European colonial rule. This context altered the discursive strategies of
many Black student activists, leading to new motifs, tactics, slogans, and all-around style. For
example, in an episode of Black Heritage, on WCBS-TV in New York, student leaders
passionately discussed “racism and education” and “the new role for Black students,” and as
the show came to a close, an unidentified man offered this suggestion to move forward: “If
students took up the gun on the campus and begin to act out on the basis of gun power . . . .that

might be one basis on which you can do some challenging.”28

Charles Hamilton found that students were seriously questioning nonviolence. “They do not
believe in the efficacy of nonviolence as a philosophy or as a tactic. In fact, many are of the
opinion that unless violence is used in some form, there is little likelihood of getting attention
from ‘the power structure.’ ”29 Students began using new language: embracing “revolution” and
“revolt,” questioning “working within the system” and openly challenging “the white power
structure.” “The rhetoric gave them a meaningful frame that fitted what they saw around them.
And their political consciousness developed.” Hamilton also found that rhetoric was used to
“shock whites,” a tactic displayed over and over again in campus confrontations.30 But at most
campuses, even as students embraced many aspects of Black nationalism, they remained
nonviolent in both theory and practice. In describing the popularity of anticolonial writer
Frantz Fanon among Blacks at the University of Oklahoma, George Henderson stresses the
appeal of “his strategies for achieving black solidarity and positive self-images. There was
little attraction among blacks on our campus for a violent revolution.”31 Still, a 1970 study of
Black high school students found that “nearly half of the activists agreed with the statement
‘violence is cleansing,’ as did more than a third of the nonactivists.” Even more telling, only 7
percent of all the Black students thought that whites could be “persuaded” to change.32

Black student organizations became the most common vehicle for Black student protest.
Some Black student organizations began in the early 1960s and were more social than
political, but most began in 1967 or 1968 and were steeped in activist culture. The title Black
Student Union was common on the West Coast, while many groups on the East Coast were
named Student Afro-American Society, but there was great diversity. At Northwestern
University, the new organization was called For Members Only, after a sign students had seen
on an exclusive club on Chicago’s north shore. The word Black had negative connotations
among most Americans, but Malcolm X, in particular, reversed its meaning for a younger
generation of African Americans, who ushered in a lasting change in group nomenclature and
identity. By “thinking black” as Malcolm X urged, they “transformed blackness from an
inherited set of physical characteristics to a deliberate political and cultural stance.”33 There
were many attempts to establish regional and national student formations. In the spring of 1968,
Black students from thirty-seven colleges in nineteen states met at Shaw University and formed
the Congress for the Unity of Black Students. There were efforts to unify Black students in
regional alliances over the next few years, notably in California, but also in Chicago, New
York, and elsewhere. Most striking is the similarity of student grievances and reform goals,
given this autonomous, local organizational structure.34

The Black Power movement elevated male leadership, reflecting the patriarchy of the larger
society as well as the tactics and ideology of the late 1960s Black liberation movement. The
reappraisal of nonviolence and embrace of more militant rhetoric increased the visibility of
male leaders, as did the fallout from a report authored in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan of
the U.S. Labor Department, which identified a rise in female-headed Black families as a
worrisome economic indicator and unnatural social development. The Moynihan report would
eventually help propel the rise of Black feminism, but at the time it dovetailed with the rise of
Black nationalism, which had typically seen the cultivation of patriarchal gender roles as

essential to race advancement.
In a sign of the masculine tenor of the times, Darlene Clark Hine, an undergraduate at

Roosevelt University in Chicago in the mid-1960s who went on to become a leading scholar in
African American women’s history, remembers reading, studying, listening to, and valorizing
Black men almost exclusively. Black men and their words and experiences represented the
race. She found “ample opportunity to study and learn about black men, including, for example,
Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and
Eldridge Cleaver.” She applauded their strong images, calling them a “powerful antidote” to
the widespread negative depictions of Black men in U.S. culture. “Articulate, handsome,
fiercely self-conscious freedom fighters, these men garnered massive media coverage” for
their demands for Black rights and social transformation. Like thousands of other Black college
students of her generation, Hine read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Claude Brown’s
Manchild in the Promised Land, John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am, Richard
Wright’s Native Son, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man. And like so many of her peers, she listened to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Pharoah
Sanders. She was “oblivious” to the lack of attention paid “to black women’s experiences” and
even felt she had developed a “black masculine consciousness” by the time she entered
graduate school in 1968.35

But male dominance did not go entirely uncontested. On several campuses, female leaders
of Black student organizations were pressured to give way to male leadership: some relented,
others held on. Deborah Gray White was president of her college’s Afro-Latin Alliance when
a rise in Black student admissions in 1968 spawned demands for a separate Black
organization. “Some of the more nationalist black students called those of us who wanted to
keep the Afro-Latin Alliance names like Oreo or Uncle Tom.” White felt “particularly set upon
as president of the Afro-Latin Alliance because the new students demanded masculine
representation.” She “never got used to being a moderate among black nationalists,” but she
“persevered.”36

In his survey of Black student activism, Charles Hamilton found an occasional but
“conscious effort to distinguish the roles of men and women. This was especially the case,” he
found, “where the groups had, as at one midwestern university, adopted a Nation of Islam
(Black Muslim) motif. The men served as snappy, disciplined, military-type guards. The
women studied their role in the revolutionary vanguard.” Whatever the outcome, he found that
the Black consciousness upsurge had sparked “serious questioning of the relation of the sexes.”
On many campuses, “some of the males, sensitive to the theory of black male emasculation,
argued that leadership roles should be assumed by men—especially in such matters as
occupying buildings, negotiating with school officials, and talking to the press. Their view was
that the black man had to speak for the ‘Black family of students and be out front in a position
to protect the black women.’ “ But Hamilton also observed some young women push back.
“Some of the women were reluctant to give up the egalitarian method of rewarding position,”
he noted. In the end, he emphasized an important feature of the movement: “Whatever the
situation, it was quite evident that men and women students, generally, were about equally
active in the groups.” Notwithstanding the popularity of patriarchal norms or rhetoric, this was

an era of youth revolt, incipient women’s liberation, and overall questioning of authority.
Young women were full participants in the Black student movement.37

Black women students on white campuses had particular grievances that arose from the
interplay between their racial and gender experience. The social scene became a point of
tension and contestation. A student at the University of Bridgeport told a reporter: “It’s much
easier for a boy to get along here. If he’s a good athlete and a good dancer, he can get into a
fraternity and no white girl is going to turn him down if he asks her to dance. But we can’t ask
a white boy for a date, and you can be sure they don’t ask us. With lots of the black boys dating
white girls, we just sit around the dorms and get angry.”38 Still, Black women students were
hardly passive participants in the negotiation of campus gender relations. Charles Hamilton
recorded “a vivid example” of such a negotiation in a meeting at Northwestern University in
March 1969. “A black co-ed had accused a white fraternity member of insulting her,” and
“Black students subsequently invaded the fraternity house and damaged some property.” At the
meeting “the black co-eds were asking for commitments from the black male students to defend
black womanhood. One after another, the black men spoke—some vehemently in defense of the
co-eds (they were judged Men); some equivocated in their willingness to fight ‘by any means
necessary’ (they were put down as Mice). The session became very heated; egos were strained
and challenged. Physical blows were almost passed . . . . ‘It really got rough there at one
point,’ a black graduate student said. ‘Cats were outdoing each other and that whole black
masculinity thing was coming out. At one point, I was sitting there just hoping that some white
person would throw a brick through the window just to bring us together again.’ “ He
continued: “The Sisters were really coming down hard on the dudes who didn’t sound right.”39

Black nationalism married the repudiation of interracial dating with authentic Blackness.
Greensboro student leader Nelson Johnson remembers being exposed to Black Power ideas
and Pan-Africanism by the charismatic activist Howard Fuller. His critique of interracial
dating stood out. “He talked a strong black power line,” he says of Fuller. “There was a lot of
interracial dating among activists at that time and he challenged us to stop it. He whipped on
any black man dating white girls so hard it was no longer in vogue.”40 Some students who
persisted in dating or marrying “outside the race” felt their loyalty to the cause was unfairly
called into question. This was true for a Black female student leader at a major midwestern
university whose white boyfriend marked her as racially suspect in the eyes of many Black
nationalist students, even with her tireless work and devotion to the movement.

What were the social origins of the students who engaged in such militant action? Student
activists were a mix of preaffirmative action children of college-educated parents, first-
generation college students from migrant, working-class families, and some (hailing from
either group) who had already had some experience in the Black freedom struggle. While many
colleges and universities began to implement modest Black student recruitment programs in the
early 1960s in response to the stirrings of the southern civil rights movement, the 1965 Higher
Education Act propelled greater desegregation and also sparked change in the class
composition of Black students. Between 1966 and 1968, crucial seedtime for subsequent
demonstrations, there was a dramatic increase in students from low-income families in
predominantly white colleges. Leon Denmark recollects that of the approximately thirty-five

Black students who entered Columbia College in New York in 1966, “all were from public
school.” And “we had a certain attitude,” he recalls.41

According to a study Charles Hamilton conducted in 1969 with 264 students at fifteen
colleges, half were getting some kind of scholarship aid. Only one-third of students reported a
parental contribution. The vast majority of students were financing education through a
combination of sources: scholarships, employment, parental contribution, and loans. Seventy-
four percent of the parents had no college education. The single most-frequent parental
occupation was “blue collar worker,” a category that would virtually disappear in twenty
years. These students hailed from what Hamilton termed upper-lower- or lower-middle-class
families.42 Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree entered college in 1971, and remembers
that the experience was a jolt for all of them. “Most of the black students who entered Stanford
in the fall were the first members of their families to attend college.” And of those parents who
had attended college, most had attended historically Black colleges. So they were all
integrating.43 Interestingly, Hamilton found a pronounced break from religion among these
students. Eighty-five percent of students in his sample grew up in religious families, yet 65
percent of them indicated that they were not personally followers of a religion. “Today’s black
student is clearly rejecting the organized church of his parents,” Hamilton reported.44

In addition to the politicization of Black students on white campuses, students at historically
Black colleges underwent their own process of politicization. The spread of the Black student
movement at both white and Black colleges helps account for its national breadth. Black
colleges have a reputation for conservatism. They do not typically come to mind as locations
that give rise to protest. But the first large-scale protests by Black college students directed at
campus policies occurred at historically Black colleges and then spread to white colleges.
Given that popular and scholarly accounts so often portray the Black Power movement as
taking place in the urban North and West, it is important to acknowledge that Black student
protest around the country was largely inspired by southern campus struggles that were part
and parcel of the Black Power upsurge. “Without question, the Black Power–Black
Consciousness movement has been felt in the South,” wrote Charles Hamilton, formerly a
professor at Tuskegee University.45 A tidal wave of protest swept historically Black colleges
and universities (HBCUs) in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by a range of student grievances,
most notably white financial and administrative control, excessive regulation of student life,
excessive discipline, inferior facilities and faculty, and outmoded or Eurocentric curriculum.

Given that schools like Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the Atlanta University
Center had been home to pioneers in Black scholarship—such as historian and sociologist
W.E.B. Du Bois, political scientist Ralph Bunche, historian Rayford Logan, philosopher Alain
Locke, and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier—what provoked the charge of Eurocentrism?
Darwin T. Turner, dean of the graduate school at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical
State University, argued that a move away from studying Black subjects emerged from the
optimism spawned by early legal decisions supporting desegregation, the defeat of Fascism,
and postwar affluence. Political repression, too, was most likely a factor. “The tendency for
black educators to neglect materials related to Afro-American heritage intensified, I believe,
during the early 1950s,” Turner wrote. The many “indications of opening doors persuaded

many blacks to discourage any education which emphasized the existence of Afro-Americans
as a body separate from the rest of America.” As a result, “studies of Afro-American history,
literature, sociology, economics, and politics were stuffed into the traditional surveys, which
were already so overcrowded that important materials must be omitted.” He felt that
“integrated surveys” were necessary but insufficient “to provide Afro-Americans with the
necessary understanding of their culture.”46 Indeed, in 1968, several members of Howard’s
board of trustees “were shocked that courses in Black history, jazz and literature were not
presently offered. ‘We had many of these things in the 1930s,’ commented one member.”47 A
1968 graduate of the prestigious Spelman College complained of “being taught a super kind of
European history.” Of fifteen courses in a literature department at the Atlanta University
Center, she said, “fourteen of them will be on European Renaissance or medieval literature,
Elizabethan poetry.” She also lamented a “super kind of paternalism” and “Puritanism,” but
nevertheless acknowledged the important history of black scholarship at the Atlanta University
Center and what she termed “a healthy kind of racialism.”48

Students at scores of Black colleges organized campaigns to reverse these trends, a story
that will be taken up more fully in chapter 5, but events at three campuses need to be
highlighted because they marked the beginning of the national Black student movement. Clashes
at HBCUs in 1967 and 1968 inspired Black students nationwide, in part because students on
these campuses faced extraordinary police invasions. In May 1967, police led a full-scale
assault on Texas Southern University in Houston. One night a person or persons threw rocks
and bottles from a dormitory and allegedly fired a gun as well. At two o’clock in the morning
police officers invaded the campus, firing “3000 rounds of pistol and automatic gunfire” into
the dorm. Their rampage left one of their own killed by a police officer’s bullet, two other
officers wounded, at least two students wounded from gunfire, several students bitten by police
dogs, and many other students with physical injuries. The Houston police invaded the building,
tore up rooms looking for weapons, and arrested 488 students. “No bull horns were used to
inform the dormitory residents of the impending attack and no tear gas was used at any time.
Instead, there was a barrage of rifle and pistol fire that could have killed scores of students.”49
Mrs. Hattie Harbert, a housemother in the dormitory, said police “made me lie on the floor and
two or three of them walked on me.” She also saw police carry out “five or six students bloody
as beef.”50

As an NAACP official wired to the U.S. Attorney General the following morning: “It is
clear that Houston police engaged in a vengeful and destructive rampage against persons and
property at Texas Southern University.”51 The confrontation came after two months of almost
continuous demonstrations against police mistreatment of TSU students and substandard
conditions generally in the Houston Black community. No weapons were ever found in the
dorm. Five students, known as “the TSU five,” were charged with the officer’s murder, even
though he was felled by an officer’s bullet. All the students were ultimately cleared, but their
prosecution distracted attention from the true culprits. According to opinion surveys shortly
afterward, the TSU police riot increased pro-Black Power sentiment among African
Americans in Houston; and with the extensive print and broadcast media coverage of the riot,
this effect was likely felt beyond Texas.52

Perhaps the massive firepower at TSU resulted from the highly militarized riot response
plans developed in police departments after the Watts uprising of 1965; perhaps it reflected a
particular hostility toward increasingly assertive Black students. Whatever the explanation, the
invasion was a disturbing harbinger of things to come, and while it prompted many regional
protests by Black students, it did not give rise to a national outcry. But this national outcry was
soon to come. Less than a year later, in February 1968, officers with the South Carolina Law
Enforcement Division shot and killed three African Americans—Samuel Hammond, Henry
Smith, and Delano Middleton—on the campus of South Carolina State University in
Orangeburg. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, the killings outraged and mobilized Black
students nationwide. However, the rapid string of assassinations, street clashes, global
upheavals and military battles of 1968 soon overshadowed the Orangeburg killings in the
major media, leading to the mistaken impression that they had generated little impact.

