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6 Black Student Power The Struggle for Black Studies As a result of the spring 1968 protest, things changed drastically at Columbia. With the mass arrest that took place on campus, SDS observed the radicalization of many Columbia students. With a large number of students advocating change in the university, President Kirk and the administration had to accede to some of the protesters’ demands. That summer, Columbia University students made history at their school with the creation of the Joint Committee on Disciplinary Affairs, which consisted of students as well as faculty and administrators. Subsequently, the group oversaw disciplinary cases. SDS also achieved its goal of having the school terminate ties with the IDA. In the New York Times in September 1969, Columbia went “on record for the immediate withdrawal” of American soldiers from Vietnam and its cessation of relations with the IDA.1 One last demand that many radical students did not expect President Kirk to meet was his own resignation from the university. On August 23, 1968, exactly five months from the start of the spring demonstration, Grayson Kirk and David Truman stepped down as the president and vice president. This might have been good news to SDS leader Mark Rudd, but at the end of the 1968 school year he had decided not to return to school and instead pursued a career as a traveling lecturer.2 Incidentally, in September 1968 SDS lost its privileges to use on-campus facilities.3 Andrew Cordier, from the School of International Affairs, took over the reins of the university as acting president; he found that he also would face his share of controversy from SDS and SAS in the upcoming school year. Like Kirk, Cordier, as president of a white institution, had to deal with the militant black movement known as Black Power. According to the tenets of Black Power, as noted by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), former president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, black people must go through several processes to reach a position of power in the United States. One of these was redefinition, which involved the reclamation of the history of black people and black people defining themselves by showing pride in their culture. Another process, political modernization, included three steps: “(1) questioning old values and institutions of society; (2) searching for new and different forms of political structure to solve political and economic problems; and (3) broadening the base of political participation to include more people in the decision-making process.”4 Black Power, at its peak during the late 1960s, influenced the protest efforts of Columbia’s SAS in its campaign for the academic inclusion of black-focused programs of study, as well as the increased acceptance of fellow black students. This chapter will discuss the rise of black studies and the effort by Columbia’s black students to create a black studies institute. The struggle to include black studies as a subject in the academic curricula of colleges and universities did not begin in the 1960s. Historians such as Carter G. Woodson, William Leo Hansberry, and John Henrik Clarke began the quest for black studies much earlier in the century. In 1915 Woodson brought into existence one of the first organizations dedicated solely to the study of black people. In the executive director’s office of Chicago’s Wabash Avenue YMCA, Woodson and several of his colleagues created the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).5 One of the purposes of the group, according to an association pamphlet, was “to promote the study of black history through schools, colleges, churches, homes, fraternal groups, and clubs.” Woodson fortified the ASNLH by establishing “Negro History Week” in 1926 and the Negro History Bulletin in 1937. Until his death in 1950, Woodson’s work with the ASNLH laid the foundation for black studies as students would know it in the late 1960s. Starting in the 1920s, William Leo Hansberry did his own part to add to the recognition of black culture and history. After graduating from Harvard University, Hansberry took an appointment at Howard University, where he lectured on the contributions of Africans to world history. The first to teach courses of that sort in any college or university, Hansberry was unpopular among many of his fellow scholars who had not witnessed the careful research that he had conducted. The black scholar then went on to receive his master’s degree from Harvard in anthropology...

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