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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY: ORIGINS OF
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY'S
CENTER FOR BLACK STUDIES

presented by

Stephen Alan Jones

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Master—ofJLts—degree in _Ameniean_Stud ies

 

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Date April 2, 1993

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MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution
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CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY: ORIGINS OF
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSIIY'S
CENTER FOR BLACK STUDIES

By

Stephen Alan Jones

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
American Studies Program

Department of English

1993

ABSTRACT
CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY: ORIGINS OF
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY'S
CENTER FOR BLACK STUDIES
By

Stephen Alan Jones

This thesis explores the creation in 1972 of the Center
for Black Studies at Wayne State University. It seeks to
illuminate events and circumstances that led to persisting
problems of lower academic status and limited resources,
which in turn provoked an 11-day sit—in by black students in
1989. Drawing on university documents, newspaper accounts
and interviews with former administrators and students, it
describes the close connections between black Wayne State
students and activists in the surrounding black community of
Detroit. It shows how negotiations over a proposed Black
Studies program were stalled for several years by an impasse
between students and administrators on the issue of student
control over the program. It also argues that the center was
weakened by the administration's unilateral decision to
create the center without substantial student or faculty

participation.

Dedicated
with love
to my wife,
Colette Gilewicz,
and our son,
Alexander Gilewicz Jones

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the
members of my committee, Dr. David Bailey, Dr. Linda Susan
Beard and Dr. Kathryn Moore, each of whom challenged and
inspired me in the classroom and encouraged my work on this
thesis. I also owe a great debt to Dr. James McClintock,
director of the American Studies Program, for his guidance,
encouragement and support.

At Wayne State University I was helped by many people,
and I would like especially to thank those current and
former administrators, faculty members and students who
granted me extensive and immensely valuable interviews: Dr.
William R. Keast, V. Lonnie Peek, Dr. Patricia
Coleman-Burns, Dr. John Edward Simpkins, Dr. Henry V. Bohm,
and Ronald Haughton. I also want to thank Dr. Michael T.
Martin, chairman of the Department of Africana Studies, for
generously giving access to the archives of his department
and the Center for Black Studies, which preceded it.

To the staff of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne
State University I am grateful for their unstinting
assistance in my research. In particular, I want to thank
Carrolyn A. Davis, archivist/librarian with the Archives of

iv

Labor and Urban Affairs, who graciously shared her knowledge
of the people and the period involved in my study.

But I am most deeply indebted to Patricia Bartkowski,
assistant university archivist, who enthusiastically guided
me through the resources of the library and the University
Archives. She was extraordinarily generous in sharing her
time and her knowledge of the archives and the university.
Above and beyond the call of duty she offered to read a
draft version of this thesis and made valuable suggestions
that helped me improve the final version. It is hard to
imagine how I could have completed this project without her

help.

Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Conclusions
Notes

Bibliography

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vi

32
63
99
107

120

INTRODUCTION

On April 12, 1989, about 100 black students took over
the Belen Newberry Joy Student Services Center on the campus
of Wayne State University in Detroit.[1] For 11 days, the
students occupied the building, which housed a variety of
administrative offices, holding it as leverage in
negotiations with university officials over a list of 17
student demands. That list encompassed a range of issues,
including demands that the university spend more money on
the recruitment and retention of black students and faculty
and that the university recognize as holidays the birthday
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the anniversary of Malcolm
X's assassination. But the students' central demands were
that the university elevate its Center for Black Studies to
full academic status, rename it the Department of Africana
Studies, and dramatically increase its budget. The black
students were angered by what they considered not merely
neglect of the center, but active efforts by the university
to dismantle it.[2] In the end, the university granted most
of the students' demands, and about five months later, amid
further controversy over the appointment of a department
chairman, the university's Board of Governors officially
created the Department of Africana Studies.[3]

In one sense, the agreement that led to the creation of

l

2

the Department of Africana Studies was the culmination of a
struggle that began in 1968. Then, an earlier generation of
black student activists pressed Wayne State officials to
establish a W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Black Studies with
full academic standing. The student activists of 1989
clearly were aware of that fact. When Wayne State President
David Adamany issued a written statement the day before the
protest began saying that the students' demands would

' student leader Darrell

"require study and deliberation,‘
Dawsey responded brusquely that university officials did not
need more time because the students' proposals had been
"proffered from as far back as the late 19605."[4]

But in another sense, the confrontation that erupted at
Wayne State in the spring of 1989 was the fruit of a
troubled tree. The seeds were planted by the student
activists of the late 19605 and early 1970s in a social soil
badly scarred by the Detroit riot of 1967. That riot, in
which 43 people died, stood as the nation's bloodiest
outbreak of urban racial violence until the Los Angeles riot
of 1992. Fears and passions stirred by the riot accellerated
the flight of white Detroiters to suburban communities and
the pace at which blacks were becoming a majority of the
city's population. Detroit elected its first black mayor,
Coleman Young, in 1973. Wayne State's creation of the Center
for Black Studies in February 1972 was partly a response to

pressure from black students and partly a genuine effort to

expand the university's tradition of service to the troubled

urban community around it.

Moreover, the center had the misfortune of being created
near the beginning of a 20—year decline in state support for
higher education and at the brink of a period of extremely
high inflation. When the black students occupied the student
services center in 1989, the Center for Black Studies had an
annual budget of $163,000, an increase of less than nine
percent from the initial $150,000 budget approved in
1972.[5] In that same 17—year period, the Consumer Price
Index had risen nearly 120 percent. That stagnant budget,
ravaged by inflation, was a key exhibit in the students'
argument that the university had little commitment to
serving the needs of minorities. In that context, the
agreement to give the center departmental status and nearly
triple its budget to $472,500 was a big victory for the
students and an important expansion of the university's
commitment. But it also underscores the disparity between
objective and accomplishment to note that the new
department's budget in 1989 was only about $35,000 more than
the budget proposed by the center's first director in May
1972,[6] and more than $160,000 lower than the budget first
requested by the students who proposed the DuBois Institute
in 1968.[7]

How did there come to be so wide and lasting a gulf
between what the students wanted and what the university
provided? It will not be possible, within the scope of this

thesis, to answer that question completely; this will not be

4
a comprehensive history of Wayne State's Center for Black
Studies. But just as the quality of an apple depends on the
soil in which the tree was planted, the turmoil of 1989 was
rooted in the circumstances that surrounded the center's
creation. I propose, here, to explore the origin of the
center and to illuminate, to the extent possible, the
process by which it was created and the forces that
determined its early environment.

One final but very important point: I have chosen to
focus primarily on the institutional process by which the
Center for Black Studies was created and therefore have
resisted the temptation to delve deeply into the fiery
rhetoric and passions of the period. As a result, this
narrative may make the debate over Black Studies at Wayne
State University seem more calm and gently reasoned than was
actually the case. The emotional intensity of that time must
not be understated or overlooked. My intent has been to
provide a detailed description of events -- the whats and

the hows —- necessary for a further exploration of the whys.

CHAPTER ONE

The 19603 earned their reputation for social turmoil.
Nearly every institution of American society was being
stretched in new and disconcerting ways, starting with the
family, which was still in the throes of the post—World War
II baby boom. That population explosion, in turn, had
swelled elementary and secondary schools to the bursting
point throughout the 19503, and by the mid-'6OS, the first
wave of the tidal surge was crashing onto the shore of
higher education.

This new generation of college students was coming of
age in an era of aggitation, violence and confrontation. On
an international level, the cold war, with its superpower
tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union,
dominated world affairs and set a chilling tone for the
decade with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. By late 1964,
the United States was deeply enmeshed in the Vietnam War and
an anti-war movement was developing. Divisions over the war
deepened and intensified as the decade -- and the war ——
progressed. Eventually the dissention shook the country's
political structure, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to
drop his bid for reelection, sparking insurgent candidacies
on the left (Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy) and right

(George Wallace), and reviving the political career of

5

Richard Nixon.

Violence shook America on the domestic front as well.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was
the nation's first truly galvanizing public event of the
television era. Although the gruesome images of Kennedy's
death, captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, were not shown
publicly for some time, millions of Americans did witness
the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live
television. Many millions more were transfixed through that
long weekend by television coverage of the nation's mourning
and the slain president's funeral. That shared mourning did
several things. First, it transformed Kennedy, whose energy,
charisma and idealistic rhetoric had already established him
as a hero for many young people, into a martyr for the cause
of youthful idealism. Second, it established the power of
television to shape what Marshall McLuhan called the "global

village,"

a world where information and images of dramatic
events were transmitted almost everywhere almost instantly.
This development grew in clarity and significance later in
the decade as campus anti—war protesters were able to keep
track of developments, not only in the war zone 10,000 miles
away, but also among their fellow protesters at colleges and
universities across the United States. And third, it began
the process of immersing American culture in a sea of vivid
images of real violence. From the murder of Oswald to the

urban riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit and other cities, to

the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and

7
Robert Kennedy, to the daily chronicles of blood and death
from Vietnam on the evening news, television thrust violence
and confrontation into the face of the American public.

The '608 also was a decade of movements, large numbers
of people brought together by shared desire for social
change. The anti-war movement was the largest and most
widely recognized in the latter half of the decade but it
was far from the only one. Other movements were beginning to
develop around the efforts of women, Hispanics, Native
Americans and other groups to change the ways they were
treated by society. Each movement aimed, in one way or
another, to challenge the existing social structure and its
underlying assumptions, and each adopted, to one extent or
another, the tactics of mass protest, civil disobedience and
confrontation with authority. Those tactics had been
pioneered in the '503 and early '60s by the archetype of
'60s social activism, the Civil Rights Movement. That
movement burst into the public consciousness with the
Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955,[1] and
continued through the lunch counter sit—ins, freedom rides
and voting rights campaigns of the early and mid-'60s. The
confrontations with injustice drew a lot of attention to the
protesters' tactics, and the righteousness of protest and
confrontation was reinforced by the brutality —~ the police
dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs, beatings and killings -- with
which the demands of the civil rights activists were met.

The Civil Rights Movement was an inspiration to many

8
idealistic young people, white and black, but it also was,
in important measure, a product of idealistic youth. The
wave of lunch counter sit-ins that swept across the South in
1960, for example, was conceived and carried out primarily
by black college students.[2] That burst of student activism
eventually led to creation of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was the driving force
in the Mississippi Summer Project voter registration drive
of 1964. And the Mississippi Summer Project, in turn, was a
compelling and deeply influential training ground for many
of the student activists -- white and black -- who led later
on—campus and off-campus movements.[3] All of these forces
were churning the atmosphere of academia in 1968 when the
Black Studies movement erupted on predominantly white
college and university campuses across the United States.
Inspired by the preceeding decade of Civil Rights activism
in the South, radicalized by growing urban rebellion in the
North, and galvanized by King's assassination, black
students began increasingly to demand that white
institutions of higher education integrate intellectually as
well as demographically.

But the roots of the Black Studies movement went much
deeper and much farther back than the lunch counter sit-ins
or even the Montgomery bus boycott. African Americans had
long placed great emphasis on education in general and on
education about their own history and culture in particular.

For more than half a century, black intellectuals, following

9
the lead of such scholars as W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G.
Woodson, had struggled to expand the body of knowledge about
black history and to infuse that endeavor with a discipline
that would achieve acceptance and respect in the
intellectual world. Until the 19603, however, acceptance of
the idea that black history, black literature and black
culture were subjects worthy of academic examination was
limited mainly to predominantly black college campuses. A
few white universities had established African Studies
programs or centers, but generally those did not draw any
connection between Africa and African Americans. By the
mid-'603, a few white colleges, sensitized by the Civil
Rights Movement, were beginning to offer a handful of
courses concerning black people and their history. But it
was not until 1968, when San Francisco State College
established a Black Studies department, that a formal
program in Black Studies appeared on a predominantly white
U.S. college campus.[4]

Given the fact that Black Studies —— not to mention
black students -— were so new to the nation's white
campuses, it is remarkable how quickly such programs took
root. In 1967, when Harold Cruse published his landmark
assessment of black intellectual history in the 20th
Century, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, he made no
mention of any debate over the introduction of Black Studies
on white campuses. But by the end of that year, the debate

was taking shape and it burst forth with great energy in the

10
spring of 1968, following the assassination of King.[5]
Black students, who only recently had begun enrolling in
large numbers at predominantly white colleges and
universities, began demanding that those institutions expand
their curricula to reflect a broader world, a world that
included African Americans, their literature, culture and
history. A few schools, such as San Francisco State, the
University of Michigan,[6] and Yale College,[7] adopted or
began designing Black Studies programs in the fall of 1968,
but the great profusion of such programs did not occur until
1969.

