In the late 1960s, black studies became a part of American higher education. By 1971 more than 500 programs, departments, and institutes had been founded on four-year college campuses; add in black-studies initiatives in those same years at high schools and community colleges, and the number jumps to more than 1,000. Today roughly 450 colleges and universities offer graduate programs, undergraduate programs, or both. To be sure, those numbers represent an occasion to celebrate. But jubilance may be premature. It is becoming increasingly clear that before the field can move confidently into the future we need to clear up some continuing confusion about why and how what we now call African-American studies began. Clarifying that has significant implications for how we think about not just a scholarly field, but about race relations in higher education and society.
The origins of African-American studies are shrouded in a hazy collective memory. The first black-studies department was started at San Francisco State College in 1968. There, according to the common account, a rowdy and violent group of black students staged a protracted strike demanding a black-studies program. What is too often ignored is that, at San Francisco State and numerous other predominantly white campuses, white students joined with Asian students, Latino students, American Indian students, and black students in the struggle to found the field. The battle they waged was multiracial, seeing black studies as the first step in a wider-ranging agenda for educational, economic, and social equality.
At San Francisco State, 80 percent of the student body supported the strike that ultimately led to the creation of a black-studies department. Thousands of students and faculty members picketed classes daily, carrying placards declaring, “This Strike Is Against Racism.” They came together with aims beyond black studies, seeking to realign and redefine the very meaning of democracy, citizenship, and social justice. If America was to live up to the ideals of inclusion so much at the heart of the civil-rights movement and the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education, college campuses would need to become more inviting to poor and disadvantaged applicants of all races, but especially to those who were nonwhite. Institutionalizing black studies was a sign that such revolutionary realignment was possible, students believed. On hundreds of campuses, they called for increasing financial aid for black students and hiring black faculty members to teach a radical new curriculum that would educate, empower, and ultimately free not just those taking the classes, but all oppressed people.
Against the backdrop of the realities of that history, the fact that today African-American studies is rarely considered a successful example of the pursuit of social justice and democratic reform, or a harbinger of widespread institutional and cultural change, tells us much about contemporary views of the field. Tellingly, when my 13-year-old son watched newsreel footage of the student strike at San Francisco State with me, he took no particular note of the images of police officers pointing guns at, shoving, and arresting black protesters. But he noticed every white student bloodied by police batons. “But those are white people,” he repeated with mantralike regularity. Sadly, it became clear to me that he could not imagine that a movement centering on black freedom could have been interracial. “Did they know they were protesting for black studies?” my son asked.
Small wonder his incredulity: Today many commentators cite the creation and institutionalization of black studies as the result of the capitulation of well-meaning white college administrators to militant, angry, and ungrateful black students who were recruited to Northern colleges during the late 1960s. Yes, there was some of that, but such a version misses far too much. It tends to see black-studies programs as mainly utilitarian, at best a way to include black students comfortably, at worst glorified affirmative-action programs to attract black students to college campuses. It tends not to see black studies as a successful example of a multiracial movement for social justice that forced colleges to begin the long, hard process of real and substantial change — both intellectually and institutionally.
Another point about the history of black studies that is often overlooked — and is not unrelated to the tendency to see the field as only relevant and related to young, angry black students — is that its growth was greatly aided by white philanthropic organizations. Beginning in 1969, a year after the first department of black studies was founded, the Ford Foundation became one of the largest supporters of the new field. Under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, the former national-security adviser in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the foundation began to craft and then finance a strategy to ensure a permanent place for African-American studies on college campuses. It envisioned it as a means of solving the longstanding “Negro Problem,” as well as a way to desegregate and integrate the student bodies, faculties, and curricula of colleges and universities.
Even before the foundation began to allocate funds, the rapid growth of black studies caught almost everyone by surprise. Indeed, program officers noted that they could conservatively estimate that at least 200 new programs were set to start within 12 months of the founding of the department at San Francisco State. The concern of the foundation was that the field would grow too much, too soon. Bundy and the handful of program officers responsible for making decisions about the first round of grants were afraid that, if not properly guided, black studies would be destroyed by the sometimes conflicting aims behind it — black militancy and racial inclusion. To avoid that, the foundation chose to emphasize racial inclusion, and the vast majority of grants made between 1969 and 1971 were awarded to programs and institutions wishing to diversify predominantly white curricula and institutions, promote integration, and, perhaps most important, give what was then seen as the more militant version of separatism and black nationalism a wide berth.
