The program has its roots in another turbulent era: the late sixties. In the wake of protests against the war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS\u201955, Hon.\u201959), and the passage of civil rights legislation, BU in 1969 established the first graduate African American Studies program in the United States. But it was Wein\u2019s endowment in 2002 of the George and Joyce Wein Chair that fueled the program\u2019s vigorous growth.<\/p>\n
The endowment has made a difference far beyond funding a single professorship, says the chair\u2019s current holder, program director Louis Chude-Sokei<\/a>. He is also a professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences, African American Studies\u2019 home on campus.<\/p>\n \u201cFor one thing, it was a commitment to legitimizing the program and its seriousness,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has made it clear to CAS and the University that this program needs to be supported and taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n The founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, Newport Folk Festival, and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Wein grew up in Newton, Mass., and played jazz piano from a young age. After a stint in the US Army, he studied at BU\u2014at least when he wasn\u2019t playing piano\u2014and started a legendary Boston jazz club, Storyville.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew so many Black musicians as a kid,\u201d Wein told arts&sciences<\/em> in spring 2021. \u201cI worshiped them, I collected their records, and when they would let me play with them, I was like a kid in teenage heaven. But then one day I was hanging out with [trumpeter] Frankie Newton, and he was in kind of a down mood. I asked him, \u2018What\u2019s wrong, Frankie?\u2019 And he looked at me and just said, \u2018George, you\u2019ve never been Black one day in your life.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he made that statement, I think it affected me completely. It led me into areas I\u2019d never thought about,\u201d he said. \u201cI became a fighter for the concept of, \u2018What has happened in a great country that can\u2019t seem to correct one problem?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Discrimination was also something he saw up close in his personal life: his late wife, Joyce, who was Black, could not even travel to New Orleans with him in 1970 when they were working to found the jazz festival, because Louisiana law prohibited interracial marriage.<\/p>\n Wein decided to support African American Studies at BU to do his part in addressing racism.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt that increasing their faculty to cover Black studies was important,\u201d he said. \u201cI would be establishing something that would become part of the future of a great university.\u201d<\/p>\n Even before the uptick in attention to racism this past year, says Chude-Sokei, BU African American Studies<\/a>, which also includes an undergraduate minor, was growing steadily; its average class enrollments have doubled since 2017. And the program is on its way to offering a major. \u201cWe\u2019re putting together the paperwork,\u201d Chude-Sokei says. \u201cWe\u2019ve also generated some scholarships for undergraduates that we are going to be unveiling along with the major\u2014which, again, is made possible by the resources of the Wein endowment.\u201d<\/p>\n Less tangible, but perhaps just as important, is the sense of security that an endowment brings.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that we feel all the time is that programs in African American or ethnic or LGBTQ or women\u2019s studies, whenever we hit moments of economic distress, they get cut, or they get swallowed up,\u201d says Chude-Sokei. \u201cBecause of George Wein, we don\u2019t feel afraid that we\u2019re going to be swallowed up by another department or cut. And because we don\u2019t feel it, we\u2019re able to keep this growth mindset\u2014especially over the COVID year.\u201d<\/p>\n That energy will be reflected in new courses, new faculty, and \u201ca lot more international perspectives,\u201d he says. And it will carry the impact of BU\u2019s African American Studies beyond Boston.<\/p>\n Chude-Sokei has just been invited to curate a festival on Afrofuturism and Black science fiction with Carnegie Hall in New York City. The festival comes on the heels of a major award from Germany for a yearlong project involving his recordings of ambient sound in areas in the African diaspora that are associated with slavery, as well as German sites connected with Nazi history.<\/p>\n All of this work, he says, is more adventurous than what he could have done without the endowment. \u201cI took some risks once I got to Boston and got the Wein Chair,\u201d he says. \u201cI can take risks because we have the support.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s perhaps especially fitting that Chude-Sokei\u2019s work is so intimately connected with sound, given Wein\u2019s lifetime of contributions to the world of jazz and folk music. \u201cFor me, music is about sound and Black listening practices,\u201d says Chude-Sokei. And for Wein, music was deeply intertwined with the African American experience.<\/p>\n With the 2020 launch of the Center for Antiracist Research at BU<\/a>\u2014led by Ibram X. Kendi, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a professor of history\u2014the African American Studies program is finding new opportunities for shared work and growth.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving both separate but collaborative institutions is not just good for BU, but a sign of how big and important this stuff is,\u201d says Chude-Sokei. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of excitement to go around.\u201d<\/p>\n Please visit bu.edu\/cas\/alumni\/giving<\/a> or contact Meghan Frost, CAS assistant dean, at mmfrost@bu.edu<\/a> or 617-358-6376 to learn more about giving to CAS.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How donor support has helped make a forthcoming African American Studies major and other advances possible<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":58044,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57078"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58158,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57078\/revisions\/58158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=57078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"\/cas\/files\/2021\/08\/GeorgeJoyce-731x1024.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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