Students at Orangeburg had been engaged in protests against a city bowling alley and other
public facilities that were still refusing service to African Americans four years after passage
of the Civil Rights Act. On February 8, state highway patrolmen, newly outfitted with the latest
antiriot armaments, converged on a campus gathering and opened fire into a large group of
students. Most of the students were already fleeing, so the bullets hit them from the back. The
white police officers killed three youths and wounded thirty more people. As at Texas
Southern, this was an extraordinary display of firepower, and shows how law enforcement
nationwide reacted to the urban uprisings by amassing greater weaponry and firepower and, in
some instances, unleashing it on student protesters. Afterward, the police rushed to whitewash
the incident, claiming falsely that the students had opened fire. Under pressure from civil rights
leaders, the federal government stepped in and tried nine officers, but the white jury acquitted
them. No officer was ever held accountable for these murders, and incredibly, the only person
ever convicted and sentenced as a result of the Orangeburg Massacre was a SNCC activist
who had been shot in the back, Cleveland Sellers.53

The Orangeburg Massacre is widely considered one of the “forgotten tragedies” of the civil
rights and student movements, but it sparked a wave of sympathy protests by Black college
students across the country. These students identified with the slain young men. From Howard
University in Washington, D.C., to Crane College in Chicago, students were hurt and angry and
held their own commemorations and memorials for the students. “The Orangeburg massacre
went through the emergent black power movement like a bolt of lightning,” recalls Nelson
Johnson, who was a student leader at North Carolina A&T. Black student leaders from sixteen
colleges in North Carolina gathered in Durham and agreed to hold “creative demonstrations”
on their campuses. At North Carolina A&T, they burned the governor of South Carolina in
effigy and conducted a mock funeral procession for the slain young men in what became one of
the largest demonstrations in Greensboro. The Orangeburg Massacre was one of a series of
catalysts that generated a national student demand for Black studies. In just one example, a year
later a commemoration of the massacre at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte led to
the creation of a Black studies program.54

Students at HBCUs inspired and shaped the Black student movement nationally not only by
their martyrdom but also through their efforts to improve and preserve Black colleges. In an

extraordinarily important, though strikingly forgotten dimension of the Black Power movement,
students fought for the survival of Black colleges in this era of desegregation. The quest by
militant Black youth to “save” Black colleges was an outgrowth of their commitment to Black
self-determination, yet it dovetailed with the professional desires of Black administrators, who
tended to be more politically and socially conservative. Despite this shared long-term goal,
conflict and hostility defined the studentadministrator relationship. Struggles at HBCUs brought
into sharp relief the twin targets of Black Power: white control and integrationist Negro
leadership. Students often criticized administrators in biting, acerbic terms, as “Uncle Toms”
working to manage the plantation at the expense of a younger generation of Black people eager
to transform racial dynamics across American society. The students were seeking to make
Negro colleges “blacker,” and this was controversial among African Americans. At the same
time, the students assailed southern white legislatures for inadequate funding of public HBCUs,
and whites on the boards of directors of private HBCUs for their paternalistic control of Black
institutions. And there were undeniable generational cleavages as well. Students opposed the
strict curfews, dress codes (especially for women), and other in loco parentis rules,55 which
they increasingly framed as excessive and oppressive. Indeed, in a sharp rupture, the students
were forgoing the “politics of respectability,” forged in the era of Jim Crow, in favor of more
assertive forms of Black representation and protest.

Many students at Howard, most famously Stokely Carmichael, had been involved in the
civil rights movement in the early 1960s and even interrupted their schooling to go south and
join the movement. By the mid-1960s their gaze had shifted to the universities themselves.
Howard students staged a series of major campus protests in 1967, 1968, and 1969. They
protested the war in Vietnam, the draft, and in loco parentis, but most controversially they
argued that Howard should declare itself a “Black university” in service to Black
communities. Surprisingly, the curriculum at Howard had few courses in either African
American studies or contemporary urban and social problems. According to one observer,
“Professor Sterling Brown was for years alone in including Negro writers in literature
courses,” and “the college had made few efforts to study or actively participate in the black
community around it.”56 The rise of Black Power inspired protest at dozens of historically
Black colleges: Howard was simply one of the first. A catalyst for the surge in Black
nationalist feeling was President James M. Nabrit Jr.’s declaration in the fall of 1966 that
Howard should raise its admissions standards and admit more white students. This statement
came amid a larger context of anxiety over what integration portended for Black institutions. In
response, students, along with Nathan Hare, a professor of sociology who became an important
mentor and ally to Black student activists nationwide, organized the Black Power Committee to
promote Black consciousness among the students in order to prepare them to challenge the
university’s new direction.57

In addition to students, a cohort of young Black professors began to envision a new and
leading role for historically Black colleges in the post-Jim-Crow era. Charles Hamilton first
articulated the conception of a “black university” in a 1967 speech, “The Place of the Black
College in the Human Rights Struggle.” He called on Black colleges to reject the white
middle-class character imposed on them by white funders and to redefine their mission to

provide greater aid and assistance to Black communities. Later published in the Negro Digest,
Hamilton’s article spawned a yearly tradition of devoting an entire issue of the Negro Digest
(later the Black World) to the idea of a Black university. According to Hamilton, the mission of
the Black university was to develop a distinctive Black ethos; to prepare students to help solve
problems in poor Black communities; and to offer a new curriculum, one that was relevant to
contemporary needs but which also required a course in ancient African civilizations. “I am
talking modernization,” Hamilton asserted. “I propose a black college that would deliberately
strive to inculcate a sense of racial pride and anger and concern in its students.” The ideas in
his essay illustrate the emerging view that the Black intelligentsia was a relatively untapped
and potentially radical leadership resource for the Black liberation movement. In some
respects, Hamilton was advancing an updated version of W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of a “talented
tenth,” an educated elite cadre who would advance the interests of the race as a whole. “We
need,” Hamilton declared, “militant leadership which the church is not providing, unions are
not providing and liberal groups are not providing. . . . I propose a black college,” he wrote,
“that would be a felt, dominant force in the community in which it exists. A college which
would use its accumulated intellectual knowledge and economic resources to bring about
desired changes in race relations in the community.” It would dispense with “irrelevant PhDs,”
he wrote, and “recruit freedom fighters and graduate freedom fighters.”58

Howard became the locus of this struggle, but the quest for a Black university did not take
place in isolation. It coincided with the broader social justice movement of the era, especially
the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, the draft, and compulsory military training courses. A
visit to Howard by General Lewis B. Hershey, head of the Selective Service System, in the
spring of 1967, triggered an escalation of protest that would shake the campus for the next two
years. Someone in the audience yelled, “America is a black man’s true battleground,” and
about forty students rushed the stage, preventing Hershey from speaking.59 In the aftermath,
Howard suspended twenty students and dismissed six politically active professors, including
Nathan Hare. The university labeled these faculty members, four of whom were white, as “a
dangerous element” for allegedly promoting Black Power. But the student newspaper, the
Hilltop, reminded readers that the charge of communism had been used in the McCarthy era to
discredit reform in general. “In effect the university used public hysteria over black power,”
the student-editors wrote, “to cloak its efforts to get rid of controversial teachers who
encouraged students to ask questions about the administration of the university or the position
of black people in this country.”60 Nathan Hare was immersed in student radicalism at Howard
and in his next job, at San Francisco State College; at both he adopted the rhetoric and style of
student leaders and stood with them shoulder to shoulder, a choice that landed him in hot water
with his employers on both coasts.61 Upset that Howard had no code of conduct or student
inclusion in disciplinary procedures, the suspended students hired attorneys from the American
Civil Liberties Union and sued Howard in federal court.62

Protest continued the next academic year, including a victorious sit-in in the fall that brought
an end to compulsory ROTC classes. Michael Harris, president of the freshman class, led
many of the anti-ROTC protests and also served as political director of the Black nationalist
student organization, Ujamma. The son of a police officer and a secretary, Harris said that his

Catholic high school experience in Chicago had turned him off to integration because he
couldn’t be himself. In his view, “Howard University should serve another purpose other than
preparing people to fill slots in white society.” Students, he felt, “want Howard to belong to
the black people in Washington, D.C., the black people surrounding the university.” Harris’s
comments in 1968 reflect the intense pace of change in the country and the sense that the United
States was undergoing unprecedented confrontation that was likely to intensify. “I think that in
about five years there’s going to be an all-out race war,” he declared that summer, fresh from
visiting the Poor People’s Campaign’s encampment at the Capitol, known as Resurrection City,
where he says police were threatening a violent takeover and using tear gas against women and
children. “To me, black power is simply a means of getting ready for the confrontation.”63

In February 1968, hundreds of students at Howard staged a sympathy demonstration for the
slain students in Orangeburg, which quickly turned into a protest against Howard’s
administration. They called for the resignation of the president and issued a long list of
demands pertaining to student rights, reinstatement of professors, and Black awareness that
came to be known as the “Orangeburg Ultimatum.” Reportedly, Nabrit and the faculty found it
“reprehensible.”64 A month later at the Charter Day ceremony celebrating the anniversary of
Howard’s founding, students stormed the stage and took control of the podium. They passed out
an alternative charter for a Black university, which renamed Howard “Sterling Brown
University,” gave control of academic matters to faculty, and gave students a seat on the board
of trustees and responsibility for regulating student life and conduct. According to student
leader Anthony Gittens, “We are trying to bring democracy and a concern for the black student
to Howard.”65

But not everyone saw it this way. It was an extraordinary disruption of Howard decorum.
“In a monumental show of rudeness, discourtesy, and vulgarity,” wrote a New York Amsterdam
News reporter, who was a 1966 Howard graduate, students grabbed the microphone and said,
“We declare today the end of Howard University. A new Black University is being born.” She
noted that firebombs had recently been thrown into the homes of Dean Frank Snowden and
President Nabrit. Two students were later arrested.66 Indeed, Black Power was a critique of
liberalism for having failed to eradicate racial inequality, and of the civil rights old guard for
still hewing to this failed course. SNCC leaders Charlie Cobb and Courtland Cox echoed this
view: “In the eyes of many students, the Howard administration has come to represent all that
is negative of older generation Negro leadership.” They were colluding with white America to
resist the inexorable rise of Black Power.67

When the administration summoned thirty-nine students involved in the protest before a
judiciary board, it rekindled widespread student displeasure with the disciplinary process. At
a rally in protest, student leader Ewart Brown called for a sit-in at the administration building,
and hundreds gathered there in the president’s office and throughout the building, causing
administrators to make a hasty exit. For five days in late March, roughly two thousand students
gathered inside or around the administration building. Even with the recent history of tumult,
this was a dramatic, unprecedented act of student rebellion at Howard. The administration
quickly suspended most classes and closed down the campus, inadvertently furthering the
students’ sense of having seized power. The Howard sit-in became a focal point of the budding

Black Power movement and attracted visitors from around the region, including SNCC leaders
like Stokely Carmichael. The students’ sixteen demands included “a black democratic
university,” the resignation of President James Nabrit, greater faculty and student rights,
African American studies, a “black awareness institute,” and the dropping of charges against
the thirty-nine students, because “Howard is run by a dictatorial system.”68

Students worked hard to project the protest—to administrators, the media, and supporters—
as respectful and disciplined, yet, as in most such protests, they also sought to construct a
visible counterculture. There was “a continuous atmosphere of black awareness and cultural
pride,” one professor noted. Leaders in the Black arts movement came to perform, and many
parents came to offer solidarity. Robert Anderson, the parent of a freshman, said the sit-in
“was done in such a manner as to make parents proud to have a child here.”69 Howard
administrators, including the president, largely absented themselves from the conflict, leaving a
leadership void that was eventually filled by a group of distinguished members of the board of
trustees—Judge Miles Paige, Dr. Percy Julian, and Dr. Kenneth Clark. Clark was a well-
known advocate of integration, having testified before the U.S. Supreme Court for the plaintiffs
in the Brown case. But he knew that bringing the police on campus risked a bloody
confrontation. In contrast to most Howard leaders, these prominent trustees did not want to use
force to clear the building. As the protest wore on, students increasingly demanded that
Howard declare itself a “Black university,” but this proved unattainable. In the end, Howard
agreed to grant the student assembly power to create a disciplinary system; to make Howard
more attuned to the times; to create a student/faculty board to work on student problems; and
not to discipline students involved in the takeover.70

FIGURE 2. In March 1968, students at Howard University occupied the administration building and issued a series of demands,
including the call to transform Howard into a Black university.

