Bobby Wilson’s Black Perspective on Geography and Clark’s Graduate School of Geography

“Can Geography, as a set of concepts and tools, be of relevance in solving the problems of the Black American community?”

This is the question that Bobby Wilson and Herman Jenkins posed as the opening sentence for their 1972 essay in Antipode.¹ In the essay, Wilson and Jenkins (1972) discussed the symposium titled “The present and future state of geography: Some black perspectives” that was held March 9–11 in 1972 at Clark University. The symposium had been organized by Donald Deskins, Jr., urban geographer and sociologist, whose efforts to increase Black geographers included his leadership of the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG’s) Commission on Geography and Afro-America (COMGA). Wilson and Jenkins noted that the question they posed was one often raised in discussions by them and other Black students in the Graduate School of Geography (GSG) at Clark University (Kobayashi 2014). They index the pervasiveness of the question to the theses and dissertations addressed to the question of race, and the fact that most of the anti-racist research and work critical of segregation was being done by graduate students who were in the COMGA Program (Choi 2018). Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) related that the question posed was “implicit in the conflicts that sometimes occur between the Black students and departmental faculty and administration.” These conflicts had much to do with the Black students’ presence at Clark, a predominately white institution. Even as Saul B. Cohen was attempting to increase Black American graduate student enrollment through the AAG’s COMGA Program and Clark’s own Teachers Teaching Teachers (Triple T) Program, faculty across Clark’s campus openly expressed support for Jim Crow policies and scientific racism (Choi 2018).

Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) noted what they saw as the main question facing Black academics entering geography, then a very new profession for them: “should black geographers address themselves to the profession as an organized group or as individuals?” As they remember it, this question permeated all the sessions at the symposium just as it did the daily lives of Black students at Clark. Wilson and Jenkins saw two schools of thought: one that argued for intra-racial unity as the basis of a Black social consciousness that would drive social change; and another organized around a philosophy of individualism that rationalized internalized antiblackness. They expressed frustration with some Black geographers, who based on “perceived status (real or fancied) in the geographic establishment” saw “themselves as something akin to plantation straw bosses resisting attempts by malcontent field hands to change the pattern of things” (Wilson and Jenkins 1972, 43). This critique of self-serving Black individualism was borne of what Du Bois would perhaps call double consciousness or what Franz Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks. The questions and critiques that Bobby Wilson posited alongside Jenkins, and those he would go on to articulate, as well as the deep insights he has so lucidly provided over his career show a deep concern with the methodologies and epistemologies of Black Geographies, and the professional politics of Black geographers.

Contemporaneous comments by Cohen, Director of the GSG, give us a sense of how the conflicts Wilson and Jenkins discussed were shaping Clark University, the GSG, and the relationship of these two institutions not only to the students in residence, but to alumni.² In his Director’s Message for the 1970 issue of The Monadnock (the student and alumni magazine published by the Clark University Geographical Society – CUGS) Cohen reflected on the fiftieth anniversary of the GSG and framed the agenda for the growth of the department this way:

I can say with some confidence to all of you that 1970–71 — the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of the School of Geography — will see us well prepared to meet the next quarter of a century as a unique geographical institution…. Our commitment to geography at Clark will be within a multi- and inter-disciplinary context. And the lines of communication among students and faculty are open… But many alumni are not thinking of disciplines or...