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The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge. Martha Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan \"black power\" into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.

The forty-year history of African American studies has led some scholars to take stock of its roots and its future. This essay examines the field's unexpected origins in black colleges, as well as at predominantly white ones, and assesses the early debates and challenges along the road to academic incorporation. Biondi takes up such questions as: Did the field's origins in the Black Power movement jeopardize its claims to academic legitimacy? If black studies is a discipline, what is its methodology? As an outgrowth of black nationalism on campus, to what extent was black studies U.S.-centric? How did the field relate to the rise of diaspora studies and black feminism? Who takes black studies classes and to what extent does the field retain a political mission? The essay concludes that African American studies remains a vital and dynamic field as it moves into the twenty-first century.

[...]the incidents reveal a dark region of U.S. political culture striving to influence the mainstream. [...]Ayers notes the irony in all the pressure on him to disavow his and the Weather Underground's actions to end the long war in Vietnam (not to mention the several other disastrous wars the U.S. government has waged since): the fact that most of their architects and proponents have never been held to account for their decisions and acts that were based on fabrications or made in violation of international law or human rights conventions.

In November 1968 the Black Student Union (BSU) at San Francisco State College (SFSC or State) called a student strike. For five months the strike rocked the Bay Area, led to nearly eight hundred arrests, galvanized local and national media, and put Governor Ronald Reagan, the Black Panther Party, students, faculty, administrators, and the board of trustees on a collision course. The students wanted to fundamentally redefine higher education. California’s reorganization of its three-tier system of higher education, together with the introduction of the SAT in the mid-1960s, had toughened admissions criteria at the state colleges, leading to a sharp

Black student activism exploded in the spring of 1969. It was the highwater mark of the Black student movement, with militant actions and mass confrontations at campuses across the country, most notably at the University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University; Harvard University; Rutgers University; and Howard University. Coinciding with the community-control-of-public-schools movement, the Black student movement in New York City aimed to redefine the relationship between universities and Black communities. Like students in San Francisco, Chicago, and other cities, students in New York wanted some form of open admissions in public institutions of higher education. But as elsewhere, the struggle

Conflict and confrontation may have characterized the student movement in California, but in the Midwest the movement unfolded in less violent, if still dramatic, form. If San Francisco State showed that a revolutionary conception of Black studies would be difficult to realize, the movement in Chicago demonstrated that it was still possible to achieve a significant transformation of educational institutions. And in a city with a Black political class closely tethered to the machinations of Mayor Richard M. Daley, student protest helped usher in changes that reverberated more broadly in the city’s political, cultural, and institutional life, laying the groundwork

The explosion of Black student activism in 1968 took many observers by surprise. Earlier in the decade, the violence unleashed by whites on nonviolent protesters in the South riveted a national television audience. Now, television news gave daily coverage to African American college students assertively seeking social change, but the images were often unsettling: violent clashes between Black students and the police in San Francisco; militant Black students disrupting classes in Madison; Black students occupying the computer center in Santa Barbara, the president’s office at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and the entire south campus of City College in Harlem. This