Black Studies Matters

Will the Black Lives Matter movement succeed? The entire country waits with bated breath to hear that question answered. And although pundits and protestors alike have compared Black Lives Matter to the civil rights movement generally in order to evaluate and predict the future of the contemporary demonstrations, a specific branch of that earlier campaign deserves additional attention.
The black studies discipline, born out of such protest, continues to influence modern equality crusades. Today, the discipline plays a part in movements by providing the historical context in which to understand them. Black Lives Matter leaders can use this context of racial progress to set a direction for the movement in order to create and sustain equitable solutions for American communities.

From Student to Activist
After helping win major victories for civil rights on the national level, students of the 1960s began to critically reexamine their own colleges and demand educational opportunities that explicitly addressed racial issues. Protestors in the black studies movement “felt like they did not have a central part in the curriculum, and they felt like black studies would become that part,” Ibram Kendi, a professor at SUNY-Albany and author of The Black Campus Movement, told the HPR.
The methodology of those original protests ran in the same vein as the wider civil rights movement. Campus activists employed everything from rallies and sit-ins to threats of violence as part of their campaign for black studies programs, said Saint Louis University professor Stefan Bradley, the author of Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Direct negotiation with school administrators became one of the most effective tactics. “Students spent a good deal of time meeting with faculty members and trustees in order to get black studies a unit on the various campuses,” Bradley explained to the HPR. “At the time, it seemed rather spectacular, because people hadn’t really seen that on college campuses before.”
In the late 1960s, many school administrators capitulated to the protests and established black studies programs on their campuses. In researching his book, Kendi found that university presidents across the nation prioritized the prevention of campus disruption over the rejection of black studies curriculum. If schools continued to resist the movement, they risked the ire of a sizable portion of their student bodies and members of surrounding communities. The protest power of these combined groups would have been enough to paralyze campuses. Black studies departments were therefore established in large part as a way to placate protestors. By the early 1970s, colleges in every region of the country had black studies.
The communities surrounding campuses heavily influenced whether administrators would establish black studies programs. Kendi observed that leaders of historically white universities near black communities were more likely to create programs in order to avoid violent protest. Bradley agreed that proximity to strong black movements was a decisive factor: at San Francisco State College—the first school to establish black studies—it was the Black Panthers and other black militant groups; at Columbia, it was the Harlem community; at Yale, it was a nearby trial of Black Panthers in New Haven. Thus, many black studies programs owe their inceptions to communities’ involvement.
From Activism to Academia
From the beginning, public opinion of black studies was skeptical: never before had an academic discipline emerged through such controversial means. Some critics claimed that black students only wanted programming so that they would not have to compete against white students, Bradley told the HPR. It was imperative that black studies undergo a transition to gain respect as an academic discipline.
Black studies did succeed in achieving a respected status on many campuses as an equal academic discipline; however, some programs have done so at a cost to their social activist roots. “In a lot of ways, universities create a sort of bubble around themselves,” said Bradley. “African American studies … in some cases, fell victim to that kind of bubble.” Over time, some programs saw their relationships with the surrounding black communities weaken. Kendi sees such programs as “socially irresponsible,” especially given the discipline’s activist origins.
Indiana University professor Fabio Rojas disagrees. “Black studies is an academic thing, so it’s designed for academia,” the author of From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline told the HPR. Consequently, he argued, black studies should not be officially involved with campus activism.
Indeed, black studies’ influence on the Black Lives Matter movement has not been through official involvement with protesting groups. Professor Bradley, whose proximity to the Ferguson protests has given him a firsthand perspective on the movement, told the HPR that he was unaware of any black studies program lending support to the protests. Fadhal Moore, the co-chair of the Harvard Black Community Leaders, and Cary Williams, the president of the Association of Black Harvard Women, told the HPR that many individual faculty members from a variety of disciplines have shown solidarity with the protests. However, that interaction has been individual rather than departmental.