Not everyone was happy with the settlement. Many of the more militant students saw it as a
betrayal of the longer list of demands, and former professor Nathan Hare urged rejection,
saying too little would be gained. Adrienne Manns, a leader of the sit-in and a rare female
spokesperson in the Black student movement, supported the settlement. She had headed the
student negotiating team. The cry of “nonnegotiable demands” would take off in the coming
year, but Manns employed a pragmatic approach to resolving the five-day protest; moreover,
she hoped to avoid a violent showdown. “We came under fire,” she reflected later that summer,
“for selling out the students from local organizations like the SNCC and other people. I guess
they had been down in Orangeburg and have seen people get killed, and they thought that’s
what should happen up here.” Manns felt that reaching a victory was more important than
continuing confrontation; still, her comments reveal the difficulty many student leaders faced of
knowing when to call off a protest. “I was not going to stay there to satisfy my ego. I wanted to
stay very much, but I realized it was a totally emotional reaction to the situation. I was not
prepared to sacrifice things for people next year because of my own emotional needs.” Some
people, she said, wanted a violent confrontation with police, but she “refused to go along with
the cowboy-on-television revolutionary stuff about just dying for its own sake.” In her view,
the threat of retaliation was real and would do little to advance their cause. “We have been
subject to police action for a long time, and we don’t need that novelty experience of getting
our heads beat,” she said.71

The media gave extensive coverage to the sit-in—WNET in New York even produced
Color Us Black, an hour-long documentary devoted to the Howard story.72 This coverage
sparked protests at other HBCUs, including Fisk, Morgan State, Cheyney State, and Tougaloo.
According to a visiting lecturer at Howard, the “dramatic occupation” of the administration
building ended an era “of internal calm, led to a series of demonstrations on other Negro
campuses, and laid their peculiar institutional problems before a public audience.”73 To some
extent, this effect was obscured by the assassination a few days later of Martin Luther King Jr.
His murder galvanized Black student protest all over the country, leading many observers to
miss or forget the emergence of Black student unrest prior to April.

Booker T. Washington might have rolled over in his grave if he knew what students were up
to at the school he founded, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, in late March and early April 1968.
The Howard protest had spurred student activists there to boycott classes in order to end
compulsory ROTC training, gain scholarships for athletes, and upgrade conditions in housing
and dining halls. A week later, frustrated with administrative apathy, students locked twelve
trustees in a guesthouse for twelve hours. The police response was swift, and as at other
protests at Black colleges, dramatically disproportionate to the offense. Three hundred
National Guardsmen and seventy state troopers converged on campus, but departed after an
African American sheriff persuaded the students to release their influential captives. They had
already released retired General Lucius Clay so he could catch his plane to New York. “There
was no threat of violence,” Clay said. We could have called for assistance at any time.”
Nevertheless, the college closed for three weeks, ten students were charged with crimes, fifty
others were suspended, and seventy-five students were placed on probation.74 U.S. District
Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, lion of the liberal judiciary throughout the civil rights era, later

ordered that the fifty suspended students be readmitted, because they had not been permitted a
hearing.75

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 intensified the sense of responsibility
among African American college students that they needed to become leaders and wage battles
to widen opportunities for Black youth. Yet the murder of the foremost advocate of nonviolence
embittered many, causing them to see the fight for inclusion as less about moral suasion and
more about organizing student power. Moreover, the assassination seemed to stand for the
crushing of nonviolent means to social change, making many young people feel increasingly
justified in resorting to confrontational tactics to spur change. That spring saw an upsurge in
Black student protest. At Wellesley College, an all-women’s liberal arts college in
Massachusetts, Black students, including future historian Francille Rusan Wilson, threatened a
hunger strike to get the college to admit more Black students and hire Black professors.
Students at Boston University demanded that the school of theology be named in honor of their
slain alumnus Dr. King. Two hundred male students at the predominantly Black Cheyney State
College in Pennsylvania seized a building, while their female allies formed a human chain of
support outside. They demanded a student voice in governance, more courses in African
American and African history and culture, and, crucially, more scholarships. The president
resigned a week later under pressure. Confrontational tactics became commonplace: at Ohio
State, Black students occupied the administration building and reportedly held two vice
presidents and four employees “captive” for eight hours. What demands prompted such radical
action? They wanted more Black professors, counselors, and courses. This upsurge of Black
protest at so many campuses across the country began to assume the shape of a movement. Only
three months after expressing outrage at the behavior of Howard students, a reporter for the
Amsterdam News now gave voice to a rapidly shifting national mood: “These comparatively
new student campus seizures have triggered a much needed reexamination, re-evaluation, and
revamping of the future of America’s universities,” she wrote.76

In addition to students at HBCUs, Black students in California were pioneering in launching
this new chapter of Black Power campus activism. Many factors pointed to the significance of
California. In the early 1960s, the state greatly expanded its system of higher education in
order to guarantee a seat in college for all high school graduates. For southern Black migrants
and their children, this would prove critical to social mobility and went a long way in shaping
their political activism.77 Harry Edwards, an activist sociologist who wrote about and
organized “the revolt of the black athlete,” helped turn Black collegiate athletes in California
into a leading force for social change.78 Finally, the Black Panther Party played a galvanizing
role in California student activism, especially in the Bay Area, although, oddly, studies of the
party have neglected this.79

Before they founded the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton had
participated in the Berkeley-based Afro-American Association, a study group promoting Black
history and Black consciousness. As students at Merritt College, a two-year public college in
Oakland, they helped to win the addition of a Black history course in 1965–1966, and with
little fanfare or media attention a Black studies department was launched in 1968.80 The
demographics at Merritt College forecast the racial change occurring in many American cities.

Black student enrollment shot up, from 10 percent in 1963 to 40 percent five years later, giving
Merritt the largest concentration of Black students at a predominantly white institution in the
United States.81

For the students at Merritt, winning Black studies was just the beginning of an effort to gain
Black power at Merritt, and beyond. Charles Hamilton visited there in 1969 and quoted a
student leader’s summation of their remarkable achievements: “For the last seven years the
Soul Students Advisory Council . . . of Merritt College has fought a long, hard battle without
compromise for a Black studies department. During this time, we have increased the number of
our Black faculty, acquired a Black president, gained total control of our student body, and
Black students sit on the major decision-making bodies of this college.” Community colleges
were, in many cities, the first large, public institutions where African Americans assumed
administrative leadership. Student activism played an important role in hastening and shaping
this demographic shift. But as would occur again in the Black studies movement in California,
the students almost immediately launched a critique of the Black studies department for
allegedly depoliticizing the struggle and reorienting Black studies toward academic
respectability rather than community engagement. “We watch as the Black studies department
we fought so hard for is bastardized by and pimped off by Negroes and Whiteys,” they wrote.82

According to historian Donna Murch, “Merritt clearly demonstrated how the integration of
black youth into ‘historically white’ institutions inspired new and influential expressions of
racial militancy.”83 San Francisco State College, another public institution of higher education
in the Bay Area, did so as well, but on a much larger, more contentious, and more publicized
scale. The Black Power movement among students had important southern origins, but it very
quickly spread nationwide, and San Francisco State was its most momentous battle. Here the
students aimed for revolution.

CHAPTER 8

What Happened to Black Studies?

After the creation of African American studies units, educators engaged in fierce debates about
the field’s academic mission and definition. The stakes were high, since in the eyes of many,
legitimacy, status, and recognition in the academy hung in the balance. Many critics, both
internal and external to Black studies, criticized it on two interrelated grounds: they claimed
that it lacked curricular coherence, and that by not having a single methodology it failed to
meet the definition of a discipline. As a result, many educators in the early Black studies
movement pursued a two-pronged quest: for a standardized curriculum and an original,
authoritative methodology. At the same time, many scholars in the Black studies movement
questioned whether either of these pursuits was desirable or even attainable. In other words,
while some scholars have insisted that African American studies must devise its own unique
research methodology, others contend that as a multidiscipline, or interdisciplinary discipline,
its strength lies in incorporating multiple, diverse methodologies. In a similar vein, while some
have argued for a standardized curriculum, others argue that higher education is better served
by dynamism and innovation. I argue that, in the final analysis, the discipline’s acceptance in
academe, to the extent that it has gained acceptance, has come from the production of
influential scholarship and the development of new conceptual approaches that have influenced
other disciplines. Pioneering scholarship and influential intellectual innovations, rather than a
standardized pedagogy or methodology, have been the route to influence and stature in
American intellectual life.

A tension between authority and freedom animates these debates. As late as 2000, an article
in the Chronicle of Higher Education reinforced the idea that multiple perspectives and
methodologies had retarded the progress of African American studies. The author criticizes the
diverse character of African American studies courses at different universities. “The Ohio
State class is chronological with a literary bent,” she writes. “Duke’s take: cultural studies.
The Penn course filters everything through a W.E.B. Du Bois lens, and N.Y.U. combines pan-
Africanism with urban studies.” Of course, this sampling reflects the range one would find in
the departments of history, sociology, or English at these same universities. But the author
stresses disarray. “There’s a reason 30 years after the discipline developed that people still
wonder whether the black-studies curriculum represents a coherent subject or a smorgasbord,”
she concludes. In this view, the discipline’s strengths—“eclectic, expansive, experimental
curricula”—are also its weaknesses.1

James B. Stewart, a former president of the National Council of Black Studies, shares this
anxiety about disarray. In his view: “We do everything—the diaspora, sex, history, language,

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economics, race.” Yet he seems oblivious to the fact that each of these areas has been vital
terrain for research innovation. “We don’t have a paradigm,” he laments. “That is why we
don’t make progress.” If achieving this unified paradigm is the measure of progress, then
Stewart, judging forty years of African American studies, must see little. Longtime Black
studies educator Abdul Alkalimat shares Stewart’s view that “standardization means the
discipline exists.”2 Arthur Lewin, a professor of Black and Hispanic studies at Baruch
College, agrees that Black studies lacks “a coherently stated rationale,” a consequence, in his
view, of having “burst full-blown upon the academic scene a generation ago.”3 Critics of
African American studies often echo this view. Stanford scholar Shelby Steele calls African
American studies “a bogus concept from the beginning because it was an idea grounded in
politics, not in a particular methodology. These programs are dying of their own inertia
because they’ve had 30 or 40 years to show us a serious academic program, and they’ve
failed.”4 This view recalls that of Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson, that African
American studies did not merit departmental status because it lacked its own unique
methodology.

Much of the 1970s was spent formulating ways to standardize course content in African
American studies across universities. For some, this impulse flowed from a view that greater
cohesion in courses would better promote the social and political mission of the field. For
others, standardizing the core curriculum signified professionalism and held the promise of
elevating the reputation of the field. In a 1975 proposal, “Consortium for the Development of
Black Studies Curriculum,” Gerald McWorter (Abdul Alkalimat) noted with concern that “a
uniform scholarly curriculum and pedagogy have yet to emerge and be accepted.” This was
particularly significant because “the heart of Black Studies is its curricular and pedagogical
approach to the unique problems that it faces.” Moreover, “the need for a model curriculum is
growing because there exists considerable variation from campus to campus.”5 In 1980 the
National Council of Black Studies adopted a model core curriculum, enshrining history,
cultural studies, and social and behavioral studies as the three primary content areas for the
field, and this tripartite approach continues to characterize the way many departments approach
hiring and curricular development.

Assisting the effort to standardize teaching—especially for introductory courses—was the
emergence in the 1980s of two popular textbooks. Abdul Alkalimat and his colleagues at “the
People’s College” published Introduction to Afro-American Studies, which included
extensive discussion of Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and Black nationalism, while Ron
Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies projected his cultural nationalist worldview known
as Kawaida as a model for Black studies pedagogy. Many African American studies programs
utilized these textbooks in the classroom. Yet these books—emerging in the midst of the field’s
incorporation, and penned by ideological partisans—bore witness to contradictory trends: both
texts emphasized ideological positions that had waned, at least among intellectuals. Showing a
fairly rapid move away from Black nationalism as a paradigm for the field, a 1980 survey of
ten major Black studies programs found that only two identified Black nationalism as their
“ideological rubric,” while the other eight emphasized ideological diversity and rejected
becoming “narrowly entrenched in any ideology.” In the view of these eight programs, “a

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vibrant faculty dialogue is seen as a major stimulus” in the philosophical evolution of the
field.6

In addition to seeking an authoritative curriculum, some sought to create a new methodology
for the discipline. Scholars and teachers influenced by Afrocentrism have been among the most
consistent advocates of creating a distinctive methodology. A school of thought within the
larger universe of Black studies, Afrocentrism captured significant media attention in the
1990s. A variant of a long tradition of Black intellectualism focused on marking the
achievements of African civilizations prior to European contact, contemporary Afrocentrism
attracts a coterie of educators who often exist in an uneasy relationship with major scholarly
developments in the discipline. Afrocentrism is most famously associated with Temple
University professor Molefi Asante. Lamenting what he saw as “the absence of a
comprehensive philosophical position” at the founding of African American studies, Asante
developed “Afrocentricity,” which stresses the need to recover and “center” African
knowledge systems. In his view, this is “the only way you can approach African American
studies.”7 Interestingly, the Black student movement was intensely engaged with contemporary
struggles and riveted by Black Power, but it was not particularly focused on ancient Africa.
There were exceptions: Askia Toure taught such a course at the Experimental College at San
Francisco State; but as a rule, the students’ Black nationalism was political as much as
cultural, and as interested in contemporary struggles in the African diaspora as in Egyptian
achievements.