Although 1969 often is remembered as a year dominated by
the war in Vietnam and the anti-war protests that convulsed
campuses across the United States, one study indicates that
demonstrations demanding Black Studies programs were much
more common. According to a survey by the Urban Research
Corporation, there were 292 major student protests on 232
campuses in the first six months of 1969. Black recognition
issues were raised in 49 percent of those protests, compared
with war-related issues, which were raised in 22 percent of
the protests. And while those black recognition issues
covered a range of specifics, from increasing numbers of
black students and faculty, to ending discrimination on
campus, to general demands that blacks be honored by the
institutions, 32 percent of the protests called specifically
for more black studies courses or black studies centers.[8]

Proposals for Black Studies programs generated heated

11
opposition on both sides of the racial divide. White
opponents often challenged the legitimacy of Black Studies
as an academic discipline or argued that information on
black culture and history should simply be added to existing
courses in the traditional disciplines. Some black scholars
also opposed Black Studies, fearing that such programs would
lead to renewed segregation and undercut the struggles and
gains of the Civil Rights Movement. But the debate over
whether Black Studies programs should be created effectively
was settled in 1969 when Harvard University, arguably the
most influential leader in U.S. higher education,
established an Afro-American Studies Department.[9] By 1973,
more than 218 colleges and universities in the United States
had established some form of Black Studies department,
center or program.[10]

But the question of program creation was simply the more
quickly and clearly resolved of two important debates that
focused on Black Studies. The second debate raged with equal
intensity among supporters of Black Studies over the
question of what kind of programs should be created. There
was no disagreement among Black Studies advocates about the
value of educatiOn or even the importance of including in
that education a full discussion of the contributions and
achievements of black people. All of them shared a certain
degree of black nationalism, at least in the cultural realm.
King acknowledged the need for black awareness when he

wrote, "The tendency to ignore the Negro's contribution to

12
American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as
the earliest history books and as contemporary as this
morning's newspaper. To offset this cultural homicide, the
Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian
manhood. . . . As long as the mind is enslaved the body can
never be free."[11] In that statement he does not seem so
far removed from Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's
assertion that

Black people must redefine themselves, and only

they can do that. Throughout this country, vast

segments of the black communities are beginning

to recognize the need to assert their own

definitions, to reclaim their history, their

culture; to create their own sense of community

and togetherness.[12]

And neither position seems at odds with the proclamation on
education contained in the Black Panther Party's 1964
platform: "We believe in an education system that will give
to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have
knowledge of himself and his position in society and the
world, then he has little chance to relate to anything
else."[13]

And yet, there developed a very strong ideological split
among Black Studies proponents, a split that separated
reform—minded intellectuals and political moderates on the
one side from the radical and revolutionary advocates of
Black Power on the other. Both factions understood the
importance of education and both believed that black history

and culture should have a prominent place in academia. But

while the reformers envisioned Black Studies as a vehicle to

13
bring black culture and black people into the mainstream of
the existing social and academic structure, the radicals saw
Black Studies as a way to eradicate that structure
altogether. In practical terms, this meant that the
reformers generally supported programs that emphasized
research and traditional models of intellectual rigor and
achievement. The radicals, on the other hand, were more
interested in social revolution and believed that
traditional institutional models were useless and
oppressive. They insisted that Black Studies programs must
transform society by liberating blacks and other oppressed
people, and to accomplish that must be committed to social
action through close links with the off-campus black
community.

The debate between the two factions closely paralleled
the broader political struggle between the reformist,
integrationist forces of the traditional Civil Rights
Movement and the younger radicals of the Black Power
movement. In some cases, the players were the same. For
example, a pamphlet on Black Studies published in 1969 by
the A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund included an
introduction by Bayard Rustin and articles by Kenneth B.
Clark and Roy Wilkins, among others. Rustin, Clark and
Wilkins were all important figures in the Civil Rights
Movement and the pamphlet was consistently critical of the
radical approach to Black Studies. Rustin expressed the

reformist perspective most succinctly in his introduction

14
when he described the nature of the debate between the
reformists and the radicals as a series of questions:

Is black studies an educational program or a
forum for ideological indoctrination? Is it
designed to train qualified scholars in a
significant field of intellectual inquiry, or

is it hoped that its graduates will form
political cadres prepared to organize the
impoverished residents of the black ghetto? Is
it a means to achieve psychological identity

and strength, or is it intended to provide a
false and sheltered sense of security, the
fragility of which would be revealed by even the
slightest exposure to reality? And finally, does
it offer the possibility for better racial
understanding, or is it a regression to racial
separatism? The power -- and also the danger -—
of "black studies" as a slogan is that it can
mean any or all of these things to different
people.[14]

Rustin's last question is particularly significant because
it underscores the fact that Rustin and other reformists
were committed -- on the question of Black Studies as on
other issues -- to an integrationist philosophy.

Clark's contribution to the pamphlet was his letter of
resignation from the Antioch College Board of Directors.
Clark, whose groundbreaking sociological studies laid the
foundation for the successful legal challenge to the
"separate but equal" doctrine of school segregation, quit
the board after the college created an Afro-American Studies
Institute for black students only. "To encourage or endorse
a separate black program not academically equivalent to the
college curriculum generally, . . . is to reinforce the
Negro's inability to compete with whites for real power in

H

the real society, Clark wrote. "It is no excuse to justify

15
the deed by citing the demand."[15] And Wilkins, in a short
essay, also assailed the idea of separatist Black Studies
programs as "Black Jim Crow." In demanding such programs or
racially exclusive dormitories, he wrote, black students
"are opening the door to a dungeon. They do not see that no
black history becomes significant and meaningful unless it
is taught in the context of world and national history. In
its sealed—off black-studies centers, it will be simply
another exercise in racial breast-beating."[16]

But the radicals rejected the integrationist approach to
Black Studies. Frustrated and angered by the intransigence
of white academic institutions and what they saw as the
glacial pace of change achieved under the integrationist
model, the radicals increasingly defined their aims in
revolutionary terms and increasingly leaned toward the use
of separatist approaches they believed would promote social
change by encouraging unity and self-determination among
blacks. If the Black Studies rhetoric of the reformists

echoed King's criticism of Black Power in Where Do We Go

 

From Here: Chaos or Community?, the ideology of the radicals

 

was infused with the spirit of Carmichael and Hamilton's
assertion that,

The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental
premise: Before a group can enter the open society,
it must first close ranks. By this we mean that
group solidarity is necessary before a group can
operate effectively from a bargaining position of
strength in a pluralistic society."(emphasis in
original)[17]

 

In Black Power, Carmichael and Hamilton took the

 

16

metaphor of internal colonialism that had been devised by
more moderate scholars -- Cruse and Clark[18] -— and
transformed it into an activist philosophy. That philosophy
put great emphasis on group identity, unity and autonomous
action in much the same way that African independence
movements had sought to shake off European colonial rule. It
was, after all, the African colonial experience that had
inspired the internal colonialism metaphor. Black
revolutionaries like Maulana Ron Karenga and Eldridge
Cleaver and radical scholars like Nathan Hare sought to
apply that philosophy to academia in concrete ways. Karenga
told participants at a Yale symposium in 1968 that white
universities had three things to offer black people:
"non-intervention, foreign aid, and civilizing committees"
that would encourage humanitarian values among whites.
Karenga's analysis was blunt and direct:

What you have to understand is that you should

not fool yourselves by thinking that education

is an academic thing; it is basically a political

thing, and it provides identity, purpose, and

direction within an American context. . . . We say

that we are another country -— you have to accept

that. We are a colony ruled by a mother country —-

that's the outside world —- we live in another world.

What we have to do, then, is to try desperately to

keep the outside world from imposing its authority

and its value system upon us.[19]

The Black Panther Party went even farther than Karenga's
demand for white non-intervention, calling for profound,

radical change of the white institutions. In an 1969 article

on "Education and Revolution" in The Black Scholar, Eldridge

 

Cleaver, the Panthers' minister of information, said the

17
white power structure must be smashed.

We have to destroy their power in the
community, and we're not reformists, we're not
in the movement to reform the curriculum of a
given university or a given college or to have
a Black Students Union recognized at a given
high school. We are revolutionaries, and as
revolutionaries, our goal is the transformation
of the American social order.[20]

And in his own Black Scholar article the following month,

 

Panthers Chairman Bobby Seale urged black students to take
themselves and their Black Studies programs off-campus, "to
move out and be more a part of the community, to educate the
masses of people of the need to end the facist, brutal war
that has been going on against black people for hundreds of
years."[21]

Black students tended to align themselves with the
radical interpretations of Black Studies and demand that the
programs have a strong emphasis on community action. They
also did not shy away from separatist concepts when they
believed separatism would benefit black people. Stephen
Lythcott, a black student at Antioch College, responded to
Clark's criticism of the college's blacks-only program by
rejecting the integrationist model that Clark championed.
Black students could not afford to worry about the benefits
that an integrated program might have for the whole society,
he wrote, because their first responsibility was to their
own growth and development.

"[T]he major task of reorienting the Black

college student, creating a new value system
for him, and additionally putting his knowledge

18

and skills at the disposal of the people he has

forgotten in the black community -— these claims

have the highest priority for us, are far more

pertinent to our situation. . . . Black students

have their hands full already without assuming

the extra burdens of white education!"[22]

Antioch's program, Lythcott argued, was designed to break
out of the either/or dilemma posed by the 19508
segregation/integration model. Clark, he said, was trying to
cope with 1969 problems while trapped in a 1954 mindset.

One obvious legacy of all this debate is that there
still is no clear, consistent, widely shared vision of what
a Black Studies program should include, how it should be
structured, and what its role is within the university. That
much is clear from the divergence of names -— Black,
Afro-American, Africana -— and the variety of structures -—
departments, centers, programs -— that characterize the
differing institutional approaches. And those programs have
not uniformly thrived. In a survey of Black Studies programs
undertaken for the Ford Foundation in 1987, Darlene Clark
Hine traced the programs' structural diversity to their
origins as a "response to political exigencies rather than

" She continued:

intellectual and academic imperatives.
Today it seems that no two black studies
programs are alike. Their diversity is evidenced
in faculty size and composition, relations with
university administrators and more traditional
departments, curriculum, degrees offered, budgets,
spatial resources, range of special programs, and
the nature of their community outreach.[23]

Because Black Studies programs arose in an intensely

political environment and in response to political pressure

19
from black students and faculty, the programs' diversity may
be seen as an expression of the unique interaction of
individuals and institutional character that occurred on
each campus. On campuses where the black students and
faculty members pressing for Black Studies were influenced
more heavily by the reformist ideal, we would expect Black
Studies to reflect a more traditionally intellectual
approach. Where the leading black advocates were more
radical, we would expect the Black Studies programs to have
adopted a stronger community orientation. Likewise,
institutional character was bound to have an important
impact on Black Studies. Universities that saw themselves as
intellectually elite were more likely to adopt strongly
academic programs, while those with a tradition of greater
openness and community service were more accepting of
programs with a stronger community emphasis.

Of the two variables, however, institutional character
was by far the more dominant. After all, the relatively
small numbers of black students and faculty on white
campuses in the late '60s may have been able to influence
administrative policy but they did not have the power to
control it. Nellie Varner helped design an undergraduate
black studies program at the University of Michigan in 1968
as a young black faculty member and junior administrator.
She later became a U-M regent. In a 1992 interview, she said
that U-M's graduate research Center for Afro-American and

African Studies was designed to fit the university's

20
traditional and academically elite mold. She recalled that
there were strong feelings, particularly among the activist
black students, that the center should be more
community-oriented than it eventually became. But that
vision of Black Studies went beyond the university's limits.
"I think that the nature of the institution and 'what was
possible' at Michigan didn't allow it to take that kind of

' Varner said. "In other words, . . . it was a choice

turn,‘
of you're either going to do something that was in the
Michigan tradition or we can't have it here."[24] The white
university administrations also controlled the effectiveness
and success of Black Studies programs through the allocation
of institutional resources. Regardless of what philosophical
model a given college might adopt, a program's ability to
grow and prove itself as an academic enterprise depended in
large part on the institution's commitment to the program.
With adequate funding and staff, a Black Studies unit could
attract the high—quality scholars and underwrite the
high-quality programs that would win it acceptance and
respect in the academy. Without adequate funding and staff,
the most carefully conceived program could find itself
diminished and marginalized.

Some of the reformists cited this possibility early in
their resistence to the radical approach. Wilkins worried
about "the practical difficulty that it costs more money to

establish real studies centers than most colleges can afford

and that qualified personnel -— black or white -- is simply

21

' Activist students, he warned,

not available at this time.'
"might well find themselves saddled with a poor substitute
for a center, foisted on them by an administration ready to
buy peace at any price."[25] And Rustin assailed the
"patronization, self-flagellation, and pusillanimity" he
perceived in many white administrators.

Many of these would-be liberals feel that by

submitting to the wildest fantasies of Negro

students they are doing them a service, but

in reality they only exhibit their lack of

concern for the education of those students.

And by permitting black studies to be

opportunistically used for political and

propagandistic purposes, they reveal their

disdainful belief that the study of the Negro

is not a subject worthy of serious intellectual

attention.[26]

In her examination of Black Studies programs, Hine found
that many of those programs had suffered from lack of
institutional support or active administrative efforts "to
thwart growth and development." Some programs also had been
undermined, she said, by their origins as hasty responses to
campus unrest, which forced them to rely on untrained
directors unable to build academically challenging programs.
Sensationalized media coverage of shootings that erupted at
the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969 during a
dispute between two black radical groups over the school's
Black Studies program and a campus protest by armed black
students at Cornell University that same year also hurt the
image of Black Studies, she said. "University administrators
who valued 'peace' and 'campus rest' had little inclination,

H

courage or will to insist on quality, Hine wrote. "Thus,

22
black studies units seldom were held to the traditional
modes of evaluation and scrutiny observed elsewhere in the
academy."[27]

It was amid this national debate and in these stormy
times for American society that the question of Black
Studies arose at Wayne State University. It is important in
examining the Black Studies debate at Wayne State to
remember that Black Studies was only one of many
-controversial issues that engulfed the campus in the late
'60s and early '70s. Throughout the period, Wayne State was
the scene of heated protests over such issues as the Vietnam
War; Black Power; the university's keeping of secret files
on students; ecological concerns; Student Power Movement
efforts to give students a say in university operations; the
impact of urban renewal and university expansion on the
surrounding community; and the efforts of student assistant
employees on campus to unionize. Emblematic of this spectrum
of turmoil was the takeover of the student newspaper in the
fall of 1967 by radical students who changed the paper's

name from the Daily Collegian to the South End. The new name

 

 

was meant to symbolize the paper's broad social concerns
through solidarity with the people who lived in the
impoverished neighborhoods at the south end of the campus.
It also implied opposition to the giant corporations, such
as General Motors and Burroughs, whose headquarters were at
the north end of campus. The editorial shift launched a

lengthy series of running battles between the paper's staff

23
and the university administration.[28]

But to understand the process by which Wayne State
arrived at the creation of a Black Studies program, it is
critical, also, to understand the unique local environment
in which these broader social forces were operating. First
of all, although Wayne State celebrated its centennial in
1968, it was, in significant ways, a Very new institution.
William R. Keast, who was president from 1965-71, said in
1992 that the celebration was "a fake centennial . . . that
celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the
earliest of what became the constituent institutions of what
finally became Wayne State University."[29] In reality,
Wayne University was created in 1933, when several unrelated
small local schools and colleges were united into a single
institution under the control of the Detroit Board of
Education, which ran the city's public schools. The
university was operated by the school district until 1956,
when it was given a state charter and began shifting its
emphasis to become, along with the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor and Michigan State University in East Lansing, one
of Michigan's so-called "Big Three" research universities.
The university's origins had built a great deal of localness
and community interaction into its atmosphere. The
transformation from a city college to a major state
university that not only drew increasing numbers of students
from outside the city but was shifting its emphasis from its

traditional teaching orientation toward specialized research

24
was not universally welcomed, as Keast recalled:
Now, when you begin to shift gears to

achieve a greater degree of competence in

research areas like physics or engineering,

which traditionally have not been very hospitable

to inner city needs and interests, tensions begin

to develop as to why you're spending money on this

or why you're spending money on that. You already

had, of course, a large cadre of faculty members

who had been in the university from earlier days

and had a very different image of themself, not as

one of the three research institutions in the state

of Michigan but as essentially a local institution.

