Solved by verified expert:I need someone to help me to write a informal response or a summary 300-400 Words for the book that i will upload for only chapter 1 and chapter 8 and the conclusion. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus: Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 8, and Conclusion.
martha_biondi_the_black_revolution_on_campus_university_of_california_press__2012_.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
The Black Revolution
on Campus
Martha Biondi
university of california press
Berkeley
•
Los Angeles
•
London
The Black Revolution on Campus
This page intentionally left blank
The Black Revolution
on Campus
Martha Biondi
university of california press
Berkeley
•
Los Angeles
•
London
University of California Press, one of the most
distinguished university presses in the United States,
enriches lives around the world by advancing
scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and
natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC
Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions
from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2012 by Martha Biondi
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biondi, Martha.
The Black revolution on campus / Martha Biondi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-26922-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. African American student movements.
2. African American college students—Political
activity—History—20th century. 3. African
Americans—Education (Higher)—History. I. Title.
LC2781.B38 2012
378.1’982996073—dc23
2012001211
Manufactured in the United States of America
20
10
19 18 17 16 15 14 13
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC
Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a
100 percent postconsumer fiber paper that is FSC
certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and
manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is
acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction. The Black Revolution on Campus
vii
1
1. Moving toward Blackness: The Rise
of Black Power on Campus
13
2. A Revolution Is Beginning: The Strike
at San Francisco State
43
3. A Turbulent Era of Transition: Black Students
and a New Chicago
79
4. Brooklyn College Belongs to Us: The Transformation
of Higher Education in New York City
114
5. Toward a Black University: Radicalism, Repression,
and Reform at Historically Black Colleges
142
6. The Counterrevolution on Campus: Why Was Black
Studies So Controversial?
174
7. The Black Revolution Off-Campus
211
8. What Happened to Black Studies?
241
Conclusion. Reflections on the Movement and Its Legacy
268
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
Index
279
319
325
329
331
This page intentionally left blank
Illustrations
Figure 1. Political scientist Charles Hamilton / 21
Figure 2. In March 1968, students at Howard
University occupied the administration building / 38
Figure 3. Sociologist Nathan Hare / 50
Figure 4. Strike leaders address a rally / 61
Figure 5. Strike leaders at the head of a mass march of ten thousand
students on campus during “December days” / 63
Figure 6. Tactical squad police brutally beat and arrested
Don McAllister / 64
Figure 7. Students in front of the Northwestern building
that housed the bursar’s office / 86
Figure 8. Northwestern student Eva Jefferson (later Eva Jefferson
Paterson) at a Chicago rally / 88
Figure 9. White student sympathizers show support / 90
Figure 10. Graduate student James Turner explains the goals
for the sit-in to the media / 91
Figure 11. Lerone Bennett / 96
Figure 12. Historian Sterling Stuckey / 99
Figure 13. Charles Hurst, president of Malcolm X College,
with Jesse L. Jackson and Betty Shabazz / 110
vii
viii
|
Illustrations
Figure 14. “Support the Five Demands” was the rallying cry for
students at City College of New York in 1969 / 130
Figure 15. The admissions policy at City College quickly changed
the demographics / 136
Figure 16. Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee / 147
Figure 17. Lerone Bennett and Ewart Guinier / 194
Figure 18. Legendary Harlem historian John Henrik Clarke / 212
Figure 19. Vincent Harding and St. Clair Drake, 1971 / 229
Figure 20. William Strickland and Walter Rodney / 230
Introduction
The Black Revolution on Campus
“Black young people feel they can change society,” a minister in San
Francisco observed in 1969. “Now that’s very important.” Black students want “revolutionary change in the basic institutions in this country,” echoed a young politician. According to students in San Diego,
“Racism runs rampant in the educational system, while America, in a
pseudohumanitarian stance, proudly proclaims that it is the key to equal
opportunity for all.” “This is the hypocrisy,” they declared, that “our
generation must now destroy.”1 This widespread feeling of power and
purpose among Black college students, combined with a sense of urgency and context of crisis, produced an extraordinary chapter in the
modern Black freedom struggle. Black students organized protests on
nearly two hundred college campuses across the United States in 1968
and 1969, and continued to a lesser extent into the early 1970s. This
dramatic explosion of militant activism set in motion a period of conflict, crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed
college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Who
should be permitted entry into universities and colleges? What constituted merit? Who should be the future leaders of the nation in this
postsegregation era, and how should this group be determined? What
should be taught and who should teach it? Perhaps most controversially, should students have a hand in faculty selection or governance?
Moreover, what would happen to public Black colleges in this era of
1
2
|
Introduction
integration? Would they close, as happened to primary and secondary
schools after Brown v. Board of Education?