In Black historiography, there is a long and rich tradition of countering the distortion of
African culture and history produced by European writers, and of vindicating the achievements
of African civilizations prior to colonialism.8 The earliest Black history writing frequently
held up Egyptian and Ethiopian history to refute notions of Black inferiority, argue against
slavery, and imagine a different future for Black people in the United States and around the
world.9 By J.A. Rogers, John Henrik Clarke, Carter G. Woodson, William Hansberry, and
others, this scholarship was vital to the struggle against white supremacy and very influential
in Black communities. In some respects the Marxist Guyanese scholar and transnational
activist Walter Rodney continued in this tradition with his landmark 1973 text, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, which detailed the long economic exploitation of the continent and
offered a framework for understanding contemporary underdevelopment. For many audiences
today, the term Afrocentric simply signifies the rejection of Eurocentric approaches or
paradigms, and Asante has described his goal as “the emancipation of African knowledge and
people from the hegemonic ideology of white racial domination.”10 And he sometimes asserts
that what Afrocentricity entails is simply an emphasis on African agency. But the stress on
Black agency arguably characterizes all of Black studies. As noted earlier, the articulation and
defense of a “Black perspective” defined the field from its inception. Rather, Asante advocates
a particular version of Afrocentrism, or as he and others variously term it, Afrocentricity,
Africentricity, or Africology. “Afrocentricity,” he declared in one of his many texts devoted to
defining the term, “is the ideological centerpiece of human regeneration, systematizing our
history and experience with our own culture at the core of existence. In its epistemic
dimensions it is also a methodology for discovering the truth about intercultural

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communication.”11

The inclination to look for insights in the African past, hoping to escape or resolve the
legacies of colonialism and enslavement, is fundamental to the approach of leading proponents
of Afrocentricity. One of Asante’s students, Greg Carr, now a professor of African American
studies at Howard University, endeavors to draw upon “deep Africana thought” and the
traditions of “classical and medieval Africa” to address the needs of Black people in
contemporary society. A key mission of African American studies, Carr believes, is to
reconnect “narratives of African identity to the contemporary era.”12 Maulana Karenga,
founder of the us organization in Los Angeles, who coauthored the Handbook of Black Studies
with Asante, believes that “the fundamental point of departure for African American studies or
Black studies is an ongoing dialogue with African culture. That is, continuously asking it
questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental questions of humankind.”13

Asante has undertaken extraordinary efforts to develop African American studies along
Afrocentric lines, founding the important Journal of Black Studies, as well as the first PhD
program in African American studies at Temple University, in 1988. He has been tireless in
asserting and claiming influence. “I have written more books than any other African American
scholar,” he said in 1994. “I have written 36 books.” As of 2009, that number had risen to
seventy, and his followers often refer to this as “Asantian” literature.14 Afrocentric students
and educators convene at the Cheikh Anta Diop annual conferences sponsored by the Diopian
Institute for Scholarly Advancement in Philadelphia. Afrocentric thinkers have also played
significant roles in shaping the National Council of Black Studies and its annual conferences.15

While Asante and others insist that Afrocentricity is the field’s most appropriate
methodology, it has struggled to gain traction in Black studies and has inspired considerable
criticism from within the discipline. Critics have offered various objections, notably that
Afrocentricity reinforces troubling discourses and hierarchies, falls short as an actual research
methodology, and lacks engagement with the actual history and culture of Africa. A common
concern is that it rejects the hybrid nature of African American genealogy, culture, and
identities, and—ironically, in light of its focus on agency—slights the Black contribution to the
making of the New World. Scholar Tricia Rose agrees with Greg Carr that an important
African intellectual tradition preceded European contact, but in her view scholars must
confront the transformations wrought by processes of enslavement and colonialism. “We are in
the West, in the so-called New World,” she contends, and should “examine the circumstances
we are in, examine the hybridities that have emerged from it.”16

As Melba Boyd puts it, “In the Afrocentric haste to discard all things European or American
they have also discarded that which is uniquely Afro-American.” Moreover, echoing another
widely shared critique, Boyd notes, “What the Afrocentrists fail to realize, in their quest to
claim civilization, is that our struggle, fundamentally and above all else, is for freedom for the
common people. We do not desire to be the “new” aristocracy. Monarchies were not
democracies. We aspire to a new society that does not worship royalty, racial hierarchies,
gold, corporate power, or any other manifestation that demeans the human spirit.”17 Literary
scholar Joyce A. Joyce echoes this criticism. “Ironically,” she observes, “some Black
nationalists and hardened Afrocentrists share superiority complexes and desire for power

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(disguised as agency) with the very hegemony they allegedly oppose.” For Joyce, Black
studies is “a creative change agent” conceived “as an intellectual discipline to deconstruct the
injustices rooted in a disrespect for cultural differences.”18

Similarly, Erskine Peters finds that Asante’s Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge
problematically asserts that “all African societies find Kemet (ancient Egypt) a common
source for intellectual and political ideas.” Peters objects to this “imperialist logic” and finds
it “dangerously like the erroneous historical paradigm which argues that European culture
brought civilization to the rest of the globe.” Moreover, he argues that Asante’s theory had
jumped ahead of his research, noting that “one comes away from Asante simply not having
learned very much about African values.”19 Other scholars have objected to the definition of
race “as some kind of innate biological bond” advanced in Afrocentric writings, as well as the
portrayal of culture, which, historian Barbara Ransby argues, is “equally
erroneous. . . . Culture is not something fixed, static, and ahistorical” but is “dynamic and
constantly in flux.” “Afrocentrists who look back and romanticize a fixed moment in the history
of ancient Egypt as the source of our salvation from our current dilemmas,” Ransby argues,
“fail to fully appreciate this fact.”20 Likewise, Perry Hall argues that Afrocentrism promotes “a
static view of culture and history. . . . For Blacks to discover who they were is important, but
only part of discovering who they are, who they can be and where they can go.”21

Afrocentricity has arguably had more influence in community-based pedagogy, cultural
programming, and heritage tours than in the production of research. This is best exemplified by
the influence of Kawaida, a worldview formulated by Maulana Karenga as a means of
promoting self-determination, unity, economic cooperation, and creativity in Black American
communities. Influential in some early Black studies programs, Kawaida’s biggest influence by
far has been its offshoot, the Afrocentric holiday Kwanzaa—which, falling in the school
vacation week after Christmas, has spawned some of the most well-attended public
programming at cultural institutions around the country. Afrocentricity has a didactic dimension
that emphasizes the need to “recover” and “restore” lost value systems, ways of knowing, and
cultural traditions more generally. The Association for the Study of Classical African
Civilizations—an organization founded by Chicagoan Jacob Carruthers, a longtime professor
at the Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University—embraces this mission,
which tends to distinguish it from more academic African American studies. Reflecting the mix
of education, cosmology, and ritual that characterizes many grassroots expressions of
Afrocentrism, the Association promotes spiritual development, the veneration of African
ancestors, the application of ancient Nile Valley culture in contemporary life, and holistic
approaches to healthy living.22 As a result of this more didactic and spiritual orientation and
the coincident incorporation of Black studies into the academy, a wider chasm than had existed
during earlier eras has developed between Afrocentric teachers and writers and more
mainstream African American studies scholars.

Still, Afrocentricity’s forceful critique of European “civilization,” its emphasis on Black
achievement, and its mistrust of white-led education have strong resonance. And context is
crucial. The continuing assault on Black humanity in post-Jim-Crow America is central to its
appeal. Afrocentricity gained visibility in the 1990s, a time when journalists, sociologists, and

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politicians promoted narratives of inner-city drug use, rampant criminality, and family
breakdown. These narratives appeared to indict individual behaviors yet suggested a
communal failure, all the while ignoring the post-civil-rights history of urban disinvestment,
regressive taxation, massive job loss, and aggressive policing targeted particularly at young
men of color.

Whether it is Afrocentricity or something else, most scholars in Black studies reject the
effort to impose a single methodology, seeing it as unrealistic and stifling. Rhett Jones,
cofounder and longtime chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, was
an early critic of the “one size fits all” approach to the discipline. “In its early years, Black
studies wasted considerable human, intellectual, and material resources in battles over finding
the master plan for the study of Black people,” he argues. Similarly, he feels that “much energy
was also wasted on responding to the charge by America’s Eurocentric, racist disciplines that
Black studies had no methodology of its own. Neither did the Eurocentrists. And they still
don’t. . . . Historians are no more agreed on methodology or theory than are anthropologists,
sociologists or philosophers.”23 In contrast to those who see pluralism in Black studies as a
weakness, Jones believes that this characteristic has been vital to the development and staying
power of the field. Pluralism was “a credit to black studies” he observes, as “its founders
realized there could be no master plan as to how the discipline should serve black
Americans.”24

Historian Francille Rusan Wilson similarly resists the effort to impose a single approach.
“There’s not one way to be black or to study black people,” she asserts. “The discipline is
quite alive,” in her view, “and the differences indicate that.”25 Political scientist Floyd Hayes
concurs, stating, “One must ask whether there should be conformity to a model curriculum and
a single theoretical or ideological orientation in African American studies.” Hayes believes it
is important to cultivate “a more flexible and innovative atmosphere” so that “African
American studies can continue to grow and develop.”26 Reacting to criticism of the eclectic
philosophies in early Black studies, philosopher Angela Davis observes that it was “precisely
the lack of unitary theoretical definition during those early years” which made the field so
“intellectually exciting.” In her view, it was fruitless to imagine transcending the very real
contradictions and disagreements in the early Black studies movement.27

While the significance of teaching to the rise of Black studies in the United States cannot be
minimized or discounted, ultimately it has been the quality of research and scholarship that has
fueled the development and stature of African American studies within academia. Despite
persistent portrayals of Black studies as intellectually barren and steeped in racial
essentialism, scholars in the field have produced work that has broadly influenced academic
scholarship. It is beyond the scope of this book to catalogue and assess the groundbreaking
works by literary theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, and others
in the broad field of African American and diaspora studies that were published in the 1970s
and 1980s. Scholars such as Robert L. Harris, Vincent Harding, Sterling Stuckey, Joyce
Ladner, Henry Louis Gates, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Helen Washington, Robert Stepto, John
Blassingame, Mary Frances Berry, Andrew Billingsley, and Ronald Walters, among scores of
others, continued the long tradition of Black scholarly innovation. However, this point needs to

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be stressed: a Black scholarly tradition did not begin with the creation of Black studies
programs, but these programs provided a new infrastructure and incentive for its growth and
development.

One important example of scholarly innovation in Black studies was the rise of diaspora
studies. Defining the scope and subject of Black studies was a point of contestation in the early
years of academic incorporation. Despite the efforts of university administrators to confine the
field to the United States, a persistent desire to encompass the global African diaspora
ultimately spawned considerable conceptual innovation and scholarly productivity.28 Black
studies scholars have from the movement’s inception been international in their origins and
much more diverse than the Black American population as a whole, which in the late 1960s
was overwhelmingly U.S. born. Notwithstanding the nomenclature of their university unit,
many scholars in Black studies have embraced Pan-Africanism, the Black World, or the
African diaspora as a guiding paradigm for teaching and scholarship.

As illustrated in the case studies throughout this book, the Black nationalism of this student
generation was internationalist; the Black Panther Party saw itself as part of a global upsurge.
Nineteen-sixties Black nationalism was forged amid rising critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam
and in explicit identification with, and admiration for, leaders of African liberation struggles
and new nation-states. Two leading icons for this generation—Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
—exemplify this twin thrust. Both embraced their African origins, traveled extensively on the
continent, and criticized U.S. efforts to suppress Black diasporic affiliations and anti-
imperialist stances. Related to the turn toward Black Power, or variations thereof, was the
decisive break from cold war strictures that had narrowed the terms of dissent in the United
States. Activists challenged the idea of “American exceptionalism,” which had worked both to
deny the centrality of racism in the United States and to sever earlier transnational alliances
and identifications.