So there were plenty of tensions within the

university and the faculty and the constituent units

as to what the institution should be and how rapidly

it should move in different directions.[30]

But the tensions were not merely internal. Changes within
the university reflected, to some extent, changes in the
surrounding metropolitan area. Those institutional changes,
however, also affected the way Wayne State was perceived in
that metropolitan area, particularly by the black community
that was heavily concentrated in the city of Detroit.

Wayne State had for years been unusual among
predominantly white colleges and universities in its
relatively high levels of black student enrollment. In a
self—study Wayne State prepared in 1976 while seeking
reaccreditation by the North Central Association, the
university reported the results of a fall 1974 study of
incoming freshmen. The study was part of a national survey,
which enabled Wayne State to make some comparisons between
itself and other public universities.

These data show that Wayne State University

continues to be exceptional in the percentage of
black students admitted. Of the 764 students who

25

stated their ethnic background, 21.1% are black.

For freshmen at other public universities, this

percentage was much smaller (3.1%).[31]
The self—study also included specific enrollment figures for
Wayne State, with breakdowns by ethnicity, for each year
between 1968 and 1974. Those figures show that in 1968, the
university had a student body that was already 10.5 percent
black (2,922 black students out of a total enrollment of
27,276). Black enrollment rose rapidly through then next six
years to 6,557, or 20 percent of total enrollment.[32] The
university cited those figures as evidence of its commitment
to providing educational opportunities for blacks and other
minority groups. Wayne State was proud of that commitment,
which it traced back at least as far as the Plans for
Progress, an executive order signed by President Kennedy in
1961. That order led to an October 1961 meeting, "during
which institutions of higher education and large industrial
firms entered into voluntary agreements to participate in
the Plans for Progress Program. Wayne State University was
the first university in the nation to sign this
agreement."[33]

At the same time, however, the percentage of students
who came from within the city began to decline. In 1966,
52.3 percent of the university's students were Detroit
residents, compared with 38.8 percent who came from suburban
and rural areas in the surrounding counties of Wayne,
Oakland and Macomb. By 1975, the portion of the student body

living in Detroit had fallen to 47.2 percent while the

26
portion of students coming from communities in Wayne,
Oakland and Macomb counties outside Detroit had risen to
44.4 percent.[34] To a great extent, this change simply
reflected the shifting realities of a growing and rapidly
suburbanizing metropolitan area. But those shifting
realities were deeply infused with racial politics. The
explosion of suburban growth, which erUpted in the 19503,
was fed largely by the migration of white residents —- and
white-owned businesses -- from the city of Detroit. Although
the early waves of suburbanization may have taken much of
their inspiration from dreams of an idyllic, semi-rural
lifestyle, there was also a strong element of rejection of
the city. That was especially true in the wake of the 1967
riot when the pace of migration accellerated and the phrase
"white flight" became a standard element of public
discourse.

In this context, the shifting focus of Wayne State and
the increasing percentage of students from suburbia was
looked at with considerable suspicion by blacks in Detroit,
despite the increasing percentage of black enrollment. If
the riot in 1967 accelerated white flight, it also
intensified blacks' skepticism about the motives of white
institutions. Patricia Coleman-Burns, a black Detroit native
who received three degrees from Wayne State, joined the
Center for Black Studies as a graduate assistant in 1976 and
taught courses there as an instructor through the 1980s,

described the situation in a 1992 interview. "[M]y sense was

27
the university's perspective was to create a conclave in the

middle of this city that was under siege, and the priority

H

was to make it safe for white students, Coleman—Burns said.

The suspicion began to grow in the late '60s and intensified
through the '70s, under the presidencies of George Gullen

(1971—78) and Thomas Bonner (1978—82), she said.

"By the time we moved into Bonner, the
university straight-up is saying, 'We don't
want to be perceived as a place that is Open
to all these black folks. We want whites to come.'
I remember the debates, they were public, around
Wayne having to change its image from being this
place where all these minorities came to."[35]

For his part, Keast remembers the strains of Wayne State
being pulled in different directions by differing
responsibilities and expectations. The university's status
as a state research institution meant that Wayne State had
to look beyond the city, or even the state, to attract
students from across the nation and internationally as well.

So I think the university board and the

university administration, and I think it's
probably true to say the bulk of the faculty

and, we have no way of knowing, I would suppose

a substantial number of students, did not want
Wayne State University to become merely or only

a community-based, overwhelmingly black institution
serving only Detroit. Now, I don't think the
question of admission in the university ever reached
the point of such stark alternatives as that, but
obviously there were, from time to time, tensions
as to where the university's resources, where the
university's efforts and so on should be directed
or how they should be distributed so as to satisfy
the variety of claims and at the same time
aspirations that we in the university had.[36]

These emotional crosscurrents of university—community

relations were just beginning to swirl when on July 23,

28
1967, the city of Detroit erupted in one of the most violent
convulsions of civil unrest in the nation's history. The
upheaval began with a police raid on an illegal bar early on
a Sunday morning. Within hours the violence was far out of
control and spreading fast over large portions of the city.
Under orders from Michigan Gov. George Romney, several
thousand National Guardsmen and Michigan State Police
troopers began patrolling the city's streets Sunday evening
to help the overwhelmed Detroit Police Department. By
Tuesday, President Lyndon Johnson had sent in a detachment
of federal troops from the 101st Airborne Division. By
week's end, a fragile calm had been restored but at a heavy
price in lives and property. The week of violence left 43
people killed, nearly 350 injured, about 3,800 arrested and
about 5,000 (the vast majority black) homeless. Property
damage estimates ranged from $50 million to $500
million.[37] That week of July 1967 has come to be
recognized widely as the Detroit Riot. But it is significant
to note that in the black community of Detroit it is still

I!

commonly referred to as "the rebellion. That phrase
reflects the view of many black Detroiters who saw the
violence as a revolt against an oppressive army of
occupation -— the overwhelmingly white Detroit Police
Department. But while the police department's history of
racism and brutality was the focal point of black rage, that

department was merely the most immediate symbol of all the

white institutions by which black Detroiters felt oppressed.

29
Except for the churches of the black community, virtually
all of the city's social and political structures were
controlled by whites, and while there were no de jure
ordinances segregating, say, public accomodations,
demonstrations aimed at guaranteeing blacks equal treatment
at department store lunch counters downtown continued at
least into 1968.[38]

It is remarkable, then, that given the vast expanse and
destructiveness of the 1967 riot, the fact that areas very
close to the university were scarred, and the anger of many
blacks toward all white institutions, Wayne State University
emerged from the riot physically undamaged. But that lack of
damage was not the result of dramatically warmer feelings of
blacks for the university compared with other white
institutions. V. Lonnie Peek, who was a co—founder of the
Association of Black Students at Wayne State in the fall of
1967, said in a 1992 interview that while the university may
have been more amenable to change than other white
institutions, blacks at the time definitely considered it
part of the white power structure. "The university was seen

' Peek said. "I can't downplay that. It was seen

as an enemy,‘
as an oppressive, white-oriented, Eurocentric-valued
institution . . . Wayne State University was viewed just as
the police department."[39] Coleman-Burns said black
students clearly identified Wayne State as a part of the
white world, albeit a part that was relatively open to them.

"Wayne was an oasis,' she said. "Wayne was not the world

30

that those of us who were black had to go back home to. So

H
C

Wayne was somewhat isolated from that But at the same

time, she said, the students had been thoroughly
indoctrinated in the black community's deep respect for
education, going back to W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington
and beyond.

Clearly, . . . the belief was that the single
most important thing to move, to advance the
black community was education. So they would

say to us, we could come down to Wayne, we could
go back into the community and they would all say
to us, "What are they teaching you down there?"
But they held us responsible for what we were
learning. There was no way we weren't going to be
educated.[40]

Keast recalled a vivid encounter with the black
community's perception of the university in the strained and
turbulent days following the riot. The enlightenment came in
a conversation he had with several black students.

I said to one of them, 'Has it ever seemed to you
unusual that in the midst of all this rioting,
burning and destruction, going on all around us,

as close as two blocks away, that nothing of the
kind happened on this campus?' And he looked at me
with, not quite astonishment, but surprise that
Whitey would be so ignorant of what the score was.
And one of them said, 'Well, why the hell would we
burn down our university?' And that, I think,
conveys, far better than I could, the sense that
this institution, which had been educating black
students, school teachers particularly, for decades,
was the principal resource that the black community
in Detroit had for moving itself into either the
mainstream of American culture or whatever they
could make to modify it.[4l]

In short, Wayne State University may have been one among
many oppressive white institutions, but it had been open

enough for blacks to believe they had a stake in its future.

31

If the university had not, as Peek and Coleman-Burns say,
fully embraced the black community, it was at least, and
unlike the police department, utilitarian. The emerging
dialog over Black Studies, however, demonstrated that while
the black community's sense of ownership may have helped
shield Wayne State from the devastation of the riot, it also
increased expectations for responsiveness and curricular

reform.

CHAPTER TWO

On a morning in early April 1968, a large group of black
students gathered in a lower level conference room of the
Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium on the Wayne State University
campus.[1] Not long before, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had
been shot to death while trying to rally support for a
sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the
students were shocked and grief-stricken. As they struggled
to comprehend the shattering news and cast about for
something to do, a group of non-student community activists
strode into the room. The activists were led by Kenneth
Cockrel, a 30-year—old radical lawyer who was just emerging
into the public spotlight. Cockrel achieved notoriety by
representing black defendants involved in highly publicized
violent confrontations with Detroit police. A decade later,
he was elected to the Detroit City Council and at the time
of his death from a heart attack in 1988, he was preparing
to run for mayor. The appearance of Cockrel and his
companions had a dramatic impact on Patricia Coleman-Burns,
who was then a junior at the university.

I remember sitting there feeling all bad about

King and in walk these very tall, very strong

folks, Ken Cockrel -- that was my first

introduction to Ken Cockrel. And they walked

down. They were very angry. And he chastised us

because here we were crying for King, and where

were we when Malcolm died? I had never heard of

32

33

Malcolm. And I realized then that there was a

lot of my education that I needed to engage in.[2]

But the incident was more than a simple lecture on the
importance of black students learning about their cultural
and socio-political heritage. The appearance of Cockrel and
the other community activists at the student gathering
represented an important force that had a profound influence
on the development of Black Studies at Wayne State
University: the relationship between the black students on
campus and the black community of Detroit. For the message
of Cockrel and the other activists was not merely, "Learn
about Malcolm X." Said Coleman-Burns, "They walked in
chastising us university students because the movement was
in the community and what were we doing here?"[3]

That campus-community relationship was a vital one for
black students and for the black population of Detroit.
First of all, the black students at Wayne State were the
children of Detroit's black community. But also, in a period
of intense civil rights activism, those black students were
an important source of energetic workers for a wide array of
activist community organizations. And for the students,
Detroit's black community, which was rapidly becoming the
majority population of the city, was an invaluable source of
emotional support, wisdom and leadership. The students
looked to the black community for advice and the community
expected the students to put what they had learned at the

university to work in the community. This interaction was

34
intensified by the nature of Wayne State as a commuter
institution. Detroit's black community was not merely a
resource for the black students. It was, in fact, home.
There was only one small dormitory on the campus, and a few
more students, mostly graduate students, lived in apartments
nearby.[4] That meant that most black students spent their
days studying at the predominantly white institution but
returned each night and on weekends to their homes in the
black neighborhoods of Detroit.

The accessibility of the university to the city's large
black community was a key reason why Wayne State had so many
more black students than most predominantly white colleges.
It also meant that black students who did enroll at Wayne
State were less isolated than black students at other public
universities nearby. Only 45 miles away in Ann Arbor, for
example, Nellie Varner was one of just 203 black students on
campus when she enrolled as a doctoral student at the
University of Michigan in the fall of 1964.

There were so few black students on campus

at that time that when we saw each other we'd

speak. We didn't have to know each other. It was

kind of like a country town. You walked across

campus or anywhere on the street and you saw

another black student you always said hi, you

know. It was like, "Glad to see you here." . . .

In my graduate school . . . I was the black

person, you know, in my classes. There just

weren't many of us at the time. There were even

fewer black faculty.[5]

At the time, one percent of U-M's students were black. After

a major student strike in the spring of 1970, U-M agreed to

a goal of 10 percent black enrollment, but 20 years later,

35
the goal still had not been reached.[6] At Wayne State,
blacks already accounted for more than 10 percent of the
student body by 1968 and within five years black enrollment
was at 20 percent. So black students at Wayne State, though
still distinctly a minority, were not nearly as isolated on
campus as their counterparts at other state schools.

