By Sarah Webster Fabio, ©1974
Black Studies, Black Student’s Union, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement were indistinguishable component parts of a movement of the 1960’s guided by enlighten self-interests on the part of Black youth and young adults.
The pattern of differentiation was a kaleidoscope one and for the uninitiated this was a cause of confusion. Black Studies was an academic attempt to create a strategy through curriculum to make education relevant to the needs of the Black community at a time when desecration was the weight placed on the backs of youth of the Civil Rights Movement.
Black Studies was a rallying cry and torch carried high by members of the Black Students Unions and their student constituents as they made demands on the established order of higher education. Not always did teaching competency and militant leadership go hand-in-hand; indeed traditionally, college professors are looked upon as “bookworms” ivory towerists, and “milktoast,” You don’t find many activities among these ranks. Obviously, there were many who cringed in fear when called upon to be counted. These remained in established disciplines and stayed on safer grounds. But, as is always the case there were the handful of scholars who could and did rise to the occasion and they became the cornerstones of this new educational thrust. Nor should we assume all the activist who said they were educators were prepared for the long haul. You will find on close scrutiny, after the initial thrust, they faded back into their old worlds.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the W.E.B. DuBois Study Clubs became a part of the base of the newly forming Black Student’s Unions: members of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) who later merged with the Black Panther Party were another part of the base. SNCC Workers, along with students of SCLC and CORE, were an early national body. They transformed themselves from SCLC to SNCC, and finally to Black Panthers rapidly, far too rapidly to endure it seems.
They remained a student constituency demanding equal rights in education and life and demanding an education geared to the needs of Black people in their given unique situations. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense – a political and para-military arm with what has often been termed a “radical violent” bend spread its influences from the campuses across American into the Black communities. The Black Power Movement was the mood which overtook Blacks in the U.S.A. who were tired of the non-violent protests under SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the directions of Dr. Martin Luther King), and following Adam Clayton Powell’s charges to the 1967 graduates of Howard University, a class including Stokely Carmichael to “see Audacious Power,” the order of the day became “Black Power.” The Black Arts Movement was a new literary, theatrical and visual arts development which translated the mood of the times into an aesthetic.
These five components converged into an exciting, even volatile complex at the heavily overpopulated soon-to-be deserted Black community college located in the heart of North Oakland. Merritt Jr. College which would become a legend for being the spawning ground of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Two, week-end long, activities were coordinated by me and termed “The Black Experience.” This event was co-sponsored by a San Francisco Bay Area intellectual community group, the Alain Locke Society of which I was member.
Norvel Smith, who would become the first Black president of a predominately white institution of higher education in California and later a vice-chancellor at U.C. Berkeley, helped coordinate the occasion. Dr. Hill Grier, who would co-author Black Rage, Dr. Andrew Billingsley, author of Black Families in White America, who would become Vice Chancellor in Charge of Minority Affairs at U.C. Berkeley and become responsible for coordinating the U.C. Afro-American Studies Program; Ruth Beckford, choreographer; Emmett Scales and a significant number of other intellectuals who would be in the forefront of guiding the Black Studies movement locally, also participated.
At this conference, B.S.U. leaders such as Jimmy Garrett of San Francisco State College and Bobby Seale, who would co-chair with Huey Newton the Black Panther Party, asserted a leadership role. State legislators from Georgia and California including Mervyn Dymally attended as did would–be legislators such as Ron Dellums. John Killens keynoted the conference; he was very active with CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). And highlighted among the artistic talent were those at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement such as: LeRoi Jones, Ed Bullings (a BSU student at San Francisco State University) and Sonia Sanchez, a member of the first Black Studies faculty at San Francisco State University.
In looking backward, there was the typical near-zero budget for the occasion. But there was an outburst of Black talent who volunteered their services. At this event, there was some of the best generational dialogue going; people attended and participated because of the urgency of the day. There was an uneasy respect which had to be earned on all sides. The occasion made and irreversible impact on the Merritt College campus; since then all of the succeeding presidents have been Black although there was a white one at the time who admitted that he was not capable of the task.
Immediately afterwards, students made demands for curricula revisions and I was named chairman of a curriculum committee which included, among others, a large part of the Black intellectuals on campus at this time. Among these were: Claude Clark, professor of art; his wife Dr. Effie Clark, philosophy and theology, a community representative; Sid Walton counselor: Dr. John Summersets, chairman of the English Department. The committee answered the charge to consider a Black Studies curriculum with an A.A. degree granting program to be approved and put into effect with deliberate speed. Therefore, in 1967, when the issue was often met with vague protest throughout the country, Merritt Jr. College was able to initiate a Black Studies program as one composed of disciplined areas of study which would strengthen academic potential and motivate career choices based on the needs of a community. So that by the Spring of 1968 when these students from junior college dispersed-often with a first degree major in this new discipline-into the state universities and into the University of California system, they made wider demands in keeping with those of the rest of the nation.
Northern California was at the forefront of the development of Black Studies for a number of reasons but the extensive junior college network found in this area was an important one. Also, the much wider network of four year colleges-public and private-and the world renowned U.C. system caused an impact to the made which reverberated throughout the nation and the world. By the Fall, 1968, we would enter the year of student strikes. The one at San Francisco State University, the longest on record: This was the year of the Hayakawa-Hare boxing bouts with Black Studies. S. I. Hayakawa, a semanticist turned college president, won and became a U.S. Senator for his efforts in blocking the growth of Ethnic and Third World Studies at the San Francisco State University campus.
Nathan Hare, a sociologist-psychologist, gave a significant Black Today conference similar to the earlier Black Experience at Merritt. But, although the forum may have added more to the national intelligence on the subject, it was not able to stabilize affairs on campus. Nathan Hare later threw in his gloves on the Black Studies issue perhaps never really fully understanding what his charge was in the long haul.
San Jose State University, under the leadership of Leonard Jefferies and with Harry Edwards, as a member of the faculty, Tommie Smith, and John Carols, both Olympic track stars as students, was able at the state college level to institutionalize this development and attract a faculty geared to the long struggle ahead. Jeffries is now chairman of the Black Studies Department at City College of New York (CCNY.)
Robert Chrisman and Robert Allen, who were in the Black Studies ranks at San Francisco State University founded and currently editor of Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research in Sausalito. This publication has been an important forum on issues. It has had the longest life span of the journals that were an outgrowth of the movements and it has now gained a national reputation.