This internationalist Black consciousness continued, even accelerated, in the 1970s. The
early Black studies movement coincided with major anticolonial struggles in Angola,
Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau; struggles against white settler regimes in southern Africa;
and a widening African solidarity movement among Black American radicals. According to St.
Clair Drake, “The country was deeply mired in the Vietnam War but many black youth were
much more interested in how the war against Portugal was going in Mozambique, Angola and
Guinea-Bissau than in the war in Vietnam.” In his view, it was critical to understand that “the
modern Black studies movement emerged within this international context.”29

As a result, it was fairly common to find Pan-African in a program’s name or in its course
offerings. At Lehman College in New York City, remembers Charlotte Morgan-Cato, “the
rallying cry ‘Portuguese wine is African Blood’ was well-known among the students as we
regularly hosted African scholars, Black nationalist leaders, radical public intellectuals and
local political leaders who espoused the Pan-African cause.”30 According to Drake, “Newly
organized Black studies programs contributed to the raising of consciousness with regard to
Africa between 1970 and 1974, and to the emergence of the group that organized a very
effective lobby,” the African Liberation Support Committee.31 The committee organized annual
African Liberation Day demonstrations and played a leading role in planning the Sixth Pan-

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African Congress in Tanzania. Many in the African Liberation Support Committee orbit,
including Owusu Sadauki/Howard Fuller, Nelson Johnson, Abdul Alkalimat, Jimmy Garrett,
C.L.R. James, James Turner, Lerone Bennett, and Haki Madhubuti—were deeply connected to
the Black student and Black studies movements. The strong activist commitment to African
solidarity by scholars in the early Black studies movement concretely and dramatically
illustrates the field’s international focus. The defeat of Portugal in 1974 brought to a close one
chapter in the long career of U.S.-based Pan-Africanism. The struggles against apartheid, white
rule in Zimbabwe, and the South African occupation of Namibia continued, but the African
Liberation Support Committee disbanded in the ideological conflict between Marxists and
Black nationalists. Additionally, Morgan-Cato, at Lehman College, felt that “student interest in
the movement of international liberation” was also cut short in the mid-1970s as a result of
fiscal crisis, retrenchment, and shifts in student outlooks and priorities.32

Still, a global consciousness in Black studies was not simply a product of solidarity
struggles in the postwar era. It has marked Black historical writing ever since its origins in the
nineteenth century. As many studies of Black historiography have shown, writers from the early
nineteenth century forward have been invested in rewriting the Western distortion of African
peoples and societies, as well as keenly interested in erecting a powerful counterdiscourse to
the statelessness, dispersal, subjugation, and dehumanization of Africans in diaspora. W.E.B.
Du Bois is most famously associated with this effort, but its practitioners are numerous.33 In
addition, the most important Black community institutions—notably churches and newspapers
—paid attention to the African diaspora. Until McCarthy-era repression undermined African
American anticolonial organizations and networks, major Black newspapers, especially the
Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, gave extensive coverage to developments in
Africa and the Caribbean.34

Although the Black studies movement is often thought of as resolutely U.S.-based, many of
its early scholars tried to persuade universities and funders to connect formally the study of
continental Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. There was widespread agreement that
the typical American curriculum had “ignored the African heritage of African Americans,
characterizing them as having begun their existence in North America as a tabula rasa—blank
slates to be imprinted with Euro-American Culture.” This was a difficult battle, in part
because African studies had been programmatically established after World War II as a result
of cold war pressures to develop knowledge about an area of the world that the United States
viewed as part of Soviet strategic designs. These programs, in the words of historian Robert L.
Harris, “had no real link to Black people in the New World.” African studies “became wedded
to a modernization theory that measured African societies by Western standards. African
history, culture and politics were explored more within the context of the colonial powers than
with any attention to African cultural continuities in the Western Hemisphere.” In contrast,
according to Harris, Black American intellectuals had long resisted this “compartmentalization
of knowledge about Black people.”35

The Black studies movement unleashed a salvo against the colonial paradigm, but faced
resistance from administrators and faculty in African studies. White scholars, many of whom
objected to the focus on identity and politics in Black studies, dominated African studies

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programs in the United States. When Afro-American studies began at Boston University, its
director, Adelaide Hill, wanted to forge ties with the already existing African studies program.
“The problem of the relationship of the two areas has agonized both faculties,” she reported.
“Some Africanists,” she found, “do not see a relationship between what they are doing and the
new Black American emphasis.” In the end, the two units agreed that there are “common and
autonomous zones between the two areas.” Similarly, Harvard’s Department of Afro-American
Studies sought to include African studies under its purview, but met administrative resistance,
in part because the department was seen as too political and too influenced by Black
nationalism.36

American-born sociologist St. Clair Drake labored his entire academic career to promote
the study of the Africa diaspora in all its scope and complexity. He often reminded his
audiences that “the first African Studies programs were at Fisk and Lincoln, but these received
no grants from the foundations,” in contrast to the white-run African studies programs at elite
universities that were lavishly funded during the cold war era. The push by some scholars in
the Black studies movement to unify the two fields produced tensions. The Africanists “fear the
political impulse associated with Afro-American Studies and the possibility of the lowering of
standards,” Drake found, and “in their effort to maintain their own preserves” sometimes
shifted from undergraduate to graduate education. At Drake’s Roosevelt University, however,
African and African American studies were taught together.37

Never a monolith, Black studies has given rise to varying conceptions of diaspora. In 1969
Drake proposed a summer institute in Jamaica. “This location serves to emphasize one of the
objectives of the institute, that of teaching Negro history and culture in its cosmopolitan pan-
African and South Atlantic context,” he noted. The workshop intended to emphasize “cultural
continuity” between Africa and “the black diaspora” in South, Central, and North America.
“The institute will be concerned with the cultural, historical, and political connections
between Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean,” Drake wrote.38 In contrast, at a seminar
of Black studies directors, the director of Princeton’s program advanced several rationales for
a global approach, including illustrating diversity in Black life. His framework, which
emphasized difference as much as commonality, shows the varied approaches to the study of
diaspora that have always marked the discipline. “The black experience varies geographically
and culturally and therefore falls within the study of comparative racial and ethnic relations,”
he argued. “There is a common denominator in being black,” he felt, “but race is a lesser factor
in the definition of the person in some situations. For example, in the Caribbean area generally,
class is more definitive of who a person is than race. In the United States the opposite is the
case.”39

The early Black studies movement was unable to immediately achieve the goal of
encompassing African studies.40 Nonetheless, courses in Afro-American studies departments
often extended beyond American borders. A 1980 examination of ten major programs found
that all of them “encompass the Diaspora in their scope,” and that all “address their curricular
attention in some measure to Africa” even while putting most emphasis on the experience of
Black people in the United States.41 The Program in Afro-American Studies at Brown
pioneered coursework in the African diaspora beginning in the 1970s at the initiative of

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Ghanaian scholar Anani Dzidzienyo.42 In a 1977–1978 survey of Black studies programs,
Drake found that “all give some attention to the implications of an African origin for Black
people in the New World, and increasingly a “diaspora” frame of reference focuses some
attention upon the Caribbean and Latin America for comparison with the United States.”43
When Roscoe Brown was appointed to direct the new Institute of African American Affairs at
New York University, he announced that “the term ‘Afro-American’ will include our Black
brothers from the various parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti, Puerto Rico, the West Indies,
the Virgin Islands, and other Caribbean peoples who are of African descent.” His attention to
“brothers” and omission of “sisters”—certainly ironic in light of the stress on subjectivity and
identity in the Black studies movement—was common in these years before feminist assertion
dramatically affected language and consciousness. Still, Brown put resources behind this
pledge, convening a yearlong seminar in 1971–1972 on the Black experience in the Caribbean
and South America.44

The Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor was an important exception to this early failure to formally include African studies
under the rubric of Black studies. At its founding in 1970, Niara Sudarkasa, a professor of
anthropology and future director of the center, “ensured the new center would deal not only
with African American experience, but also with sub-Saharan Africa itself.” Godfrey
Uzoigwe, an Africanist at Ann Arbor, noted, “CAAS is one of the few black studies programs
in which the comparative emphasis was built into its structure from the beginning.”45

Yet other avenues for forging networks and affinities among scholars of Africa and the
diaspora emerged, most notably the African Heritage Studies Association, which was founded
in 1969 after John Henrik Clarke and others led a protest at the annual convention of the
African Studies Association (ASA) in Montreal. Black scholars of Africa had long felt
marginalized in the ASA and had been pressing for greater Black leadership in the organization
and for the ASA to play a more active and progressive role in influencing American policy
toward Africa. In Montreal, the Black Caucus of the ASA declared the Association
“fundamentally invalid and illegitimate” and even “injurious to the welfare of African people.”
It assailed the group’s scholarship, leadership, and affiliations. “This organization which
purports to study Africa has never done so,” the caucus declared, “and has in fact studied the
colonial heritage of Africa.” They condemned “the intellectual arrogance of white people,
which has perpetuated and legitimized a kind of academic colonialism and has distorted the
definition of the nature of cultural life and social organization of African peoples.”46

A major point of conflict was the demand for “racial parity” within the ASA, with an equal
number of board seats designated for whites and blacks. Several radical whites, like Immanuel
Wallerstein, supported the Black Caucus, but most white Africanists objected to many or most
of their demands. As John Henrik Clarke recalled, the white Africanists “resented the
projection of an African people as a world people with a common cause and a common
destiny. More than anything else they resented the Afro-Americans being linked with the
Africans in Africa.” In Clarke’s view, the white Africanist scholars possessed the sense of
dominion and paternalism that had been generated by European colonialism and Western
imperialism more generally. “Africa to them was a kind of ethnic plantation over which they

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reigned and explained to the world.” The conflict at Montreal gave rise to the African Heritage
Studies Association (AHSA), which in the early 1970s, prior to the creation of the National
Council of Black Studies, served as an annual gathering and institutional network for Black
studies scholars. Dr. Clarke, its founding president, defined the AHSA as “committed to the
preservation, interpretation, and creative presentation of the historical and cultural heritage of
African people” throughout the world. “We interpret African history from a Pan-Africanist
perspective that defines all black people as an African people,” he insisted. “We do not accept
the arbitrary lines of geographical demarcations that were created to reflect colonialist spheres
of influence.”47

The meetings of the AHSA reflected the various currents of Black nationalism in the 1970s,
as well as the continuing interest in “relevance,” or contemporary policy and political issues.
The 1978 conference in New York illustrates these concerns and the global character of the
AHSA. Most of the presenters were university scholars, but also on panels were the Nigerian
ambassador, the African National Congress representative to the United States, and several
attorneys and filmmakers. Politics and culture dominated points of discussion at the
conference. Session titles included U.S. Foreign Policy in Southern Africa; Blacks in
American Politics; Caribbean Nation Building; The Military in Post-Independence Africa;
Forum on Southern Africa; A Decade of Assessment of Black Studies; Black Artists in
America; Caribbean Literature; Black Men, Black Women and the Black Family; Affirmative
Action and Social Change; Integrating Black Music into the Curriculum; and Legacy of
Colonialism.48 Notwithstanding what the Association’s name might convey, the conferences of
the African Heritage Studies Association during the 1970s were contemporary in emphasis,
and they strongly demonstrated the interest of the Black studies community in the United States
in African liberation struggles and new nation-states. Yet, like the ASA from which it had
bolted, the AHSA remained predominantly male and seemingly oblivious to the rising tide of
feminism. On this score, its Black nationalism offered a circumscribed vision of postcolonial
change, protecting male leadership prerogatives and forgoing discussions of alternative visions
of postcolonial leadership and liberation.

Notwithstanding efforts by administrators or others to limit the scope of African American
studies to the United States, these early efforts to formally include Africa as well as the
diaspora in Black studies departments and professional organizations ultimately bore fruit.
Four decades later it became increasingly common to encounter Departments of African and
African American Studies or Departments of Africana Studies, which explicitly take Africa,
the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America as their subject. Campuses as diverse as
the University of Illinois, Dartmouth College, the University of Minnesota, Duke University,
Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Kansas, Stanford
University, the University of Texas, and Arizona State University join together African and
African American studies. Of course, the limitations of budgets and faculty size may interfere
with fully realizing the promise of interdisciplinary, truly global coverage. And to be sure,
there continue to be significant challenges in integrating African and African diasporic studies
in the same units, as well as tensions and divergences between Africanist and African
Americanist scholars. The process of defining African diaspora studies, indeed of defining

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blackness, is ongoing and the subject of lively debate. But the crucial point is that the Black
studies movement ultimately achieved a degree of success in undoing the colonialist
compartmentalization of research and knowledge that had insisted on severing African studies
from African American studies.

In addition to diaspora, another development in the Black studies movement that generated
innovative research and helped to propel the discipline forward in the midst of an ongoing
discursive climate of “crisis” was the rise of Black feminism and its influence in both Black
studies and academia more generally. Black feminist scholars insisted on the need to move
beyond a monolithic focus on the racialized subject and take into account interconnected, and
multiple, subjectivities and oppressions. They argued for the significance of gender, but also
brought heightened attention to class and sexuality, an interpretive move that influenced other
disciplines in addition to Black studies. However, this outcome was by no means easy or
assured. Black women intellectuals had to wage a fight to legitimate their perspective, and they
often encountered withering criticism from male—and sometimes female—scholars in their
effort to cultivate a feminist revision of the Black studies movement. According to Rhett Jones,
a Brown University Africana Studies professor, “Our discipline also failed to address Black
women’s issues,” which he feels is “surprising in a field claiming to take a new perspective on
scholarship.”49 Many Black women have argued that this failure flowed from the male
chauvinist, homophobic tenor of the nationalist 1960s. “The truth of it is,” Toni Cade reflects,
“a whole lot of organizations back then in the sixties floundered, fell apart, and wasted a lot of
resources in the process, due in large measure to male ego, male whim, and macho theatre.
That story needs to be told.”50

Many scholars of modern Black feminism have characterized its emergence as a reaction,
on the one hand, to the sexism of the Black Power movement, and on the other hand, to the
racism in the white women’s movement and broader U.S. society. But more recently, historians
have argued that the racial identity politics of the Black Power movement were a generative
influence for the rise of gender identity politics in Black feminist organizing and assertion.51
Both perspectives provide useful insight on developments in the Black student and Black
studies movements. These movements had blithely embraced male leadership and conventional
gender roles, but at the same time, they had also encouraged not only critical consciousness,
self-affirmation, and a group-based identity but also individual empowerment and personal
agency. And all these phenomena stimulated the rise of Black feminism(s) and, later, Black
women’s studies.