Nor were they as closely tied to the campus. At U-M,
students lived in dormitories or in apartments nearby, and
because they lived at an overwhelmingly white school in a
city with a very small black population, social events or
other activities that addressed their particular needs,
interests or concerns were largely of their own design.
Because they lived on campus, the campus tended to be the
focus of their activities. But at Wayne State, almost no one
lived on or in the immediate vacinity of the campus. Many
students commuted from neighborhoods where they had grown up
and thus retained close ties with family, friends, churches,
labor unions and other community groups they had been
involved with for years. Moreover, for smart, young,
energetic students with any interest in political or social
activism, the black community of Detroit offered a vast
supply of opportunities. The atmosphere, Coleman—Burns
recalled, was intensely community-oriented.

Whether it was the League of Revolutionary

Black Workers or the rising Shrine of the

Black Madonna or the Republican [Republic of

New Africa] rap of the Henry brothers, . . .

all of those, the Panther Party, all of thos

organizations were strong, in fact, most of
them born out of the city of Detroit. So the

36

other thing was, my feeling was this university

didn't have anything to teach the youth. They

were being taught in the movement.

I mean, I think about all the meetings.
I never went to hear Malcolm, but many of

my peers did. Malcolm came through here

frequently, frequently. . . . Ed Vaughn and

his bookstore and the study groups. I mean,

you were politicized in the community. You

didn't go to the university to get politics.

You went to study groups in the community.[7]

Of course, this community orientation was not unique to
the black students at Wayne State, a fact reflected in the
pages of the campus newspaper, the South End. The direction
of the paper's news coverage vascillated dramatically in the
late 1960s as white and black students alternated in the
paper's top editorial post. But in either case, the focus of
the coverage was regularly off campus. For example, soon
after John Watson, a black student, became editor in May
1968, a pair of black panthers appeared in the paper's
masthead and the paper's content took a sharp turn toward

black radical thought. The paper ran a full-page excerpt

from Soul on Ice and over the year of Watson's editorship

 

ran numerous articles about the national Black Panther
Party, the imprisonment of Huey Newton and more local
stories about the Detroit black community: labor organizing
efforts of black workers; the New Bethel Church incident, in
which nearly 300 blacks were arrested following an exchange
of gunfire with police; a national black economic
development conference held in Detroit. The next year, when
white students became the top editors, coverage veered back

toward the interests of the white radical left:

37
international political developments; the Vietnam war; and,
more locally, the White Panther Party and the imprisonment
of one of its founders, John Sinclair, on a marijuana

possession charge. The South End did not ignore the Wayne

 

State campus, but throughout the period its campus coverage
was very spotty because of its editors' absorption with

radical politics and community issues.'Even the name, South
End, which was adopted in 1967 as the paper was transformed

from the Dailnyollegian, carried a political message and a

 

community orientation. The name referred to the geography of
the campus and its surroundings. At the north end of campus
was Detroit's New Center area, dominated by the corporate
headquarters of General Motors Corp. and, at that time,
Burroughs Corp. At the south end of campus was the Cass
Corridor, one of the city's most notoriously blighted and

impoverished areas. By naming their paper the South End, the

 

paper's editors were consciously and emphatically aligning
themselves with that part of the off—campus community.[8]
Black activists on the campus routinely consulted with
leaders of the broader city's black community. Lonnie Peek
was a founding co-chairman of the Association of Black
Students at Wayne State in the fall of 1967. He had just
enrolled in a master's degree program after two years of
teaching at Detroit high schools. Early that fall, Wayne
State was embroiled in a controversy over a symposium on
racism that was sponsored by the university as a response to

the riot that had torn the city just three months earlier.

38
Strenuous objections arose, however, that the university had
excluded blacks in planning the symposium. The controversy
led to creation of the Association of Black Students, but
Peek recalled the controversy went well beyond the campus.

During the latter part of the summer of '67,

it was decided that there wasn't any community
input into the formation of the Black Symposium,
so community activists decided they wanted to
boycott it and they organized inside of Wayne
State. Right prior to me going on campus, a day
prior, I had a meeting with Grace and Jimmy
Boggs, Frank Joyce, several others, more
revolutionary type individuals and they told me
about boycotting the symposium. And I says, . . .
when I get to Wayne State, yeah, I'll do whatever
I can do.[9]

Peek was thrust into the public spotlight while taking part
in a demonstration against the university's symposium. A
white student identified Peek to reporters as a spokesman
for the black students and in response to the reporters'
questions, Peek said he represented the Association of Black
Students with 700 members, a group he then felt compelled to
begin organizing.[10] The symposium protest was the
launching pad.

[W]hat happened was that that was the first

negotiation with the university. "You all go

ahead and do your thing, us black students are

going to do our thing." And about two or three

months later, we had our own symposium. We

brought in national people. . . . It was the

first time black students at Wayne State had

been involved in an event. That was the

organizational catalyst. That allowed me to

organize ABS because we had an issue.[1l]

An issue that had been defined, initially, by off-campus

black community leaders.

 

39

These kinds of community contacts were very important as
the nascent black students organization began negotiating
with university officials about the symposium and,
eventually, Black Studies. The students looked to community
activists for help in defining issues and developing
strategies for dealing with the university. The community
activists looked to the students as a force for advancing
the battle against racism in the specialized forum of the
university campus. Peek recalled the community influence as
strong and helpful.

Not only did you have students who interacted

in the community, lived in the community and
were part of the community movements, you had
community activists who had direct access to

the college and to the black students. So when
we had an ABS meeting, we might have 200 people
there and 75 of them might be community folks,
who were young, who blend in. . . . And so they
had input into the philosophical direction of
the organization itself. So there was a marriage
between the student and the black person out in
the community who wasn't in college . . . and
the student movement gave him a forum, too. That
probably had a greater impact upon how we were
thinking and how we were moving than the
suspected oppression of the university. . . .
[T]o be able to lift from the minds of community
activists some of our thoughts and directions, I
know helped me tremendously.[12]

Many of those community activists may, indeed, have been

' but they were not entirely

young and able to "blend in,'
able to disappear. University officials saw them and knew
they were there, though the officials may not have fully
understood their connection. President Keast said he noticed

the outside community people present during his early

meetings with black students on the issue of Black Studies.

as

in

 

40

We had quite a number of people at these

meetings which were usually attended by, oh,

15 or 20 representatives of the black students.

We quite regularly had people who were clearly

not students. Who they were I never sought to

find out. There's an unexplained, to my mind,

gap in our understanding of the way in which

the black students connected with black adults

in unions, political parties, etc., etc. I

don't understand how it all came about, what

happened, who did what to whom. But nonetheless,

the process was there.[13]

Black students, led by Peek, made their first formal
demand that Keast's administration create a major Black
Studies program at Wayne State in April or May of 1968,
after the assassination of King. But it was not King's death
that inspired the demand. "I'm not sure if Dr. King's
assassination had any direct input in the process," Peek
said. "Indirectly, obviously, it did. But . . . indirectly,
as opposed to directly."[14] Keast said he believes "the
impulse for the establishment of some kind of formal work in
something broadly called Black Studies" began sometime in
the fall of 1967, shortly after the riot. "It's hard for me
to believe that it was anything more than pushed along by

H

the assassination of Martin Luther King, Keast said. "That
was a shattering event but it certainly wasn't an event that
called into being a whole set of interests and activities
that had not existed before."[15] Indeed, Wayne State had
been facing growing pressure for several years to expand its
curriculum to include more information about African

American history, culture and literature. In October 1965,

for example, a group of black students gathered about 800

41
signatures on a petition asking the university to establish
a course on Afro-American and African History.[l6] The
petition drive, it is interesting to note, was reported in

the Michigan Chronicle, a black-owned newspaper that focuses

 

on Detroit's black community. Around the same time, a
graduate course in Afro-American literature was offered, but
the course was dropped when the black professor who taught
it left the university. In October 1968, a young instructor

named Geneva Smitherman told the South End of the

 

frustrations she had faced in trying to revive the course.

I wanted to teach the course but the English
department said that I needed a PhD in order
to teach a graduate level course. The next
year it was suggested to the Policy Making
Committee of the English department that I
set up a 200 level course in Black Literature
for undergraduates . . . We were told . . . by
the committee that this was 'racism in reverse.
These are the only reasons why we don't
have a course in Black Literature; the policy
committee rejected the proposal each time and
if presented again this year to the committee,
it will probably be rejected again.[17]

Smitherman became an assistant director of the Center for
Black Studies in 1974 and directed the center from 1977 to
1981.

These pressures on the university were intensified in
the summer and fall of 1967 by the riot and the controversy
over the Black Symposium. Eventually, in April 1968, the
Association of Black Students approached Keast with a
proposal that the university establish a Black Studies
program. The exchange began with a letter from Peek to Keast

charging that the university perpetuated the myth of white

42
racial superiority and calling on the university to provide
$8,000 in "seed money" to help the black students develop a
Black Studies program and also a "Five Year Program" to help
more black students qualify for admission to college. "There
is no question that a curriculum relating to the Black

" Peek wrote.

students is conspicuous only by its absence,
"We feel as though it is the responsibility of the
University to assist us financially in implementing thes
[sic] programs."[18] A week later, Keast and Peek met,[l9]
and on May 9, Keast reported to the university's Board of
Governors on their discussions. According to the board's
minutes, Keast said Peek asked about "the development of
studies in Negro history, including the achievements and
special problems of Negroes, and will provide the President
with additional information on the kind of classes that he
proposes the University establish."[20] That information was
delivered to Keast on June 3: a six-page proposal for the
Five Year Program and a l6-page proposal for creation of the
W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Black Studies.[21] A draft budget
followed three days later, proposing an allocation of
$632,900 for the institute's first year.[22]

The DuBois Institute proposal was elaborate and
ambitious, and it was suffused with the community-oriented
concerns of the students who designed it. In essence, the
proposal called for the creation of an entirely new college

within the university, a college that would be named for

DuBois, fully accredited and -- most important of all -—

43
"under the exclusive control of the Association of Black
Students." The first 10 pages were given over to a lengthy
critique of the faults of the American educational system
and the culture it sprang from, and a list of six criteria
for determining the value of an educational institution.
Those criteria emerged from the belief, asserted in the
proposal, that "for such an institution to fulfill its
function it must employ a radically different theory of
education, a theory that will prepare the student to be an

" The six criteria were:

effective servant of the community.

1. The degree to which the institution
functions as a forum for the discussion of the
problems that confront the community. . . .

2. The number of community projects that
emanate directly from the institution. . . .

3. The number of community organizers that
are trained by the institution. . . .

4. The number of school teachers that the
institution trains. . . .

5. The number of "functional" intellectuals
provided by the institution. . . .

6. The degree to which the institution
functions as a center for the study and propagation
of the community's culture. . . .[23]

The black students wanted the DuBois Institute to reflect
those criteria by taking the traditional university
structure of colleges and departments and radically
reshuffling the way knowledge is organized within those
departments. The institute, they suggested, would have the
status of a college and would be composed of six
departments. But those departments would be organized around

concepts that were not constrained by traditional

disciplinary limits, as the names of the departments

44
suggested: Community Problems Department; Cultural Studies
Department; Development of American Institutions Department;
Historical Development of Radical and Political Thought and
the Afro-American Department; the Department of Applied
Knowledge and Research; and the Department of Education.
Each department would offer a range of courses and/or
workshops and most of the proposed departments would cross
traditional disciplinary lines. The Community Problems
Department, for example, would offer courses bearing on
political institutions, economics, sociology and psychology.
The Cultural Studies Department would offer courses in
history, black humanities, applied creative art and black
literature. In some cases, it appears, disciplines would
cross departmental lines. For example, the outline of the
Community Problems Department included an economics course
on "Labor Unions And The Black Community," while the
Development of American Institutions Department was to offer
a course called "Labor Union and The Afro—American."

But if distinctions between the departments and their
functions were not clearly defined, it must be remembered
that the proposal was a first effort to outline the scope
and direction of an ambitious plan to reshape an educational
institution. The students had, perhaps, a firmer grasp on
the weaknesses they perceived in the existing structure than
on the precise structural components that would produce the
sort of education they sought. On one point, however, they

were absolutely clear: Any meaningful Black Studies program

45
must arise from and direct its efforts toward the needs of
the black community. The proposed Community Problems
Department testified to that orientation in its very name,
and in the fact that virtually every proposed course
offering in the department incorporated the phrase, "The

0

Black Community,' in its title; e.g., "Merchant Power In The

Black Community" and "The Church In the Black Community."
But the extent of this community emphasis was expressed most
succinctly in the description of the Department of Applied
Knowledge And Research:

This portion of the curriculum is not
an area of specialized study. This aspect of
the curricular structure will consist of
workshops in which the student will demonstrate
how well he can apply the knowledge which he
has gleaned.

The bulk of the workshops will take the
form of community workshops as outlined in the
introduction to this proposal. The remaining
workshops will be Research Workshops in which
the student will be required to demonstrate his
ability to gather information which is essential
to the functioning of the college and its various
community [projects].