With remarkable organization and skill, this generation of Black
students challenged fundamental tenets of university life. They insisted
that public universities should reflect and serve the people of their communities; that private universities should rethink the mission of elite
education; and that historically Black colleges should survive the era of
integration and shift their mission to community-based Black empowerment. Most crucially, Black students demanded a role in the definition
and production of scholarly knowledge. These students constituted the
first critical mass of African Americans to attend historically white
universities. Deeply inspired by the Autobiography of Malcolm X and
the charismatic leadership of Stokely Carmichael, yet shaken by the
murder of Martin Luther King Jr., they were engaged in a redefinition
of the civil rights struggle at a time when cities were in flames, hundreds of thousands of young Americans were at war in southeast Asia,
and political assassination was commonplace. These were “Malcolm’s
children,” and they were inspired by the slain leader’s denunciation of
American hypocrisy and his call for Black control over Black institutions. In essence, student leaders were turning the slogan “Black Power”
into a grassroots social movement. For many of the young people in
this book, it was a revolutionary, hopeful time, a time they were determined to shape. Their energy and idealism inspired Latino, Asian
American, and progressive white students to launch and intensify their
own campus crusades. The Black Revolution on Campus shows how
students moved to the forefront of the Black freedom struggle and
transformed American higher education, sometimes in unexpected
ways.2
There were two critical moments in the Black freedom struggle when
students took the lead: 1960, with the lunch-counter sit-ins and creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC);
and 1968, with the explosion of campus activism. Yet most studies of
campus protest in the late 1960s focus on the white New Left’s opposition to the war in Vietnam. Black students, so prevalent in representations of the sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives of the
early 1960s, virtually disappear in histories of the late 1960s. While the
white student movement of the late 1960s has garnered much more
attention, Black student protest produced greater campus change. In
contrast to conventional wisdom, the most prevalent demand in the
hundreds of campus protests in 1968–1969 was African American in-
Introduction | 3
clusion, not opposition to the Vietnam War. The centrality of race to
campus uprisings of the late 1960s has been forgotten.
The students often faced harsh reprisals, including criminal prosecution and, particularly at historically Black colleges, violent police invasions. While their confrontational tactics and Black Power rhetoric
alienated many, their achievements were impressive. Their efforts pushed
colleges to formalize and expand affirmative action policies and provide
greater financial aid, leading to a sharp jump in Black college enrollment
in the 1970s. In essence, these student activists forced a permanent
change in American life, transforming overwhelmingly white campuses
into multiracial learning environments. The academic community would
never be the same. Reflecting the rights consciousness of the era, Black
student activists asserted a right to attend college, especially public ones.
Moreover, student protest stimulated demand for Black faculty and
sparked the desegregation of college curricula with the creation of hundreds of African American studies departments and programs.
In the style of social movement history, the first five chapters tell the
dramatic story of the Black student movement at selected campuses
across the country. Every region in the country was part of this story, so
every region has a chapter, including the South, with its historically
Black colleges. The last three chapters explore the outcomes of the
Black student movement, focusing in particular on the early formation
of Black studies in traditional academic settings, as well as its influence
on community-based initiatives. The Black Revolution on Campus combines activist history and intellectual history in order to show the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university
culture in the United States. It is imperative to understand the two in
tandem. I chart the rise of an academic discipline that has widely influenced intellectual production in the United States even though, in the
eyes of some of its founders, Black studies has failed to realize its radical potential. For many students and scholars, Black studies signified
the inclusion of the histories and cultures of African-descended people,
taught from the perspective of Black scholars, in the curriculum of higher
education. But for many others, Black studies meant more than the creation of a new academic discipline. It “began with the utopian vision of
a constant stream of young black people from the colleges and the universities helping ghetto dwellers to achieve Black Power and to transform their neighborhoods.”3
The thousands of African American students in the United States
who engaged in sit-ins, demonstrations, picket lines, and campus strikes
4
|
Introduction
in the late 1960s were not the first Black students on these campuses.
Small numbers of African Americans had been attending majority white
colleges and universities since the nineteenth century. Many of the Black
students who began to enter predominantly white northern universities
in the early 1960s were athletes, but this early group also included
middle-class children of college-educated parents. A jump in Black enrollments came in 1967 and 1968, when new federal policy and the
mounting effects of the civil rights movement modestly increased the
numbers of Black undergraduates. These students tended to be from
working-class, migrant families and were often the first in their families
to attend college. They, in turn, engaged in direct action protest to demand greater numbers of Black students. From 1970 to 1974, college
enrollments for African Americans shot up 56 percent, compared to a
15 percent increase for whites.4 In many respects, the broader desegregation of institutions of higher education in the American North and
West was won by the children of southern migrants and constitutes another legacy of the twentieth century’s massive internal migration.
