Part Three: ASC Campus Locations

African Studies Center,154 Bay State Road, mid-1950s

The ASC has lived a somewhat peripatetic existence, though five locations in almost 50 years is not exactly transhumant. In its early years it occupied a temporary structure next to its current location at 270 Bay State Road (that first site is now the SMG parking lot). Then in the mid 1950s as what retired professor George Lewis calls "a reward for being a good program," the Program moved East to more elegant quarters at 154 Bay State Road, next to the current Department of International Relations. With its State Department training contract the Program expanded to include 206 Bay State Road, a typical brownstone now a dormitory kitty corner from the Castle. Between 1966 and 1982 the African Studies Program (designated as a "Center" c. 1965) occupied the large Tudor-style house at 10 Lenox St. across the Mass Pike in Brookline. It is this building, its sweeping staircase and spacious offices that many senior visitors and Africanist scholars recall as the ASC’s benchmark location, now occupied by the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. In 1982 the ASC moved to the heart of campus, occupying the marble-floored townhouse at 125 Bay State Road that now is the Office of the General Counsel.

The ASC moved to its current location (the former home of the Dept. of Mathematics) at 270 Bay State Road in early 1984. This setting affords views of the BU "Beach," the Charles River, and the campus’ most extensive green space (the Alpert Mall). It is there that Joanne Hart and the staff have created an ideal space for intellectual engagement, social conviviality, and teaching. Though it contains no marbled staircases or wood paneling, its dedicated seminar rooms, faculty offices, Outreach Library, and art displays make it a distinctive and effective academic space. 270 Bay State Road is perhaps the most intellectually appealing and comfortable quarters for an African studies program anywhere in the nation.

African Studies Center, 10 Lenox St., 1966-1982	African Studies Center, 125 Bay State Road, 1982-1984	African Studies Center, 270 Bay State Road, 1984-present

Director’s note:

This sketch of the ASC’s institutional history is a draft and, of course, needs comments and corrections by alumni, friends, and critics. An obvious need, is to link the developments in African studies at Boston University to the sweep of events and processes in Africa and Africa’s meaning in the American context. That is a much larger project of research and reflection that I hope this current exercise will stimulate. To that end I hope others will contribute documents, memorabilia, notes, etc. to the ASC to allow us to establish an ASC institutional history collection at the African Studies Library.