Ebony Scholar in the Ivory Tower

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Reddick’s intellectual activism during the 1970s while a professor at Temple University and Harvard University, which came after the black campus movement had begun to remake American higher education. He clashed repeatedly with white administrators and faculty members at Temple while helping to build a Black Studies program there. Off campus, he took a leadership role in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, the Philadelphia Bicentennial Corporation, the Kinte Library Project with Alex Haley, and in the crusade against white control of black history in the historical profession. Alongside Vincent Harding and others, he launched a scathing indictment of Time on the Cross (1974) and institutional racism within academia. With support from the Moton Center, he also pursued research on institutional racism on college campuses and the impact of desegregation on black colleges. Reddick demonstrates how black intellectuals began disrupting institutional racism within higher education, public history, philanthropy, and publishing, even as they encountered a growing climate of conservatism and white backlash symbolized by the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).