Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 43
generally believed that there was no intrinsic reason to deny Afro-American
studies recognition as a bona fide academic discipline. They felt that the
major obstacle to Afro-American studies was faculty members who did not
take it seriously. The real problem, however, was the students’ uncritical acceptance
of courses that celebrated the Afro-American past and their hostility
to faculty (Black more so than White) who insisted on a critical analysis
that showed heroes and heroines to be merely human. 27
A Field of Study
Apart from the need to define an academic turf in a sea of Eurocentric
Whiteness, and beyond the psychological rationale arguing that courses in
history and literature and culture would lead to a healthy discovery of “self,”
there was the claim that the African/Afro-American experience and culture
provided subject matter of legitimate academic study in its own right. The
African Diaspora, the Black presence in the Western Hemisphere and particularly
in the United States, provided, it was argued, a historical reality
worthy of study for its own sake as well as for its value in understanding
conventional history. Afro-American writers had left a literature, there was
an Afro-American musical heritage, and there was folklore, none of which
had received adequate academic attention. Courses should be offered in
Afro-American studies to fill a gap in scholarship and to spur scholarly interest
in a neglected field.
By the sixties, actual scholarship in what was to be called Afro-American
studies had a considerable history. The names of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G.
Woodson, and Arthur Schomburg, whose works date back to the first decade
of the twentieth century, are well enough known to illustrate this point. There
were others like them whose names are not so well known. Aside from their
personal scholarship, they joined with others in support of such scholarly organizations
as the American Negro Academy (1897–1915) and Woodson’s Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History, which was established in
1916 and which is now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American
Life and History.
This early generation established a tradition of careful and conventional
scholarship. Their work, however, was largely unacknowledged by