Oddly, such a vision of black studies held true whether the program was instituted on a college campus that was predominantly black or predominantly white. At Morgan State University, one of the five historically black colleges to receive an award during the first round of grant making, funds were provided to compile and publish 13 syllabi for one-semester-long courses in history and literature. The institution wanted to make those materials available to white colleges interested in offering courses with content related to black subjects, but without faculty members or expertise to do so. Over all, between 1969 and 1971, the foundation approved more than 30 black-studies grants from more than 100 applicants. Most of the applications were to restructure existing undergraduate curricula at institutions like Princeton, Rutgers, and Stanford Universities by offering a class or two relating to black topics. Not one of the applications for help setting up an autonomous department or program in black studies was awarded a grant.
The decision to structure black studies in a way that sidestepped the demands of reform-minded, militant, or radical students — as well as the foundation’s commitment to making black studies intellectually and structurally dependent on traditional disciplines — was one that many program officers knew would raise eyebrows and blood pressures. For Ford, black studies was not to become a base for radical change: It was a way to foster necessary but incremental integration. According to those at the foundation, black studies needed to avoid becoming an academic ghetto, so it couldn’t be a stand-alone discipline. Black students needed to learn to define themselves with-in the system, even if the system redefined black studies to center on the racial education of white students.
The history of African-American studies — and the way we remember it — has left a legacy that programs and departments still have to address. In many ways, the complex history continues to obscure the intellectual validity of the field, seeing it primarily as a political project or a tool to diversify the faculties and student bodies at predominantly white institutions. Hence the focus in the last few years on “new black intellectuals,” as if black intellectual contributions were only recent! And hence a tendency to increasingly divorce African-American studies from its radical potential, at times seeing it just as another affirmative-action strategy to benefit (unfairly, it is more and more claimed) black students by bringing them into the university (in a period when the long-term future of affirmative-action programs is under hot debate).
But times have changed. African-American studies today sits in the midst of a shifting reality. It is witnessing an ironic development: a substantial rise in the number of first- and second-generation college students of Caribbean and African descent. In 2004 a front-page New York Times article entitled “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?” highlighted the increase in black students — but decrease in African-American students — at some of the nation’s top colleges. As a result, it is becoming clear that on contemporary college campuses the meaning of “race” is changing — shaping a new definition of the “Negro Problem” in the 21st century.
Multiracial cooperation on the part of students and an embrace of racial integration by the Ford Foundation were at the heart of early efforts to institutionalize black studies. Today the success of the foundation’s strategy has created a complex situation. Despite a shift in racial dem-ographics in the United States, and a far more complicated dialogue over race and diversity in higher education, colleges have by and large been slow to consider how the increase in the numbers of black students from various ethnic backgrounds defines the experience of “blackness” on their campuses, and what that means institutionally. Colleges have not, for example, confronted what that diversity among black people implies for affirmative action. Few would argue that African-Americans still face major obstacles in going to college. But whom do our affirmative-action programs serve? Buzzwords about “diversity” don’t get us very far.
As we have seen, over the last 40 years there have been moments of contestation and change in how America has viewed, used, and remembered African-American studies. In the 1970s, when discussions of “race” were understood in our collective cultural lexicon to refer, either rightly or wrongly, to relationships between black and white people, the field was seen as an avenue to more-harmonious relations between those two groups. Today the field is key to understanding the shifting realities of diversity among black people. As such, it is a vital tool to foster broad discussions of the nature, makeup, and meaning of race, diversity, integration, and desegregation.
Though it has never been an easy topic of conversation for Americans, race is still a central feature of American culture and society. But America is not well practiced in confronting its complexities. That is why we need African-American studies more, not less, than ever before. It is an essential place for helping us understand and discuss the nature of blackness, the efficacy of affirmative action for African-American students, and the meaning of racial progress in the 21st century.
Throughout our history, for every instance of multiracial cooperation and democratic resolve to at least address, if not eradicate, the scourge of racial inequity, we have witnessed moments and images, like those in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where we as a nation are once again forced to look upon the pain, shame, rage, and despair that underlie racial inequality in the United States. What is frustrating is the sneaking suspicion that we are not getting any better at having a mature conversation about race than we were when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
From the multiracial coalition building of the first student protests to the Ford Foundation’s efforts to integrate white colleges with African-American studies, the field has been ground zero for broad discussions about the meaning of race and for crafting strategies to at least negotiate, if not eliminate, racial inequality. However, few observers today discuss African-American studies as central to reaching those collective goals. That may be partly because of a lack of familiarity with the scholarship in the field by observers outside it. But it is also because of the way we craft our memories, and the tendency to reduce African-American studies to a response to black-student protest. That association — erroneous yet persistent — dates to the formative years of the field. We need to first reclaim, and then celebrate, that promise.
Noliwe M. Rooks is associate director of the program in African American studies at Princeton University. Her book White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education has just been published by Beacon Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 23, Page B8