Student Activism & Civil Rights in Mississippi:
Protest Politics and the Struggle 
for Racial Justice, 1960-1965

Talk by
James P. Marshall
Followed by a book signing and refreshments

Tuesday, April 9 at 5:00 pm
at the African American Studies Program Building

138 Mountfort Street, Brookline, MA 02446 

 Drawing on unmatched access both to participants and primary documents about the student-led civil rights movement in Mississippi, James P. Marshall, scholar and participant plows new ground in this superbly documented study of students and local people organizing for freedom. Read more about the James P. Marshall and the Student Activism & Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965.

Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates posted an article “A Flawed America” on his Atlantic monthly blog, which was prompted by his visit to African American Studies and conversations with his former teachers, BU Professors Linda Heywood and Allison Blakely.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor of The Atlantic and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle, visited the African American Studies Program  to lecture on “The 150 Year War: Race and Emancipation in the Age of Obama.”

Dr. Mary Anne Boelcskevy, Senior Lecturer in African American Studies, presented a paper, “The Neo-Slave Narrative in Outer Space: Octavia Butler’s Dawn” on February 14th at the 2013 NAAAS & Affiliates Joint National Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The Neo-Slave Narrative in Outer Space: Octavia Butler’s Dawn

Slave narratives not only made the case for abolition but also form a foundational genre in African American literature. The genre itself did not disappear with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865 but was transformed into the neo-slave narrative. The neo-slave narrative revisits slavery, most often in antebellum or Reconstruction years, to give voice to some of the earlier form’s necessary silences. In making the case for abolition, fugitive slaves were careful, for example, not to give specific details of escape, lest those routes be closed to those still in bondage. Neo-slave narratives bring to the page the precise plans and strategies. Slave narratives often described the psychological impact of freedom denied but did so in the language of feelings available in a nineteenth-century culture. Neo-slave narratives make particularly effective use of the twentieth-century advances in our understanding of the psychological impact of trauma and in our knowledge of modern narrative techniques to convey the horrifying state of enslavement. Octavia Butler brings the neo-slave narrative and science fiction together. Her mainstream bestseller novel Kindred (1979) uses time travel to shuttle its heroine Edana somewhat randomly back and forth from her 20th-century Southern California home to the 19^th century plantation of her ancestors, effectively juxtaposing two very different lives and their consequences. In Butler’s1987 novel Dawn, however, the neo-slave narrative rockets into outer space. In the first book of what will be her Xenogenesis trilogy, Butler moves the setting to a spaceship two centuries after an apocalyptic war on earth. The aliens, the Oankali, have just awakened Lilith Iyapo, one of the rescued humans they have kept in suspended animation. Dawn translates the master-slave into alien-human. It re-envisions some of the subtler issues of community, identity, and loyalty that the original slave narrative first explored. This paper examines Dawn through the lenses provided by slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of An American Slave and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and by the neo-slave narratives, Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved and Paule Marshall’s 1983 Praisesong for the Widow, in order to discover which threads have woven into the twenty-first century.

The African American Studies Program announces  an Essay Competition for BU Students on any subject related to African American Studies. The competition is open to all current Boston University students in any school or department. Essays should be submitted by April 26, 2013 via email to afam@bu.edu. Undergraduate essays should be 10 to 12 pages in length and graduate essays should be 18 to 20 pages in length.

Undergraduate Prize $150
Graduate Prize $250

Please contact Professor Mary Anne Boelcskevy mboelcsk@bu.edu for additional information.

The WINNIE:The Epic Untold Love Story event was well-received and well-attended by friends and members of the Boston University community.

To start off, guests were greeted with an African cuisine feast (from Ariya Catering) sponsored by the Boston University African Students Organization(ASO). Then, the event began officially with Professor Linda Heywood, Professor of History and African-American Studies, and Portia Amofa, the events coordinator for the Boston University African Students Organization, welcoming the audience and introducing the program respectively. We were lucky to have Anne Marie Du Preez Bezrob, author of the  biography Winne Mandela: A Life, on which this film is based, as our guest speaker and she gave a short lecture before the screening of the film screening and discussed the film with the audience afterwards.

