Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

The American University
in Crisis and Transition:
An Introduction to the Huggins Report
The late historian Nathan I. Huggins was chair of the Department of Afro-
American Studies and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard
University when Ford Foundation program officer Sheila Biddle commissioned
his essay on the “present state and future prospects of Afro-American
Studies.” Professor Huggins’s report is much more than an overview or survey.
He used the opportunity to contextualize the historical and political
conditions that gave birth to Black Studies on predominantly White campuses.
He explores the explosive growth and changing nature of the American
academy following World War II and the contemporaneous movement
Black Americans waged for political rights and social justice. Their convergence
set the stage for the emergence of Black Studies.
Because Huggins’s point of origin is the immediate postwar years, his
history of the field is less an intellectual history and more an institutional
one. He does not evaluate the quality of a century-old scholarly project but,
instead, is primarily concerned with the various institutional forms a field
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