Black Studies, Names Controversy

Black Studies, as it emerged on university and college campuses across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was fundamentally the product of the many sacrifices of countless black students. Much of the early philosophical confusion surrounding the field was reflected in the lack of clarity the students found in the naming process itself, thus Black Studies is referred to by a thicket of names.

These black students—with the support of the small cadre of black faculty and staff who joined them (there were very few black faculty and staff at most predominantly white universities and colleges at that time), as well as with sympathetic white students, faculty, and staff—sought to establish institutional structures that would enable them to study systematically, and from a black perspective, the lives and works of black people in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. They did not seek to simply infuse existing courses in, say, history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and English with some black-related materials or to graft onto the curricula of these disciplines courses with “Black,” [Page 159]“Afro-American,” “African American,” or “African” in their titles. They sought to break away from the whitedominated content of virtually all of the classes to which they were exposed and reorient their education in a direction that gave them a sounder social and psychological mooring in regard to the lives and works of black people. At the very outset, then, Black Studies was seen as a corrective to the extant curricula of just about every college and university in the American academy.

Black students, who made untold selfless sacrifices to lay the institutional foundations of Black Studies, held very strong views and opinions about what they wanted, though they generally lacked the knowledge and experience necessary to achieve what they envisioned. Furthermore, they usually did not receive support from their black professors, as of the few blacks who filled faculty and staff roles at predominantly white colleges and universities, many did not subscribe to the creation of Black Studies departments, divisions, programs, and so on. Given the small cadre of black faculty and staff who shared the sentiments of the students concerning the institutionalization of Black Studies, it was the desires, demands, and pressure of black students that were foremost in impelling largely white administrators and faculty to establish Black Studies on their campuses.