Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Funding Change:
Introduction to the O’Meally, Smith Report
In 1993, eleven years after Huggins’s Afro-American Studies: A Report to the
Ford Foundation and three years after Harris-Hine-McKay’s Three Essays:
Black Studies in the United States, program officer Sheila Biddle commissioned
a new report that would be conducted by two scholars of African
American literature—Drs. Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor
of English and Comparative Literature, and Valerie Smith, then professor
of English at UCLA.
The very title of this third report—Evaluation of Ford-Funded African
American Studies Departments, Centers and Institutes (1994)—says much
about the field’s evolution since Huggins. There is an implicit recognition
that Ford funding, though central to the field, does not constitute it. The
title tells us that there are a number of programs not funded by the Ford
Foundation. And, of the three reports, O’Meally-Smith is the first to assess
the impact of Ford funding on specific programs.
In 1988, in addition to its other African American Studies program
grants, the foundation began awarding three-year grants of approximately
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