Martha Biondi

Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies

Martha Biondi

© 2011 by Martha Biondi

MARTHABIONDI is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwest- ern University. Her publications include To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003) and “The Rise of the Reparations Move- ment,” Radical History Review (2003). Her newest book, The Black Revolution on Campus, is forthcoming from the Univer- sity of California Press.

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has prompted some observers to assert that the nation has overcome its history of white supremacy and moved into a “post-racial” era, making continued attention to race and rac- ism passé and unnecessary. Radio and television host Tavis Smiley posed this provocation to his guests in a 2009 radio special on the fortieth an- niversary of African American studies in Ameri- can colleges and universities. He asked, is African American studies still necessary in the age of Oba- ma? Eddie Glaude, Elizabeth Alexander, Greg Carr, and Tricia Rose–chairs of African Ameri- can studies departments at, respectively, Prince- ton University, Yale University, Howard Univer- sity, and Brown University1–each articulated important themes in the intellectual tradition of African American studies. Thus, their discus- sion is a useful lens through which to explore key themes in the historical development and future trajectory of the ½eld.

Eddie Glaude and Greg Carr captured two truths about the history of African American studies. Glaude noted its origin in black student activism of the 1960s. The upsurge of campus activism in 1968 and 1969 was a critical component of the broader black freedom struggle. In contrast to the media-driven notion that Black Power was merely a slogan lacking concrete application, black col- lege students successfully turned the concept into a genuine social movement. On some campuses,

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the students emphasized the black col- lege graduate’s responsibility to serve black communities. They saw black studies as a means of generating leaders for, and sharing intellectual resources with, neighboring black communities. Even more, they envisioned black stud- ies as a means of training black students to one day return to, and help enact the self-determination of, their communi- ties. But the black student movement also aimed to affect campus politics. On most campuses, the push for curricu- lar transformation–alongside the ½ghts for open admissions, af½rmative action, black cultural centers, and black faculty, coaches, and advisers–was part of an in- tentional effort to rede½ne the terms of integration: away from assimilation into a Eurocentric institution and toward the restructuring of that institution and its mission. Students won many victories and launched major changes in campus culture, opportunity structures, and in- tellectual production, notwithstanding continued resistance and challenges.

Greg Carr offers a more critical inter- pretation of this history. African Ameri- can studies, he notes, was “a concession” that began as “crisis management.”2 Today, it bears remembering that in 1969, the majority of white academics and ad- ministrators doubted the scholarly grav- itas of African American studies and viewed black studies as a means to ap- pease student discontent. African Amer- ican studies began its modern career in a context of insurgency and turmoil, and its advocates continually had to ½ght for resources and support. Carr argues that the real history of African American stud- ies, as a serious, respected endeavor, lies in historically black colleges and univer- sities (hbcus) and other black-controlled spaces, such as Atlanta’s Institute of the Black World, an activist think tank of the 1970s. Indeed, hbcus employed the schol-

ars who wrote pioneering studies of black life, namely, giants such as intel- lectual leader W.E.B. Du Bois, political scientist Ralph Bunche, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and philosopher and educator Alain Locke. This intellectual tradition is at the heart of the black stud- ies project. Moreover, Carter G. Wood- son’s Association for the Study of Afri- can American Life and History, founded in 1915, exempli½es the long history and autonomy of Africana intellectual life.

Still, this genealogy is contradictory and complex. A tidal wave of protest swept through hbcus in the 1960s and 1970s. The outcry was inspired by a range of student grievances, most no- tably, criticism of white ½nancial and administrative control, excessive regula- tion of student life, excessive discipline, inferior facilities and faculty, and out- moded or Eurocentric curricula. “With- out question, the Black Power-Black Consciousness movement has been felt in the South,” wrote political scientist and activist Charles Hamilton, formerly a professor at Tuskegee Institute (now University); its biggest manifestation was the quest for a “Black University,”3 he said. Hamilton ½rst articulated the concept of a black university in a 1967 speech on “The Place of the Black Col- lege 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 re- de½ne their missions to provide great- er aid and assistance to black communi- ties. Later published in the Negro Digest, Hamilton’s article spawned a yearly tra- dition 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 dis- tinctive black ethos; to prepare students

Martha Biondi

228 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

to help solve problems in poor black com- munities; and to offer a new curriculum, one that was relevant to contemporary needs but that also required a course in ancient African civilizations. “I am talk- ing 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 illus- trate the emerging view that the black intelligentsia was a relatively untapped and potentially radical leadership re- source for the black liberation move- ment. “We need,” Hamilton declared, “militant leadership which the church is not providing, unions are not provid- ing and liberal groups are not providing. . . . I propose a black college that would be a felt, dominant force in the community in which it exists. A college which would use its accumulated intellectual knowl- edge 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 ½ghters and graduate freedom ½ghters.”4

Given that schools such as Howard and the Atlanta University Center had been home to pioneers in black scholar- ship, what provoked the charge of Euro- centrism? Darwin T. Turner, dean of the graduate school at North Carolina Agri- cultural and Technical State University, argued that the academic turn away from blackness emerged from the optimism spawned by early legal decisions support- ing desegregation, the defeat of Fascism, and postwar affluence. Political repres- sion, too, most likely was a factor. “The tendency for black educators to neglect materials related to Afro-American her- itage intensi½ed, 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, sociol- ogy, 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 insuf½cient “to provide Afro-Americans with the necessary understanding of their culture.”5

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.”6 Students there had taken over a build- ing to press for a department of Afri- can American studies. They pressured Howard to identify itself as a black uni- versity and adopt an explicit mission of serving local black communities.

Black nationalist thought and action in this period were also directed toward transforming black education on white campuses. Much of the impetus to de- velop black studies came from exposure to the freedom schools of the Southern (and Northern) civil rights movement. Activists had come to view the entire nation’s educational system as a contest- ed and profoundly signi½cant space: a means of racial domination, on the one hand, or a path to black empowerment on the other. Thus, as Greg Carr sug- gests, administrators may have viewed the introduction of black studies courses as “crisis management,” but for students, the turn toward black studies reflected a genuine development in their approach to advancing the cause of black liberation.

Strikingly, this huge achievement of the black power movement immediately faced a crisis. With the students gone, who would design and develop this new,

The Historical

Development & Future

Trajectory of African American

Studies

229140 (2) Spring 2011

and quite extensive, national black stud- ies infrastructure? In 1970, less than 1 per- cent of those with a Ph.D. in the United States were black, and most of these schol- ars were over age ½fty-½ve.7 In a further dilemma, quite a few traditionally trained specialists in African American subjects initially opposed the creation of African American studies as an autonomous unit, or were reluctant to risk their careers on an untested experiment. Many young black scholars probably questioned whether black studies would even last and may have viewed launching a career in the ½eld as too risky. On this reluctance from black scholars, sociologist St. Clair Drake observed, “[T]hey want the security and prestige of being in a traditional depart- ment. Black Studies might be a fad, and they’d be left out in the cold.”8 At times, non-academics ½lled faculty positions; on occasion, immigrant scholars with little connection to the students’ politi- cal vision ½lled positions, generating new tensions and many local debates over the ½eld’s responsibility and mission.

A view quickly took root among many elite academics that creating African American studies programs was smarter than creating departments: the former, by being formally af½liated with other departments, stood a better chance of attracting top scholars. Yet for all the scorn/neglect/resistance heaped on them, departments have de½ed the recurring predictions of their demise. Most stu- dent-founders preferred departmental status, owing to the department’s greater status and independence or, as the stu- dents would have put it, its autonomy and control. The more recent develop- ment of doctoral programs in African American studies has relied on depart- mental structures, even inducing Yale to convert its program–once held up as the national exemplar–to a department. Today, African American studies attracts

leading scholars, trains graduate students, and produces influential research, even though faculty still face occasions when they must explain or defend its existence.

The black studies movement has been marked by intense debates over its aca- demic character. During and after the years of its emergence, black studies was criticized, internally and externally, on two interrelated grounds: that it lacked curricular coherence and that, by not having a single methodology, it failed to meet the de½nition of a discipline. As a result, many educators in the early black studies movement pursued a two-pronged quest for a standardized curriculum, on the one hand, and an original, authorita- tive methodology on the other. 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 the disci- pline’s ultimate acceptance in academe (to the extent that it has gained accep- tance) has come from the production of influential scholarship and research and the development of new conceptual ap- proaches that have influenced other dis- ciplines. Pioneering scholarship and in- fluential intellectual innovations, rather than standardized pedagogy or method- ology, have been the route to influence in American intellectual life.

A tension between authority and free- dom animates these debates. As late as

 

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