Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Preface to the Harris,
Hine, McKay Report
The Ford Foundation has supported Black Studies since the first programs
were established on American college and university campuses in the late
1960s. Since 1969 the foundation has granted some $19 million to assist
the development of both graduate and undergraduate programs and, more
recently, to strengthen scholarship and research at selected centers of Afro-
American and Africana Studies. Another $1 million has supported editing,
archival, and oral history projects documenting the Black experience.
Given the size of the foundation’s commitment and the growing impact of
Afro-American scholarship on traditional disciplines, in 1982 the foundation
asked Nathan Huggins, then the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, to review the
evolution of Black Studies and its future prospects. His report was published
by the foundation in 1985. 1
Recognizing the rapid growth of the field and the emergence of a new
generation of scholars in the 1980’s, the foundation commissioned a series
of consultancies in 1987–88 intended to provide a sense of the current state
of Black Studies in the United States. Three distinguished scholars were invited
to survey selected Black Studies departments, programs, institutes,
and centers judged to be representative of the structural diversity and programmatic
scope of Afro-American and Africana Studies across the coun-
88