The Marginalization of the Black Campus Movement

Most of the small amount of literature on the Black Power Movement consists of autobiographies or are examinations of the Black Panther Party. That's why Peniel Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour, Clayborne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar's Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, and Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975—all scholarly non-autobiographical, non-Black Panther literature—are so important as they inquire about the breadth of the movement. However, as they seek to demarginalize the Black Power Movement, this review essays shows that they in turn marginalize (in varying degrees) the struggle waged by Black college students to reform higher education and the vanguard organization of that struggle, the San Francisco State Black Student Union. They marginalize the Black Campus Movement and its leading organization despite many of the icons of the Black Power Movement coming into their own in college, and most of noteworthy Black Power protest and reforms occurring on these campuses.