The Campus as Crucible of Struggle: A CBFS Interview

September 03, 2024

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS) is a monthly discussion series held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Curated by Jeanne Theoharis and Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine with Komozi Woodard, the series was established as a space to discuss the latest scholarship in Black freedom studies, bringing the campus and community together as scholars and activists challenge the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture, and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. In anticipation of the discussion on “The Campus as Crucible of Struggle,” scheduled for September 5th, we are highlighting the scholarship of three of the guests alongside Black studies scholar Joshua Myers.

Dr. Stefan M. Bradley is the Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College. He is the author of Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, which won the Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies and the History of Education Society's Outstanding Book Award and was a finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society. He is also the author of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, the Demands of Transcendence, and Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s.

Joshua M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Of Black Study (Pluto, 2023), Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021), and We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal. In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he is the senior content producer at the Africa World Now Project, and served as the co-coordinator of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project and as an organizer with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action. He is currently working with SNCC Legacy Project's Digital Movement Platform.

Danica Savonick is an ACLS Fellow and an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland, where she teaches courses on multicultural and African American literature, feminist theory, and digital humanities. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. in English from Rutgers University. Her current book project, Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2024). Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Hybrid Pedagogy as well as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle. She is currently working on a project about the radical writers and artists who taught at Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s.

Barbara D. Savage is an historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford where a thesis prize in Black History is named in her honor. Savage has written three books and co-edited two others. Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar is an intellectual biography of an African American woman who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. With graduate degrees from from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941), Tate was one of the few black women academics of her generation and a prolific scholar with a wide-range of interests. Savage’s introductory essay on Tate was included in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, a collaborative collection she co-edited with Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones. Her books include Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, a collaborative project led by R. Marie Griffith.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write your books?

Stefan Bradley (SB): I wrote both Harlem vs. Columbia University and Upending the Ivory Tower for several reasons. First, I was enthralled with the willingness of young Black people to risk their lives and life chances in the most exclusive educational spaces in the nation. By attending Ivy League institutions, they had a certain privilege in contrast to so many other Americans. That they risked it all to demand Black freedom and respect for Black communities was well worth my time and attention. Additionally, as an historian, I wanted to add nuance to discussions of civil rights and Black Power. Scholars, when discussing Black liberation, typically focused on the working and under classes in areas like the rural South or the urban North. I wanted to show that institutional racism was expansive and that Black people had to struggle, in their own ways, at every socio-economic level of society. Then, knowing what the Ivy League meant to so many Americans in terms of "qualifications," I wanted to see what happened when Black people joined the nation's leadership class.

Joshua Myers (JM): I was led by a strong relationship with the activists involved in that struggle to help them document the meaning of their protest and larger work. It was never just a passion project or something that interested me as a scholar per se, it was about a service to a group of people who were in some ways responsible for me being where I am.

Danica Savonick (DS): I wrote Open Admissions to share the stories of these activist teacher-poets and help readers think about college classrooms as sites of social change. I wanted to show how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich were not only brilliant writers, they were also transformative teachers and pedagogical theorists who developed creative, empowering, and consciousness-raising teaching methods. In addition, I wanted to highlight how they saw teaching not as an ancillary financial obligation, but as a meaningful form of political, intellectual, and creative work—something deeply related to their writing.

It also felt important to revisit this revolutionary moment in educational history, when CUNY opened its doors to the city and guaranteed every high school graduate a seat at one of its public colleges, free of tuition. When I began working on the book, around 2013, the right’s neoliberal defunding of public universities had resulted in interlocked crises in higher education: a massive student debt crisis, the exploitation of adjuncts, and a society in which affluent students are tracked into well-funded, elite institutions and working-class students are channeled into massively underfunded ones. Today, public universities are continually forced to do more and more with ever fewer resources. Amidst these ongoing crises, I wanted to revisit CUNY’s open admissions experiment and highlight all of the things that free college makes possible, both for students and for society more broadly.

Barbara Savage (BS): Merze Tate came into my life when I began to work with the collaborative project that yielded the 2015 collection Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. I knew something of Tate already but thanks to the digitalization revolution, I began to learn more. Here was a black woman scholar who trained at Oxford and Harvard in the 1930s/1940s, who was on Howard’s faculty for 35 years, who published five books and dozens and dozens of scholarly articles, and who had an enduring critique of race and imperialism seen through the lens of diplomatic history and international relations. Despite all of that she had been erased from the history of Howard and from the fields in which she had worked. So in many ways my decision to research and write about her was the need to answer two simple questions: who was this woman and what can her life still teach us?

CBFS: How did writing these books shape your thinking about the role of education in the Black Freedom Struggle?

SB: I learned that these institutions, while conceived of as bastions of liberal thought, functioned as keepers of the culture of white supremacy. It took disruptive young people, aspiring members of the Black intelligentsia, to challenge those notions and lead these universities and colleges into an era when Black freedom became paramount. These student-activists did so by protesting for higher Black admissions, Black faculty and staff, Black spaces on and off campus, Black curricula, and respect for Black people in general. As they took up the cadences and tone of the social movements raging in the streets, I termed the young learners' efforts Black Student Power.

JM: Education was foundational. Not formal education as much, but alternative, political education was foundational to this story. The activists had to create their own schools, so to speak. Akin to the freedom schools and experimental colleges of the 60s, 80s activists had educational formations that were attached to their activist pursuits. That continues of course in current iterations of Black freedom struggle.

DS: Due to the exclusionary politics of mainstream academic institutions, and their penchant for “miseducation” (teaching that serves white supremacy) Black liberatory learning has often, by necessity, taken place outside of formal institutions: in sites like Citizenship and Freedom schools, independent Pan-African and Black Liberation schools, communist labor schools, and study groups. But Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich remind us that public college classrooms—especially remedial and introductory writing courses—have also been sites of transgressive teaching and learning that challenge the status quo.