All students will be required to participate
in both aspects of this section.[24]

When implemented, the students proposed, the institute would
operate with a faculty of 60, including six full professors,
nine associate professors, 15 assistant professors and 30
instructors. The proposed $632,900 budget also called for at
least 30 other non—instructional staff members, including
counselors, secretaries, payroll clerks, coordinators, a

librarian, an accountant and a full-time attorney. The aim,

according to Peek and Ozell Bonds, co—ordinator for the

 

fifi

46
institute, was to establish an entirely new educational
structure. "The graduate of this institute, first of all,
will be able to serve the community," Bonds told the

Michigan Catholic. "Black students coming out of the

 

institute will have the knowledge to serve the
community."[25] The same article quoted Peek as saying the
black students rejected what they saw as the common American
idea that "you measure a person's education by his
pay—check." Peek added, "So we have to look at education
from an entirely different viewpoint. And the thing had to
be based on: How capable are you of serving your
community."[26] The article continued:
"We are talking about a new concept of

education altogether; one that is much more

applicable to us, one which is much more feasible,

much more valid," Bonds said. "These courses

are not merely black replicas of white courses."[27]

The university's opening response —- or at least Keast's
—- to the students' proposal was generally favorable. In
fact, about two weeks after their initial meeting, Keast
sent Peek a letter urging him to submit the additional
information about the students' proposals that had been
promised during the meeting. "I hope very much that you will
let me have it as soon as possible so that we can move
forward with these discussions," Keast wrote.[28] The
students' response was the lengthy proposal submitted on
June 3. Although he perceived some serious problems from the

outset, primarily the students' insistence that they retain

control over curriculum and faculty appointments, Keast

47
publicly supported the institute idea and encouraged an
atmosphere of negotiation between the black students and the
university. "My initial reaction to the spirit and intention
of this proposal, and my present view, are strongly

" Keast said in his annual report to the faculty

sympathetic,
at a December 4 convocation. "The constructive initiative
taken by a concerned group of students in working out an
elaborate educational proposal is, if not unique, certainly
unusual, and highly commendable."[29]

In August 1968, Keast found private funds to send Peek
and four other black students on a fact—finding trip to
California, where they examined the efforts of several other
colleges to design or implement Black Studies programs. And
in September, he arranged a seminar at which the students
shared their findings and proposals with members of the
faculty, administrators, other students and people from the
community.[30] Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Detroit gave the ABS a $34,000 grant to underwrite planning
for the institute.[31] In his December 4 report to the
faculty, Keast was looking ahead toward continued progress
in implementing some sort of curriculum change that would be
acceptable to all.

The next steps to be taken seem to me

to be these: first we must have a faculty

committee to consider the proposal in all

its implications for the University, to meet

with the ABS committee, to collect and evaluate

faculty, student, and community opinion, to

organize discussion of the proposal in the

University, and to develop recommendations
which can be considered by the appropriate

48

University bodies. I hope to be able to appoint

this committee within the next two weeks. Second,

I believe we should arrange for a national

conference on the intellectual, social, and

institutional problems associated with black

studies programs.[32]

Keast added that he already had secured a promise of funding
for such a conference.

On the surface, Keast's openness to the students'
proposals is surprising, given the radical nature of the
changes the black students had in mind. The students were
demanding a profound transformation of the institution, not
merely in the content of the curriculum, but in the
university's lines of control and authority. But while he
was obliged to preserve and protect the authority of the
university administration, Keast genuinely believed that
Wayne State had to become more open and more inclusive. And
despite the shift away from local roots that accompanied
Wayne State's evolution as a public research institution,
the university still declared that service to the inner-city
community was a vital part of its mission. In his December
1968 speech to the faculty, Keast described the publication
of a new brochure, "Wayne and the Inner City: A Survey of

' calling it an "inventory" of the

Urban Concern,'
university's major forms of involvement with the inner city.
Its basic purpose, he said, was "to provide . . . a rough
index to our current performance in this critical area of

University responsibility and, more important by far, to

stimulate us to move farther, faster, more imaginatively,

49

and in new directions."[33] The university's 1976 Self—Study
also describes the city as an important focus of the Wayne
State's mission: "Increasingly in recent years the
University has been acutely conscious of its special
obligations of service to urban society and especially to
the Detroit metropolitan area and its inner-city."[34] Keast
said he tried to make that urban mission an organizing
principle, encouraging the institution to see its immediate
environment as an asset.

One of the things I sought to do was to

emphasize the need for a unique institution

which took advantage of the fact that it had

an urban location . . . that there were urban

problems emerging more rapidly than anybody

had anticipated that required research and care

and ameliorating and that we were therefore in

a unique position to do something about this.

How far we succeeded is a different story.[35]

But many black students and faculty members thought the
university's urban mission was honored more in rhetoric than
in action. When they looked at Wayne State as an
institution, what they saw most was fear and resistence.

' Peek said. "It was in a

"The university was scared,’
volatile situation where it sat in the heart of the city
with all these crazy niggers running around with dashikis
and afros on. So it really wasn't sure how to respond."[36]
Concrete actions, such as the creation of the Center of
Black Studies in 1972, often were seen by blacks more as
fearful efforts at appeasement than genuine commitments to

increased institutional diversity. "Wayne State University

is a university that's . . . very much afraid of, and

50
uncomfortable with its presence in a city that's turned

' said John Edward Simpkins, who was

majority black,'
hired to direct the center soon after its creation. "This
was a concession to the times and it was not a concession
that was made because the university believed in Black
Studies programs."[37]

A certain degree of fear and suspicion was to be
expected on both sides. The riot had rubbed emotions raw.
For a week the city had been convulsed in violence that most
people interpreted in racial terms and that all agreed had
heightened racial tensions. Only martial law and the
occupation of the city's streets by the National Guard and
federal troops had ended the violence. The National Guard
returned briefly to the city in April 1968 after the
assassination of King. Fear was on everyone's mind, and Peek

did not cringe from using that fear in negotiations with the

university. He told the South End in January 1969 that the

 

university required prodding occasionally: "Whenever they

' says Peek, "We just say, 'Now

balk at one of our proposals,'
look, you guys just had a riot here and none of us wants a
new one, do we?'"[38] In a 1992 interview, Peek said such
heightened rhetoric was partly a reflection of reality, and
partly a conscious strategy because it was an effective tool
in pushing the university to act. At the same time, he said,
he enjoyed a friendly and constructive relationship with

Keast. The problem was that Keast was not the whole

university. "As usual at most institutions, the individuals

51

at the top may be sensitive, but as you get further down the
pecking order . . . you get resistence," Peek said. "There
was a lot of confrontation, hostilities at Wayne State."[39]

But the crucial point in the negotiations over the ABS
proposal for a Black Studies institute was not institutional
resistence to the concept of Black Studies, or even the
community orientation of the proposed institute. The
fundamental issue was control: the students demanded it; the
university would not give it up. Keast recalled that the
starting point for the black students was that, "they wanted

' Discussions

some kind of program that they could run.’
continued for almost nine months, all through the fall of
1968 and into the early winter of 1969. Keast recalled those
talks almost as a seminar that explored not only the
students' demands and aspirations but also the history and
rationale of university organization.

My objective was to make clear that we could

not have any part of the university in which

the program was designed exclusively by, the

faculty was both chosen and appointed

exclusively by a group of students, or indeed

by any other limited group, however well-

qualified. You do not have a school of social

work or a school of pharmacy on the basis of

the wishes of the people interested in the

school of pharmacy alone.[40]
By early January 1969, Keast had made his point clearly
enough that the ABS abruptly announced it was halting
negotiations aimed at creating a Black Studies program on

the Wayne State campus and would seek, instead, to establish

the DuBois Institute off—campus in the community. The

52

announcment took officials by surprise, both at Wayne State
and at the University of Detroit, operated by the Roman
Catholic Church, where parallel negotiations had been under
way. Peek charged that both universities had been "dragging
their feet" on the issue of a Black Studies program.[4l]
Keast issued a non—committal statement expressing Wayne
State's willingness to consider "the question of possible
relations between the University and the Institute."[42]

Looking back, Keast said, the students' decision to
focus off-campus may have been "a natural consequence" of
the clash of differing traditions and attitudes, "namely the
traditional notion of the way in which the university
operates . . . and the perfectly understandable desire on
the part of this group of activist students to have a
program they could call their own."[43] Peek said the
students' decision was ideological, a choice to embrace the
community self—determination philosophy of black nationalism
that was very much in step with Carmichael and Hamilton's

call in Black Power for black people to assert their own

 

definitions. The argument for moving off-campus, Peek
recalled, was:

Why would we put a Black Studies institute
inside a racist, honky university when we
can establish it in the community itself

and make it a credit that can stand on

its own two feet? That was the philosophical
position, which I disagreed with at that
particular time. I always thought that the
best way to change institutions was from
within. So I thought it would have a greater
impact from inside of the institution itself.
But the sentiment was very strong in there

53

from the nationalists, the Africanists. So

I was but one vote.[44]

And so, armed with the $34,000 grant from the archdiocese,
the black students set about trying to design and organize
their own Black Studies institute off—campus. The effort was
complicated by some internal dissention. When the students
announced their decision to focus off-campus, they also
announced that James T. Daniels, an instructor who taught
courses at both Wayne State and the University of Detroit,
would head the center. But the ties between Daniels and the
institute lasted less than two months; by late February
1969, the students fired Daniels citing unspecified
statements in his resume that they said could not be
confirmed.[45] Ozell Bonds, one of the student leaders, took
over as director and within a few months, Peek left, after a
falling out with Bonds and others involved with the
institute.[46]

But the institute and the students working to get it off
the ground never entirely broke their connections with Wayne
State and the university administration. "I think one of the
things that happened was the realization that we really
can't do this thing completely by ourselves," Peek said. "We
need to have some relationship with the university."[47]
From the university, the institute h0ped to draw students,
instructors and, most of all, academic legitimacy. If an
agreement could be reached that would enable people taking

courses at the institute to transfer course credits to

54
accredited degree programs at Wayne State, the institute's
credibility would be established. Credibility also was
needed to promote fundraising, and a tuition-sharing
agreement with Wayne State could open the doors to a steady
source of income for the institute. The university stood to
gain as well from some sort of association with the
institute. At stake for Wayne State was not credibility with
potential funding sources, but credibility with Detroit's
black community. The university did not want to appear
insensitive to the interests of black students and was
feeling significant pressure from black community leaders to
work out an agreement with the institute. On July 16, 1969,
a group of 13 black state legislators, all from Detroit,
urged Keast to accept four guidelines for a relationship
between the university and the institute: that the
institute's courses be accepted with accreditation; that
instructors for the courses be institute personnel; that
Wayne State accept economic responsibility for the courses;
and that Wayne State courses and facilities be open for use
by institute students and personnel.[48]

In fact, discussions between university officials and
institute organizers continued almost uninterrupted by the
black students' abrupt shift in focus in January 1969. Two
weeks after the students' announcement, Mildred Peters,
secretary of the University Council, the faculty governing
body, sent Keast a memo informing him that the council's

policy committee had passed unanimously the following

55
resolution: "We recommend the prompt establishment of a
liaison body to work with Mr. Daniels and the Black
Institute." Peters also expressed the committee's feeling
that, "This should be a liaison body authorized to speak for
the University, acceptable to members of the Black community
and still have among its members representation from the

hard core academics."

Normally, such a liaison task might
naturally have fallen to the committee itself, but Peters
alluded to the awkwardness involved in negotiating sensitive
race-related issues. "It seemed to be the concensus of our
members that the Policy Committee is too large a group to
carry forth what is needed here and because of our pallor
may not be able to meet all the criteria that we have
enumerated," she wrote.[49]

The committee was duly appointed and had its first
meeting with Daniels on January 29. In a February 3 letter
to Keast, Daniels responded to the discussions of that first
meeting with a 15-point outline of how the institute would
be structured. The letter indicated that the institute hoped
to raise $2.5 million over a two-year period and had already
begun approaching potential funding sources, such as the
Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, New Detroit
Inc., the Archdiocese of Detroit and local financial
institutions. But while the letter emphasized that the
institute would be independent, it also made clear the

expectation that the university would provide substantial

support. For example, the institute would be responsible for

56
recruiting its own staff and raising its own funds, but
those funds would be "earmarked for the Institute and
payable through the university." Permanent staff of the
institute would be "appointed in consultation with
university officials" and the institute would set the
curriculum and "make certain, in consultation with the
university, of the sufficiency of its contents for credit

' The institute would have sole

towards a university degree.’
responsibility for and authority over non-credit courses
that would be open to the community in general. The letter
also requested another meeting with the university committee
at which the first agenda item would be, "Finances being
made available to the Director for the establishment of an
Institute of Black Studies."[50]

Daniels' letter was forwarded to the university's
lawyers. On February 18, General Counsel Richard Strichartz
sent Keast a four—page legal analysis of Daniels' proposals.
Strichartz told Keast that the university could not legally
enter into the kind of agreement outlined in Daniels' letter
because it would amount to a delegation of authority in
violation of the state's Constitution. The proposal, the
memo said, would require the university to give operational
money to the institute, act as a conduit for admission to
the institute, and agree to grant university degree credit
for institute courses while the institute retained exclusive

supervision and control over its operations. The memo

conCluded:

 

57
The thrust of this proposal as revealed

by said letter and Guidelines is a request

that the University establish and support,

at least in part, a separate institution of

higher education over which it will have no

jurisdiction and control.

