Fifty Years of African and African American Studies at Harvard, 1969
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Fifty Years of African and African American Studies at Harvard 1969–2019 COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE Compiled, edited, and typeset by the Class Report Office, Harvard Alumni Association Contents Foreword ............................................................................................... v A Special Congratulations from Neil Rudenstine ...........................xiii Department of African and African American Studies .....................xiv Greeting from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ............ 1 Reflections of the Former Department Chairs .................................. 3 Werner Sollors ................................................................................. 3 Henry Louis Gates Jr. ........................................................................ 7 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ..........................................................11 Lawrence D. Bobo .............................................................................15 Reflections of the Faculty .................................................................21 Emmanuel K. Akyeampong ................................................................21 Jacob Olupona ..................................................................................25 Kay Kaufman Shelemay .....................................................................27 Jesse McCarthy .................................................................................28 Brandon Terry ..................................................................................29 Reflections of the Alumni ...................................................................35 Foreword This book commemorates, celebrates, and reflects on fifty years of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Of course, Africa and its diaspora in the Americas have been studied at Harvard for far longer than a half century. However, 1969 represents the formal recognition of the academic field at this institution. The story of the founding and evolution of the Department of African and African American Studies is complex and fraught, and no account can be definitive or without controversy. I offer one version of that story. As administrators, former department chairs and faculty, and alumni of multiple generations add their voices in the pages that follow, a rich and riveting picture emerges, one that I hope readers will appreciate and be inspired by. Founders and Early Days Throughout the twentieth century, students and faculty across the country have called for formal recognition of and an institutional support for black studies within higher education, a call that rarely received a positive response. By all accounts, it was the world-shattering assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that propelled this persistent call for “Black Studies” into a militant mass movement. King was killed on April 4, 1968. And five days later, a service was held to honor him in Memorial Church. However, members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students, known as “Afro,” refused to participate. Instead, they held their own simultaneous service outside on the steps of Memorial Church. The next day, on April 10, Afro published an ad in the Harvard Crimson demanding that the University: 1. Establish an endowed chair for a black professor [which was later changed to a demand for a chair in Black Studies.] 2. Offer more courses relevant to blacks at Harvard. 3. Hire more black faculty. 4. Admit more black students. Student activists soon formed a ten-member Ad Hoc Committee of Black Students to communicate and refine the demands of the black student community. In addition to the four initial demands, the Ad Hoc Committee called for the creation of a Department of Afro-American v Studies with the power to appoint and promote its own faculty and set its own curriculum. It also called for the establishment of an African American Research Center. Then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Franklin L. Ford, created a nine-member faculty committee on African and Afro-American studies, chaired by Henry Rosovsky, then professor of economics. This committee included Martin L. Kilson Jr., a political scientist who specialized in African politics and was the first black faculty member to be awarded tenure at Harvard. The committee was charged with “movement toward a possible field of undergraduate concentration, necessarily cutting across disciplinary lines but held together by the centrality of concern for African and Afro-American subject matter.” The Ad Hoc Committee of Black Students nominated two members—Ernest Wilson III and Octavia Hudson—to serve as observers on the faculty-led committee. The faculty committee issued its report (the “Rosovsky Report,” as it came to be known), recommending: 1. Establishing a standing faculty committee to develop and oversee a joint concentration in the field of Afro-American studies. 2. Establishing a committee on African studies to coordinate course offerings in African studies. 3. Building a cultural center for black students. 4. Founding a center for Afro-American studies. 5. Dramatically increasing black enrollment in the graduate school. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of accepting the Rosovsky Report recommendations, and Dean Ford appointed a search committee, which included students, to identify candidates for faculty appointments in Afro-American studies. Now, all of the students’ demands were ultimately met, and they continue to be satisfied and even greatly surpassed today. However, the road has been stony, with a number of pivotal moments in the evolution of the Department. In the spring of 1969, the black students were deeply dissatisfied with their lack of a meaningful role in the hiring of faculty and the designing of curricula for Afro-American studies. They also reaffirmed their desire for the new unit to enjoy department status, and not mere inter-departmental committee status. They petitioned Dean Franklin for redress and received it. On April 22, 1969, the FAS faculty sided with the students and voted to establish Afro-American studies as a department and to give students a substantial role in appointing faculty for the new department, including voting rights. Second, in September 1969, the Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies issued a new report, which came to be known as the Musgrave Report, named after the committee’s chair, the eminent economist Richard Musgrave. vi It announced nine new faculty appointments, including the sociologist Orlando Patterson, who today is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at the University. The report also announced the Department’s first chair, Ewart Guinier, an influential labor organizer and lawyer, and also the father of Lani Guinier, a well-known legal scholar, political theorist, and Bennett Boskey Professor of Law Emerita—she was the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at the Law School. She was also a founding member on the original Ad Hoc Committee of Black Students. The Musgrave Report proposed the establishment of an Institute for Afro- American Research, to be named in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois. The first director of the Du Bois Institute was the distinguished scholar of African American religion and Christian ethics Preston Williams, Houghton Professor of Theology and Contemporary Change Emeritus, who was the first tenured African American member of the Divinity School faculty. Another product of late ’60s activism that we cherish at Harvard is an undergraduate organization devoted to celebrating spirituality and black creative genius. Kuumba, which means “creativity” in Swahili, is also celebrating fifty years at Harvard. Founded by Dennis Wiley and Fred Lucas, members of the first Harvard class to graduate from our Department, Kuumba is, and has always been, much more than a choir. It is a community, with its own rich history, rooted in the traditions of Africa and its diverse diaspora. For a brief period, the Afro-American Studies Department enjoyed high course enrollments, many new concentrators, and curricular expansion. The first class of concentrators, totaling fourteen students, graduated in 1972. Some faculty and students experienced this as an exciting time for the Department, full of possibilities. Others, however, criticized the quality of instruction, felt the academic standards of the Department were too low, believed the students were exerting too much influence on its direction, and were anxious that the Department was overly politicized and separatist. This attitude was not unique to Harvard. As Martha Biondi notes in her important history of the black studies movement, “Black studies was seen by many as an academically suspect, antiwhite, emotional intrusion into a landscape of rigor and reason.” In October 1972, with the Black Power movement facing political repression and losing energy and support, a committee to review the Department issued a new report with the following recommendations: 1. The Department should prioritize Afro-American studies over African studies. 2. Afro-American studies should be available to students only as a “field of joint concentration,” that is, to be studied always alongside a traditional discipline. 3. Faculty in Afro-Am should be jointly appointed with another department. vii 4. Community engagement should be subordinated to academic study and research. 5. The right of students to vote on faculty appointments should be