In addition to SNCC activists, Black and progressive college students protested and demanded universities to hire Black faculty and teach more courses about African Americans. Black student activists and their allies protested the Eurocentric curriculum in higher education that viewed Western Civilization as “universal” and for all other civilizations to emulate. In 1968, most American college graduates could not name the capitals of ten African nations and had not read one book by an African American scholar. However, in 1968, the majority of African American students attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities and engaged in what historian Jelani Favors refers to as the “second curriculum,” where they studied the Black intellectual tradition and took African history courses (Favors, 2019, p. 7).

Between 2018-2020, hundreds of Afro/American/Black, African American, Africana, African/African American Studies, Programs, Institutes, and Departments held Golden Anniversary celebrations. These celebrations highlighted the origin stories of the discipline, progress, challenges, and the intellectual impact of African American Studies in universities and local communities alike. African American Studies is a discipline that teaches the same skills—critical reading, writing, and thinking—as other disciplines. Black Studies is not a hobby designed to appease angry Black students or hire a few Black faculty members. During the late sixties, Black students and faculty understood that in order for African American Studies to succeed, it must become a department which addresses institutional racism within the academy. Black faculty and students recognized departments provide tenure, track, appointments, and power. African American Studies is a discipline born of struggle and over the last 50 years the discipline has developed a number of schools of thought: African Centered (Carr, 1998); Afrocentric (Asante, 1994); African American (DuBois, 1903); Black Feminist (Hill Collins, 1990); Africana Womanism (Weems, 1993; Watkins, 1998); Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 1982); and areas of concentration such as Hip Hop Studies (Rose, 1994); Black Queer Studies (Johnson, 2016); Black Male Studies (Curry, 2017); Critical Race and Digital Studies (Noble, 2018); Black Girlhood Studies (Webster, 2020); African American Studies textbooks and readers (Karenga, 1982), (Anderson, 1993), (Hayes, 1992), (Asante, 1996), (Norment, 2001); and Africana Studies research methods (McDougal, 2014).

Historians have examined Black student protests at predominantly white and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and this scholarship has created a master narrative in the history of African American Studies (Rojas, 2010), (Rogers, 2012), (Biondi, 2014), (Bradley, 2014), (Favors, 2019). Consequently, most students are familiar with the 1968 Black Studies Department origin story at San Francisco State University, the Black student boycotts and demonstrations at Ivy Leagues and other predominantly white universities, the creation of the first Ph.D. Program in African American Studies at Temple University, and the “legitimacy” of African American Studies due to the rise of “Black public intellectuals,” (Black faculty in African American Studies programs at Ivy League schools who have access to major white-owned media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The New Republic, CNN, and MSNBC. African American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates (Harvard), Cornell West (Harvard), Michael Eric Dyson (Vanderbilt University, taught at University of Pennsylvania), Melissa Harris-Perry (Wake Forest, taught at Princeton), Eddie Glaude (Princeton), Marc Lamont Hill (Temple University, taught at Columbia University) Trisha Rose (Brown), Imani Perry (Princeton), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Princeton), and Jelani Cobb (Columbia) have access to “whitestream” media. The African American Studies master narrative is necessary and informative, but there is a need for a local study on the development of African American Studies programs and departments.

This book is the first to document the history of African American Studies at an institution, the University of Florida. The history of African American Studies at the University of Florida is similar to many others. During the late sixties, Black students formed a Black Student Union and demanded that the University of Florida admit more Black students and hire Black faculty. As David Horne notes, the Black Students Union at UF was a part of the “Black Campus Movement” and in 1970 African American Studies began at the University of Florida (Horne, 2021). The book chronicles the long history of African American Studies, documents the research of Black faculty at UF, examines African American Studies Program community engagement, and includes testimonies from community elders who, as Dr. Paul Ortiz states, used “testimonial culture” (Ortiz, 2021) to teach younger African Americans about the students’ central role in history of the African American Studies Program at UF and in Gainesville. This book also includes reflections by and about prominent UF alumni, such as Judge Stephan Mickle and Dr. David Horne.

As the new Director of African American Studies at the University of Florida, it was my honor and privilege to write the foreword for this monograph. This local study of the history of African American Studies at the University of Florida will serve as a model for other African American Studies departments.

References

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