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

2 The Road to Black Studies

Black studies’ history is remarkable because its establishment in 1968 was a sudden event. Before the 1960s, there was a substantial amount of black scholarship and intellectual work, but it was rarely taught in college courses. Since the nineteenth century, black intellectuals had developed a corpus of historical , literary, and sociological work, but few colleges and universities explicitly dedicated themselves to this body of knowledge. But during the 1960s, a number of events, such as the civil rights mobilization, encouraged students and intellectuals to demand the institutionalization of knowledge about black culture .Almost overnight,students were making demands for new academic units as they marched in picket lines and conducted sit-ins. The questions addressed in this chapter are as follows: How did the demand for black studies emerge from the turbulent 1960s? How did social trends of the mid-1960s converge to enable students to effectively shut down college campuses to demand, among other things, black studies programs? What specific tools and ideas did students obtain in 1968 that allowed them to bring a new academic discipline into existence? To address these questions, I draw from sociological theories of how social movements emerge and press for demands.A key lesson from social movement research is that social change does not emerge from a vacuum.Even when individuals believe that society is moving in the wrong direction or that the state is oppressive or otherwise illegitimate, they do not automatically act together for social change. Instead, social movements emerge from years of planning and c h a p t e r t w o The Road to Black Studies debate among the aggrieved.¹ Individuals feel that not only is their situation unjust, it is also something that can be alleviated through struggle and sacri- fice.² They form organizations that have multiple functions such as collecting money, providing avenues of communication, and creating a place for people to meet.³ Social ties between movement participants reinforce shared identities and a commitment to change and are a valuable resource for future action. However, it is not sufficient for a movement to develop the infrastructure for action. A second lesson from movement research is that movement groups must create and exploit opportunities for social change. Even the most well organized and highly motivated groups will find it difficult to change a popular institution or social practice. Events that are beyond the movement’s control might undermine public confidence or otherwise weaken a movement target, allowing challengers to more easily assert their claims.⁴ Consider the position of the Bolsheviks in 1916. Had not the First World War completely undermined the tsarist regime and then Kerensky’s government, the Soviet state, as we now understand it, might never have been founded. Without external events disrupting the Russian state’s capacity for internal repression of dissidents , the Bolsheviks might have been completely stifled, turning out to be a small footnote in early twentieth-century Russian history. Thus, the important lesson from social movement research is that movements often need political opportunities and a substantial level of internal development. This perspective, which emphasizes both a movement’s internal development and its political context, suggests that the demands for black studies were made possible by broader trends of desegregation in America, the rise of speci fic grievances leveled at colleges, and the maturation of black political organizations that black students used to launch their campaigns. The current chapter discusses these specific conditions in order to untangle the story of how black studies was made possible by the unique combination of these three trends. First, I discuss the desegregation of college campuses.Without the sudden influx of black students at predominantly white campuses in the mid1960s , there simply would not have been enough black students to organize mass action.Thus, this chapter begins with a discussion of what college life was like for black students pre–Brown v. Board of Education. Drawing from published biographies and academic research, I discuss the court decisions that allowed black students to matriculate in white colleges in larger numbers, how that changed life for black college students,and the political groups that formed at historically black colleges. The Road to Black Studies 23 The second part of this chapter discusses the ideological situation circa 1966. After the civil rights movement’s stunning political successes of the mid1960s , activists and intellectuals became disillusioned with the...