Since the Constitution of the State of

Michigan provides that the Board of Governors

must have control over the use of its funds,

and since the Board of Governors' jurisdiction

and power to operate an institution of higher

education can not be delegated to third parties,

it is the opinion of this office that the

letter proposal can not be performed or the

subject of agreement by the Board of Governors

or the executive officers of the University.[51]
In late February the ABS ousted Daniels and Ozell Bonds took
over as director of the DuBois Institute. Talks between the
institute and the university continued and Bonds gave the
university a revised proposal. But the revisions did little
to resolve the underlying issue of control. Strichartz wrote
a new memo to Keast's staff on April 22 stating that Bonds'
proposal "has many of the same deficiencies" he had
identified in his analysis of the earlier proposal by
Daniels. Strichartz pointed out in the new memo that the
proposal to have the university offer course credit for
programs taught by the institute, which was itself not
accredited, could jeopardize Wayne State's accreditation.
Moreover, he said, the university had to resist the
assertion that the issue of the institute's academic program
was not germane to discussions on the proposed agreement. It
certainly would be germane in relation to whether the

institute was an accredited institution of higher education,

Strichartz said. "We must also be very clear that we cannot

58
enter into a relationship with an institution which in
itself, while seeking to create a black awareness through
black studies, would be discriminatory in not admitting
other races or ethnic groups," he wrote.[52]

In June 1969, the DuBois Institute issued a progress
report. The seven-page document, which appears from its
final paragraph to have been part of an appeal for continued
funding from the Archdiocese of Detroit, focuses mainly on
the philosophical transition that led the black students
from their initial proposal for a Black Studies college
within the university to their most recent design for an
independent institute. But while the report describes
substantial philosophical development, it also makes clear
that in practical terms, the institute's organizers found
their situation little changed from a year earlier. Included
in the report are two lists: problems that have been solved
and problems that remain to be solved before the institute's
opening, then scheduled for September 29, 1969 -- just three
months away. The problems that had been solved involved the
institute's governing principles, administrative structure
and curriculum structure. But the list of remaining problems
is most telling. It included: acquisition of initial
operating funds; finalization of site; orientation and
selection of faculty; and finalization of the relationship
between the institute and Wayne State University.[53]

Meetings between leaders of the institute and university

officials continued through the summer. An ad hoc committee,

59

with a relatively fluid membership that included Bonds, Peek
and several other representatives of the institute, as well
as Winfred Harbison, Wayne State's vice president for
academic administration, and several deans and faculty
members, met at least three times in July and August of
1969. Minutes of those meetings indicate that both sides
were still actively working to develop some sort of mutually
beneficial joint program. Most intriguing is a proposal
outlined in a July 31 meeting by Sidney Dillick, dean of
Wayne State's School of Social Work, whereby the institute
would essentially have been established within the
university to be spun off as an independent body when the
necessary source of outside funding could be found. Under
this proposal, the institute and the university would have
worked together to establish the courses that the institute
considered to be the core of its curriculum.

These courses are to be taught at Wayne State

University by faculty substantially selected

by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute and working in

collaboration with Wayne State University

faculty, with substantially all costs being

assumed by Wayne State University. This will

give black studies a program-in-being, and on

the basis of this phase 1 the plan is to

negotiate Foundation financial support for the

W.E.B. DuBois Institute to become financially

self-sustaining and independent, in which case

the black studies program will move into phase

2 or Plan B.[54]
But the minutes of two subsequent meetings reflect little
progress toward implementing the plan outlined by Dillick,

or any other plan, for that matter. At an August 21 meeting,

which appears to have been the last of the series, Bonds

60
said: that Ford Foundation officials were "respectfully
awaiting a more detailed submission" from the institute
before making any funding decision; that further discussions
on an agreement between the university and the institute
would have to wait until the institute was adequately
organized, probably by February 1970; and that the institute
did not expect to seek accreditation for four to five years.
The minutes conclude with a notation that was not promising:
"Mr. Bonds suggested, and the committee agreed, that no date
be set for the next meeting and that another meeting be
called whenever Mr. Bonds and/or Mr. Harbison decided there
was something urgent to be discussed."[55]

The institute set about getting itself better organized,
setting up a board of directors that included Keast and two
other university representatives, and continued with its
search for outside financing. But the search proved
fruitless. Keast recalled that small amounts of money, "some

' were found from various sources and a few

spare change,’
supplies, such as some old desks, were scrounged from the
university. Major funding sources, however, were never
found. General Motors Corp. considered a funding request for
six months or longer before turning it down, and another
longstanding request to New Detroit Inc. brought
nothing.[56] By early 1971, the institute was a fading
dream. "I think what happened with the institute is that the

funding apparatus was never ever locked in place," Peek

said. "I don't recall anything ever coming after the

61

Archdiocese's $34,000."[57] Discouraged by the lack of
financing and the lack of substantive progress some of the
institute's organizers headed off in different directions.
Peek, who took a teaching post at the newly organized Wayne
County Community College in the fall of 1969 and developed a
Black Studies program there, was the first to leave. But by
January 1971, even Bonds admitted his discouragement in a
letter to Keast, in which he despaired over the institute's
inability to find significant financial support. At that
point, however, there was little more that Keast, who had
always been the institute's main supporter in the university
administration, could do to help. He had announced his own
resignation as Wayne State president in September 1970 and
was preparing to leave the university at the end of June.

Looking back, Keast said, the black students'
aspirations may have been more elaborate than necessary, but
in any event, ran into a brick wall when it came to raising
money. Only one potential funding source was overlooked,
Keast said, but that, ironically, was the black community of
Detroit.

I don't think that we ever made a serious

effort to tap the resources of the black

community. I think that was a mistake. If

indeed we neglected that, that would have

been a mistake. I have no recollection of

our having attempted. I'm not sure at that

time there was even a logical place in

which to go look. You could have gone up to

Motown or something like that, but I don't

recall any conversations about how to get the

black community behind this effort and get
them to put some dollars in.[58]

62
In the end, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Black Studies
fell victim not simply to a lack of money, but to an
unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, conflict over power
and purse strings. As long as the students who launched the
institute insisted on autonomy and black community (i.e.,
black student) control, the university could not legally
finance the institute in any significant way. To reach an
agreement that would assure financial support from the most
obvious, and, in fact, most willing, source, the university,
the institute's organizers would have been forced to abandon
the concept of community self-determination that was a
fundamental principle of the institute's organization and

educational philosophy.

CHAPTER THREE

In late January 1969, about two weeks after the
Association of Black Students announced its intention to set
up a Black Studies institute off campus, Keast sent a letter
to Professor Alvin W. Rose, asking him to take over as
chairman of Wayne State's Faculty Committee on African
Studies.[l] Rose's appointment was an effort by Keast to
breathe new life into an effort that had begun awkwardly.
The committee was created in the spring of 1968, about the
same time the black students presented their first proposal
to the university, to study the possibility of creating an
African Studies center at Wayne State. The committee grew
out of the interest of faculty members who specialized in or
had some affinity for scholarship related to Africa. Keast
initially appointed as chairman Louis Friedland, associate
dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and the committee held
some brief discussions that spring. By the fall of 1968,
however, Friedland had begun an extended absence from campus
and had appointed Professor James Christensen, chairman of
the Department of Anthropology, to fill in as acting
chairman of the committee.

Neither appointment sat well with some committee
members. On November 18, Rose and three others from the

committee (Oliver Osborne from the College of Nursing,

63

64

Audrey Smedley from the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, and Kenneth Wylie from the History Department)
met with Joan Rogin, an assistant to Keast, at Rogin's
invitation to discuss their concerns.[2] The four professors
began by expressing considerable surprise that an African
Studies brochure had been printed without them being
consulted. The brochure, they said, seriously misrepresented
the university's progress toward establishing an African
Studies center when the interested Africanists themselves
had reached no decision on what sort of center, if any,
should be established. The professors also expressed
bewilderment that Friedland, who lacked any African
specialization, had been appointed chairman of the
committee, and they felt that Friedland's selection of
Christensen, whose leadership they did not consider
constructive, as his stand-in was improper because Keast had
chosen specifically not to appoint him in the first place.
All four felt the committee's chairman should have a
background in the problems, history and aims of various
African Studies centers. Moreover, they strongly disapproved
of the exclusion of students from planning for the center;
Friedland had been adamant that student participation was
inappropriate.

Keast's letter asking Rose to take over as committee
chairman two months later suggested that Rose's appointment
was an effort to relieve Friedland and Christensen from

excessive burdens on their time. But the move probably was

65
aimed at least equally at resolving the problems Rose and
the others had raised with Rogin. In a subtle nod to the
concerns raised about the leadership of Friedland and
Christensen, Keast offered to meet with Rose and the
committee, but added, "I believe that the African
specialists should be the principal determiners of the kind
of African Studies Center that is appropriate to the
University."[3] Rose, who was a black professor of
sociology, was certainly an African specialist. He had spent
a year as a visiting professor at Lovanium University in the
Congo, a year as United Nations senior advisor to the Congo
on social affairs, and a year as visiting professor at Haile
Selaissie I University in Ethiopia. Keast's charge to Rose
was twofold: "To determine what the character of a Center
for African Studies at Wayne State University should be and
to recommend the specific steps that are required to
establish such a Center"; and to recommend a budget to
support the committee.

Rose responded with a long letter of acceptance that
laid out a five-phase approach to launching an African
Studies program that projected administration approval of a
preliminary proposal by June 1969. Revisions and efforts to
win financial support from the federal government and
private foundations would continue through the summer.
Arrangements with cooperating African universities and
active promotion of the program would extend through the

1969-70 academic year with the program to open in September

66
1970.[4] Rose also requested a reduced teaching load to
enable him to handle the committee's work and money for
travel, specifically to a national meeting of the heads of
university African Studies programs. Keast gave his
enthusiastic support, authorizing the travel request from
budget of the President's Office and telling Rose he was
delighted with the plan. "I am pleased with the timetable
you have established . . . and hope very much that your work
can be accomplished within this framework. I look forward to
having the Committee's recommendations and proposed budget
in the near future . . ."[5]

For Keast, the African Studies Committee was simply
another front along which to press the effort of opening up
the university. He was personally committed to changing the
institution by making it more reflective of the nation's and
the world's cultural diversity.

[W]e had all this ferment of interest in

correcting our university's, most universities'

woeful inattention to the most salient aspects

of the life and history of blacks in America

and in the world generally. It was, and indeed

remains, a pretty sparsely populated area, and

every step forward is still taken against a hell

of a lot of pressure. The same is true of

Women's Studies and most other kinds of things

that run against the grain of the established

way of doing things. . . .

I make no effort whatsoever to conceal my
enthusiasm for this whole business. The

testimony to that is the amount of time I spent

on it. . . . I wanted to see something done,

something happen. We had an enormous amount of

energy and interest and there was a need. The

question was what are you going to do and how

are you going to do it?[6]

Wayne State's curriculum was beginning to change on its own

67
as interested faculty members began broadening the scope of
their courses, but the process was extremely slow. In the
fall of 1968, Monteith College, an experimental unit within
Wayne State that focused on general education, began
offering a three—course sequence entitled "The Afro-American

Experience."

The sequence was prompted by Herb Boyd, a black
Monteith student who suggested the courses in the spring of
1968 and taught them in conjunction with members of
Monteith's faculty.[7] The format, involving a student
co-instructor, was remarkable in itself, but the effort to
teach a survey sequence in African American history and
literature underscored by contrast the absence of other
related courses in the university. Geneva Smitherman, the

only black English instructor then at Wayne State, told the

South End that, "the Afro-American History class taught by

 

Herb Boyd is the only Black course taught at
Wayne."(emphasis in original)[8] In January 1969, the South
End also reported that a seminar, called "Black Social
Thought," was being taught by black students for the faculty
of Wayne State's Department of Education.[9] It was in this
context that Keast sought to encourage every option for
.expanding the reach of the university's curriculum. The
protracted negotiations with ABS over the proposed DuBois
Institute raised the unorthodox possibility of the
university being able to absorb what it wanted and could
appropriately use from the educational resources of an

outside, autonomous institute. Rose's committee was the

68
conventional approach, seeking to design a specialized
research center using models that already were firmly
established in academia.

Rose's committee met through 1969 and into 1970, but
progress was much slower than Rose had projected in his
initial letter to Keast. At Rose's request, several
students, including Lonnie Peek and Ozell Bonds, were added
to the committee, which eventually comprised as many as 28
members. Some changes in committee membership occurred
during the 1969-70 academic year, most notably the addition
of several new student representatives from ABS because Peek
and Bonds were no longer registered as Wayne State students.
Both men, however, continued to serve on the committee —-
Bonds as director of the DuBois Institute, and Peek as
director of Black Studies at Wayne County Community College.
Through most of 1969, the committee's efforts were hobbled,
it appears, by confusion over the committee's assignment and
the availability of the resources needed to support its
work. According to the committee's final report to Keast in
April 1970, the delays lasted into November 1969.

For almost a year, your administration, under

the excellent and wise leadership of Vice Pres.

Winfred Harbison and Dean Harlan Hagman was not

completely sure of this Committee's terms of

references and, therefore, quite candidly asked

the Committee to postpone its operation. Only

last November, some five months ago, were we

finally given a secretary, an office and the

requisite facilities for operation.[10]

The source of the snags is not clear. Rose was not always

easy to deal with,[ll] but a lack of interest or commitment

69
in the university's bureaucracy to match Keast's eagerness
for action is equally plausible. In any event, by very early
1970, nine months later than Rose first projected, the
committee's preliminary report was beginning to take shape.
In a January 5 letter to the committee's members, Rose noted
that, "we have sorted out some ten major perameters which,
if we can develop and fit together in a meaningful gestalt,
might comprise a major University program in African

Studies."

He added that he hoped the committee would agree
at its first Winter Quarter meeting, scheduled for February
19, to recommend, "the establishment of a permanent Center
for African Studies."[12]

At the February 19 meeting, Rose outlined a lO—point
African Studies proposal, which the committee unanimously
adopted in principle as a recommendation to Keast, pending a
revision that would include some suggestions for modest
changes that were made during the meeting. The proposal, as
outlined in the minutes of the committee meeting, included:

* an extensive international faculty exchange program;

* a Junior-Year—In-Africa program;

* creation of five faculty committees to promote
teaching and research about Africa at Wayne State;

* an African languages program;

* a Michigan Consortium for African Studies;

* an annual summer African Studies tour;

* recommended improvements to Wayne State library

facilities and holdings to support African Studies;

7O

* a working relationship between the proposed African
Studies program and the DuBois Institute;

* creation of a Center for African Studies;

* and a projected budget of $625,000 annually, or $3.1
million for a five-year period.[13]

Less than two weeks later, on March 2, Rose sent a
letter that included an ll—page revision of the proposal to
five outside experts and solicited their comments. The
experts included officials with the African-American
Institute, the Social Science Research Council, and Overseas
Educational Services in New York, as well as Dr. Gwendolyn
Carter, director of the African Studies Department at
Northwestern University, and G. Mennen Williams, the former
Michigan governor who was under secretary of state for
African affairs in President Kennedy's administration.
Interestingly, the revised proposal included an additional
point, a university-community relations program, which Rose
said would concentrate,

on the strengthening of relationships between

our University on the one hand and the larger

community on the other hand with reference to

Africa.

