ABSTRACT
The emergence of the Black Studies Movement in its original thrust, before its later cooption into the mainstream of the very order of knowledge whose “truth” in “some abstract universal sense” it had arisen to contest, was inseparable from the parallel emergence of the Black Aesthetic and Black Arts Movements and the central reinforcing relationship that had come to exist between them.* As with the latter two movements, the struggle to institute Black Studies programs and departments in mainstream academia had also owed its momentum to the eruption of the separatist “Black Power” thrust of the Civil Rights Movement. It, too, had had its precursor stage in the intellectual ferment to which the fi rst southern integrationist phase of the Civil Rights Movement had given rise, as well as in the network of extracurricular institutions that had begun to call for the establishment of a black university, including, inter alia, institutions such as the National Association for African-American Research, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, the Institute of the Black World, the New School of Afro-American Thought, the Institute of Black Studies in Los Angeles, and Forum 66 in Detroit. The struggle for what was to become the institutionalization of Black Studies was to be spearheaded, however, by a recently enlarged cadre of black student activists at what had been, hitherto, almost purely white mainstream universities, all of whose members had been galvanized by Stokely Carmichael’s call, made in Greenwood, Mississippi, for a turning of the back on the earlier integrationist, “We shall overcome” goal of the fi rst phase of the Civil Rights Movement, and for the adoption, instead, of the new separatist goal of Black Power.
