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This chapter describes demands for Black Studies programs, especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and the founding of the Institute of the Black World. Vincent Harding, along with Stephen Henderson, a literature professor at Morehouse College, and colleagues organized the IBW in conjunction with the Martin Luther King Center. Harding and Henderson's rationale for Black Studies and the eventual creation of the IBW was a “Black university perspective.” This analytical and organizational philosophy emphasized opposition to the normative methodological approaches to racial analysis, structural autonomy, and relevance to Black communities. In adherence to the Black university perspective, the IBW organized a Black Studies Directors Conference in November 1969, where the IBW leadership and associates evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of emerging Black Studies programs.

Parish revivals enabled many Catholics, including blacks, to attain a deeper knowledge of their faith and to take fuller ownership of it. Catholic revivalism differed in its emphasis on the sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist. African Americans, especially former slaves, flocked to these events as they helped them transition from slavery to freedom, and from rudimentary knowledge of their faith to a stronger identification with and knowledge about Catholicism. Black Catholic Studies originated in the late 1960s not among academics but among African American priests, brothers, and members of women's religious communities who had for too long endured the shared experience of institutional racism in the Catholic Church. It enriched African American theology without being subsumed by it; the movement also deepened Catholic historical studies in the United States—as noted by the chapter in an assertion rich in implications for Catholic Studies practice—by prompting a recognition that the “syncretism” marking African American Catholic devotional practices was not confined to the black Catholic experience.

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.

The rise of Black Power in the black Atlantic world of the late 1960s transformed the cultural politics of decolonisation in Britain and the Caribbean. In the injunction to ‘think black’ was a demand to re-orientate and to understand differently the social relations of artistic production in a decolonising culture. The legacy of this period still partly determines the parameters of postcolonial and black cultural studies today. This chapter explores this transition through the Caribbean Artists Movement, an artists’ group whose existence spanned the rupture between this secondary politics of decolonisation and early anti-colonial artistic practices.

As the civil rights movement gave way to black nationalism, Black Power, and urban unrest, Freedomways and the Communist Party worked to navigate these changes. Jack remained committed to Party work despite its waning relevance, but his writings on the Angela Davis case and on Vietnam offer examples of his commitment to pressing issues. For Esther, a Popular Front approach to her work at the Freedomways allowed discussion, debate, and the promotion of a range of views on the journal’s pages. Freedomways also became a central part of the transformation of black history and black studies in the 1970s and 1980s. As managing editor, Esther shaped the journal by soliciting, selecting, and publishing articles and responding to correspondence. Esther and Jack continued to support one another while they developed their independent careers and activism.

This book concludes with an essay from Mae G. Henderson originally published in 1996, which explores the tensions between Black Studies and Black Cultural Studies. She begins by noting the similarities between the two projects. Black Cultural Studies “continues the Black Studies project in that it takes as its object of investigation the consequences of uneven economic, social, and cultural development.” Moreover, “like Black Studies, cultural studies challenges received and conventional disciplinary paradigms in the construction of knowledge through its multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus.” Both schools, too, privilege “the study of vernacular and mass culture.” In short, “many, if not most, of the central concerns of black cultural studies have been anticipated by the Black Studies project and the challenge it brought to the academy two decades ago.”

This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences around Fuller’s sexuality have been (de)constructed across time and space. It identifies exactly who helped manufacture these silences, speculates about factors that led to their production, gestures to the contexts out of which they emerged, and illuminates rare moments when some of these silences were punctured. By mapping the production (and shattering) of silences, the chapter offers insight into the ways movement activists responded to Fuller’s sexuality. His intimate life--as a man who had sex with other men (and women)--troubles conventional wisdom about the movement and Black nationalism, more broadly. The chapter argues that instead of being simplistic, dogmatic, or uniform in their thinking, movement participants thought about sexuality in complex, varied, and inconstant ways.

This chapter provides an institutional history of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), one of the most renowned African American artist collectives of the Black Arts movement. It recounts OBAC’s efforts to challenge Chicago’s established racial order and to reorient Black Chicago’s relationship to artistic production. It argues that OBAC pioneered several community-centered projects that served as hallmark modes of artistic practice within the movement while simultaneously helping to popularize the era’s burgeoning ideas. The group made Chicago an important epicenter of movement activity, attracting artists, activists, and intellectuals from around the world. At their peak, OBAC sparked a national intellectual debate over their creative philosophy of “a black aesthetic,” effectively polarizing arts discourse as it related to African Americans. Their growing popularity and heightened national profile generated a number of internal challenges, including intractable ideological and class contradictions, and tensions between individual professional aspirations and collective community engagement.

