Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 59
some community-related programs that were federally funded, the Urban
Center did very little. Nothing of an academic or scholarly character was
developed in the center, and few of the university’s faculty were involved.
The funds ran out in 1977, and the center was allowed to expire.
The Institute of the Black World (IBW) was established in Atlanta in
1969. It was originally intended to be part of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Memorial Center and to work in cooperation with the Atlanta University
Graduate Center, but in the summer of 1970, for ideological and other reasons,
IBW split with the King Center and Atlanta University. The King Center
came to focus almost entirely on King’s literary and ideological legacy,
and its leadership was far more integrationist in its approach than the leadership
of the IBW.
From the beginning the IBW attracted many of the most capable
among those who followed the “Black Power” mode. Vincent Harding,
William Strickland, Howard Dodson, Lerone Bennett, St. Clair Drake, and
Sylvia Wynter were among its original board of directors. Claiming to be a
“gathering of Black scholar/activists,” it remained consistently intellectual
and serious in scholarly intent. 36
IBW’s funding came from a variety of sources. In 1969–70, perhaps
its most promising year, it received grants from Wesleyan University, the
Ford Foundation, the Cummins Engine Foundation, and the Southern Education
Foundation. The level of funding was far lower over the next
decade, yet the institute managed to generate position papers from scholars
and others that were generally of good quality and provocative. In 1983,
with its staff much reduced and its principal office now in Washington,
D.C., IBW, it is fair to say, has ceased to function as a center for scholarly research.
It is now seeking funds for a major film that will provide a Black
perspective on American history.
The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies was established
at Harvard in 1975 by President Derek Bok. Seen perhaps as a corrective
to Harvard’s highly political, radical, and contentious Afro-American
studies department, the Du Bois Institute was designed for advanced study
of Afro-American life, history, and culture. During its first five years, led by
a series of “acting directors,” the institute supported lectures and other