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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

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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,

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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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2000, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reinforced the idea that multi- ple perspectives and methodologies had retarded the progress of African Amer- ican studies. The author of an essay on the state of the ½eld criticized the diverse character of African American studies courses at different universities: “The Ohio State class is chronological with a literary bent,” she wrote. “Duke’s take: cultural studies. The Penn course ½lters everything through a W.E.B. Du Bois lens, and N.Y.U. combines pan-African- ism with urban studies.” Of course, this sampling reflects the range one would ½nd in the departments of history, soci- ology, or English at these same univer- sities. But the author stresses disarray. “There’s a reason 30 years after the disci- pline developed that people still wonder whether the black-studies curriculum represents a coherent subject or a smor- gasbord,” she concludes. In this view, the discipline’s strengths–“eclectic, expansive, experimental curricula”– are also its weaknesses.9

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, 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 uni½ed paradigm is the measure of progress, then Stewart, judging forty years of African American studies, sees none. Longtime black studies educator Abdul Alkalimat echoes Stewart’s view that “standardization means the disci- pline exists.”10 Arthur Lewin, a profes- sor of black and Hispanic studies at Baruch College, agrees that black stud- ies lacks “a coherently stated rationale,” a consequence, in his view, of having

“burst full-blown upon the academic scene a generation ago.” He envisions a “grand theory” that would unify the views of black nationalists and “inclu- sionists” as well as bene½t from the in- sights of Afrocentrism while moving beyond its ethnocentrism.11

Scholars and teachers influenced by Afrocentricity have been among the most consistent advocates of the need to cre- ate a distinctive methodology. For Tem- ple University scholar Mole½ Asante, Afrocentricity “is the only way you can approach African American Studies” because it puts ancient African knowl- edge systems at the center of analysis.12 For Greg Carr of Howard University, the challenge is to draw on “deep Africana thought,” the traditions of “classical and medieval Africa,” for guidance in enact- ing positive social change for African descendants. A key mission of African American studies, he believes, should be to reconnect “narratives of African identity to the contemporary era.” His department taps “into the long genealo- gy of Africana experiences” in order to assess how to improve the world. Carr distinguishes this mission from the mis- sion of African American studies on other campuses. “We’re not trying to explain blackness for white people” or looking at “our contributions to Amer- ican society.” Rather, the approach at Howard is “an extension of the long arc of Africana intellectual work.”13 The inclination to look for insights in the precolonial African past, rejecting Euro- pean modernity and thereby hoping to escape or resolve the legacies of colonial- ism and enslavement, is fundamental to the approach that leading architects of Afrocentricity have taken. Indeed, for Ron Karenga, author of an early black studies textbook and the founder of Kwanzaa, “the fundamental point of departure for African American Studies

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or Black Studies is an ongoing dialogue with African culture. That is, continuous- ly asking it questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental questions of humankind.”14

Whether proponents of Afrocentricity or a different approach, most scholars in African American studies reject the effort to impose a single methodology, seeing it as unrealistic and stifling. Rhett Jones, cofounder and longtime chair of the de- partment of Africana studies at Brown University, was an early critic of the “one size ½ts all” approach to the discipline. “In its early years, Black studies wasted considerable human, intellectual, and material resources in battles over ½nding 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.” He points out, “Historians are no more agreed on methodology or theory than are anthropologists . . . soci- ologists or philosophers.”15 In contrast to those who see pluralism in black stud- ies as a weakness, Jones believes that this element was crucial to the development and staying power of the ½eld. Plural- ism was “a credit to black studies,” he observes, as “its founders realized there could be no master plan as to how the dis- cipline should serve black Americans.”16 Historian Francille Rusan Wilson simi- larly resists the effort to impose a single approach. “There’s not one way to be black or to study black people,” she as- serts. “The discipline is quite alive,” in her view, “and the differences indicate that.”17 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 Amer-

ican Studies.” Moreover, Hayes believes it is important to cultivate “a more flexi- ble and innovative atmosphere” so that “African American Studies can continue to grow and develop.”18

Scholars have endeavored to move be- yond the notion that African American studies was merely “additive knowledge” by emphasizing that it constitutes a pro- found critique of the major disciplines and seeks to transform intellectual life generally in the Western academy. For Eddie Glaude, African American stud- ies is about “pushing the boundaries of knowledge production” and influenc- ing ½elds of study across the university. African American studies at its best, in Glaude’s view, is “challenging the ways we know the world.” Elizabeth Alexan- der shares this emphasis on humanistic transformation and regards African American studies as an essential compo- nent of “being fully educated.” Tricia Rose’s approach to the question of the ½eld’s focus is in many respects exem- plary of dominant trends. She expresses agreement with Greg Carr that an im- portant African intellectual tradition preceded European colonial 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.”19

