(This brief review of an older book is pertinent to USIH readers because the relative weaknesses of the book are directly related to the author’s lack of attention to intellectual history.)
The black power movement had a strong presence on campuses across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, true at historically black colleges, such as Howard University, and at mostly white institutions, such as the University of Illinois. Black power on campuses was a movement of young people who were reacting to two forces: institutional barriers that transcended the de jure barriers of Jim Crow; and to the apparent failures of the earlier civil rights movement focus on assimilation and integration. It took the form of invented tradition: black power advocates, in response to the stereotypes about black culture and history that pervaded mainstream, white society, sought to accentuate and celebrate blackness, or a version of blackness. The celebration of blackness, of course, often constricted other forms of activism, and on campuses, often served to alienate some black students.
Joy Ann Williamson tells this history in Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75 (2003), a useful and interesting case study, since the University of Illinois was over 98% white in the mid-1960s, and Champaign-Urbana was known to be overtly racist as a community. It is also a good case study because the majority of the black students on campus were from Chicago, 100 miles north of Champaign-Urbana, where black power and other forms of black nationalism had long flowered. Thus, it should have surprised nobody when tensions erupted on campus, as 250 black students were arrested for a sit-in at the student center on September 10, 1968. Somewhat ironically, just as the university took steps to admit more black students—in response to the emerging consensus that federal law required some form of affirmative action at public institutions—black students became far more militant in their demands. This irony was interpreted as unruliness by local whites, and by state legislators, who quickly enacted Draconian polices against student gatherings (that also targeted mostly white anti-war student protestors).
As Williamson tells it, black power was in part successful, as two institutional legacies of it remain on campus: a black studies program; and a black cultural center shared by students and the local black community. Williamson’s institutional history of these developments is thorough and instructive. She is especially good at dealing with the relationship between the Black Student Association (BSA), the organized manifestation of black student power, and the university, which ceded to some BSA demands so as to not be outpaced by inevitable changes taking place on campuses nationwide. For instance, the chancellor recognized that it would be a good move to create a black studies program well before the BSA demanded it, since hundreds of universities were following in the footsteps of San Francisco State College, the first to implement black studies—there, as a response to the student Third World Strike that shut down the campus and aroused political conservatives, including Governor Reagan. Williamson is great in detailing this history.
However, where Williamson is strong in institutional history, she is weaker in intellectual history. Despite her many claims about how conceptions of “blackness” changed to suit the movement, the reader never gets a sense of what this means. Few of the primary intellectuals sources of black power are cited or interpreted. This makes the text duller than need be. Where the author does include such sources, the text flies off the page. I’ll conclude by way of an example. The BSA defined blackness in terms of militancy. A poem from their newspaper Black Rap gives us a sense of this:
Black enough to belong to the BSA
but too white to come to meetings
Black enough to have lived in the ghetto
but too white to return
Black enough to understand our lingo
but too white to speak it
Black enough to wear an Afro
but too white to appreciate it
Black enough for your Honkey friends
but too white for me.
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