The publication of the landmark text The Black Woman by Toni Cade in 1970 opened a
period of growth, questioning, and assertion in Black women’s activist, literary, cultural, and
academic organizing. Notably, the paperback appeared at a time when the major media
characterized feminism as a white woman’s movement of little relevance or concern for Black
women, and when the majority of Black men and women readily agreed with this assessment.
In these years, white feminist activists evinced little awareness of, or interest in, the particular
experiences or needs of women of color. Moreover, the ethos and political strategy of the
Black Power era was indisputably race first. Widely recognized as a writer and literary figure,
Cade was also a leader in the Black studies movement, having advised protesting students

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while a professor at City College and designed an innovative plan for a Black studies
department there. The Black Woman was an eclectic volume of activist writing, and it featured
three essays by Cade. In one she denounced conventional gender roles for what she described
as their debilitating impact on the movement. Instead of trying to prove one’s manhood or
womanhood, she asks, in a creative turn, why not just seek “blackhood”? In response to critics
who might call patriarchy a white system, she cautions that “we have not been immune to the
conditioning; we are just as jammed in the rigid confines of those basically oppressive socially
contrived roles. For if a woman is tough, she is a rough mamma, a strident bitch, a ball
breaker, a castrator. And if a man is at all sensitive, tender, spiritual, he’s a faggot.” The worst
part was the effect of such thinking on a liberation movement. She called it “a dangerous trend”
to “program Sapphire out of her ‘evil’ ways into a cover-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool
obedience role.”52

Her essay “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation?” frankly explored the tensions and debates
between Black men and woman over contraception in light of the long history of reproductive
abuse and theories of Black genetic inferiority, on the one hand, and patriarchy and
conservative sexual norms on the other. The Nation of Islam, for its part, denied a woman’s
right to control reproduction. Leader Elijah Muhammad famously said a “woman is man’s field
to produce his nation.”53 Still, Cade’s advocacy of a Black woman’s right to reproductive self-
determination was resolute. Her essay exemplifies the kinds of discussions that feminists were
committed to having and the kinds of topics they insisted were political. Yet Cade entered a
political minefield.

A striking feature of Black studies units when they first formed on hundreds of campuses
was their male character—although, to be sure, every academic discipline was
overwhelmingly male in the early 1970s. A 1968 survey of doctoral and professional degrees
conferred by Black institutions found an extraordinary gender gap: 91 percent of the degrees
were awarded to Black men, and 9 percent to Black women.54 This translated into a stark
gender disparity on collegiate faculties. At the University of Pittsburgh in 1972, for example, 8
percent of the professional staff was Black, and of this group just 14 percent were women.
Among the white professionals, the presence of women was, at 17 percent, slightly higher, but
this number too showed the disproportionate male presence in academe. The distinctions were
sharpest in the upper ranks. White males filled half of the associate and full professor positions
at the university; Black men held 31 percent of them, white females 19 percent, while Black
women held just 3 percent of these higher paying, more prestigious positions. In the University
of Pittsburgh’s Black studies department, only three women numbered among the seventeen
faculty members.55 As one observer noted, this large differential reflected broader social
patterns, as signified dramatically in a 1971 Ebony tabulation of the nation’s one hundred
leading Black Americans, which listed only nine women.56

When asked in the 1990s whether women in the early Black studies movement had been
given their due, Mary Jane Hewitt, who had directed various affirmative action programs at
UCLA, responded, “Well, there weren’t that many opportunities, given or offered, for black
women to do much of anything.” In “the late sixties,” she explained, “there weren’t that many
women around, very few, and certainly not in top positions.”57 To be sure, this scenario was

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changing, as women of all backgrounds began to enter the academic profession in greater
numbers. But the small numbers of Black women scholars and administrators in the academy
encountered marginalization, consternation, and resistance. Constance M. Carroll, a Black
woman who later served as a college president, wrote in 1972: “Black women in higher
education are isolated, underutilized, and often demoralized.” Denied the same opportunities
for mobility and networking, they faced numerous challenges and obstacles. “Black women
have had very few models or champions to encourage and assist them in their development,”
Carroll wrote. “Black women have had to develop themselves on their own, with no help from
whites or Black men, in order to ‘make it’ in academic institutions. This has taken its toll on
Black women,” she found, “in all areas of life and work.”58

It is important to note that Black women scholars raised critical questions about the male
character of the Black studies movement from its inception. At a 1969 conference of Black
studies directors, Lillian Anthony from the University of Minnesota remarked that some faculty
at her institution said, “We don’t need a woman,” after her name had been put forth by the
search committee. “I am very much concerned about the Black woman’s role in Afro-American
studies departments or Black studies departments,” she said. “I think it negates much of who
we really are, and when men participate in that kind of deliberation, they are also negating
themselves.”59

The passage of the Education Amendments Act in 1972, prohibiting discrimination in
federally funded institutions of higher education, and an investigation by the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare of several hundred universities for noncompliance with federal
guidelines regarding equal treatment of minorities and women, raised expectations, awareness,
and discussion about hiring practices in academe. Universities had to submit written
affirmative action plans in 1972 specifying their goals and timetables for achieving equal
treatment of women and minorities. Many Black women feared that unless they asserted
themselves, Black men and white women would be the prime beneficiaries of affirmative
action policies. While some people claimed that Black women had an advantage, as their
hiring would do “double duty” and fulfill a race and gender mandate, Black women knew the
more likely outcome was their falling through the cracks. This legal/employment/policy
circumstance encouraged Black women to define the uniqueness of their status in American life
and to emphasize their commonalities as well as differences with the positions of Black men
and white women.

The early to mid-1970s saw the appearance of courses, campus lectures, and programming
devoted to Black women, including what was reportedly the first class on Black women
writers, taught by Alice Walker at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in 1973.60 At the
University of California, Los Angeles, a group of Black women students, faculty, and staff
came together as the Black Women’s Research Committee and launched a petition campaign
demanding that “the university become more sensitive to the needs of black women on campus,
and demonstrate that sensitivity via immediate action” in creating courses, lectures, and
programming focusing on the Black woman. They “were appalled at the lack of programming
for black women at UCLA” and noted that there had never been any courses anywhere in the
university focusing on Black women.61 In May 1973, the Black Women’s Research Committee,

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in conjunction with the Center for Afro-American Studies, held the first Black Women’s Spring
Forum, a monthlong series of panels and lectures titled “Images of Black Womanhood.” The
primary objective of the forum was “to present an exhaustive, in-depth exploration delineating
the recurring philosophical themes contributing to the development of Black womanhood in the
United States.” Titles of the panels and lectures included: Women in Africa, Women in
America, Black Women in the Media, Black Women in Theater Arts, Black Women in
Law/Politics, and Black Women at UCLA. In 1977, Toni Cade delivered the keynote address at
a Black Women’s Conference at the Institute of the Black World. This Atlanta-based think tank
had been founded in 1969 as a bastion of mostly male scholars, who for many years generated
complex analyses of the politics of race and class in the United States. By decade’s end, the
IBW, too, was feeling the impact of Black women’s demands for a voice in Black activist and
intellectual programming.62

An outpouring of Black feminist organizations, manifestoes, cultural production, literary
anthologies, and polemical writing marked the 1970s, helping to set the stage for a new
generation of academic scholarship in Black women’s studies. The National Black Feminist
Organization was formed in 1973, and in 1977 the Combahee River Collective boldly asserted
the importance of a Black lesbian perspective amid the widespread disavowal of the Black
lesbian experience in the Black liberation movement. In 1981 Bell Hooks published Ain’t I a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism, followed in 1982 by the landmark anthology But Some
of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies,
edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. Hull and Smith’s introduction
called out the racism in the women’s studies movement, and sexism and homophobia in the
Black studies movement. “Only a feminist, pro-woman perspective that acknowledges the
reality of sexual oppression in the lives of Black women, as well as the oppression of race and
class, will make Black Women’s Studies the transformer of consciousness it needs to be.”63
The rise of Black feminism strongly influenced the rise of Black women’s studies, yet it is
important to recall that the two are not synonymous. Not every scholar of Black women
necessarily subscribes to the radical politics of Black feminism or produces scholarship in a
feminist idiom.

By the 1980s a new generation of Black women scholars, especially in the humanities,
insisted on gender as a category of analysis and began to place Black women at the center of
their research. An examination of the emergence of the first generation of Black women
scholars after the creation of Black studies illuminates Black studies’ highly gendered
landscape, as well as the various triggers for the cultivation of Black women’s studies.
Historian Sharon Harley underwent a political awakening as a student in the late 1960s:
wearing an Afro, leading her college’s small Black student organization, selling copies of the
Black Panther Party newspaper, reading poetry from the Black arts movement, and attending
the Congress of Afrikan Peoples in Atlanta. “Nothing to that point,” she recalls, “approximated
the euphoria I experienced at the Atlanta event.” Close to three thousand participants attended
sessions in Atlanta. But Black Power was complex and contradictory. Harley may or may not
have attended the workshop on Black women, but the coordinator, Amina Baraka, began by
quoting the cultural nationalist activist Ron Karenga: “What makes a woman appealing is

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femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive.” Baraka advised women to
submit to their “natural roles,” learn to cook better and improve their personal hygiene.
Apparently, Black women’s bodies needed to be disciplined, improved, and strikingly, made
cleaner.64 Still, as Harley’s story illustrates, the Black Power movement was important in
shaping the consciousness of a future feminist historian. Harley also considered herself a leftist
and studied at Antioch College with veteran labor and civil rights activists Jack O’Dell and
Bob Rhodes, who had also exposed graduate students in Chicago to Marxist theories of
political economy in Saturday classes at the Communiversity on the city’s south side.65

As part of a cohort of graduate students at Howard in the 1970s who would publish
pioneering work in Black women’s history, Harley had a vibrant and supportive graduate
education but quickly encountered racial and gender exclusions in the profession. At
conferences of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the American
Historical Association, and Organization of American Historians, she found few sessions that
focused on women. Owing to this neglect of women’s and specifically Black women’s history,
Harley and fellow graduate student Rosalyn Terborg-Penn found a niche in the new Berkshire
Conference of Women Historians, and in the Racine Conference on Women organized by the
white historian Gerda Lerner. A postwar Communist, Lerner was a pioneer in both Black and
white women’s history and published the important documentary collection Black Women in
White America in 1972. “Although Lerner was the major force behind integrating black women
into the profession and the scholarship of history,” Harley still found that “the field at-large
effectively made black women invisible or insignificant.” She eventually concluded that only
through the concerted agency of Black women historians would a new scholarship emerge.
This was a critically important insight. “I was part of a movement of early black women
historians who understood that our effort to encourage white women historians to adopt a more
inclusive women’s historical discourse was too laborious and that we had better do something
about it on our own.” As graduate students, Harley and Terborg-Penn coedited a
groundbreaking volume, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, published in
1978, which featured essays by young scholars who would go on to be leading researchers in
African American women’s history.66

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s scholarship has transformed scholarly views on Black women in
the suffrage movement, but it took nearly twenty years to get her book published, not only
because of the heavier teaching load at an HBCU, but also, more significantly, because of the
effects of racism and sexism in academe and the publishing world. Entering graduate school in
1972, Terborg was the first person in Howard’s history department to declare a dissertation
topic in Black women’s history. “I would have an uphill struggle,” she wrote, “because I had to
convince the faculty that black women’s experience was viable.” One professor called her
topic “Mickey Mouse” and urged her to study something serious, such as Eleanor Roosevelt. In
the professional circuit, she encountered white women historians who challenged her findings
of racial discrimination in the suffrage movement, and Black male scholars who argued that
“women’s history was feminism and that it distracted us from the struggle to legitimize black
studies.” Terborg-Penn recalls that she and several of her Black female colleagues “noted this
phenomenon—racism from white feminist scholars and sexism from black nationalist male

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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scholars—and we tried to develop strategies to overcome the prejudice we discerned.” In
response, she and historian Elizabeth Parker began a series of conversations among colleagues
across the country, which culminated in the formation of the Association of Black Women
Historians in 1981. Terborg-Penn still struggled to find a publisher for her manuscript. One
editor wanted her to give more attention to white women in the suffrage movement, but Indiana
University Press, in a series under the direction of Darlene Clark Hine, a pioneering scholar of
Black women’s history, finally published the highly anticipated African American Women and
the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 in 1998.67

Black women scholars had to struggle against the white male academy, as well as with
condescension and opposition from within Black studies, simply to justify research on African
American women. In writing her pathbreaking study of enslaved women, Ar’n’t I a Woman?
Deborah Gray White faced numerous hurdles. Many white historians criticized her for using
the WPA slave narratives rather than traditional plantation sources, which of course were
authored by slaveholders. But White was also challenging the core gender politics of Black
nationalist scholarship, and she suffered retaliation. Her chair in African American studies at
the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, made a contemptuous remark about her work and, she
later learned, failed to support her bid for tenure. Evidently he was displeased that she had
declined to perform the role of “official hospitality hostess” when their department hosted a
meeting of the National Council of Black Studies. As a commentator on a panel discussing a
book on Black nationalism and slavery, White endured twenty minutes of “an unrestrained
verbal thrashing, the likes of which no scholar should have to endure,” for merely suggesting
that an examination of women and gender would have enriched the analysis.68 These
experiences show how the patriarchal politics of Black nationalism circumscribed the
intellectual potential of the new discipline. Deborah Gray White, Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn
Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley, and many other Black women scholars have all been
instrumental not only in redefining the fields of history and African American studies but also
in doing the difficult and bruising breakthrough work that has helped the discipline of Black
studies come closer to achieving an inclusive counterhegemonic vision.

