Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

46 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
advanced, it split racially as well. Black sociologists created separate caucuses
to establish an independent direction and to criticize what they began
to refer to as “White sociology.” 30 The deep racial and ideological divisions
within sociology were perhaps best illustrated by the rancor and division
generated by the so-called Moynihan Report.
It is important to observe that the Black sociologists who took the lead
as advocates of Afro-American studies were likely to be at the radical edge
in this split. Both Nathan Hare and Harry Edwards were deeply cynical
about, and distrustful of, institutions and traditional academic fields. Their
tendency was to be anti-intellectual and anti-”Establishment.”Edwards saw
the Black student movement as providing the “impetus for violent and irreversible
revolution in America.”And he saw the object of Black leadership
and Black Studies as being to “fight the mainstream to establish Black authenticity
and to achieve full equality or be overwhelmed in the attempt.” 31
It should be said, however, that St. Clair Drake, a senior and respected
scholar, early took on the direction of Afro-American studies at Stanford
and made it one of the best programs in the country.
The humanities (excluding history) were always the most Eurocentric
of American scholarly fields. English literature, philosophy, art history, and
music were, in the sixties, the fields least touched by subject matter having
to do with Black Americans. Of these fields, literature, music, and the fine
arts had the least excuse; American literature was a field where Blacks had
played a role. It was a rare college course in a northern school that taught
any Black author—until Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin became fashionable.
There were, however, a number of senior Black scholars in American
literature: J. Saunders Redding, Blyden Jackson, Charles Davis, George Kent,
to name a few. Most taught in southern Black colleges. Professionally, the
modem languages are so factionalized that it was almost natural for scholars
of Black literature to become merely another faction within the professional
ranks. As activity in the subject developed, room was made for them,
as it would be made, for example, for Chicano literature. Very little room
would be made, however, in the canon of American literature or in the
mainstream curriculum.