Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Mae G. Henderson In 1968, Sterling Stuckey was invited to Carleton College, a small midwestern liberal arts college in Minnesota, located in the town where Jesse James and his gang staged the “Great Northfield Raid.” The occasion was Black History Month, and Stuckey, a gifted African American historian of considerable eloquence, brought with him an impassioned message that was rousing to the handful of black undergraduates in that mainly white, idyllically-situated ivy tower in the nation’s heartland. Black Studies, he proclaimed, was coming of age! For a young black co-ed earning her way through college by means of a scholarship and work study, his voice embodied something close to the Living Word. She hailed him as a prophet who had found her in the wilderness. His message delivered her from the fires of the flaming white furnace, from the belly of the great white whale. Upon hearing him, she realized that she had survived the freshman dread, sophomore slump, junior jitters, and now senior scruples—had, indeed, studied four years of history, literature, philosophy and education—without ever even once having encountered in the classroom or curriculum a book, article, or scholarly note of any kind referring to the life and culture of African Americans. Pip and Jim didn’t count, although, to her credit, she had, on her own, read Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright during an illness and convalescence that had confined her to a dorm room during the winter of her third year. This was the fortuitous happenstance that changed the course of my graduate study and subsequently, the course of my career that winter, now more than a quarter of a century ago. Of course, my own story is a tale twice told: It must have been the same for numberless other budding, young “black scholars” in historically black as well as predominantly white colleges and universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s who, as it were, received “the call.” Like others, I responded with an ardency matched only by the urgency of the appeal. And despite some no doubt benevolent and well-meaning advice from a favored English professor, I proceeded to apply (with skeptical support from my mentor) to a graduate program where I knew I could study African American history and culture. I chose the American Studies Program at Yale because I knew that a small cohort of black scholars was there building an undergraduate Afro-American Studies Program. (There were no graduate programs in African American Studies anywhere in the United States at that time.) Many of the black students of my generation at Yale worked with the historian John Blassingame, whom we thought to be the Black Scholar par excellence, and who, by precept and example, prepared us to enter the black professorate. During the early 1970s, the Yale program expanded to include a Master of Arts in Teaching, and achieved national recognition as one of the leading Black Studies programs in the country. It was an exciting and heady time to be a young black student—to meet and rub shoulders, chat and dispute with artists and writers like Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Jay Wright, Sterling Brown, [End Page 57] Robert Hayden, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, and others who held court at the Friday afternoon “teas” over which the master of Calhoun College, Charles Davis, presided with much elegance (Davis was fond of quipping that he was “master” of Calhoun). Such occasions provided rare opportunities for students to encounter writers and artists who were defining the field. These were the founding years of Black Studies at Yale, characterized (like the history of African Americans in this country) by triumphs and defeats in the course of its institutionalization into the academy nationwide. What we learned, more than anything else, was how a history of oppression had produced a legacy of survival and a culture of creativity. Our collective memory, however, must not let us forget that Black Studies was the academic component of a much larger political and cultural project, one that included the Black Power as well as the Black Arts movements. As such, its significance...