This essay examines the epilogue of Revelation (22:8-21) as an intervention for new imaginations of, and actions toward, a new heaven and new earth that can be realized in the present. It names the ways that Revelation (indeed, the Bible) is used to make outsiders of queer people. More importantly it suggests that the author/narrator John is not the only one who can be filled with the spirit on the Lord(e)’s day with something to say to those “with ears to hear.” The particular “queer time and place” of this investigation occurs at the intersection of queers of color critique, theories of queer temporality, and Sankofa—the Akan concept that we take what is beneficial from the past in order to work toward a more pleasurable future. Composite sketches of the lives of queer folks in the African Diaspora are gathered to create a “deep archive” (following Judith Halberstam) from which Muñoz’s call for new visions of a utopian “then and there” can be articulated in resistance to their apocalyptic “here and now.” Consequently, a re-vision of the death-dealing epilogue can become a life-restoring prologue toward the enactment of Africana queer utopian futures outside of apocalyptic Christo-heteronormativity.

At the height of the Black Power movement, African American students, especially those attending predominantly white colleges and universities, demanded access to and inclusion in their institutions’ resources. Their demands included Black Studies and Black History programs, the end of racist practices by faculty and administrators, and more culturally sensitive programs that reflected their lived experiences. This essay examines how the Black Power movement sought to redefine the beauty aesthetic by exploring how African American students at Memphis State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s politicized the campus positions traditionally reserved for white students. In 1970 Maybelline Forbes was elected the first black homecoming queen at Memphis State. As athletic teams began to integrate during the 1960s and 1970s, black women struggled to penetrate the membership ranks of cheerleading squads, serve as homecoming queens, and join other spaces that excluded them. This essay demonstrates how these positions became contested spaces for the larger black student protest movement, thus offering a different perspective on how black activists engaged in protest on college campuses in the Black Power era.

The introduction argues that although the academy has a spoken (the written) commitment to diversity, the same attitudes (the unwritten) that kept faculty of color out of predominately white institutions in the 1940s works against them during personnel reviews. It highlights examples of the current climate where meritocratic language is used as if it’s neutral, discusses how the work of program building that many scholars of color are called upon to do is undervalued, and argues that personal narratives about tenure process are vital to a clearer understanding of the system’s weaknesses. In addition to including quantitative data, the introduction offers a historical and contemporary context for the stories included in the anthology.

Chapter 5 discusses the legacies of 1920s and 1930s studies within the Gullah revival and the land battles raging throughout the region. Chapter 5 unearths the origins of the revival, analyzes the lull that proceeds it, and explores the new meaning of "Gullah" that takes shape during the 1970, 1980s and 1990s in the wake of the Black Studies Movement.

The first chapter of the book maps out the manner in which Black manifestations of cultural autonomy, from music to visual arts, have been systematically eliminated from public education. This discussion is bookended by a discussion of the central force that fomented Black cultural enclosures – Western Christianity.

This chapter explores the hierarchies and hegemonies established through a culture of “excellence.” The open admissions struggle at City College was indicative of this, as it eventually resulted in an academic divide between African American and Puerto Rican students. In June Jordan’s essay, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” she observes that the academic institution—far from isolating itself from colonialist impulses—serves to reinforce racialized genealogies of colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism. Emergent interdisciplinary fields like black studies were envisioned as transcending beyond the bounds of institutional excellence, yet these fields are also a divisive force that can remove the context of one minority group’s participation in favor of the other. Jordan’s alternative to such institutional practices is to recognize the possibility of lives within the academe—that the Puerto Rican context in the open admissions debacle matters as much as the African American one.

This chapter is devoted to Mudimbe’s crucial move to the US in the late 1970s. This transfer had far-reaching consequences, not least because he had to change language and redefine his role as an African scholar in an academic context which had become increasingly receptive to the ‘proto-postcolonial’ claims of rewriting history from its hitherto neglected ethnic and gender ‘margins’ (Black studies, Herstory). Two main texts are privileged here. Firstly, Carnets d’Amérique (1976) in which he explores the main cultural and racial features of American imperialism; secondly, The Invention of Africa, a book in which he was able to write the history of African ‘gnosis’ and apply an analytical grid previously developed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970). What is striking in this book is Mudimbe’s ability to discuss notions such as ‘epistemological rupture’ and ‘conditions of possibility’ and to incorporate analyses of Renaissance and classical paintings alongside examinations of major figures of African philosophy and ethnophilosophy such as Blyden, Tempels, Senghor, Kagame, Hountondji, Mveng, and Cheikh Anta Diop.