The early black studies movement co- incided with major anticolonial strug- gles in Angola, Mozambique, and Guin- ea-Bissau; struggles against white settler regimes in southern Africa; and a widen- ing African solidarity movement among black American radicals. According to (pioneering scholar of the African dias- pora) St. Clair Drake, “[T]he country was deeply mired in the Vietnam War

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but many black youth were much more interested in how the war against Portu- gal 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.”20 Still, a global consciousness in black studies was not simply a prod- uct of postwar solidarity struggles. It has shaped black historical writing ever since its origins in the nineteenth century. Black historiography has been both invested in rewriting the Western distortion of Afri- can peoples and societies and keenly in- terested in erecting a powerful counter- discourse to the statelessness, dispersal, subjugation, and dehumanization of Afri- cans in diaspora. W.E.B. Du Bois is most famously associated with this effort, but its practitioners are numerous.21

Although the black studies movement is thought of as resolutely U.S.-based, many of its early scholars tried to per- suade 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 dif- ½cult battle in part because African stud- ies had been programmatically estab- lished after World War II as a result of Cold War pressures to develop knowl- edge about an area of the world that the United States viewed as part of Soviet strategic designs. These programs, in the words of scholar Robert L. Harris, “had no real link to Black people in the New World.” African studies “became wed- ded to a modernization theory that mea- sured African societies by Western stan- dards. African history, culture and poli-

tics were explored more within the con- text of the colonial powers than with any attention to African cultural continuities in the Western hemisphere.” Black Amer- ican intellectuals had long resisted this “compartmentalization of knowledge about Black people.”22

Administrators initially sought to lim- it the scope of African American studies to the United States, but early efforts to include Africa as well as the diaspora in black studies departments and profes- sional organizations ultimately bore fruit. After four decades, it has become increasingly common to encounter de- partments of African and African Amer- ican 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, Dart- mouth College, the University of Min- nesota, Duke University, Harvard Uni- versity, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Kansas, Stanford Uni- versity, the University of Texas, and Ari- zona State University join together Afri- can and African American studies. Of course, the limitations of budgets and faculty size may interfere with fully real- izing the promise of interdisciplinary, truly global coverage. But the crucial point is that the black studies movement ultimately achieved a degree of success in undoing the colonialist compartmen- talization of research and knowledge that had insisted on severing African studies from African American studies.

At various junctures in its forty-year history, African American studies has been steeped in a discourse of crisis. In the 1970s, many of the discipline’s units were marked by declining course enroll- ments, budget cuts, part-time faculty, and continued questioning of their legit- imacy and scholarly rigor. The rise of

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black women’s studies in the 1980s pro- vided an extremely signi½cant counter- weight to these trends and proved criti- cal to re-visioning the ½eld. An outpour- ing of scholarship and literature by and about black women helped revitalize African American studies–and raise its stature. In many respects, this develop- ment is ironic, given the patriarchal char- acter of the early black studies movement. Male scholars dominated leadership of the ½eld and often resisted research and pedagogy on gender and sexuality, cast- ing these topics as beyond the boundaries of black studies. But as historian Darlene Clark Hine noted in 1990, after summa- rizing a body of pioneering black femi- nist scholarship, “[T]he study of black women is the current frontier in black studies.”23 In more recent years, the rise of black queer studies has further pushed African American studies to confront the homophobic and hetero-normative assumptions that shaped early pedagogy and scholarship in the ½eld. According to Tricia Rose, on the discipline’s fortieth anniversary, “[G]ender, class and sex- uality are more and more a part of the ½eld.”24 The study of intraracial divisions –along various axes–has assumed a prominent place in African American studies.

Yet in this era of escalating income in- equality, mass incarceration, permanent unemployment, and global economic restructuring, many African American studies programs and/or scholars main- tain a commitment to using scholarship and the resources of the academy to ad- dress the multiple crises facing black com- munities. Social conditions are dire for large segments of the African American population, as the middle class shrinks, hiv/aids incidence soars, jobs disap- pear, and the number of families living in poverty increases. The left-wing, or progressive, tradition in black studies

has been most visible in curricula that seek to join and engage traditions of so- cial resistance and critique. Individuals such as sociologist and radio host Michael Eric Dyson and scholar and civil rights activist Cornel West make such inter- ventions to a mass media audience, but more typical are the less well-known black studies scholars and teachers who are activists in their local communities on issues ranging from immigration to health care, employment, education, and housing. Black studies, along with other interdisciplinary ½elds, has created lead- ers in producing scholarship and engag- ing in critical social analysis on issues ranging from the rise of neoliberalism to the development of the United States as a mass prison society with all its atten- dant social, economic, cultural, and po- litical implications.25

