Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 33
made a series of demands, placing the negotiations with the faculty and administration
in an atmosphere of imminent violence. The occupation
ended as the students, armed with rifles, shotguns, and belts of ammunition
over their shoulders, marched out of the building.
These were the most public and most notorious events; the struggle
to establish a Black Studies program was going on simultaneously, as if it
were a separate and independent matter. On September 15, 1968, the university
agreed to establish an Afro-American studies program with a budget
of $250,000 a year, and announced a search for notable Black scholars to
staff it. In early December, however, students from the Afro-American society
met with the acting director of the program and insisted that the program
be turned over to Black students. Within a week they demanded that
Afro-American studies be established as an autonomous all-Black college.
President Perkins reaffirmed his support for an Afro-American studies
program but rejected the idea of an all Black college. The faculty-student
committee appointed James Turner, a graduate student, as director. In time,
Turner was able to convince the faculty and administration that a separatist
Black-studies program made sense. By mid-May 1969, in the wake of the
most potentially explosive racial conflicts ever on a northern campus, Cornell
acquiesced. While the program was neither autonomous nor all-Black,
it was one of the most separatist and most political in the country.
University of California, Berkeley
By the spring of 1969, the University of California at Berkeley had been
shaken by a series of student protests, few having to do with minority issues.
Yet increased numbers of minority students,and their heightened consciousness
of special needs, brought pressure on the university to reform its curriculum
and increase minority faculty. These demands (in a context of broad
student demand for reform) resulted in the creation that spring of a department
of ethnic studies, which was divided into Afro-American, Chicano,
contemporary Asian, and Native American studies divisions. The student
instigators of this reform, behaving in keeping with the alienation they
felt, insisted that the department remain outside the College of Letters and