The History of Black Studies

Abdul Alkalimat

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745344249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A surge of African American enrolment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programmes are taught at more than 1, 300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened.

Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come. Structured in three broadly chronological sections - Black Studies as intellectual history; as social movement; and as academic profession - the book demonstrates how Black people themselves established the field long before its institutionalisation in university programmes.

At its heart, Black Studies is profoundly political. Black Power, the New Communist Movement, the Black women's and students' movements – each step in the journey for Black liberation influenced and was influenced by this revolutionary discipline.

PART I

Black Studies as Intellectual History

Black intellectual history has always been the root of Black Studies. This does not exclude important contributions by, and dialogues with, scholars outside of the Black community. But Black Studies is fundamentally a product of Black intellectuals.

Beginning late in the 1800s, Black people began to earn advanced degrees and establish a record of scholarship focusing on the African-American experience. This spanned most academic disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. These academic high achievers earned degrees at the most outstanding institutions of higher education. The first scholarly studies of the African-American experience were their dissertations. Many of them spent very productive careers at historically Black colleges and universities, particularly Howard University, Fisk University, and Atlanta University. Their decades of scholarship and institution-shaping form an enormous part of Black Studies as Intellectual History.

The Black community also created its own flavor of intellectual development, including public intellectuals. Organizations of all kinds created documents that were essential reading for the faithful. These documents presented a view of Black history and laid an ideological foundation for the Radical Black Tradition. In newspapers, magazines, and journals, Black intellectuals and artists kept the community informed about the issues of the day, rethinking historical experience and comparing African Americans to the entire African Diaspora and people all over the world. There were bookstores, special library collections, museums, and cultural centers. But, for the most part, mainstream scholars ignored these developments and omitted Black thought from their curriculum materials, even though many of the authors had been their classmates—even in the Ivy League.

Black history itself must be understood as a dialectical unity of, on the one hand, particular social forces that produce ideas and, on the other hand, a tradition of study that fuels knowledge production—in other words, a unity of the people who act and are acted upon with the consciousness of those same people. African Americans have lived through three major periods of social stability, called elsewhere modes of social cohesion: slavery, rural tenancy, and urban industry (Alkalimat 1986, 49–120). These periods of transgenerational continuity have shaped the social life of Black people and seen institutions form and flourish. This has given rise to five main, always evolving, dogmas or ideologies: Pan-Africanism, nationalism, Black liberation theology, feminism, and socialism. Each of these goes into the cauldron of debate when society enters periods of social disruption and change. The emancipation process brought forward the debate over emancipation. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century process of establishing the Black community brought forward the self-determination debate. The urban explosion of the 1960s brought forward the Black liberation debate.

Why embrace this early work as Black Studies as Intellectual History? Sometimes it is thought that people without a past are people without a future—that is, unless other people come along to help. When Black people enter the mainstream for their college experience, they study texts that ignore this historical background. The mainstream, being less informed, sets the standard for what is academic excellence in subjects about the Black experience. Black Studies as Intellectual History sets a different standard—an imperative for intellectual accountability. Moreover, without this history, any scholar or activist risks reinventing the wheel. Intellectual history provides its most valuable service when one generation, after studying and critiquing what previous generations have done, builds on that existing knowledge. This is revealed in literature reviews, footnotes, and bibliographies. The names in this part of the book represent only a sample of the people who need to be considered in each area of scholarship.

Every new scholar has three options when engaging existing research: confirm and agree, contradict and disagree, or fill in a silence. Each of these is valid scholarship on any given aspect of the Black experience. Each generation has to go through this process. With research transformed by new digital tools, people can process larger and larger bodies of digitized texts and other data and use the digital tools to search and find sources on a global level.

Finally, Black Studies as Intellectual History establishes that the field is not limited to the campus or the academy. Black Studies has always been connected to efforts by Black people to study and struggle, to connect knowledge with making life better. This was true, even when Black people were under lockdown during slavery. Even then, everyone knew that reading was a tool to free the mind so that you could then free the body.

1

The Academic Disciplines

This chapter makes the case that Black scholarship from after the American Civil War (1861–1865) through the 1950s constitutes the beginning of the study of the Black experience.

Returning to the thesis of the book as presented in the Introduction, this chapter describes how a growing cohort of Black people began to engage in scholarship about Black people, in resistance to hegemonic opposition and in close relationship to cultural practice. The focus in this chapter is on the activity of a middle-class elite, who were able to gain access to the institutions of scholarship, namely, mainstream universities in the USA. Due to unrelenting racism, these scholars were inside, but also kept outside, as the chapter will show.

Of course, Black people in Africa and Europe had conducted serious academic scholarship well before this time. Just two examples of the earliest speak to the force of that work and how it was received.

The ancient city of Timbuktu, located in what is today Mali in West Africa, became a major marketplace and on that basis also a center of learning. Three large mosques formed the institutional arrangement called the University of Sankore from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Theological study centered on the Quran was the foundation, much as institutions of higher education in the West originated as places for religious study. But a full curriculum of science and math was required as well. Today, 700,000 texts from the University of Sankore have been preserved by families rooted in the cherishing and sustaining of the literary artifacts of their cultural heritage (Clarke 1977; Khair n.d.). The university itself fell victim to the defeat of the central African Songhai Empire by the Moroccans, which took place simultaneous to the rise of the European empires.