Returning to Tavis Smiley’s question: what is the role of African American stud- ies in the age of Obama? Princeton’s Eddie Glaude argues that African Ameri- can studies teaches “the skills to under- stand race and racism,” which in many respects is more urgent than ever as we face a post-racial discourse that refuses to acknowledge racism and racists. As Elizabeth Alexander puts it, the goal is not to be post-racial, but post-racist. Tri- cia Rose believes the independent mis- sion of African American studies remains essential because “most academic knowl- edge in the west has not been race neu- tral.” The disciplines came “into forma- tion inside ideological moments when white supremacy was profoundly dom- inant,” and this formation is relatively recent.26 But has the mission of African American studies changed in other ways?

One change, commented on by many longtime professors in the ½eld, concerns a shift in the composition of students tak- ing black studies courses, from almost ex-

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clusively black in the early days to mul- tiracial in later years. Rhett Jones cites student diversity as the most striking difference from 1969: “In the early years our classes were almost entirely black. Now we know we will ½nd a rainbow of Latino, Asian American, white and black students in our Afro-American Studies courses.”27 According to Elizabeth Alex- ander, 30 percent of students at Yale are of color. “What we do,” in African Amer- ican studies, she insists, “is for all of our students.”28 This shift is widely celebrat- ed as a sign of the broad appeal of Afri- can American studies and the fact that a diverse group of students appreciates its centrality to a well-rounded liberal arts education. Yet this development also illustrates the shift away from the original Black Nationalist intent by some advocates of black studies–that is, to halt “the mis-education of the Negro” and instill black collegians with a strong racial consciousness. As the black liber- ation movement waned, the ambitious visions of the more radical Afro-Amer- ican studies programs also waned, or were crushed, depending on the campus. And as employment prospects soured in the 1970s, black students pursued an agenda in higher education more close- ly tied to acquiring job skills and profes- sional mobility. According to a business major at George Washington University at the time, “Black students are taking accounting instead of black history as a matter of survival. They’re asking ‘what can you do with Black Studies?’”29

In more recent years, black students have faced a series of obstacles in their efforts to attend college. Forty years ago, student activists asserted a right to edu- cation and not only won open admissions and af½rmative action but also increased ½nancial aid. Many of these reforms have been repealed outright or dramatically weakened. The early black studies move-

ment was a vibrant development in both urban, working-class public institutions and elite research universities. This dual presence survives, but as the incorpora- tion of African American studies by elite institutions coincides with the defund- ing of public institutions and the sharp rise in economic inequality in the United States, a widening chasm has formed between these locations, and distanced them from their shared histories. These developments have led some commu- nity-based black studies programs or veterans to question the contemporary direction of the ½eld. The rise to public prominence of black studies scholars at Ivy League institutions likely fuels this feeling of estrangement. Olive Harvey College, a working-class public institu- tion based on the South Side of Chica- go, has been hosting an annual African American Studies Conference since 1977. On its thirteenth anniversary, confer- ence convener Armstead Allen expressed concern that the new wave of black stud- ies proponents had strayed too far from the founding mission. “From its incep- tion, black studies has sought tangible, not just theoretical, connections to the everyday concerns of the African-Amer- ican community,” he said, contending that the ½eld had moved in less relevant academic directions.30

The relationship between African American studies and Latina/o, Asian American, and other ethnic studies is increasingly broached in this era of rap- idly changing demographics and new racial discourses and con½gurations. On the one hand, African American studies is respected as a pioneer and looked to as a model of interdisciplinarity as well as institutional resourcefulness and longevity. As Rhett Jones rightly notes, “Ideas about multiculturalism, plural- ism, and diversity are now central ele- ments in higher education because of

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black studies’ many successes. Cynics and conservatives predicted that Afri- cana studies would be a fad, but it has instead proved to be a strong and endur- ing part of higher education, shaping scholarship, teaching, and service.” In addition, “African American studies serves as the model for ethnic studies, women’s studies, Native-American stud- ies, Latino studies and Asian-American studies.”31 This modeling happened quickly on many campuses in Califor- nia, where, in the late 1960s, radicalized Asian American and Mexican American students demanded curricular inclusion and recognition, and in New York City, where Puerto Rican students protested alongside African Americans in the 1969 uprisings that swept the City University of New York.