The Black student movement was part of the Black Power movement, whose rhetoric, political analysis, and tactics broke from the civil
rights movement, but whose goals of Black representation and inclusion were shared with civil rights activists. Black Power emphasized the
creation of Black-controlled institutions and racial solidarity and entailed
a vigorous emphasis on culture—both in celebrating African American
culture and in seeing it as a catalyst for political action and the forging
of a new Black consciousness. Black Power advocates saw themselves
as unmasking U.S. institutions—including liberal ones like universities—
and exposing the whiteness disguised as universalism. They were seeking to change the terms of desegregation: it must not be color-blind, but
pluralist. Their call for self-determination was not antithetical to the
quest for full inclusion and equal rights, but a strategy for achieving it
in a nation deeply shaped by a history of white supremacy. Crucially,
Black Power encouraged African Americans to see themselves as African descendants, as part of a global majority rather than an American
minority. This international consciousness intensified in the 1970s, giving rise to new Pan-African and Third World identities, initiatives, and
solidarities.5
No single individual or organization directed the activist energies of
Black college students in this era, but several leaders and groups played
important roles. Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966,
the Black Panther Party initially focused on combating police brutality,
Introduction | 5
but within a few years it was calling for revolution and an end to the
war in Vietnam, as well as advocating free health clinics, Black studies
in high school and college, and other programs to meet local needs. To
a greater extent than has been appreciated, students admired, followed,
and sometimes joined the Black Panther Party.6 For its part, faced with
the escalating deindustrialization of Oakland, the Black Panther Party
wanted to recruit from the “lumpenproletariat,” a Marxist term describing a social stratum outside the formal economy: hustlers, gang members,
and ex-convicts. Nevertheless, the party was surprisingly successful in
appealing to high school and college students, and as a result, Panther
chapters in Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago included
student leaders. As Black students sought to build new institutions on
college campuses, they were deeply inspired by the Panthers’ success in
creating and running their own programs. Indeed, a nationwide independent Black schooling movement would arise in the 1970s from this
ethos of countercultural self-reliance. SNCC was a second critically
important source of influence on Black students nationwide. By the late
1960s, many veteran SNCC organizers had shifted their attention away
from the rural south toward college campuses. The most famous SNCC
leader who inspired and shaped the nationwide Black student movement
was the former Howard University student Stokely Carmichael, who by
1968 had become a seasoned organizer and charismatic orator, crisscrossing the country urging Black college students to fight for greater
recognition and power.7 But most important, leadership in the Black
student movement was indigenous and local: students formed their own
campus organizations and led their own struggles, even as they traveled
to other campuses and learned from each other.
A major victory for the students, the achievement of African American studies quickly became its own site of struggle with a new group
of protagonists, mainly professors who held competing views of how
to build Black studies. The seemingly arcane question of whether Black
studies should take the form of a program, college, department, or center
became deeply enmeshed in the political struggle for self-determination
and the academic struggle for stature and legitimacy. Even after commitments to create Black studies had been won, another round of conflict often ensued over precisely what form it would take and who would
be calling the shots. Similarly, an intellectual battle over the character of
Black studies developed at the same time. Pressure to show a rationale
for Black studies led many scholars to argue for the advantages of and
need for a “Black perspective” in teaching and research. While some
6
|
Introduction
observers feared lockstep thinking in such an approach, the defense of a
Black perspective in academe relatively quickly gave way to a critical
search for various ways to understand the multivalent Black experience.
Three factors shaped the turbulent emergence of Black studies as a site
for innovative and influential scholarship: ideological disputes over
what should serve as the intellectual basis for Black studies, which had
the effect of establishing multiple streams of intellectual thought within
the field; the desire of some scholars to pursue relatively conventional
academic careers, which led them into an ambivalent, even contentious
relationship with Black studies; and the influence within Black studies of
Marxist and feminist critiques of cultural nationalist approaches to the
study of the Black experience. Indeed, in contrast to what many might
expect, Afrocentricism, with its focus on reclaiming precolonial African
achievements, cultures, and value systems, was not the predominant philosophical approach as African American studies entered higher education in the United States.
The first chapter examines the experiences and political outlooks of
Black college students in the mid- to late 1960s, with an eye toward
capturing their fast-growing impatience with “token integration” and
their attraction to a new politics of racial pride and assertion. The students’ Black nationalism was controversial, in both Black and white
communities. In addition to setting up the shift in Black student consciousness that helped pave the way for new forms of student protest, I
identify the beginnings of the Black student movement at historically
Black colleges and universities. Student activists met with lethal violence in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and experienced a major police
assault on the campus of Texas Southern University in Houston, but
they won an important victory at Howard University. By highlighting
the activism at historically Black colleges in the opening chapter, I unsettle the usual geography of vanguard student radicalism, which emphasizes the New Left at Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Columbia. In contrast to
their conservative image, Black colleges were important incubators of
leadership in the Black student movement throughout the entire decade
of the 1960s.
Chapters 2 through 5 narrate student struggles in different regions of
the country in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. The chapters are
roughly chronological, but it is crucial to understand that campus
upheavals (especially in 1968 and 1969) were happening at virtually
the same time across the nation. Chapter 2 provides a close analysis of
what is widely understood to be the launching pad of the Black studies
Introduction | 7
movement. Vowing to shut the campus down until their demands were
met, the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College launched a
five-month strike that convulsed the Bay Area, drew national media attention, and put Governor Ronald Reagan, the striking students, the
faculty, college president S. I. Hayakawa, and Black community leaders
on a collision course. Deeply influenced by the Panthers, the students
adopted militant tactics. T …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