Instead, black studies programs exert their primary influence on the protests by contextualizing the current struggle within black history. “I think that by creating the intellectual framework for this kind of criticism, [black studies programs] are providing a valuable service to the rest of society … even if they aren’t running the protests,” Rojas told the HPR. To this, Williams added, “Given the deep historical context of these issues, I’m even more inspired to take action, because it’s not like these things popped up yesterday. They’ve been around for generations.”
New Movement, New Goals
Despite the similarities between the black studies movement and Black Lives Matter, the latter faces challenges regarding its future direction. Current leaders would be wise to look to the black studies movement’s clear platform and remarkable persistence as a model to create lasting change.
Meeting with faculty, a revolutionary strategy in the 1960s, has become more commonplace now. For the Black Lives Matter movement at Harvard University, interaction with administration and faculty has become an element of its outreach strategy. Moore told the HPR that students have been communicating regularly with the administration about events associated with Black Lives Matter. Williams echoed this claim and stated that the administration has “stepped up” in addressing issues of racism on campus. In the weeks following dialogue with student leaders, Harvard’s administration showed support for the movement through an official statement from President Drew Faust, a picture of Faust wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on the university’s Instagram account, and organizational support during the controversial Primal Scream protest.
For both the black studies and the Black Lives Matter movements, a national leader has been conspicuously absent. Instead, the demonstrations were—and remain—highly localized, with leaders and participants coming chiefly from the affected communities. Kendi argues that this lack of national leadership helped the black studies activists succeed because it “made it more difficult for their opponents to strike down their leaders and consequently end their protests.” Some critics, he added, “have made the case that those protestors that have had leaders in the past have been more successful. … [However,] that’s not necessarily historically accurate.” Indeed, several movements, such as the Vietnam War protests and the marriage equality movement, have achieved success without a single leader.
But for many current protestors, the lack of defined leadership can be frustrating. Moore acknowledged that although he appreciates the flat structure of the Black Lives Matter movement, it sometimes detracts from the efforts to organize protests and rallies. “Most of our time is spent on [coordinating], as opposed to actual action,” he explained. Additional organization, he reasons, would help focus the movement’s energy. Professor Rojas agreed with Moore’s sentiment, noting, “Having some structure is highly valuable … [and] you need some sort of organized interaction with the state if you ever want to change things.” That interaction, for Rojas, requires more structured, national leadership from the movement.
Even without an overlying national structure, the black studies movement’s concrete goals enabled protestors to advocate for and attain their objectives. Furthermore, the movement did not necessarily need centralized leadership, as it focused primarily on negotiating with individual colleges. But for the Black Lives Matter protests, creating a similar set of clearly stated objectives has been a challenge. Much of the attention has so far been placed on “shutting this racist system down” rather than advocating for concrete policy proposals. “[Protests now] are usually not as instrumental and not as goal-oriented as they were in the 1960s,” Rojas said. “[Back then,] people had very clear goals in mind. They had built the right tools to achieve those goals, and they were very dogged about it over a period of decades.”
Bradley sees promise in smaller reforms in Ferguson’s municipal government, as well as in the few policy goals—like putting cameras on police officers—that have emerged. McKenzie Morris, a third-year law student and the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, expressed hope to the HPR that these policies would take hold. “The police cameras, in my opinion, are the first tangible step through which people are trying to get to the main goal, which is accountability,” she said. “That is the main policy goal out of all of this: a true checks and balances system that does not currently exist.”
The current movement’s prospects to create lasting changes remain uncertain. Bradley sees promise in what student protestors have been able to accomplish so far. Now that they have “the whole world watching,” he believes more substantial reforms can take place. But for Rojas, such reforms will only come through organization. “That’s my message for the modern movements of today,” he stated. “You can raise consciousness. You can shift the discourse a little bit. But until you start hitting the pocketbook, until you start making people lose elections, until you make people lose customers, there’s not going to be a whole lot of change.”
This article has been updated from an earlier version (2/24/15).
Image credit: Yale University Library