The talk covered Winnie Mandela’s development as a prominent political leader, her role in the formation and establishment of a democratic South Africa in 1994 and thereafter. It explores her natural leadership qualities as a member of a prominent royal family; her political development; the question whether – and if so to what extent – her political role and leadership was predisposed by her relationship with Nelson Mandela; her overt political role and carefully orchestrated sacrifices for the sake of the new political dispensation; and the allegations against her of kidnapping and murder.

Many thanks to the BU Center for the Humanities, BU Dept. of History, BU African Studies Center, BU African Students Organization, and the BU Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program for their support, without which this event would not have been possible.

For the program, click here. Please visit us on Facebook for more pictures.

The 50th Anniversary Celebration of Independence of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago was well-received and well-attended by members of Boston University, surrounding colleges, as well as representatives from the local Caribbean community.

The event included the national anthems of the United States, Trinidad & Tobago, and Jamaica. Professors Allison Blakely and Linda Heywood welcomed the audience and introduced the program respectively. There were also cultural performances; a musical performance by the Jah Jah Drummers, a dance performance by the Ark Dancers, and a dramatic performance by Wilva Mark and Wilma Coulden. Denzil D. McKenzie, Honorary Consul to Boston, Consulate of Jamaica noted the importance of the 50th Independence of Jamaica and Carol Leggett read a letter from Dr. Neil Parsan, ambassador of Trinidad & Tobago. These remarks were followed by academic reflections on Caribbean independence from Professors Orlando Patterson and Emmanuel Akyeampong of Harvard University and Professor Selwyn Cudjoe of Welleslley College. Finally, Roy T. Anderson, director of the film Akwantu: The Journey, introduced the film as a personal journey to discovering his Jamaican roots.

Many thanks to the George and Joyce Wein Fund and Wellesley College for their support, without which this event would not have been possible.

For the program, click here.

From L-R: Roy T. Anderson and Linda Heywood, Roy T. Anderson, Ark Dancers, Jah Jah Drummers

For more pictures, please visit us on Facebook.

Two scholars dispute assertions that a 17th-century forebear was one of the first documented slaves.

Faculty members at Boston University’s African American Studies Program, Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D, discuss President Obama’s ancestral roots in an article on The Root. Click here to read the entire article!

Allison Blakely, Professor of European and Comparative History, and the George and Joyce Wein Professor of African American Studies at Boston University gave the African American Studies Program Convocation address.

The Future of African American Studies

This is a topic with a history that began in parallel with the sudden creation of hundreds of African American Studies Programs in the 1960s and 1970s, including this one in 1969.  Since this was all mainly in response to student protests, it is not surprising that the number of programs dwindled dramatically by a decade later. The question of their value has continued to draw attention within academe all along; for example, the City University of New York and The Schomburg Center, among others, have periodically sponsored conferences on The State of African American and African Diaspora Studies. However, this topic is now being taken up more frequently among the broader public. In 2008 (the summer before the Presidential election) in the Phi Beta Kappa magazine The American Scholar, the Afro-American novelist, philosopher, and English Professor Charles Johnson published an article entitled “The End of the Black American Narrative.”  Most famous for his 1990 novel Middle Passage, which won a National Book Award, in his American Scholar article Johnson stated that ”A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences.” He went on to say that “The conflict of this story is first slavery, then segregation and legal disenfranchisement.  The meaning of the story is group victimization, and every black person is the story’s protagonist.” He declared that story to be outdated in the Obama era, a period that climaxes a generation that has seen thousands of black elected officials, CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express, and Merrill Lynch, two Secretaries of State, Nobel laureates and Ivy League Professors.  He admits that there remain serious social and cultural problems, but attributes them now to class, and not any longer to race:

In the 21^st century, we need new …. concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised, if not completely overturned.

In a similar vein, the Pulitzer Prize – winning journalist Eugene Robinson, also Afro-American, echoes this same message more emphatically in his 2010 book titled, Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America. Citing some of the very same measures of progress, and bolstered even further by the actual election of Barack Obama.  He writes:

Ever wonder why black elected officials spend so much time talking about purely symbolic “issues,” like an official apology for slavery?  Or why they never miss the chance to denounce a racist outburst from a rehab-bound celebrity?  It’s because symbolism, history and old-fashioned racism are about the only things they can be sure their African American constituents still have in common.

