Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 45
one needed scholarship. Du Bois, too, came to argue the special responsibility
of southern Black colleges to support such scholarship for the purpose
of teaching Black youth who, otherwise, would be mis-educated. 29 All of
these men, however, called for the soundest scholarship.
In the sixties, the few Black Ph.D.s were likely to echo these beliefs.
They were prepared to support Afro-American history courses, willing to
advocate their scholarly importance, but insistent on professional standards
of scholarship. In the last regard they differed with student advocates of
such programs. This older generation of scholars tended also to be distrustful
of (or ambivalent about) the students’ efforts to politicize the program,
to make an academic program the instrument of ideology. They preferred
to see such courses taught within conventional departments for two reasons:
(1) the department would give a legitimacy and stability to something
new to the institution; and (2) such courses would be a foothold, a beginning,
in the reform of the scholarly profession. As we will see, these expectations
ran counter to what students and some of their faculty allies wanted.
I have written here mainly of historians, in part because they were
asked to play a major role in Afro-American studies. (To the extent that
there was a field, it depended on them.) Sociology, perhaps, had the largest
number of Black scholars interested in the Afro-American. Race relations
had, from the 1890s, been a recognized academic field, one in which both
White and Black scholars had built reputations. Beginning with the work of
Robert Park, the University of Chicago had been a center of this study, supporting
such scholars as Eric Reuter, E. Franklin Frazier, Horace Cayton,
and St. Clair Drake. Black sociologists like Charles S. Johnson, Ira De A.
Reid, Frazier, Cayton, and Drake had built national reputations. But sociology
as a field was not ready to supply leadership to Afro-American studies.
In the first place, most of the old scholarship (whether by Blacks or
Whites) seemed to view its Black subjects pathologically, with Whites as the
exemplary norm. Furthermore, the field of sociology was beginning to
splinter. The newer, positivistic, quantifying scholarship was becoming predominant
in the field (as it was in other social sciences), and such qualitative
and relatively subjective topics as race relations were receiving less
respect. The profession began to split over methodology and, as the sixties