The college and university campuses of America are a long way from where most of us come. Our homeland (known to white folks as the ghetto) is hardly conducive to the growing of ivy. “Mother wits” was our thing, not encyclopedias. We have been the companions of every evil, cycle, syndrome, or mania that would strike fear in the hearts of our white compatriots.
Education in America, as we have come to know it, is a strictly utilitarian endeavor. The colleges and universities have not been established for the sake of education. The colleges and universities are the wholesale producers of a designated mentality conducive to the perpetuation and continuation of America’s present national life. A national life that we have witnessed to be in total and complete contradiction to the wholesome development and survival of our people.
The black student in America has, for as long as anyone can remember, been the victim of mental brutality, character subversion, and inundatory alienation from his black community. His value to his community at the end of his college or university career has been zero. His community has thereby been left without the element most essential to its regeneration and construction—its aware young people. Black students can no longer afford to be educated away from their origins. Henceforth, our education must speak to the needs of our community and our people. We can no longer prostitute our minds to the vain and irrelevant intellectual pursuits of Western society while our community lies in ruin and our people are threatened with concentration camps. This would amount to intellectual shuffling, and we are determined to shuffle no more.
We must therefore ask with unrelenting insistence that our future education be radically reformed. We demand a program of “Black Studies,” a program that will be of, by, and for black people. We demand that we be educated realistically, and that no form of education which attempts to lie to us or otherwise miseducate us will be accepted.
If the university is not prepared to educate us in such a way that our education may be relative to our lives, then we ask that the university prepare itself to do so immediately. If the university will not prepare itself to address our educational needs, then we ask that the university accept no more of our parents’ tax money, which it has used in the past to miseducate us.
We have outlined a proposed course of study that we believe necessary not only for our education but for our very survival. We ask that this proposed program be considered in the light of the stark realities of American society. We ask that this program be considered because the destruction of our minds and the current rate of attrition for our students can no longer be tolerated. We ask that this program be reconsidered because nothing less will do.
Afro-American Student Union, from its “Proposal for Establishing a Black Studies Program.” The University of California, Berkeley, inaugurated its African American studies department in 1970, two years after the union submitted this proposal, and offered thirty courses in its first semester. “Everybody knows,” James Baldwin said in a 1979 speech hosted by the department, “that you can’t change a school without changing a neighborhood, and you can’t change a neighborhood without changing the city, and there ain’t nobody prepared to change the city, because they want the city to be white.”
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