Black as Gravitas: Reflections of a Black Composition Studies

2013

366 pp. ISBN 9780520296224) provides accounts of Black student activism on college and university campuses throughout the United States. The Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University explores selected college and university campuses as case studies, chronicling the power and impact of Black student activism in the late 60s. Using archival research and oral histories, Biondi's 278-page work provides insight into how Black students revolutionized higher education through their protests, strikes, and seizures of buildings towards the fulfillment of their demands.

College English 69.4, 2007

In this article, I focus on the work of the Black Caucus (BC) of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The Black Radical Tradition must be excavated here to relocate historical examinations of culture, rac(e)ism, political economy, and (literacy) education. In particular, I attempt to re-insert the work of Ernece Kelly and the legacy of NCTE’s policy, Students’ Rights To Their Own Languages (SRTOL), into a black radical paradigm for critical literacy and social justice. Black Power movements set the tenor and tone for our 21st century referents of “identity, difference, and recognition” and so I check the pulse of Black Power in composition studies via two concurrent platforms: 1) a protracted campaign for social justice and racial equality by African American scholars in and against NCTE as they formed their first Black Caucus, and; 2) a protracted campaign against racism in education where language rights carried the Black Power banners of self-determination, independence, and freedom from white rule. The work of Kelly and her black college students at the dawn of the BC, thus, offers us an important, historical lens into alternative, professional sites and spaces where the work of composition studies has occurred outside of the racially limited bounds of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). If we see the work that Kelly was doing as building what Fisher calls Independent Black Institutions (IBIs), then we can see multiple, institutional sites in which the work of composition studies has been done and can continue to be done where race, literacy, and the experiences of students of color are central.

Journal of Pan African Studies, 2014

A growing body of research examines the long black campus movement from various angles. In this article I discuss four recent volumes that critically frame the black campus movement, the institutions, and the people involved in pushing colleges and universities toward a more just space to live and study. Specifically, I review the recent work of Stephan Bradley, Wayne Glasker, Ibram X. Kendi, and Joy Ann Williamson to provide a window into this burgeoning research area. Although this discussion is not all-encompassing, I aim to provide a springboard for future research and discussion of how the black campus movement changed higher education, the Black Power Movement, and American society as a whole.

1979

Black Studies: Pedagogy and Revolution A Study of Afro-American Studies and the Liberal Arts Tradition Through the Discipline of Afro-American Literature May 1979 Johnnella E. Butler, B.A., College of Our Lady of the Elms M.A.T., Johns Hopkins University, Ed.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Rudine Sims The Afro-American operates within the context of an Eastern/Western, African/Euro-American, Black/White sensibility that is simultaneously in concert with and diametrically opposed to the dominant Anglo-oriented American sensibility. The Western aspect of the warring sensibilities within the Afro-American experience maintains an oppression of the African sensibility by virtue of inherent contradictions between the sensibilities, and by virtue of colonial oppression. The duality, operating within the context of the dominant either/or sensibility, is exacerbated thereby maintaining a colonized state for the

Students of color and conscience across the country wonder today if higher education is able to meet their demands for black knowledge produced by black people. For anyone familiar with the nineteenth century history of universities and twentieth century movements to radicalize them, this is an alternately thrilling and sobering fact. For we can and should recognize that student movements for diversity, inclusion, and curricular change are taking us not only back to the 1960s but to America's 19 th century racial history. They are making that history real and necessary and indispensable, bringing it home to roost within the very infrastructure that produces knowledge about the nineteenth century: the twenty first century academy. " Abolition, " increasingly used an antiracist trope on college campuses, and institutional structures of racial inequality are with us again today within the university because they unfolded within the university and it structure of knowledge creation their 19 th century forms. Abolition, I now believe, should be understood not so much as a public sphere that happened to employ contemporary national and local markets of print media but an insurgent, improvisional attempt to create an alternative educational space—a para-university-that employed mass media and community forums because and when formalized curricula and degrees fails racial justice. In the 1960s, activists like Nikki Giovanni would be called a " black

Journal of African American Studies 16(1): 1-20 , 2012

With a beginning remarkably different than conventional academic disciplines, Black Studies emerged on the American college campus amidst Black Power protests and student demands. Now more than forty years old, Black Studies exists as an established discipline constituted by a robust scholarly discourse, an ever-expanding body of innovative interdisciplinary literature, hundreds of collegiate programs at the undergraduate level, a growing number of graduate and doctoral programs, and some of the world's most well-known intellectuals. This introduction-and special issue of the Journal of African American Studies-explores the origins and history of the Black Studies Movement in the United States. Our aim in this volume is to bring the political history to the forefront. Based on historical detail and deep archival research, the works ground the history of Black Studies in the radical Black politics of the late 1960s and 1970s, while emphasizing local materiality and ideological developments. The contributions in this special issue recover some of the names (and faces) of Black Studies' founders, offering a range of perspectives on the movement to establish the field both within and without the American academy.

Journal of African American Studies, 2023

This article examines Black student activism in the context of the Black activistintellectual tradition. It explores activism as a form of learning. Examining the Black Student Movement in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1975 in the context of student engagement and high impact educational practices reveals that (1) it is appropriate to analyze the Black Student Movement, and related social movements, in the context of student engagement and high impact practices highlighting the intellectual agency of Black student activists, and (2) that the Black Student Movement of the 1960s and 70 s were part of the Black activist-intellectual tradition requiring a reconceptualization of Black student activists as intellectuals. This case study draws upon autobiographies and semi-structured interviews of former Black student activists illustrating that activism is an intellectually and academically enriching activity.

This paper examines the Black Campus Movement at Loyola Marymount University (LMU), and thus explores Black student activism at LMU from 1968 to 1978 revealing how the climate and influence of Black Power energized and mobilized Black students to navigate and negotiate the university in their quest to demand respect, as well as their request for the social and academic resources they needed to maximize their college experience. The paper argues that the creation of the Black Student Union (BSU), the Office of Black Student Services (OBSS), and the African American Studies Department (AFAM) institutionalized the Black Campus Movement at LMU. Archival research indicates that unfavorable and hostile conditions on campus led to the formation of the BSU, which became a central Black student organizing body. Results also illustrate the rigidity of the university begot increasingly aggressive responses from the BSU. However, when the university responded respectfully to Black students illustrating the institutional sincerity about their concerns, the students responded in kind, although trying to attain and maintain as much as institutional power as possible.