Their work also helps us think about liberatory learning as a question not only of what is taught (content and curricula), but also how (methods). As educators, these women recognized that they could not challenge practices of domination—capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism, and homophobia—through pedagogical paradigms predicated on the tyranny of instructors over students. Rather, challenging social hierarchies required remaking the classroom, too. In the book, I explore how they developed teaching methods that redistributed classroom power to students and facilitated student knowledge production. I’m especially interested in their development of a public- and project-based pedagogy that encouraged students to use what they were learning in classrooms to create something (whether that be a children’s story, a radio broadcast, a poetry anthology, or a proposal for a new course) that could make an impact beyond the classroom.

In addition, their educational activism at CUNY highlights how the fight for universal free college is key to broader Black liberation movements and the production of a more just, equitable, and pleasurable world.

BS: Doing this work reinforced what I had taught for years – that black people held a powerful belief in the emancipatory power of education in slavery and after. I knew that from my own upbringing in Southern Virginia when the admonishment to “get your education” was driven into us at home, at school, at church. The book is a quest narrative of Tate’s desire to become a professor in what she aptly called a race and sex discriminating world. But more than a personal story, Tate’s life takes us into the web of HBCUs, the network of educators, and a social and culture life that sustained black education. We know the legal history stretching from Charles Hamilton Houston to the Brown decision, but Tate’s life took me back vividly into the world of dedicated and rigorous black public-school teachers – mostly women - who taught me in the all-black schools of Virginia in the 1960s. That pre-desegregation world has itself been slighted so I was grateful to be brought back to its centrality in shaping generations of young black people.

CBFS: As students organize in solidarity with Palestine at colleges and universities across the country and world, how can histories of campus struggles allow us to understand the present moment and build a more liberatory future?

SB: In my studies, students have always held the moral ground (regarding racism and war) and led their institutions of higher learning to more righteous positions regarding human rights. None of this, of course, occurs without sacrifice. In the era I focused on, young people who dissented on campus risked losing their student status and increased their chances to be drafted during the Vietnam Conflict. They also lost popularity among certain segments in their own communities. Still, they persisted at their own peril. Fifty years later, in so many cases, these colleges and universities recognized disruptive students for their "courage" and "foresight" and "care" for the issues. In the end, it is the job of young people to make authorities live up to their puported ideals and missions. That is a service to posterity.

JM: We are seeing campuses reckon with what they really are. On the administrative side they are leaning into what they see as a vehicle for capital and solidarity with empire. So many students and faculty still go along with those plans. But thankfully we are also seeing people begin to break. That's what this year was about. The more we encourage the breaking the more we might be able to imagine a different kind of university. The repression that this version of the academy fostered however tells us that it was never meant to be a liberatory space and that they will not go down without a fight. I worry about my colleagues and their sensibility toward conserving a kind of detente that allows them space and access. I also worry that students will be caught in the middle of the war between faculty ambition (and the way we can kind of overplay our hands in framing the issue) and administrative conservatism. So I think it's on us to try to push harder to make the space safer for them. Letting them do what they need to do, even if that includes failing, because there are lessons in that too. I want us to learn to get out of the way, until called in. And to know what to do when called in.

DS: First, I think it’s important to remember that historical student struggles have been victorious and have utterly transformed our society. With the 1969 campus takeover at City College, students demanded and won changes to curriculum and admissions policies. Student activism across the country has resulted in departments of Black and ethnic studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; it has also changed the terms of national conversations and generated political pressure that has helped end wars and apartheid.

I’ve also been thinking about the multifaceted ways that Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich supported students in that campus takeover. To name just a few:

• They taught students about histories of oppression and resistance, for instance, by assigning films like The Battle of Algiers, about the guerrilla tactics Algerians used to resist French occupation (this film inspired student protests across the U.S.).
• They helped students cultivate an activist consciousness and practice using their knowledge and skills to advocate for change. They designed assignments that asked students to connect their everyday lives to broader power structures; to evaluate whether their educations were helping them live better lives; and to research solutions to social issues—educational inequality, drug addiction, lack of access to nutritional food—in their local communities.
• They moved their regularly-scheduled classes to the occupation site to show their solidarity with students and encouraged students to participate, framing the protests as a learning opportunity.
• They wrote about the victory at CUNY for national publications to spread the news of what students had accomplished and galvanize further actions across the country.

These teacher-poets thus practiced the lesson they sought to impart to students: that social change will happen when all of us organize where we are: that is, when each of us assesses what power we have and figures out how to use that power to fight for a better world.

CBFS: What lessons does the life and work of Merze Tate teach us about liberation today?

BS: I started college in 1970 as part of that first generation of proud affirmative action students who saw ourselves as beneficiaries of the sacrifices of our families and of the brave men and women of the civil rights movement. I know first-hand the struggles over black power and black student organizing on white campuses right alongside Vietnam war protests – even on a staid campus like UVA. When activism about the war erupted last fall, it all felt so familiar – not the tactics per se, but the special sense of moral outrage that young people bring to politics. We still need that as much as ever. Tate was on Howard’s campus during its protests in the late 1960s and 1970s; she resented the disruptions, but she supported the ends, including the demand for curricular changes. She began to offer a new course on “Imperialism in Africa” as one response to that, and she saw her classes as spaces for open and vociferous debate – informed by studying European history to better understand imperialism there and in Asia and the Pacific. Working to use power against the institutions where we learn and teach cannot succeed without knowing that history.