Black Studies

Black studies is an academic field that examines the history, culture, and experiences of people of African descent in the United States and around the world. The idea of creating a college curriculum to study the Black experience arose out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. By the early 2020s, more than 150 universities across the United States offered such courses and awarded more than one thousand degrees a year. Specific topics of Black studies vary widely and can include African history, the history of slavery, Black literature, Black activism, feminism, and sociology. Although Black studies have been offered by many US colleges for more than half a century, the courses were not offered at the national high school level until 2023. However, the introduction of Black studies as an advanced placement high school curriculum caused controversy, as some local and state government leaders claimed some subject matter was too politicized.

Overview: Pioneers

African Americans were freed from enslavement by 1865 and were granted rights as citizens in 1868. A year later, African American men were granted the right to vote. Despite these achievements, local laws and the inherent racist views of the era kept Black Americans from gaining true equality. Still, African Americans made significant progress in many aspects of American life, even before the abolition of slavery.

In 1847, David Jones Peck became the first Black American to earn a medical degree in the United States. Charles Lewis Reason was the first to become a college professor in 1849. Joseph Rainey was the first elected Black US Representative in 1870. That same year, Hiram Revels became the first Black US senator when he was appointed to a seat representing Mississippi. In 1875, Oliver Lewis became the first Black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. In 1904, John Baxter “Doc” Taylor became the first Black American to win an Olympic gold medal.

In 1915, Black historian Carter Woodson wanted to find a way to showcase the rich history of African Americans in the United States. He joined with minister Jesse Moorland to found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), a group that focused on the history and accomplishments of Black Americans and those of African descent. Woodson and the ASNLH began publishing The Journal of Negro History in 1916 and founded Negro History Week in 1926.

The idea of Negro History Week gained steam across the United States and was buoyed significantly in the 1940s and 1950s by the support of W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black historian and author. Du Bois was a proponent of highlighting African American history and had long pushed for a true study of Black history, as opposed to the unreliable version disseminated by many White institutions of the time.

Negro History Week was celebrated in mid-February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, who had championed the Thirteenth Amendment to outlaw slavery, and Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved person who became a noted abolitionist and author. By the 1960s, many college campuses had expanded the focus on Black history from a week to the month of February. In 1975, Black History Month was recognized by presidential decree and in 1986, Congress passed a law officially designating February as Black History Month.

Born from the Civil Rights Movement

The 1950s and 1960s were a significant time for Black Americans. After centuries of enslavement and legally sanctioned bigotry, their voices were finally being heard with the passage of laws that made discrimination based on race illegal. The civil rights movement that brought about the historic changes was not an easy journey. Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. faced many obstacles in the quest for civil rights. They used methods such as protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience to achieve their goals. The success of the civil rights movement not only changed the social landscape of the United States, but it also emboldened other groups to stand up and speak out on important issues and causes.

The idea of Black studies grew out of the civil rights movement as Black students and teachers at colleges across the United States began to call for Black-centered courses. In 1968, following months of student-led protests, what was then San Francisco State College created the first department of Black studies in the United States. The school was the first to offer a four-year bachelor’s degree in the subject. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, the push for Black studies gained even more steam, and programs sprung up in schools across the nation, such as Brooklyn College in New York, Northwestern in Chicago, and several historically Black colleges and universities across the south.

Over the next few decades, dozens of universities across the United States implemented Black studies programs. They were called by various names including African American studies, Afro-American studies, Africana studies, Black world studies, and Pan-African studies. The terms Africana studies and Pan-African studies were used to reflect a more global focus on African people and people of African descent living around the world.

Fields of Study

The specifics of Black studies vary widely as each college and university can develop its own curriculum. Black studies is an interdisciplinary field that covers several broad topics, but these topics are by no means universal. In general, Black studies can encompass Black history, sociology, religion, economics, psychology, politics, and Black art, literature, and music.

Black history can include the history of Africa, such as an examination of the continent’s ancient cultures, the rise of its powerful West African empires, and the twentieth-century independence movements that shaped modern Africa. It can also include the history of the slave trade, the lives of enslaved people in the Americas, the abolitionist movement, and the rise of racist Jim Crow laws. More modern topics such as the civil rights movement, Black activism, and the presidency of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, are also common topics of Black studies.

Black sociology studies the role people of African descent play within society as a whole and how their interactions with that society are governed by a unique set of cultural norms. Topics can include how centuries of racism have shaped the Black perspective or how the bonds formed in Black communities are unique. One common element of Black sociology is the idea of Afrocentrism, in which the Black American worldview is shaped by their distinct African background and culture. It is meant to stand in contrast to Eurocentrism, the worldview historically imposed upon both enslaved Africans and those living in European-controlled colonies in Africa.

Black religious studies can include an examination of traditional African religions, as well as the impact the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have had upon Africa and those of African descent. Topics can include the historical impact of Islam in West Africa, African American Christianity from the time of slavery to the modern era, and the Ethiopian Jewish community that has thrived in the region for centuries.

Black economics can examine the effect economic factors have on the African continent and Black people around the world. This can include a study of colonialism’s impact on the African economy and the disparity in pay and opportunity between Black and White citizens in western economies. Black psychology studies the paths to knowledge, absorption of culture, and ways of viewing the world distinct to those of African descent.

Black politics can encompass many topics ranging from the history of Black people in government to important social issues that become magnified as political issues. A large number of Black studies courses examine the political and societal fallout from slavery and the Jim Crow laws that followed. Other courses focus on the efforts to end segregation and implement efficient civil rights legislations. Modern topics deal with issues such as police brutality, affirmative action laws, or voting rights in Black communities.

Another prominent field in Black studies are the humanities, specifically the study of Black writers, artists, actors, and musicians. Among the most prominent examples are twentieth-century African author Chinua Achebe and Black American writers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. They can also include artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, actors such as Sidney Poitier, and singers that range from opera singer Marian Anderson to rapper Cardi B.

Further Insights

According to Data USA, an online database for US government data, 129 four-year or more public colleges or universities offered Black studies programs in 2020. In addition, more than 35 private universities offered the program. Master’s degrees in the discipline were offered by 20 schools and 20 offered doctorates, although some schools offered advanced Black studies degrees as a specialization in conjunction with another degree, such as sociology.

Data USA reported that 1,044 people earned at least a four-year degree in Black studies in 2022. Of those, 870 earned a bachelor’s degree, 73 earned a master’s degree, and 47 earned a doctorate. Another 23 received a post-baccalaureate certificate and 16 received a certificate. The University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) issued the most Black studies degrees with 34, followed by University of Virginia with 30, Yale with 29, and the San Francisco State University with 28. Over 188,000 people with Black studies degrees were in the workforce in 2022, earning an average salary of $92,863 a year. The majority, were lawyers, judges, or other judicial workers; the second highest group were elementary or middle school teachers, and the third largest group were postsecondary teachers.

Issues

Since the first Black studies programs were created in the 1960s, the field of study has been taught exclusively on college campuses. In most cases, for those not majoring in Black studies, the courses were electives, allowing students interested in the topic the chance to take them. In a few cases, some schools made taking at least one Black studies course mandatory. In addition, Black studies inspired the creation of other ethnic studies courses, including Hispanic American studies and Asian American studies. Many schools have also created LGBTQIA+ studies programs. In 2020, California signed a law into effect mandating that all students in its twenty-three-campus state university system take one class in either Native American, African American, Asian American, or Latinx American studies.

In the 2010s and early 2020s, in connection with a reported increase in racist incidents and police violence against African Americans, some states began the process of initiating Black and other ethnic studies at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. In 2023, New York City announced that it would begin to roll out Black studies in its schools for the 2023–2024 school year, and eventually expand the program to all grades from Pre-K to grade twelve. Asian American, Pacific Islander, and LBGTQ studies were already being taught at some New York City schools and were set to expand in 2023–2024.

As of 2023, similar efforts were also underway to increase Black and ethnic studies in Connecticut, Illinois, and Washington, DC, while California's Assembly Bill 101, signed by Governor Newsome in 2022, makes ethnic studies mandatory to graduate high school. Such decisions have led to conflict between those who view the curriculum as a way to help Black Americans learn about their history and those who see it driving a wedge between races because of its perceived politicized content.

In 2021, the College Board proposed a series of Advanced Placement (AP) courses on Black studies to be taught in high schools across the United States and Canada. The courses were scheduled to be launched in sixty US schools in 2022–2023 before expanding to eight hundred schools in Fall 2023. However, the 2022 draft of the proposed courses generated controversy in some states, most notably Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis said he would ban the curriculum. DeSantis and other conservative politicians objected to some courses they claimed were politicized and adhered to overly liberal ideals. Among their targets were courses on Black queer studies, reparations for slavery, Black feminism, and Black Lives Matter, an activist group formed in the wake of several high-profile police killings of Black men in the mid-2010s.

In the face of the criticism, the College Board revised its curriculum to remove the controversial content. This in turn stoked anger among some liberals and Black scholars who felt the College Board was caving to pressure and the courses were being “watered down.” In April 2023, the College Board announced that it would once again be revising the guidelines but did not mention specific changes.

As of April 2024, the Advanced Placement guidelines contained seventy-four topics including courses on Africa's Ancient Societies, Atlantic Africans and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Abolition and the War for Freedom, Migrations and Black Internationalism, the Long Civil Rights Movement, Diversity Within Black Communities, and Black Power and Black Pride.

Bibliography

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