There is a tremendous amount of organizational
interest in Africa in the surrounding community

and your Committee Chairman is just beginning to

exploit these rich resources.[14]

Although the total proposal was very broad in scope, it
appears that Rose was most interested, and most deeply

involved in the proposed international faculty exchanges. It

appears, also, that Rose's interest heavily influenced the

71
committee's direction and the proposal that emerged. The
proposal called for four triangular exchanges, each
involving Wayne State, an African university, and a third
university from Europe, Canada, the Caribbean or South
America. Rose began mining his overseas contacts by late
1969, with telephone calls and formal letters proposing the
exchanges, and by February 1970 he had received letters
indicating support from a dozen foreign universities: the
University of East Africa; the University of Ghana; Lovanium
University; Haile Selassie I University; the University of
London; the University of Montreal; the Hungarian Technical
Institute; Phillips University of Marburg; the University of
the West Indies; the Federal University of Rio de Janiero;
the University of Geneva; and the University of Belgrade.
The exchange was by far the most elaborate part of the
proposal, and also, by far, the most expensive, accounting
for nearly 42 percent of the entire projected budget. The
next most-expensive part of the proposal, in which students
would have been able to spend a year studying in Africa,
would have cost rougly half as much.[15]

On May 1, 1970, the committee submitted its report to
Keast. The introduction referred to the report (bound, at
least an inch thick with a 42-page introduction and
voluminous supporting materials) as a "provisional
recommendation -— subject to any revisions or modifications

which you and your administration think wise. The report

acknowledged that many relevant details were yet to be

72
developed but presented what its authors considered a "broad
educational strategy" for the university.

[W]e deeply believe we are offering something

imaginative and constructive -— not an addendum

or an appendage to be tacked onto the educational

structure and process here at Wayne State

University, but a recommendation which we think

can suffuse and significantly reorient for the

common good the entire University fabric.[16]

One additional point had been added to the proposal, a
program of in-service institutes on Africa for Michigan
public school teachers and administrators. The idea was one
that already had generated some positive response from the
state's Department of Education, the Detroit Public Schools
and the African-American Institute in New York.

But almost immediately, the African Studies proposal
foundered on the same rocks of inadequate funding that
eventually sank the DuBois Institute. Within three weeks
after the committee's submission to Keast, the proposal was
sent by university officials to more than two dozen
foundations with requests that they help fund the programs
included in the proposal. Response from the foundations,
however, was not favorable. Many praised the committee's
effort, but none offered financial support. By the end of
July 1970, the university's financing options were
effectively exhausted. On August 3, Allen Hyman, director of
Wayne State's Office for Research Administration, wrote a

letter to Rose in which he sketched a bleak picture. All

possible funding agencies had been contacted, he wrote, and

73
the submitted material was "exceptionally complete." But the
response was discouraging.
With regard to funding, the prospects

continue to be disappointing. Of the eight

"major" sources from which we have requested

support for the entire program, all eight have

responded in the negative. Of the twenty-two

"minor" sources from whom we have requested

support of some portion of the total program,

seventeen have responded in the negative.[l7]
The university was awaiting responses from several more, but
Hyman said the outlook was not good, and his office had been
unable to identify any additional potential sources of

support. "I cannot help,"

he concluded, "but express my
pessimism as to the possibility of getting the program under
way this September."

The African Studies project suffered yet another setback
in September 1970 when Keast announced his resignation as
Wayne State president, effective at the end of the 1970—71
academic year. Keast said that his reasons for resigning
were "entirely personal" and that he was suffering from
"presidential fatigue."[l8] But his resignation came in the
wake of a controversy that had embroiled the university's
rapidly growing medical school and had led, in March 1970,
to the resignation of the medical school's dean and his
entire office staff. Henry V. Bohm, then vice president for
graduate studies and research, recalled that the year
following Keast's resignation,

was not a period when . . . new directions,

new enterprises could be undertaken, other
than in the medical school, which was just

74

an enormous problem in itself. In other words,

the Black Studies question, in terms of real

substantive changes, . . . took a back burner.[19]
Although he remained as president throughout that academic
year, Keast's focus, of necessity, turned toward
preparations for his departure and the transition of
authority to a successor. His time and energy were directed
toward the daily management of the institution and tying up
loose ends. He had neither the time nor the energy nor the
strength (as a lame duck administrator) to push the
university in dramatic new directions or launch ambitious
new programs. The power void created by the announcement of
Keast's intended departure was particularly unfortunate for
the African Studies proposal. Keast had been the main
administrative supporter of Rose's committee and his
resignation compounded the economic uncertainty that had
left the committee in limbo. In a letter to Rose in February
1971, Keast expressed his disappointment that his time was
being "given over to many things not necessarily of my own

'

choosing." "It is clear to me,’ he wrote, "that I will not
be able to devote anything like the attention it should have
to the comprehensive report prepared by the Committee and
submitted to me last spring."[20] And in later letters to
contacts at the Geneva Africa Institute in Switzerland and
at the African-American Institute in New York, Rose cited
Wayne State's administrative transition as reason for the

delay in implementing the proposed faculty exchange

program.[21]

75

And yet, while the African Studies program did not get
under way in the fall of 1970 as Rose had hoped, the African
Studies Committee did not disappear. The committee met at
least once informally during the fall to talk with a
representative of the African-American Institute, although
there is no indication that anything substantive came of the
session. Rose continued to look for ways to get an African
Studies program off the ground and in December 1970 wrote a
letter to Keast suggesting the appointment of a full-time
director for the program, which at that point was still
nothing more than the abstract proposals contained in the
committee's report. Rose told Keast that the demands of his
work as chairman of the Department of Sociology (a post he
assumed shortly after taking over the African Studies
Committee) were making it difficult for him to give adequate
time to the African Studies project. He proposed, therefore,
that the committee begin to screen candidates for the
full-time directorship with the aim of recommending someone
to Keast by June 1971.[22] Keast did not respond immediately
and Rose followed his proposal with a note in late January
1971 asking Keast to appoint three new student
representatives and an additional faculty member to the
committee.

In early February, Keast consulted with Ali B. Cambel,
executive vice president for academic affairs, who proposed
a letter of response to Rose that cited the university's

difficult situation in "a year of very severe fiscal

76
austerity" and said there was no way the university could
afford a full—time director for African Studies. The
proposed letter, however, urged Rose to continue serving as
chairman of the committee "to insure a thoughtful holding
action as we live through these hard times."[23] Keast wrote
back to Cambel that he was "sure that Professor Rose will
understand perfectly that our budget for this year (and
probably for next year) cannot be stretched to include a

' But while he also said he considered

salary for a Director.'
Cambel's suggestion of a holding action sound, he asked
Cambel to meet with Hyman, Bohm, and Martin Stearns, dean of
the College of Liberal Arts, as well as Rose and other
Africanists on campus to see whether progress might be made
in implementing at least some of the committee's
recommendations.
I believe that this whole subject area

ought to be given close attention in the

administration where responsibilities both

for graduate and for undergraduate programs

are held. I am reluctant to have such a

comprehensive, multidisciplinary effort

shelved merely for lack of ready money

without being sure that all avenues for

implementation —- even partial implementation

-- have been explored thoroughly.[24]
The final version of Keast's response to Rose alluded to
"the realities of our budget limitations" and mentioned his
request that Cambel undertake a new review of the
committee's recommendation. But it also reflected Keast's

impending departure from the university and his inability to

give the committee's proposal the attention it deserved. The

77

memo concludes with a request that Rose "extend to all of
the members of the Committee my personal appreciation for
their hard and extremely productive work, and, on behalf of
the whole University community, our thanks for a job well
done."[25] Although the letter holds out slender hopes for
progress, its tone echoes with disappointment and dead ends.

But if the 1970-71 academic year brought a waning of the
African Studies Committee effort, it also brought a
resurgence of black student activism on the Wayne State
campus. The most visible ABS leaders of 1968—69, Peek and
Bonds, had moved on, first to the DuBois Institute and
later, for Peek, to Wayne County Community College. But
while their attention had shifted off-campus, their active
participation in negotiations with the university,
especially in the case of Bonds, meant they continued to
dominate some of the key ABS issues through the 1969-70
academic year. In the spring of 1970, however, a new
generation of ABS leadership began to emerge: David Booker
and James Hood were elected co—chairmen of ABS. The black
students continued to focus a great deal of their attention
on activities and organizations in the off-campus black
community. And demands for a Black Studies program at Wayne
State still were framed in community-oriented terms. ABS "is
demanding a Black Studies Program which will help Black
students relate effectively to the University and society,"

Booker told the South End. "ABS believes that if the

 

University controls the program it will provide nothing

78
important . . ."[26] In a lengthy November interview with

the South End, Booker described the group's activities, most

 

of which were community oriented:
We are trying to get our Supermarket

off the ground, since it is very much in

the red, something like $50,000. It is also

necessary to let black people know that they

own something. At our Inner City Sub—Center,

which is our community base, we have a variety

of community related activities, like karate,

movies, swahili, first aid classes, reading

and things of this sort. We also have talent

show dances.[27]
Booker also mentioned a newsletter, and a tutorial program
that involved black college students working at a local
elementary school. The interview included only one reference
to Black Studies and that was a brief statement of support
for the program Peek was developing at Wayne County
Community College. But ABS also was revitalizing its efforts
on the Wayne State campus. In December 1970, the group
reorganized as a coalition of at least 20 independent black
student groups. The aim of the newly reorganized ABS was to

'

promote 'cultural, political, economic, and social unity

among black students and the community,"

according to
Michael Alston, a member of the ABS publicity committee.[28]
To accomplish that aim, ABS set out to have an impact on
the campus political scene. In this they were remarkably
successful, electing in the course of the 1970-71 academic
year 13 ABS members, including Booker, to the university's

Student-Faculty Council, which had a total of 20 student

seats. The black students recognized that the council had

79
little real power, but they were determined to use the
council as a forum from which to pressure the university
for a Black Studies department. "In a city that is
predominately black it is ridiculous for Wayne not to have
any real Afro-American studies program," Booker told the

Detroit News. He continued:

 

A black studies program has been developing
for three years but never got off the ground
because of lack of university support.
We need an independent department to teach
black studies, history, culture, literature and
the black experience on a SOphisticated level . . .
We know the things we have in mind won't be
achieved right away, but we'll inform the student
body of our goals and learn the process to get our
proposals approved.[29]
Booker and four other black student members of the council
said that they wanted a program similar to the undergraduate
degree programs at the University of Michigan and Harvard
University, and that they intended to take their proposals
to the state Legislature, as well as the university
administration. At the same time, Peek was working to ensure
the survival of Wayne County Community College by prodding
the university to accept transfer credits for Black Studies
courses offered by WCCC.[30] He hoped close ties with Wayne
State would build credibility for the college and in the
spring of 1971, after much discussion, Wayne State agreed to
accept transfer credit for the courses in some cases.[31]
All of these forces —- the surviving, if latent African

Studies Committee; the resurgence of student activism;

continued outside pressure; the uncertainties of

80

administrative transition —- converged in July 1971 when
George Gullen took over as acting president of the
university. Gullen came to the post after five years as
Wayne State's vice president for university relations. He
was a Wayne State graduate and former president of the WSU
Alumni Association who joined the university's
administration after a 30—year career in corporate labor
negotiations, the last 10 at American Motors Corp., where he
had been vice president for industrial relations. He shared,
on a personal level, Keast's genuine concern for social
justice and institutional responsibility, but his approach
was dramatically different. Whereas Keast was the
philosophical scholar, lending his discussions with black
students the aura of an academic seminar, Gullen was a
mediator and arbitrator, steeped in the pragmatic art of the
contract negotiator. Not surprisingly, his closest advisors
and allies came from the same sort of background. Ed
Cushman, who continued as Wayne State's executive vice
president and treasurer under Gullen, was a longtime
colleague and mentor of Gullen's, Bohm recalled.

They both came out of negotiating backgrounds,

arbitration, mediation. Consequently, George's

instincts all the way were, no matter what the

hell the question was, Black Studies, anything

else, let's look at the problem and split the

difference. So that George Gullen, the mood of

his administration, throughout his administration,

was one of, there isn't anything we can't settle

by discussion and negotiation.[32]

Eventually, Gullen prevailed on another longtime Wayne State

hand and labor negotiations expert, Ronald Haughton, to

81
return from a Ford Foundation mediation project to become
Wayne State's vice president for urban affairs, a new post
in which he oversaw several of the university's specialized
centers, including, after its creation, the Center for Black
Studies. Haughton, in turn, recruited John Simpkins to
direct the Center for Black Studies in the summer of 1972.
Simpkins, who had two degrees from Wayne State, had most
recently served as head of labor relations for the
Philadelphia public schools. Gullen, thus, came to the Wayne
State presidency extremely familiar with the institution and
with a determinination to get things done.

