Pan African Studies Still Strong at 30

Thirty-one years ago, a white assistant coach kicked a black player at a Cal State Northridge football game and called him a name that hurt even more.

The result was two months of campus protests, a mass arrest of 300 students and the establishment of two pioneering ethnic studies departments that helped change the course of American academe.

With 320 majors between them, Cal State Northridge’s Pan African studies and Chicano studies departments are more popular than ever and remain two of the largest such programs in the nation.

Among the first ethnic studies departments in the nation when established in 1969, the two have graduated thousands of students and inspired other universities and colleges to create similar programs.

On Thursday, CSUN’s Pan African studies department celebrated its 30th anniversary with gospel music and original plays about two black historical figures. About 100 students--most of them African American--attended.

“There are some people in academia who didn’t think this was a legitimate field,” said David L. Horne, chairman of the department. “But [such departments] are all across the country now, alive and kicking.”

Once derided as an academic fad, black studies departments have sprung up at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Cornell, Yale and Stanford universities, Vassar College and UC Berkeley all have programs devoted to the study of African American culture, history and literature. Pan African studies professor Joseph Holloway, a Fulbright scholar at Cal State Northridge, doesn’t mind taking credit.

“We are the model for all the other black studies departments,” he said. “Gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, Asian studies, Chicano studies--all these little fringe groups--we were the model. Through our struggle, we made it possible for them. We were the trailblazers.”

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Although ethnic studies proponents say such programs promote understanding among diverse student groups, college campuses can also be incubators for ethnic tension.

Last month, students and professors walked out of class at UCLA Law School to protest the decrease in minority students in the freshman class, including only two blacks among 286 new enrollees. Earlier this year, UC Berkeley was slapped with a class-action lawsuit, alleging its admissions policies are unfair to minorities.

At Cal State Northridge, a group of Latino students protested an editorial published last month in the campus newspaper in support of a statewide measure that expels remedial freshmen who fail to catch up. Protesters said the editorial targeted minorities, whose remedial rates are higher than those of whites.

These incidents point to the continued need for ethnic studies, proponents say.

Last summer, the Pan African studies department hosted representatives from 25 colleges and universities to discuss establishing an accreditation program for black studies departments, and three colleges have invited the Northridge staff to evaluate their programs, Horne said.

Pan African studies at Northridge began in the aftermath of the kicking incident 31 years ago last week. Holloway was a student when two dozen Black Student Union members occupied the administration building of what was then San Fernando Valley State.

The protest galvanized antiwar activists on campus and Latino students, who joined with black students to demand that the university admit more minority students, hire more minority faculty members and set up the Pan African and Chicano studies departments.

“See, up to that point, this school had been lily white. Many of the teachers here had never seen a black face,” said Holloway, who teaches African American history.

Cal State Northridge professor Barbara Rhodes, who organized Thursday’s event, was among the first Pan African studies professors at the university. From the beginning, Rhodes said, she and her colleagues tried to integrate black studies classes into the mainstream curriculum.

“We made sure that most of our courses were general education courses, so that we were made part of the university package offered to all students,” she said.

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In those heady days, many African American studies departments, including San Fernando Valley State’s, were dedicated to the kind of black nationalism espoused by H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Some early black studies scholars sought to combat what they believed were Eurocentric intellectual trends with Afrocentric tracts.

“In the beginning, we were all concerned about nationalism,” Holloway said. “I mean, a lot of us didn’t even have all our academic degrees. Since then, things have changed from nationalism to scholarship. It’s all right to be a nationalist, but you have to do the research to back it up.”

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Many black studies professors have rejected the concept of Afrocentrism just as ardently as they have rejected Eurocentrism--or any philosophy that exalts one race or culture over another.

“I understand the impulse on the part of Africanists to create a place in the academy and in the curriculum for African American history and culture that has been lost, strayed or stolen,” said Richard Newman, a researcher at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Afro American Research Institute. “But to replace one essentialism with another is not a gain.”

With such intellectual luminaries as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Anthony Appiah and William Julius Wilson on the faculty, Harvard’s Afro American studies department is currently regarded as the standard-bearer.

Although Horne says he has philosophical disagreements with Harvard’s approach to the field, he acknowledged that Harvard has raised the profile of black studies programs everywhere.

“People say, ‘If Harvard says it’s OK and they have been spending money and publicity on that, then it must be OK,’ ” Horne said.

Jeff Davenport, a 17-year-old African American student at Cal State Northridge, is not a Pan African studies major but takes courses in the department.

“I was taught by white teachers all through high school,” said the Pasadena native. “I’m not saying they were bad, but it seems like my black teachers are more prone to wanting to see me succeed.”