A few Africans who made their way to Europe obtained formal education there and subsequently joined institutions of academic scholarship. Among them, coming from an area that later became Ghana, Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–1759) became the first African to complete a PhD at a European university, the University of Wittenberg in 1734 (J.E.H. Smith 2013; Hountondji 2007, 111–30). He went on to hold professorships in philosophy in universities at Halle and Jena in Germany, and continued to publish. He was an early materialist in his thinking, as shown by his views on the mind–body contradiction:

Whatever feels, lives; whatever lives, depends on nourishment; whatever lives and depends on nourishment grows; whatever is of this nature is in the end resolved into its basic principles; whatever comes to be resolved into its basic principles is a complex; every complex has its constituent parts; whatever this is true of is a divisible body. If therefore the human mind feels, it follows that it is a divisible body.

(From Amo’s “On the Ἀπάθ∊ια (Apatheia) of the Human Mind 2.1,” quoted in “Anton Wilhelm Amo” 2018).

Amo soon faced a reactionary turn in Germany. He was forced to leave his position and return to Ghana. Even there, he faced continued harassment and isolation, for fear he would foment a mass uprising against European colonial domination.

So while there had been some early achievers in the mainstream prior to the Civil War in the USA and in Europe, the institutional basis for the Black academic intelligentsia that first generated Black Studies developed as a result of the victory of the antislavery Union army (Anderson 1988). This profound event opened up new opportunities: educational institutions sprang up all over the South and in the North as well.

Early evidence of this leap came just as Black people were beginning to enter the mainstream universities as doctoral students: they created their own networks. The first formal organization of Black scholars and intellectuals was the American Negro Academy, founded and led by Alexander Crummell in 1897, shortly before his death in 1898. The academy, the first professional society dedicated to Black intellectual production, held an annual meeting and published occasional papers until 1928 (American Negro Academy 1969; Ferris 1969). As this organization reflected, people with PhDs and at universities worked alongside of and in communication with leading cultural producers outside of academia.

Not only did these early Black scholars form their own networks, they also began to create bibliographic works that would allow their output to be found and read. Table 1 demonstrates that of the thirteen periodicals that documented and promoted the work of Black scholars, seven were founded in or before 1950: Negro Year Book (1912), Opportunity (1923), Journal of Negro Education (1932), Crisis (1936), The Negro Handbook (1942), Negro Digest/Black World (1943), and Index to Periodicals by and about Negroes (1950). Notable among these is Monroe Work’s 1912–1937 Negro Year Book series (Edwards 1985; M.N. Work 1912, 1913, 1914, 1916, 1918, 1921, 1925, 1931, 1937, 1965 [1928]).

All thirteen of this list of bibliographic sources, but especially the first seven, testify to an unbroken record of Black academic writing, a literature that reflects and analyzes the Black experience in virtually every area of scholarship. H-Afro-Am was a discussion list that also contained many bibliography lists.

Table 1 Works of Bibliography by and about African Americans

So Black people were not only intellectually productive, but were also documenting their own intellectual history in such a way as to create a tradition of Black thought. Of course, several of these sources—Opportunity, Crisis, Freedomways, Integrated Education, AIMS Newsletter, and Black Books Bulletin—are connected with the Freedom Movement rather than with academic institutions. This is evidence of what subsequent chapters will elaborate on: Black intellectual production and the freedom struggle have always gone hand in hand.

It is also important to consider this work alongside the experience of the University of Sankore and Professor Amo. These bibliographic reference works grew out of institutions that facilitated intellectual production, distribution, and readership. They also had an appreciative audience. Within the segregated community, there was serious study of the Black experience, and discipline-specific efforts like this emerged as well. Yet, at the same time, mainstream discourse largely ignored this work, because it challenged the dominant racist narrative of Black intellectual inferiority.

One more example is necessary here. There is a general agreement that the preeminent African American scholar of the twentieth century is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), who was also a historian and a sociologist of Black people (J.H. Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick 1971; A.D. Morris 2015; Meier and Rudwick 1986; Thorpe 1971). Du Bois wrote comprehensive narrative surveys of Black history as well as detailed studies of specific historical periods and social institutions. His contributions will be discussed in several chapters of this book. He used poetry and fiction as well as social science. He took on the Black experience in world context and dared to speak about world events, being concerned with both the welfare of Black people and that of humanity in general (Du Bois 1968).

Du Bois is an exemplar for Black Studies scholarship. He transcended disciplinary boundaries and used various methodologies and intertextual strategies to get at the content of the Black experience. He combined scholarship with activism, pushing the standards of each to their limits, always depending more on how he anchored himself in the historical progress of his people rather than approval he might or might not get from mainstream gatekeepers. He famously summed up his moment of liberation from submission to conventional thinking about being free in America, when he described the staunch opposition to his proposal to undertake a decades-long research program focused on Black people:

It was of course crazy for me to dream that America, in the dawn of the Twentieth Century, with Colonial Imperialism, based on the suppression of colored folk, at its zenith, would encourage, much less adequately finance, such a program at a Negro college under Negro scholars. My faith in its success was based on the firm belief that race prejudice was based on widespread ignorance. My long-term remedy was Truth: carefully gathered scientific proof that neither color nor race determined the limits of a man’s capacity or desert. I was not at the time sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason; nor did I know Karl Marx well enough to appreciate the economic foundations of human history.

(Du Bois 1944, 49)

His major work, inspired by his reading of Marx, is Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk ...