The Battle for Black Studies

Founding the First PhD in Black Studies: A Sankofa Remembrance and Critical Assessment of Its Significance

“…Nathan Hare (1972) called for Black Studies to keep its original mission if it is to rightfully advance and serve its fundamental transformative and emancipatory function. He stated thatBlack Studies is at best a mass movement and mass struggle based on the notion that education belongs to the people and the idea is to give it back to them.…”

“…Led by students, joined, and supported by faculty, staff, and community activists, the struggle for Black Studies arrived on campus in the late 1960s as both an intellectual and political challenge to the university (Claybrook, 2016; Edwards, 1970; Rogers, 2012; T’Shaka, 1982). This initiative challenged the university’s functioning and its claims, its racist and exclusionary policies in admissions and hiring of Black people and other people of color, its Eurocentric self-congratulatory narrative posing as curriculum, its complicity in societal oppression, and the manifest and disadvantaging irrelevance of its education in serving the needs of the students and addressing meaningfully the intellectual and social urgencies of the context and the times (Allen, 1974; Hare, 1972; Karenga, 2010).…”

“…For an education to be useful to the community meant that it must cultivate and produce intellectual activists, scholars, and professionals who are committed and prepared to serve the community, to aid it in its struggles for cultural and political liberation, social and racial justice, and political and economic empowerment. Nathan Hare (1972), the founder of the first Black Studies program and department, writes that the early advocates of Black Studies understood and advocated for education as “an education for liberation or at least change.” Thus, “it was to prepare Black students to become catalysts for a Black cultural revolution. All courses—whether history, literature or mathematics—would be taught from a revolutionary ideology or perspective.…”

Blackness, Empire and migration: How Black Studies transforms the curriculum

“…One of the first Black Studies courses was founded at San Francisco State College in 1969, after a five‐month strike that included students and faculty, who were organising for a range of ethnic studies to be incorporated into campus. Nathan Hare (1972) called the emergence of Black Studies a “battle,” which is apt given that students at Cornell University felt the need to arm themselves in defence of threats by the KKK after they occupied Willard Straight Hall (Downs, 1999). Black Studies only emerged because of student and community mobilisations and was rooted in the Black liberation struggle of the time.…”

“…This was designed to wed Black communities, heretofore excluded, and the educational process, to transform the black community. (Hare, 1972, p. 33)…”