1.1 What Is African American Studies?

African American Studies looks at the lives, ideas and creations of people of African descent. It covers the United States, but also the African diaspora: the communities of African-descended people living outside Africa, in places like Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba, mostly because of the transatlantic slave trade.

The field is interdisciplinary, which means it combines the tools of many subjects. One question, such as how enslaved people kept their culture alive, can be answered with history (plantation records), literature (slave narratives), music (spirituals), art (quilts and pottery), religion and even genetics. That's why this course asks you to read poems, maps, photographs, laws and songs, not just a textbook.

The field also studies Africa itself, and the ties that still link Africa to diaspora communities. Part of its work has been correcting the false idea, common in older European and American writing, that Africa had no history worth studying. Africa is where humanity began and the ancestral home of African Americans, and its early societies made lasting contributions in art, architecture, technology, politics, religion and music.

Black writers, artists, ministers and activists were doing this work long before colleges created departments. W.E.B. Du Bois published a detailed study of Black Philadelphia in 1899. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and launched Negro History Week in 1926, which later grew into Black History Month. Arturo Schomburg collected the books and papers that became the Schomburg Center in Harlem.

So when universities added the field, they were formalizing a tradition that already lived in Black churches, newspapers, schools, clubs and the arts. The field has always been tied to freedom struggles, and it still helps people understand present-day movements for Black freedom, on campus and off.

In the 1960s, near the end of the Civil Rights movement and during the rise of Black Power, Black students began enrolling at mostly white colleges in large numbers for the first time. Many found few Black professors and almost no courses about Black life.

During the Black Campus movement, students at more than 1,000 colleges protested, joined by Latino, Asian American and white supporters. They held strikes, sit-ins and building takeovers. They demanded Black studies courses and departments, and more support for Black students, professors and staff.

The best-known protest was the strike at San Francisco State College. It was led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of students of color. It began in November 1968 and lasted about five months, one of the longest student strikes in US history. San Francisco State became home to the first Black Studies department at a four-year college. Within a few years, hundreds of colleges offered Black studies courses or programs.

• A 1968 photo of the Black Student Union's strike for Black studies at San Francisco State: evidence of students using direct action to change what colleges taught.
• Hunter College's 1972 course schedule for Black and Puerto Rican Studies: shows the new field turning into a real curriculum, and Black and Puerto Rican students in New York building it together.
• The 1975 program for the National Council for Black Studies' first annual conference: shows scholars organizing the field nationally, with its own professional association.