By the 1980s, male scholars in African American studies were feeling the effects of Black
feminism and Black women’s scholarship more generally, and a few began to rethink their own
research and pedagogy. At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, John Bracey
participated in a two-year faculty seminar on the differences, similarities, and underlying
assumptions between Black studies and women’s studies, and he later developed three new
courses devoted to Black women’s history.69 Teaching a course in Black women’s history in
the Black studies department at Ohio State prompted Manning Marable to publish the essay
“Groundings with My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women” in 1983.
“Black social history as it has been written to date has been profoundly patriarchal,” Marable
concluded. “The sexist critical framework of American white history has been accepted by
Black male scholars.”70

In Marable’s view, this serious problem required that Black male intellectuals and activists
engage in a rigorous retraining and rethinking. “Black male liberationists must relearn their
own history,” he argued, “by grounding themselves all the time in the wisdom of their sisters.”

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While the essay’s brief overview of history illustrates Black women’s oppression and
resistance, and shows the prevalence of patriarchal gender roles in Black nationalist
movements, Marable was also intent upon emphasizing a counter-Black-male feminist
tradition. He highlighted especially the vigorous advocacy for women’s suffrage and equality
by both Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.71 Rhett Jones later argued that “Black studies
was miraculously rescued by Womanist scholars of both genders, various races, and not—as
some would have it—by those copycatting white feminists.” This view perhaps spreads the
credit too thin, as particular recognition is due Black female intellectuals, but his framing of
the new scholarship as a rescue is instructive.72

The emergence of scholarship in African diaspora studies and Black women’s studies, to
take just two examples, exemplifies a critical point about the recent history of African
American studies: on balance, its stature in the academy has rested on the production of
innovative and influential scholarship. The quest for curricular standardization and a single
authoritative Black studies methodology has generated interesting debates and useful materials,
yet tellingly, neither ever seems to have been achieved, and still the discipline develops and
moves forward.

The early Black studies movement opened a broader space for subaltern discourses in
academia than many of its founders initially expected. The Black student movement and the rise
of Black studies inspired a push by other marginalized groups for representation in research
and teaching, including Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, all women,
and gays and lesbians. As one scholar put it, “Just as the larger Black liberation movement has
catalyzed activity against various facets of oppression, Black studies has given rise to calls by
other groups—Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, white
ethnics, women and gays among them—for scholastic treatment of their experiences.”73 This is
an extremely important legacy of the early Black studies movement. Yet, at the same time,
Black studies has had a vexed relationship to these other developments, and a particularly
fraught relationship with ethnic studies. On the one hand, Black studies has been an inspiration
and fellow traveler to Asian American and Latino studies, yet on the other hand it’s a wary
coethnic and questioning ally. Since it was in the vanguard of the campus struggle, Black
studies generated an image of power and clout in the eyes of many Latino and Asian American
activists, yet Black people, especially in the housing and employment markets and certainly in
the criminal legal system, have often felt vulnerable, even expendable, in relation to other
nonwhite ethnic groups.

Ethnic studies first emerged in California and New York in the late 1960s. Typically, Asian
American, Mexican American, or Puerto Rican students joined campus revolts launched by
Black students, and made their own demands for curricular inclusion. Administrators in
California often sought to group Asian, Latino, and African American studies together as ethnic
studies. Sometimes this term arose following unsuccessful efforts to constitute a separate
college of Third World studies. The shift in terminology itself reflects a process of rising
administrative design and control. Sometimes, as at Los Angeles and San Diego, Black student
leaders welcomed such joint efforts, but at other campuses the proponents of Black studies
objected to unified consolidation. This was most famously true at Berkeley, where the original

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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demand for a Third World college was ultimately incorporated into the university as the
Department of Ethnic Studies, which Black studies faculty seceded from in the mid-1970s.
They desired autonomy.

The scholar Alan Colon argued that grouping these diverse units together under ethnic
studies “while clearly providing the chance for comparative study, would tend to make for
conflicting agendas in program content to the disadvantage of all. No racial or ethnic studies
program,” he believed, “should lose sight of its specific intellectual-cognitive goals and tasks
for the sake of a tenuous universal ethnic studies program unity.” He stressed the pitfalls of
having to compete for scarce resources, a view that was particularly widespread in the cash-
strapped 1970s. “To introduce the element of racial-ethnic groups competing for diminishing
resources under the same administrative umbrella has no positive advantage and may be
viewed in some instances as a central administrative tactic to divide and conquer in some
institutions hostile to Black studies.” Yet this chronicler ended by advising that “possibilities
for inter-racial and inter-ethnic cooperation in other projects on and off campus” should be
“explored, nourished and actualized.”74 An assessment of the field conducted in 1994 for the
Ford Foundation conveyed a continuing ambivalence. “In the coming years,” Valerie Smith and
Robert O’Meally predict, “The question of where African American studies will stand in
relation to ethnic studies and revamped American studies programs will be prominent and
difficult.” They urge supporting collaborations but caution that many in Black studies fear
losing ground unless its visibility and autonomy are preserved. In the words of a Black studies
scholar, “When people say ‘ethnic’ they don’t usually mean Blacks.”75

At most institutions, ethnic studies arose after African American studies and has been
incorporated separately into the academy. Yet, on many other campuses, especially those with
smaller student-of-color populations, African American studies is grouped together with
Asian, Latino, and Native American units to form a single ethnic studies programs. The newer
programs, such as many Asian American studies programs established in the Midwest and East
Coast in the 1990s, face the numerous challenges of being small, understaffed, and
intellectually marginalized or misunderstood.76 Still, it seems that when the questions of turf,
existence, and administrative form are settled, the possibilities for greater intellectual
discussion and collaboration along the lines of comparative race and diaspora can develop. A
cutting-edge infrastructure for interdisciplinary, transnational ethnic studies has begun to
emerge, including journals such as Social Text, American Quarterly, Small Axe, and Ethnic
and Racial Studies, as well as numerous conferences. These collaborations and conceptual
innovations have exerted a powerful intellectual influence in African American studies and
ethnic studies in the twenty-first century.

In the early 1970s, many skeptics of various political persuasions had questioned whether
African American studies would have longevity in colleges and universities. Some more
conservative scholars predicted that its lack of intellectual reputation and overly political
orientation would consign it to a short life, while many Black scholars questioned whether the
academy would ever truly incorporate an intellectual insurgency led and defined by Black
people. As we have seen, many of the more radical, expansive, community-connected visions
for Black studies were defeated before they even had a chance to get off the ground. Moreover,

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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the United States has a diverse and localized system of higher education, and many colleges
and universities traversed this era relatively untouched by the Black studies movement. But
despite numerous obstacles and challenges, African American studies has not only survived
but also grown to have international stature and presence.77 Crucially, despite ongoing rumors
of its demise, African American studies continues to attract intellectuals who have produced
the scholarly innovations and breakthroughs that have helped bring longevity to the discipline.

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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CONCLUSION

Reflections on the Movement and Its Legacy

The Black liberation movement did not unravel after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., but
grew and irrevocably changed the landscape of American higher education. The Black student
and Black studies movements were forceful continuations of the overall Black freedom
struggle, yet they have been comparatively forgotten or severed from the longer civil rights
narrative. Why the amnesia? Perhaps it is not surprising that challenges to the status quo are
quickly buried or discredited in popular narratives. Indeed, the Black student movement grew
to encompass wide-ranging critiques of American society—from militarism to racial
oppression, and it united a broad spectrum of African American, Latino, white, and Asian
American liberals and radicals. Perhaps the censorship has been internally generated as well:
maybe the students’ confrontational rhetoric and tactics complicated their inclusion in the
pantheon of civil rights heroes. Needless to say, vandalizing cars, planting small bombs, and
calling administrators “motherfuckers” does not conform to the politics of respectability.
Nevertheless, a budding scholarship, as well as the widespread campus commemorations of
the fortieth anniversary of student strikes and Black studies programs, has begun to alter our
understanding of the complexity of the late 1960s and the broad reach of the long civil rights
movement.

The student activists of the late 1960s believed they could change society. They translated
Black Power theories into concrete gains, producing, arguably, the most important and lasting
movement victories of the late 1960s. Many of the ideas articulated by Malcolm X and Stokely
Carmichael, such as gaining control over public institutions located in Black communities;
reclaiming and revaluing Black people’s African heritage; identifying with global anticolonial
struggles; and throwing off the psychological shackles of self-hatred and internalized racism
were all seriously and vigorously pursued by Black students and intellectuals on campuses
across the country. The effects were profound. From open admissions to affirmative action and
the rise of Black cultural centers and Black studies, the fruits of student protest permanently
changed American higher education. Moreover, demands for Latino, Asian American, and
women’s studies soon followed, adding further dimensions to the opening up of collegiate and
intellectual life and culture in the United States.

An unappreciated outcome of the Black student movement is the extent to which it enabled
urban Black communities to make successful claims on local universities. Malcolm X College
in Chicago, with its increase in Black faculty and administrators and its strong embrace of a
mission to serve the needs of working-class Black Chicagoans, is a perfect example, but it was
not unique. Community or junior colleges in scores of cities from Detroit to Los Angeles to

Washington, D.C., underwent similar transformations and redefined missions, playing a vital
role in both Black access to higher education and the opening up of professional and
administrative opportunities in major urban institutions. San Francisco State, for all the
harshness of the poststrike crackdown against strike leaders, became an important site of
multiracial employment and educational opportunity in the Bay Area.

The quest for open admissions or large-scale entry of Black and Latino high school
graduates into publicly funded urban colleges constituted a social leveling that challenged the
more traditionally hierarchical college culture. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this effort
spawned a forceful backlash, especially in New York City, with its storied history of
immigrant success at City and Brooklyn Colleges. But what has been largely forgotten in the
intense effort to overturn open admissions and restore the competitiveness of four-year public
colleges is how white these institutions were in the late 1960s. While some may have viewed
this as an appropriate exclusivity, many Black and Latino families saw it as blatantly
exclusionary. And as city residents and taxpayers, they made a powerful push to make these
institutions better serve their needs. A great tragedy is that open admissions got under way on
the eve of the severe municipal fiscal crisis of the early 1970s. Funding for public universities
was slashed just as their student populations shot up, and one by-product—the schools’ greater
reliance upon tuition to meet costs—has subsequently made higher education much more
expensive for the contemporary working class and their children.

On the one hand, The Black Revolution on Campus is a fitting culmination to a narrative of
civil rights reform that begins with Brown. The struggle to increase Black access to higher
education is an affirmation of the long-standing conceptual links between education,
opportunity, citizenship, and mobility in American ideology. African American college and
university attendance and graduation rates rose as a result of this struggle. The Black student
movement, in the context of the overall Black freedom struggle, successfully pressured
institutions of higher education to place much greater emphasis and importance on Black
college and university attendance and graduation. For a while at least, this appeared to become
national policy, and the effects were significant. The opening up of greater educational
opportunities for African Americans contributed to the growth and reconfiguration of the Black
middle class in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, “diversity,” in these years, was more than
cosmetic: it signified a redistribution of resources. It meant opening up opportunities for
people heretofore excluded, and this included not only African Americans but also other
socially and economically marginalized minorities, such as Puerto Ricans, Mexican
Americans, and Chinese Americans. In other words, affirmative action did not signal the
pursuit of heterogeneity for the sake of heterogeneity, or diversity for the educational benefit of
the white majority. Other students of color in these years had their own long histories of
discrimination and struggle in the United States. The Latino and Asian American students who
joined the radical campus movement were not part of the new wave of immigrants who came
in enormous numbers to the United States in the decades following the 1965 congressional
immigration reform. Rather, they were descendants of earlier histories of American labor
recruitment, westward continental expansion, and overseas colonization.

On the other hand, The Black Revolution on Campus is a narrative of African Americans

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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reconnecting with global struggles against imperialism and colonialism. The constricted
definition of patriotism promulgated during the cold war had demanded a silencing of Black
American support for anticolonial and antiwar struggles. Beginning with the Truman Doctrine
of 1947, domestic civil rights struggles had been forcibly separated from broader anti-imperial
struggles.1 But the uprisings of the late 1960s changed everything. A global perspective by
African American activists began to return as the civil rights movement intensified and
radicalized, and as the war in Vietnam pulled increasing numbers of African Americans and
other young men into the U.S. military. Not every Black student activist moved from campus
Black Power to solidarity work for the Angolan or Zimbabwean independence struggles. But
many did, and when the antiapartheid movement arose in the United States in the 1970s and
1980s it built on this foundation and drew many African American students and intellectuals.2
The rise of African diaspora studies as part of the Black studies movement reflects this shift
from the narrow Americanist thinking of the cold war era to a much broader and more critical
global consciousness. Moreover, as the end of legal Jim Crow served to strengthen Black
American citizenship and national affiliation, African American studies came to be a unique
and generative space for debates over the meaning of national belonging versus the long history
of diaspora consciousness and activist strategies.

