“A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object”

There is this story. Once upon a time I was 12 years old–that’s a long time ago. And I recalled that a member of the Harding family, close to my own family in Memphis, Tennessee, went away to graduate school and returned home one winter. Now, it actually might have been another season, but somehow in my imagination it is winter. And young Ms. Harding was telling stories about a place where she was studying for a graduate degree in physics. This place was far away from Memphis where the Hardings and the Spillerses lived. And fast forward 10 to 12 years later, I applied to a school named Brandeis for graduate work in English and American literature.

Aside: (One of the reasons why I did that was I loved the sound of that name, and how when you called this number, there used to be a woman who answered “Brrrrandeis.” I thought I’ll just have to apply at “Brrrrandeis” for it … for a PhD.)

So, I applied to Brandeis for graduate work in English and American literature, because some years before, without knowing it and without meaning to or meaning not to, someone planted a seed. You might call that cultivation on the fly, simply because no one plans it, nor is it possible to anticipate how or when or to whom it will happen or what the outcome will be. So, this work of planting ideas, of working the ground of the mind is the vocation of the social that is not always guaranteed to succeed. But here we are this weekend and we’ve even forgotten that it is the height of winter, because our hearts are so full.

This is the weekend to extend warmest and sustained congratulations to the first triple-A (AAAS) protocol that I’ve ever known and that is the department of African and African American studies at Brandeis University. Listening to yesterday’s panel, it occurred to me when it was pointed out that Fred Hamlet, and that’s one of the people that I thought I might see this weekend, that Fred Hamlet … and I remember that Fred Hamlet was the head of security in Ford Hall. Is that right? I think that’s right as I remember that. That Fred Hamlet is still alive and well.

After hearing that story, I decided that there must be as many versions of Ford Hall as there are years since Ford Hall. They’re things I’m still learning about a Ford Hall just sitting here and listening to people talk. So, there must be at least 50 stories of the narrative of that celebrated novel … . (What am I saying? That’s the next sentence. I actually … Well, okay. Confession time. I worked on a novel for a long time that was about Ford Hall. It’s true. I think the only person here who knew that might’ve been Roy DeBerry, because Roy DeBerry and I are really homies. We are both from the Mississippi Delta. I’m from Memphis, the upper end of the Mississippi Delta, which is the way Faulkner talked about it. Roy was just right, right down the road at Holly Springs. So, we are really children of the same natal community, as it were. I think maybe Roy knew about that novel, but in any case, I’ve had a novel on the desk since the 1980s. When I went to Bread Loaf in the 1980s for a summer, one of the people who read a novel in the making was Toni Morrison, actually. Okay. So that’s something that I still would like to write one of these days.)

[A]ccording to Wikipedia, the Cornell takeover of Willard Straight Hall succeeded the Brandeis Ford occupation by two months. Ford Hall in February of 1969 and Willard Straight on the campus of Cornell University in April 1969. In any event, both of these occurrences were the mimetic acts before and after it set in motion a repertoire of practices, of intellectual technologies, that have essentially transformed the study of the human sciences in the United States. When the intellectual history of the last half-century is written, and there will likely be several versions of it, my hope is that some of its leading theoreticians will be African American creative intellectuals, and that the story they are going to tell looks something like this … We recognize that black studies were not unprecedented. That’s one of the things that I want to say to you now. I vividly remember that when my beloved deceased brothers, Curtis Spillers, Jr. and Ira Spillers, were students at Tennessee State University in Nashville almost 70 years ago, Ira was a history major. He brought home a thick, navy blue, hardbound book called The History of the Negro by one of his professors at the time, a man by the name of Merl Eppse

At the same time that I was discovering the world of textbooks, including Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary that began with Malcolm X’s aardvark, I was also reading The Pittsburgh Courier, which was the newspaper my family subscribed to alongside The Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar. And The Pittsburgh Courier, which takes its place in the annals of black newspapers of the African diaspora, actually had a centerfold. I found out where the centerfold was from The Pittsburgh Courier centerfold, but it was not the one you think.

This was a gorgeous sepia-toned print spread across two pages of newspaper of important black Americans. That’s where I found out who among other people, Mary McLeod Bethune was, Ralph Bunche, Thurgood Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, Phillipa Duke Schuyler and her father George Schuyler and his syndicated column that was printed in The Pittsburgh Courier.

I also remember discovering in the pages of The Courier the announcement of the wedding of an African political figure whose last name was Appiah and the daughter of a member of the peerage, Sir Stafford Cripps, the future parents of Anthony Appiah. I told Anthony Appiah that years later. I don’t know if it embarrassed him or not, but I thought that was really funny that I met the child that grew out of that wedding. Or that the glee clubs of predominantly black institutions had very distinguished directors, like William Dawson at Tuskegee, where my sister had gone to college to study dietetics.

Now, what these random instances of everyday life and textual life would suggest is that the deep structures of the black life world were rich, extensive, definitive, and a matter of record, some of it captured in the archives initiated and sustained by black people.

One other thing. Du Bois’ study of aspects of Negro life, the Atlanta University studies, and also going back to one of the earliest manifestations of the work of the new social sciences of the late 19th century, early 20th century, The Philadelphia Negro, which interestingly enough to my mind shares a publishing context with Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, all say to me that America’s best-kept secret, precisely because of America’s robust color coding of the social order, was its complex black life unfolding in the witness of millions of historical subjects above and below the Mason-Dixon.

And for all its precarity and deprivation and disappointment and betrayal and travail, black people lived actual lives of considerable value that W.E.B Du Bois, for example, believed was evidence of a vital cultural enterprise that was spoken about in the earlier panel today. So vital, in fact, that he attributed to black America the embodiment of the aims of the Reconstruction of American democracy, in Black Reconstruction.

Now this, to my mind, is enormous in its implications, because it means that what we know today as Black Studies, and I would even informally call it “the black studies movement,” is novel only in the context of predominantly white institutions. Now perhaps we could say that prototypical black studies were what was performed at historic black colleges and universities, churches and schools, lodges and pool halls, et cetera, in the Post-Emancipation Period. And if that is so, then the implantation of triple A-S was about a century old when the occupation, say here at Brandeis and at Cornell, began.

So that movement, in its nodal point, needs a name that I would want to call the prehistory of Black Studies that needs to be placed in perspective with its aftermath, in order to understand how intellectual movement is choreographed as an organic occurrence, and the extent to which the black life world subsisted in an internal coherence and a conceptual and practical integrity that lended a distinct and distinguishing mark. In other words, the name Black Studies, triple A-S (AAAS) for instance, were of their moment but their content and aim were not infant.

The moment then of Black Studies, which I believe constitutes a critical chapter in the history of ideas is inscribed by a couple of crucial elements. And this is something I would like to give sustained attention to, not here today, because it would be a lot of stumbling and bumbling and carrying on. But one of those moments is that a moment of protest becomes a curricular object. (Right? That happened on a dime.) …

I had never in my life seen anything like that before. What it signals to my mind is the extent to which, and we too often forget this, the extent to which higher education is not leisurely activity. It is not trivial pursuit, but it is a crisis. That it is the name of crisis and that it necessitates choice.

Higher education in our world does not engender an ivory tower, nor is it generated from such an unimaginable place. Just as Brandeis itself in all the proud dignity of its eponymous tribute to Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis had been implanted in the urgent aftermath of the Second World War as a powerful response to the global future of Jewish community, Africana Studies emerges in what seemed at the time imminent revolution in the United States and what it portended for black Africa and the Caribbean, in addition to the black United States.

In short, the Black Studies movement appears in a crossroads or in an intersectional responsiveness to the very moment in which we were standing, which was by definition, politically and philosophically, the past and the future. So it is also a matter of curiosity to me that if you investigate or interrogate this period from a trans-Atlantic perspective, Africana Studies is unfolding at the very moment when philosophical and conceptual paradigms themselves are shifting in the very heart of European procedure and disrupting economical protocols that had held in place a colonial and enslavement order for centuries.

We have yet to systematically trace the simultaneity between left activity across the globe more generally speaking, Black Studies movement in particular and the gulf that opens up fields of radical possibility in the world of thought that will reconfigure higher education in the United States. For instance, the difference between a doctoral dissertation written before in 1968 and a doctoral dissertation written after 1968–I don’t even want to start talking about the dissertations that are written today and what is possible for people to write.

I was able to write Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon, here at Brandeis for my doctorate in 1974 under the direction of Alan Grossman [ … ] precisely because an epistemic gap had opened in the chain of necessity. And such a thing as an inquiry into Martin Luther King’s sermon style, for example, had been made visible to the discursive orders of knowledge production. But this visibility had been enabled precisely by that combination of circumstance that I have attempted to describe.

I was among the occupants of Ford Hall and I have always been happy that I overcame what fear I had. I was actually afraid that the building would be invaded by police power. And I know that police power in the United States is not in love with people who look like me. So, I was afraid of that enough to break out in hives. I’ve had hives twice in my life and if you don’t know what that is, that’s bumps come on this side of your face and then they clear up and then they go over here, right? And then they come back over here. That’s the kind of fear we had, because the word was out that that the National Guard and a few other folk were raring to get in that building. In any case, I was among the occupants of Ford Hall and shared the moment of protest and the aftermath.

So the curricular object that Black Studies became, as a repertoire of critical inquiry, meant that my generation of black scholars and creative intellectuals had to create a field or fields of study and practice those fields at the same time, not always with happy results. In fact, the opening years of Black Studies creation and practice on many mainstream campuses. ( … Do I need the name one or two?) That those years were often characterized by backlash, insults, hostility, and I would go so far as to say that even though the overall picture is much improved, we are, nevertheless, not entirely clear of danger even today.

The forces of race hatred and revanchism and their quite astonishing powers of renewal and quite impressive shape-shifting capacity have regrouped to answer a new time and place. And should like to anticipate the end of Black Studies, the people who practice them, and demolition of the epistemic transformations that have brought the current academy to stand.

But we pledge today and replant today, 50 years later, to run on toward the future in all the openness of possibility and potential that future evokes. So, what is to come? Which was the question posed at the end of the last panel.

As Black Studies have taken shape over the last half-century their protocols have been sharpened and clarified. And by that, I mean that the textual universe in which Africana is embedded could not have been anticipated. Whether or not texts come directly from the disciplinary formations of Black Studies and many, many of them do, today’s intellectual technologies, especially in the humanistic areas of inquiry, cannot complete their itineraries until they have taken into account the impact of race and critical race theory. It is fair to say that Black Studies in its varied articulations put race on the table as social construction, as an idea whose history can be tracked, as a heuristic device. In short, as a topic that has lost its secrecy; its prohibitive and unspeakable character. It has made race visible and accountable to critique.

And I want to end here. I’m not quite sure how to formulate this notion, how to put this idea. But it’s something that I’ve been chewing on for a while, and it goes something like this: As one of the locuses of black culture, Black Studies, by centering a particularity takes hold of something larger. That is to say the concept of culture itself. And perhaps we can talk about this later. Are we bound for the day when Black Studies are everybody studies?

Thank you.