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

1 The Movement That Became an Institution

On November 5, 1968, black students at San Francisco State College gave President Robert Smith a list of ten demands. The first demand was that the college immediately create a Department of Black Studies. Other demands included the appointment of Nathan Hare, a Chicago-trained sociologist, as department chair and the reinstatement of George Murray, a Black Panther and student who was suspended from the college for attacking the editor of the student newspaper. A few days later, other students calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front issued similar demands for a School of Ethnic Studies. If the demands were not immediately met, the students would strike to shut down the campus. Although Smith supported black studies and ethnic studies, he would not reinstate Murray or appoint Hare.With that declaration, the Third World Strike started. From November 1968 to March 1969, students fought with administrators until the college’s next president reached an agreement ending the conflict and the first Department of Black Studies was born. Incidents like the Third World Strike stand out in the popular imagination as black studies’ defining moment. However, protest and black power are only the beginning of the story. Soon after militant students graduated and campuses settled down, black studies entered a new stage in its development as an academic discipline.Writing in the New York University Education Quarterly in 1979, St. Clair Drake asked, “what happened to black studies?” He observed that black studies had moved away from its roots in the black student movement of the late 1960s and begun a new stage in its development: c h a p t e r o n e The Movement That Became an Institution What black studies were turning out to be was neither what their most youthful, dedicated supporters had envisioned nor what white faculties and administrators had wanted them to accept. The black studies movement was becoming institutionalized in the sense that it had moved from the conflict phase into adjustment to the existing educational system, with some of its values being accepted by that system. One of these was the concept that an ideal university community would be multi-ethnic, with ethnicity permitted some institutional expression , and with black studies being one of its sanctioned forms. A trade-off was involved. Black studies became depoliticized and deradicalized.¹ Drake’s theme is accommodation and compromise within the system of American higher education. Protest created an opportunity within the university system, but the black studies movement did not completely transform educational institutions. Instead, black students created an arena for the expression of new values within the university system. At the time Drake wrote the article,much evidence supported his thesis.Fifteen hundred students had been awarded B.A. degrees in black studies; black studies professional organizations had been formed; and there were more than two hundred black studies degree programs nationwide, many of which were interdepartmental programs. The field demonstrated that it was quickly developing the institutional infrastructure normally associated with older academic disciplines. Black studies’ recent history further confirms the contention that the field has accommodated itself to American academia. For example, at least seven universities now offer doctoral degrees in black studies, surely a sign that the field has found a place in higher education.² The assembly of Harvard’s black studies “dream team”in the 1990s confirms that administrators have responded to the values promoted by the black studies movement.³ The implicit endorsement of black studies by the administration of an elite research university brought the field publicity and legitimacy, enabling black studies to be more fully developed in other research universities.⁴ Of course, there also has been much tension and conflict over black studies. Afrocentrists, Nile Valley scholars , and their critics argued fiercely in the 1990s.⁵ At Harvard, the tensions between black studies professors and the administration erupted into the national media.⁶Yet,theseincidentsreinforcethebasicpoint:criticsfocusonblackstudies precisely because it is located in highly prestigious universities. Black studies programs occupy an ambiguous position in the academy. On 2 From Black Power to Black Studies the one hand, the discipline is highly visible and well established in America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Multiculturalists interpret the emergence of black studies as the first step in a racial diversification of the academy.⁷ From their perspective, black studies was the discipline emerging from the 1960s that encouraged women, Latinos, Native Americans...