But the push for Latino/a, Asian Amer- ican, and comparative ethnic studies came later in other parts of the country. In some instances, budgetary pressures and the seeming logic of the white/non-white divide have induced administrators to collapse heretofore independent black studies programs into umbrella ethnic studies units, introducing new anxieties into a discipline whose resources and stature, to the extent that it has them, have come relatively recently. In any event, African American studies will face many challenges and dilemmas as it adapts to a new intellectual/political/ demographic landscape. For example,

Muslims in the United States have been targets of many forms of racial pro½ling in the years since the attacks of Septem- ber 11, 2001, politicizing a new Muslim generation that has begun to assert itself on college campuses. These students are demanding a voice and place among eth- nic studies and student-of-color organi- zations. Will African American studies approach this development as an oppor- tunity to cultivate solidarity and sharpen and update its analysis of racism in the United States? Or will it ignore such concerns in favor of an exclusive focus on the culture, struggles, and dilemmas of African Americans?

Arguably the most exciting develop- ment for African American studies in the twenty-½rst century is the expansion of doctoral programs. The opportunity to train young scholars can only add to the growth, rigor, and institutional stature of the ½eld. But ensuring the success of this development will necessitate further investments in order to enable depart- ments to provide the additional mentor- ing and teaching graduate education re- quires. After forty years, it is now clear that African American studies has been one of a series of new departures in the academy that have dramatically altered the narrow, Western-oriented curricu- lum and culture of the American uni- versity. Perhaps a fuller appreciation of what has been accomplished can inspire hope in the possibilities that lie ahead.

endnotes 1 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Show, Pub-

lic Radio International, original airdate September 18, 2009, http://thetavissmileyshow .com/100108_index.html.

2 Ibid. 3 Charles V. Hamilton, “They Demand Relevance: Black Students Protest, 1968–1969”

(unpublished manuscript, c. 1971), 70; copy in author’s possession.

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4 Charles Hamilton, “The Place of the Black College in the Human Rights Struggle,” Negro Digest 16 (11) (September 1967): 6 –7.

5 Darwin T. Turner, “The Center for African Afro-American Studies at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University,” Journal of Negro Education 39 (3) (Summer 1970): 221–222.

6 The (Howard) Hilltop, April 26, 1968. 7 Nathan Huggins, Afro-American Studies: A Report to the Ford Foundation (New York:

Ford Foundation, 1985), xx. 8 Steven V. Roberts, “Black Studies Aim to Change Things,” The New York Times,

May 15, 1969. 9 Alison Schneider, “Black Studies 101: Introductory Courses Reflect a Field Still De½n-

ing Itself,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2000. 10 Ibid. 11 Arthur Lewin, “Towards a Grand Theory of Black Studies: An Attempt to Discern the

Dynamics and the Direction of the Discipline,” Western Journal of Black Studies 25 (2) (Summer 2001): 76.

12 Mary-Christine Philip, “Of Black Studies: Pondering Strategies for the Future,” Black Issues in Higher Education, December 29, 1994.

13 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Show. 14 Maulana Karenga, “Black Studies: A Critical Reassessment,” Race and Reason 4 (1997–

1998): 41. 15 Rhett Jones, “Black Studies Failures and ‘First Negroes,’” Black Issues in Higher Education,

October 20, 1994. 16 Rhett Jones, “The Lasting Contributions of African American Studies,” Journal of Blacks

in Higher Education 6 (Winter 1994–1995): 92. 17 Schneider, “Black Studies 101.” 18 Floyd V. Hayes, “Preface to Instructors,” in Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American

Studies, ed. Floyd V. Hayes (San Diego, Calif.: Collegiate Press, 2000), xxxvi. 19 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Show. 20 St. Clair Drake, “Black Studies and Global Perspectives: An Essay,” Journal of Negro Edu-

cation 53 (3) (Summer 1984): 231. 21 A global focus had long characterized black history writing. See Robin Kelley, “‘But a

Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950” The Journal of American History 86 (3) (1999).

22 Robert L. Harris, “The Intellectual and Institutional Development of Africana Studies,” in Black Studies in the United States: Three Essays, ed. Robert Hine, Robert L. Harris, Jr., and Nellie McKay (New York: Ford Foundation, 1990; repr., Inclusive Scholarship, 2009), 95–94.

23 Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Studies: An Overview,” in Black Studies in the United States, ed. Hine, Harris, and McKay, 23–24.

24 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Show. 25 See, for example, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of

Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); and David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2008).

26 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia.” The Tavis Smiley Show. 27 Jones, “The Lasting Contributions of African American Studies,” 92.

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28 “40th Anniversary of African American Studies in Academia,” The Tavis Smiley Show. 29 Art Harris, “Black Studies Enrollment Shows Dramatic Decline,” The Washington Post,

November 11, 1979. 30 Salim Muwakkil, “After 20 Years, New Respect for Black Studies,” In These Times,

May 16–22, 1990. 31 Jones, “The Lasting Contributions of African American Studies,” 92.

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