Robinson concludes that because of what he terms the disintegration of Black America, there are now really four, largely separate black Americas:

• a Mainstream middle-class majority with a full ownership stake in American society
• a large, Abandoned minority with less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction’s crushing end
• a small Transcendent elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect
• two newly Emergent groups -individuals of mixed-race heritage and communities of recent black immigrants – that make us wonder what “black” is even supposed to mean

Robinson’s ultimate conclusions, however, show a greater awareness and sense of urgency than Johnson’s regarding a lingering, shared racial identity that the majority of African Americans must address.  He writes:

As long as the Abandoned remain buried in both society’s and their own dysfunction, with diminishing hope of ever being able to escape, the rest of us cannot feel that we have truly escaped, either.  We cannot begin to un-hyphenate ourselves.

In the wake of the on-going Trayvon Martin case, it is also worth noting Robinson’s further, almost prophetic observation, that :

There are times and places where we all still come back together – on the increasingly rare occasions when we feel lumped together, defined, and threatened solely on the basis of skin color, usually involving some high-profile instance of bald-faced discrimination or injustice,…

But given the hesitancy of the broader American public to respond to the enormity of the unjust handling of this affair, one wonders if Robinson still thinks such cases are so rare.  And given the fact that Trayvon Martin was enroute to his father’s home in an exclusive, gated community, I wonder if  Charles Johnson remains convinced that the only remaining serious problems can be explained by class, and not race.

So what does all this have to do with the future of African American Studies?

To begin with, what is missing in Professor Johnson’s analysis is a deep understanding of the relevant history, sociology, and political science involved in the narrative he is referring to. This weakness is a demonstration of what is so valuable in the interdisciplinary approach African American Studies brings, which requires those already versed in the arts, literature and philosophy to understand the Black experience in all of its dimensions. Eugene Robinson shows a much sounder grasp of the interaction between the different spheres of the Afro-American experience, but reveals an insufficient appreciation of the fact that the present “disintegration” he finds so novel is a predictable continuation of our earlier history, not some startling new departure. The American Black community was always an artificial construct imposed and named by a slave society, not created voluntarily; and its days of any sense of unity were numbered once the legally sanctioned segregation was removed in the late twentieth century.  The election of President Barack Obama likewise must be viewed in its full historical perspective to gauge its significance. For example, my own elation over the election results was immediately tempered when I learned that John McCain surpassed Barack Obama by 12 points in the white vote, despite the normally decisive winning combination of a bad economy, two unpopular wars, and an inept opponent who had chosen a running mate who was almost universally considered unqualified to be “just a heart beat away” from the Presidency, under what would have been an honorable, but elderly President with a known heart condition. All this suggests to me that President Obama was only elected out of desperation, by a society looking for emergency assistance to put it back on track, after a self-inflicted train wreck. If I am right, this would not be the first time Black people have been employed in our history to do the heavy lifting, only to be denied any credit!

I submit that continuing African American Studies is more vital than ever in this new era of a still deeply rooted, but more subtle racism.  It is no longer polite to talk about it; but it can never be overcome if we do not continue to keep the study and discussion alive. I want to close by further illustrating this point by citing one more writer, one who is not Afro-American, the journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, whose op ed some of you may have read in the May 7^th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It was entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” Referring to the titles of three recent dissertations from respected Black Studies Programs, she asserts:

What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

The first title she lists is: “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” Riley follows this title with the derisive remark, “How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is?” The other two titles she mocks in a similar fashion are: “Race for Profit:Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s;” and “A History of Black Republicanism.” I have not seen a better example than this author’s outrage at still having to read about such issues. In her own words: “the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!” Ms. Riley graduated from Harvard University Magna Cum Laude, and has written for such leading publications as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education on earlier occasions; but in this instance she has produced a shoddy piece of journalism that can perhaps be best read as a job application advertising her propaganda talents to the Conservative establishment, in the culture war just now heating up in the new Presidential campaign season. She gives no indication in her opinion piece that she actually read the dissertations she critiques beyond their titles.  Unfortunately, I have found that her level of indignation and impatience on this subject is all too prevalent in our society; and far too many have yet to learn that you cannot tell a book by its cover, or the character of a person by the color of their skin.

Ms. Toriola, were you one of those children who would sit in the back seat on long family car trips and keep asking: “Are we there yet?” Well, regarding the ending of African American Studies, the answer is still “no.” We are far from a point where such study is no longer needed; and we hope that, while you are leaving us, you will continue to spread the word in whatever successful career you choose.