This study offers a fresh appraisal of Black political thought during the Black Power era. It
was a time of intense ideological fervor among young activists. The rising currents of Black
nationalism galvanized this generation and inspired considerable grassroots organizing. Some
were drawn to cultural nationalism, while others identified with a leftist analysis. Rather than
remaining frozen in time, Black radicalism grew and evolved to incorporate new directions.
Ideas in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Black Power: The Politics of Black
Liberation greatly inspired young people as they endeavored to redefine Black American
identity and reshape American colleges. They succeeded in bringing a Black perspective to the
entire process of integration, forcing administrators and faculty to hear their views and
accommodate their cultural interests and aspirations. Students embraced many core tenets of
Black nationalism, yet in many instances their Black nationalism was decidedly anti-
imperialist and internationalist, owing certainly but not exclusively to the influence of the
Black Panther Party and rising critiques of the Vietnam War. In some contexts, especially
where there was a significant Asian American and Latino student population, this
internationalism was articulated as Third Worldist, and in other contexts as Pan-Africanist.
The students’ evolving consciousness was shaped by experiences gained through alliances
with Puerto Rican and Mexican American student struggles. Sometimes it was forged in study
groups, where students read and debated a wide variety of texts. Moreover, as the 1960s gave
way to the 1970s, Black feminism arose to dramatically influence the Black studies movement
and Black radicalism in general. Black nationalism, in short, was subject to critique and
reappraisal, and out of this process African American activists went in a variety of directions,
joining labor, human rights, reparations, educational, environmental, prisoner rights, antiwar,
and other social justice movements.

Scholars, including historians of the civil rights and Black Power eras, have neglected the
rich history of historically Black colleges. In a narrative that diverges from the dominant story

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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of school integration, African Americans strove forcefully to preserve the public Black college
system in the 1970s. While still underfunded, and in some cases in acute crisis, HBCUs
continue to serve a vital social and educational function, especially as affirmative action and
other gains of the civil rights era have come under attack. The students’ struggle put the quest
for self-determination to test and helped to preserve important institutions that have shaped
African American life and culture in the United States since the nineteenth century.
The Black Revolution on Campus reinforces the dialectic of reform and repression found in

many accounts of the decline of the Black freedom struggle but suggests a wider swath of
repression. Black student unions sometimes became targets of police surveillance and
infiltration. Many campuses endured police invasions, and many experienced large numbers of
student arrests and trials. For example, twenty-seven unarmed students at a state college in
California were tried on seventy felony counts of conspiracy, assault, kidnapping, false
imprisonment, robbery, and burglary in 1968 for occupying the president’s office for four
hours.3 The police violence and shooting deaths at many Black colleges in the South sent a
powerful message. Student protest was met with overwhelming state violence. Black lives
were expendable, and white officers could kill with impunity. Considered singly, these
episodes can appear disconnected, but together they demonstrate that it was not only Black
Panthers or rioting youth who were targets of heavy-handed law enforcement in this era;
upwardly mobile college students were, too. Still, it is important to acknowledge that the
Orangeburg Massacre, in particular, helped to catalyze and give shape to a national Black
student movement, which achieved many victories. Orangeburg may have been forgotten by
many across the nation and whitewashed by South Carolina officialdom, but Black college
students never forgot it and were inspired by the tragedy to intensify their own campus
struggles.

Campus radicals of the late 1960s are often portrayed as either idealistic collegians who
eventually settled down to adult lives of affluence, professional ambition, and retreat from
radicalism, or as irresponsible, wild-eyed youth whose brash acts inspired police crackdowns
and then the rise of the right. The first scenario may be commercially appealing and the second
provides a useful scapegoat, but both are misleading portraits of student activists, particularly
Black student activists. Many individuals suffered reprisals or repression, which permanently
altered their lives. This is especially true for those at San Francisco State, North Carolina
A&T, Brooklyn College, Southern University, and all the other campuses where students
endured police invasion, expulsion, harassment, or arrest. Fred Prejean was profoundly
affected by the murders of Denver Smith and Leonard Brown at Southern University in East
Baton Rouge. Many veterans of the San Francisco State strike have lived with the legacy of
that epochal struggle in very personal ways. Nathan Hare never returned to academia after his
dismissal by Hayakawa and had to switch careers. George Murray, Black Panther leader and
aspiring English professor, left political activism behind after the strike and has pastored a
church in Oakland ever since. SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers was shot in the back in
Orangeburg and unjustly prosecuted, but today he is president of Voorhees College in Denmark,
South Carolina. In 2002, his son Bakari T. Sellers was elected to the state legislature, where
he pursued a reckoning with the Orangeburg Massacre. Activists Howard Fuller and Nelson
Johnson went through intense ideological passages yet remain active community leaders, in

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Milwaukee and Greensboro, respectively.
To be sure, for many people, the late 1960s marked the high point of their activism, “the

golden years” as one student leader put it. But for many, many others, those tumultuous college
years were the beginning of a lifetime of activism, public service, or political and legal
advocacy. Danny Glover, an actor and San Francisco State strike leader, exemplifies the
enduring commitment to social justice by many of this generation. Moreover, the range of
Glover’s political interests, spanning education, labor, human rights, and especially antiracism
and anti-imperialism, reflects the expansive Black radicalism of the Bay Area.4 Other veterans
of the San Francisco State strike followed a similar trajectory, notably Hari Dillon, whose
Vanguard Public Foundation made grants to social justice initiatives around the country for
three decades.

Many student activists went to law school. In an ironic outcome, given the Black Power
critique of civil rights lawyers, many student activists themselves became civil rights lawyers.
But their lawyering style and philosophy were deeply affected by the social justice movements
of their youth. Northwestern graduate Victor Goode served as director of the National
Conference of Black Lawyers and joined the faculty of the City University of New York Law
School, a school designed to foster public interest lawyering. Malcolm X College graduate
Stan Willis has become a leading human rights lawyer in Chicago, founding Black People
Against Torture and fighting for justice for the scores of African American survivors of a
twenty-year police torture ring in Chicago. Charles M. Powell Jr., a student leader at City
College, became a civil rights lawyer after being urged by then state senator Basil A. Paterson
to go to law school. “I realized my role in life was not just about making money but about
helping people survive and get what they deserve,” he remarked on the thirtieth anniversary of
the occupation of south campus.5 Eva Jefferson Paterson of Northwestern worked with the
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights for decades before founding her own organization, the
Equal Justice Society in San Francisco. Howard student leader Lew Myers, who in 1969
believed that “black students were the best hope to save this country,”6 graduated from Rutgers
Law School and launched a career as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, where he has
represented, among others, the national Rainbow PUSH Coalition and Louis Farrakhan.
D’Army Bailey, who led the Black People’s Committee of Inquiry at Southern, served as a
public defender and a judge in Tennessee and helped found the National Civil Rights Museum
in Memphis, which stands on the site of the demolished Lorraine Motel.

When Ramona Tascoe entered San Francisco State College in 1967, she “intended to go to
law school and become president of the United States.” A triple major, she worked her way
through college in the medical office of the legendary Carlton Goodlett, a physician, civil
rights activist, and newspaper publisher. One day, Goodlett and his medical partner, who
happened to head the local NAACP, asked her, “Why law?” and she responded, “Why not?” In
unison, they replied, “Because you’d be one hell of a doctor.” As a result, she turned down
Stanford Law School and applied to medical school. With the revolution cresting in the Bay
Area, Tascoe began to view medical school “as a safe place to hide.” She was afraid to die,
she said, and had begun “to see that leaders who were passionate and had a lot of capacity
faced a risk of being killed.” However, the University of California, San Francisco, School of

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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Medicine twice rejected her—unfortunately they judged phenomena unrelated to the practice of
medicine. Her Afro was evidently too big. “We do not need anyone looking like Angela Davis
coming to UCSF,” they told her. She was finally admitted and has practiced medicine in
Oakland for decades; more recently, she brought medical relief to Haiti following the
earthquake of 2010.7

Many student activists entered the field of education or joined the academy, including Black
studies. John Bracey and James Turner played vital roles in both the student movement and the
Black studies movement. Bracey joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, in 1972, where he taught African American history and helped develop a PhD
program in African American studies. He and his colleagues assisted efforts to build Black
studies programs at neighboring colleges, making western Massachusetts a surprising center of
the movement. Turner played a leading role in the African Heritage Studies Association and
brought a Pan-Africanist philosophy to the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell.
Askia Davis, a Brooklyn College student leader and former Black Panther, built a career at the
New York City Board of Education, serving as senior assistant to several chancellors.
Northwestern student activist Wayne Watson has served as chancellor of Chicago City
Colleges and president of Chicago State University. Abdul Alkalimat has pioneered “eblack
studies” and is committed to bringing Black studies fully into the digital era.

This book demonstrates a complex origin story of African American studies in the academy.
African American studies took root in historically Black colleges early in the twentieth century
but was somewhat eclipsed by the long fight for integration in the postwar era. A clamor for it
arose in the latter half of the 1960s at every type of college in the country—Black, white,
public, private, two-year, four-year, and liberal arts—and at research universities. Students
demanded it; on many campuses they helped to create it, and they rightly deserve credit for its
beginnings. But then the narrative gets more complicated. On some campuses, students
continued to stay vitally involved in forging the character and mission of Black studies
programs. But on others, student activists passed the baton to administrators and professors,
and as the overall Black liberation movement declined, the political mission of Black studies
was not always embraced with the same perspective or fervor. The sense of its political
potential tended to shift from a hope for broader social transformation and Black community
empowerment to a narrower intellectual or academic transformation. To be sure, an
intellectual transformation is no small thing, but the point is that many student activists had
envisioned a more dramatic, even revolutionary, potential for Black studies. And as well, this
view may have been a miscalculation. Indeed, many student activists graduated and went on to
medical and law school, or organized in factories and Black communities, or journeyed
overseas to help build new African nation-states, and began to see the terrain of struggle as
necessarily broader than the campus.

The faculty who labored to incorporate African American studies into permanent programs,
centers, departments, and even distinct colleges had a distinguished scholarly and literary
tradition upon which to build. Frederick Douglass, St. Clair Drake, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G.
Woodson, Horace Cayton, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry,
Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox, and many others could have easily wound up on a

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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course syllabus. (Although a big problem in early Black studies courses was that much of this
material was out of print.) Moreover, important scholarship continued to be produced by
historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and other
academics during the 1970s and beyond. But during the first decade and beyond, Black studies
programs did not always succeed in attracting research-active, professionally ambitious
scholars, in large part because the fledgling discipline faced the challenge of winning
institutional legitimacy and respect. In addition, some Black scholars sought to steer clear of
the seeming politicization of African American studies and its association with Black
nationalism.

Still, a wide-ranging group of Black artists, writers, educators, and activists rose to the
occasion and helped to create African American studies departments, centers, and programs.
And for these builders of the field, its links to the student movement, or Black radicalism or
nationalism more generally, was a source of pride rather than lament. This feeling was mostly
true of the first cohort of faculty hired to teach Black studies at San Francisco State. James
Turner instilled this ethos in the Africana Center at Cornell. Michael Thelwell helped to build
a department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a dynamic faculty composed of
activists from the Black liberation movement, including John Bracey, William Strickland, and
Ernest Allen. At Harvard, Ewart Guinier brought deep experience in labor and community
organizing to his role as the chair of an embattled department. He may not have been an
academic, and that likely put him at a disadvantage in navigating the rarified terrain of
Harvard, but he did understand a political fight and he staunchly defended the department’s
integrity and mission.

In the short term, the Black studies movement fulfilled the students’ goal of bridging the gap
between campus and community, but ultimately its greatest impact has been in humanities and
social science scholarship and in undergraduate, and increasingly graduate, education. Within
the academy, Black studies has been judged by its contribution to scholarship and research
innovation. In the early years, its accomplishments in these areas were widely questioned—
indeed, answering skepticism about the scholarly legitimacy of Black studies consumed
considerable energy in the discipline’s first twenty years. Nonetheless, Black studies has
ushered in a transformation of graduate training and knowledge production in the United States,
putting categories of race and, ultimately, gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity at the center of
intellectual analysis across disciplines. Moreover, its emphasis on experiential learning is now
considered a normal part of higher education. And it has modeled a diasporic and transnational
orientation increasingly adopted in American studies and long a part of ethnic studies.

The hiring and promotion of Black faculty in departments other than African American
studies, however, remains a slow process. The persistently low percentage of Black faculty at
predominantly white universities, especially at elite ones, is the most powerful illustration of
the limits to change in the American academy. Moreover, despite the many positive changes
achieved through activism and policy reform, conservatives began organizing to reverse many
of these gains almost immediately, especially open admissions and affirmative action in
admissions. That story is beyond the scope of this study, but the conservative backlash against
taking race into account in order to achieve a diverse student body has achieved considerable

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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success in courts, legislatures, public opinion, and ballot initiatives.8

Perhaps we should revisit the insights of student leaders in the late 1960s to find our way
out of this backlash, which, combined with soaring educational costs, has put higher education
out of reach for so many or subjected them to extraordinary indebtedness. Black student
activists and their allies insisted that higher education was a right not a privilege. They insisted
that government make higher education available and affordable to all who sought it. Thus, they
argued that public universities should be robustly supported by tax dollars. They rejected the
market-driven approach that dominates the contemporary landscape of higher education, and
viewed the discourse of merit as laden with disguised class and race privilege—a critique
with continuing validity. Here, the students pushed the civil rights movement beyond a quest for
equal opportunity in the current system, into a quest for much wider opportunity in a
transformed system. And as with so many other struggles in the civil rights era, this one offered
benefits not only to Black students but also to a much more diverse group of working-class
youth.

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus, University of California Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=928946.
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