From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline

Appendixes

Appendix A: Note on Research Method Numerous tools are needed to assess black studies’ political and organizational development. Although the black student movement of the late 1960s is well known, it has not received the same coverage from historians and social scientists as the civil rights movement or other 1960s movements such as the Vietnam War protesters. Therefore, researchers investigating black studies’ social or administrative history must consult bureaucratic archives, student newspapers, and other sources of information. In addition to textual sources, interviews provide information not found in archival files and published sources. This is especially important, given that university departments inconsistently donate their records to archives. Often, interviews are the only method for collecting information on university decision making that took place in the distant past. To collect information about black studies programs, I consulted published sources on well-known programs, historical treatments, first-person accounts of student activism , and higher education reference books, such as the College Board’s Index of College Majors. I also spoke to people who had been involved with black studies programs as proponents or critics. I consulted various reports issued by black studies programs, government offices, and nonprofit groups that were available in university libraries. These documents and discussions helped me develop a rough view of black studies’ history and an understanding of the field that suggested lines for research. Some research questions were easily answered with existing data. For instance, a natural question concerns the number of universities that have black studies programs. Higher education reference books provide a convenient list of black studies programs. Other questions required slightly more effort. For example, chapter 6 answers a question about student protest and program creation with data culled from newspapers, government databases, and other public data sources. The most demanding data collectiontaskinthatcasewascallingprogramchairstoaskabouttheageof theirprogram. However, most of this book uses data that I collected myself or that was stored in archives. In some cases, this data was easy to collect. For example, Chapter 6 discusses attitudes among black studies professors. To collect this data, I created a roster of all black studies professors and asked every one of them to complete a questionnaire using their Web browser. There is little to distinguish the Survey of Issues in Africana Studies from any other survey, except for its use of Web-based survey technology. Similarly, when I chose to interview retired Ford Foundation officers, most of them were willing to speak at great length about their careers and their relationship to black studies. Appendixes In other cases, there was great difficulty in obtaining data. My requests for interviews were often ignored or rejected. There were instances when a person I wanted to contact could not be found or had died. In a few cases, interviewees reacted negatively to my questions. Perhaps the most challenging issue is the use of archival sources.Some archives were easy to find and use. The Ford Foundation archives, which I used extensively in writing chapter 5, are unusual in that they are well known and well maintained. After reading the foundation’s reports on black studies, I learned that the foundation had extensive records of their support for the field.The Ford Foundation preserves huge amounts of materials, maintains excellent records, and employs a highly efficient computer system for filing and tracking documents. Furthermore, the Ford Foundation archives are extensively used by foundation staff and external researchers, which means that the archives’ staff makes retrieving and viewing documents a painless task. In contrast, many times I visited a university only to find that the archives contained nearly nothing about the campus’s black studies program. Librarians informed me that academic departments do not regularly deposit papers; records are left at the discretion of individual faculty members. Therefore, it was through sheer luck that I was able to build the document collection I would need. I learned about the federal government’s collection of Third World Strike documents while looking for minority college enrollment reports on a federal government Web site. The Grace Holt Papers, which provide extensive information about the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, came to my attention only when I spoke to Darnell Hawkins , a professor emeritus and former chair of the program. Similarly, many individuals knew about document caches at various archives and were generous enough to point me in the right direction. The existence of a few collections is not public yet because the...