The call to action on the issue of Black Studies came in
the form of a long and frustrated, almost bitter, memo from
Rose to Bohm about two weeks after Gullen became acting
president. On March 17, 1971, several weeks after Keast's
memo to Rose, a meeting had, in fact, occurred between Rose,
Cambel and Hyman. This was the meeting Keast proposed to
seek ways of implementing parts of the African Studies
Committee's proposal. The result of the meeting was that
Cambel suggested that Rose pull together a list of existing
course offerings in African Studies at the university. On
July 13, Bohm sent Rose a memo on behalf of Cambel asking
what had become of the list. Bohm pointed out that the
course list was to be combined with lists of relevant
library acquisitions, research being conducted at Wayne
State, and African students enrolled at the university to

define "this University's present program in African

82
Studies," Bohm wrote. "Such a tabulation is a very necessary
step in any effort we can usefully undertake in asking
outside (either federal or foundation) support for further
work in this area."[33]

Rose fired back a four-page memo, with a copy of the
committee's report attached, outlining the committee's
history and expressing his dismay at the university's lack
of action. In particular, he emphasized the extensive
efforts that had gone into lining up the foreign
universities as partners in the proposed faculty exchanges.
Those universities had been told that the committee would
let them know as soon as Wayne State's administration had
reached a decision on its recommendation. "It has been,
therefore, a considerable embarrassment, that until your
memorandum of today (except for a warm letter of
congratulation from the President) the university has been
silent about this recommendation," Rose told Bohm.[34] Rose
acknowledged Cambel's suggestion regarding the list of
course offerings, but said the committee had seen no value
in merely reproducing a list that already had been compiled
a year earlier. "The reaction of our university faculty
committee was that this suggestion did not represent a
serious commitment, a clear indication that the university

' Rose

really would develop an African Studies program,’
wrote. Moreover, Rose wrote, he had been advised by Harlan
Hagman, the university's dean of administration, that "at

the end of the 1970-71 fiscal year, there would in all

 

83

' Rose said he

likelihood be no budget for African Studies.'
had begun, therefore, preparing to terminate the committee
"with a great measure of sadness —— primarily because I am
thoroughly convinced that it is a serious mistake on the
part of the university not to make a serious commitment in
the area of African Studies."

Less than a week later, on July 20, 1971, Rose sent
another memo to a dozen peOple familiar with the committee's
work —— faculty members, administrators, and three of the
newly elected black student members of the Student-Faculty
Council —— asking them to attend a July 26 meeting in the
president's conference room to develop a recommendation for
submission to Cambel, Bohm and Gullen.[35] Because the
committee was inactive during the summer break, Rose said,
he thought the responsibility for offering a recommendation
"should be shared by a more or less representative cross

H

section within the university. Rose attached copies of the

memos he had exchanged with Bohm, and said Gullen was
actively interested.

On yesterday, Vice President Cambel
telephoned me to say that, having read a
copy of my memorandum to Dr. Bohm, Acting
President Cullen and he wanted to emphasize
that the University wished action in this
matter without undue delay. Accordingly, the
Vice President continued, he wanted me, within
the limits of practicality, to offer a
recommendation which hopefully the University
could implement straightaway.[36]

Significantly, however, the agenda was no longer limited to

African Studies. Rose told the meeting invitees that the

84
university administration was equally concerned with
Afro-American Studies, which had been the thrust of the
university's protracted discussions with the organizers of
the DuBois Institute. Rose wrote:
Our recommendation, therefore, will

want to be at least two-pronged -- what to

do about African Studies and also what to do

about Afro—American Studies. It may be that we

will recommend the immediate establishment of a

Black Studies program, with a separate faculty,

Director, budget, etc. Or we may want to

recommend something else entirely. In any case,

this is an extremely serious matter . . .[37]

The day after Rose issued his invitation to the ad hoc
committee, Gullen sent him a letter encouraging the effort

' Gullen also

and calling the list of invitees "excellent.'
praised the African Studies Committee report, which he had
just read, and expressed his commitment to "making progress
in this entire area which has two distinct dimensions, 3)
African Studies and b) Black Studies."[38] Gullen said he
would like very much to sit in on the July 26 meeting and
asked whether it would be adviseable. He added, "I want you
to know and the members of your committee to know that I
regret that more specific communications has not taken place
between the administration and your group and that it is my
intention to correct that at once."

Gullen attended part of the July 26 meeting and made
some introductory remarks that Rose said, "established a
positive and constructive tone which prevailed throughout

the meeting."[39] The ad hoc committee focused mainly on the

issue of Black Studies because a comprehensive written

85
report on African Studies already existed. The committee
recommended that a subcommittee, consisting of three faculty
members and four black students, be appointed to devise a
proposal, with possible alternatives, that the university
might adOpt in regard to Black Studies. The group was to be
given 60 days to accomplish its work and a budget of about
$1,000 for secretarial help and travel to other campuses in
the state that had Black Studies programs.

Meanwhile, Gullen was receiving advice from others in
the university who thought Rose needed to be reined in.
Louis Friedland, associate dean of the College of Liberal
Arts, sent Gullen a memo in which he criticized the African
Studies proposal as misdirected and excessively
elaborate.[40] To begin with, he wrote, the voluminous
report of Rose's committee dealt only with African Studies
and not at all with the Afro-American issues commonly
referred to as Black Studies. Secondly, the report
overemphasized international considerations, such as the
proposals for faculty exchanges and student travel abroad,
rather than focusing on resources available on the Wayne
State campus. "In short," Friedland wrote, "it is more
essential it seems to me to determine what additional staff
and other requirements in the form of facilities, library
additions, etc. are necessary prior to the launching of any

" Moreover, he wrote, Rose's report was

large scale program.
too ambitious in scope and its proposals "beyond the

capacity of the University to handle with any significant

86

hope of success."

Attempting such an undertaking would put
Wayne State in the difficult position of competing with
several long-established African Studies centers in the
United States for recruitment of the necessary specialized
personnel, he said. "The strengthening of our own facilities
and faculty, would, therefore, seem to be the first order of

' Friedland wrote.

business,'
Vice President Cambel also wrote to Gullen, but his
concern was the administrative difficulty of managing Rose's
activities as chairman of the African Studies Committee and
also as chairman of the Department of Sociology.[41]
"Presently Professor Rose deals with a variety of University
officers (Messrs. Bohm, Hagman, Hyman, Stearns and with me)

' Cambel wrote. "This

but sends his reports to the President,’
causes confusion and contradictions. It is no way to run a
railroad." Cambel suggested that Gullen re-appoint Rose's
committee with a budget not to exceed $15,000 for the
1971-72 academic year, and that Gullen make clear to Rose
"that he must differentiate between his duties as Chairman
of the Sociology Department and as Chairman of the African

" Gullen responded with a memo to Rose that

Studies Program.
emphasized the proper lines of authority and suggested a
meeting between Rose and Cambel to "sort out the various
issues" involved in advancing programs in African Studies
and Black Studies.[42]

On August 20, 1971 Rose wrote to Cambel, acknowledging

Gullen's request that they meet.[43] Rose wrote, "I have, in

87
preparation for our discussions, drafted a concrete plan of

' Accompanying Rose's

action, to be implemented immediately.'
memo was a five—page outline for a proposed Black Studies
Center. The center was to have a director and a minimum of
four additional faculty members representing the social
sciences, the humanities, education and one of the
professions. Policy for the center would be the
responsibility of a University Committee for Black Studies,
appointed by the president and consisting of five faculty
members, two representatives of ABS, three representatives
of the undergraduate student body, a representative of the
university administration and the center's director. The
final page of the proposal included an estimated budget
totalling $197,000 for the 1971-72 academic year. Rose told
Cambel he had discussed the proposal with most of the people
he had asked Gullen to appoint to the subcommittee, but it
appears that the proposal was essentially Rose's. The black
students he had consulted later sent him a memo saying they
were unable to offer meaningful comments on the proposal
unless Rose could share with them the information he had
gathered "regarding the planning, organization, structuring,
and operation of Black studies type programs."[44]

Although Rose's proposal was not immediately
implemented, the university administration moved ahead
quickly in its preparations for a Black Studies program. By
early December, university officials were beginning to

consider Black Studies as part of a more elaborate plan for

88
ethnic studies at Wayne State. Cambel sent Gullen a memo on
December 6 that appears to be a distillation of some earlier
discussions.[45] In the memo, Cambel said the Center for
Black Studies "would be the first of a series of centers
dealing with the various components of the so-called
'non-traditional student,' i.e., Blacks, American Indians,
Chicanos, women, veterans, as well as a host of other ethnic
groups . . ." After several such centers had been
established, he wrote, they would "become sections of a yet
to be established umbrella organization to be called the

Division of Ethnic and Minority Studies. Under this plan,

 

however, the center would not have its own faculty and teach
its own courses, but would focus on research and encourage
the teaching of specific Black Studies courses through the
existing academic departments. Still, the center would have
a director, two secretaries and a paid, ll—member steering
committee of center associates, each member representing a
college or school within the university. For this sort of
center Cambel estimated a budget of $309,300.

It was, however, an inopportune time, in economic terms,
to be undertaking any large new project. In early January
1972, the university found itself in a major financial
crisis because of cutbacks in appropriations from the state
and because of a federal government ruling blocking a
tuition increase under guidelines of the government's Wage
and Price Controls. As a result, the university released 115

faculty and staff members and sent notices to 281 more that

89

they would be released in June.[46] The crisis eased
somewhat by April, when Gullen was able to tell the
University Council that state plans for a supplemental
appropriation and effective cutting of the non-academic
budget had allowed the university to retain all but about 20
of the terminated faculty and staff members.[47] Still, the
university clearly remained pressed for money.

But Gullen was determined to get a center established.
On January 31, 1972 he took his proposal for a Center for
Black Studies before a meeting of the University Council
Policy Committee, which was the executive committee of the
faculty governing body. The University Council secretary
sent Gullen two pages of suggestions the next day, some of
which (such as incorporating the council's proposed policy
governing the establishment of centers) Gullen adopted.[48]
On February 2, 1972, Gullen spoke to the entire council,
telling them his proposal would be presented to the
university's publicly elected governing body, the Board of
Governors, for their approval on February 10.[49] Gullen
told the council that the center would coordinate campuswide
efforts to promote Black Studies and would seek to stimulate
new courses. On February 9, Gullen sought and received
preliminary approval from the governors' Committee of the
Whole, whereupon he then wrote a letter to Rose formally
offering him the job of director of the Center for Black
Studies and inviting him to make a few comments to the full

board meeting the next day.[50]

90

In his remarks at the board meeting, Rose praised
Gullen's proposal for the center for its underlying
assumption that the history, experience and traditions of
black people were worthy of academic attention; for its
intention to link the center with virtually every
departmental unit on campus; and for the commitment from the
top leadership of the university that it represented.[51] He
said this Black Studies program would bear fruit precisely
because it had sprung from that commitment, unlike programs
at many other universities where young black students were
forced to prod the institutions to action in the absence of
leadership from the university administration. Credit, he
said, was due to Gullen and Cambel:

The facts are that the Acting President and

the Vice President of this University, upon

assuming office a few months ago, saw that the

approximately thirty million Black people in

this nation were substantially unaccounted for

in the curriculum of Wayne State University --

that what thinking and programs we do have are

un—coordinated, and that something must be done

to correct the matter.[52]
But Rose also put three reservations on his acceptance of
the center directorship: that the center office would be
assigned at least one executive level secretary and one
administrative officer; that the president would appoint an
advisory committee that would be one—third faculty,
one—third students and one-third at-large members,
"including perhaps representatives from the surrounding

South-Eastern Michigan community"; and, finally, the

approval of an adequate budget. Gullen thanked Rose and said

91
he was sure Rose's objectives could be accomplished,
whereupon the board approved creation of the center. No
specific budget was mentioned.[53] A news release announcing
the board's action was issued, in which Gullen said the
university already offered 86 courses in Black Studies.
Enrollment in those courses had grown 11 percent, to 2,555
students, from 1969—70 to 1970—71.[54]

Black students, however, were not impressed. At a
meeting with Gullen two days before the board's action,
black students angrily attacked Gullen's proposal because
students had not been involved in the planning and because
the center would be controlled by the university
administration. ABS Chairman Duane Lewis reminded Gullen
that the black students had developed close ties with black
community organizations and black state legislators. "They
have expressed a desire to see an autonomous Black Studies

' Lewis said. "Speaking for

Center established here at Wayne,’
the Black population here at Wayne, This will not do, Mr.
Gullen. We will not accept this."[55] The students also
challenged Gullen's claim that the university offered 86
courses related to Black Studies; they said many of those
courses cited in the in university's registration book were
not open for registration. Lonnie Peek also attended the
meeting and urged Gullen to increase student involvement in
the plan. "I hope you move to break away from tradition,"

Peek said. "Since this program is to meet the needs of

students, they should have an input or the program may find

92
a way of becoming watered down."[56] The day after the

overnors' meetin , the South End carried a front- a e
8 8 P 8

 

editorial signed by a black student, Gene Cunningham,
denouncing the board's action. "The Center for Black Studies

as approved by the WSU Board of Governors is totally

H

unacceptable to Black students, Cunningham wrote. The

editorial cited Rose's reservations on the issues of
staffing, funding and the advisory committee as drawbacks.

Black students cannot be mislead (sic)
by Administration deceptions. The "86 courses
of minority interest" are phantom courses,
most aren't currently offered and many never
were or ever will be. Dr. Rose and the
Association of Black Students stand firm. 86
dummy courses that don't exist and a Black
Studies center without Black control are
half—assed tricks with no effect.[57]

Black student protests against the center, in the form
of rallies and additional articles and editorials in the

South End, continued into the early spring. Meanwhile, Rose

 

set about creating the center. At some point, probably in
late April but the date is not clear, Rose submitted a
proposed budget that called for an allocation of $53,638 to
the center for the remainder of the academic year and a
1972—73 budget of $231,275. Attached were 12 pages of
memoranda explaining many of the line items. The full—year
budget called for, in addition to the center director, an
assistant director, a research director, two secretaries,
four student assistants, 12 research fellows and four
visiting black and/or African professors. The budget also

contemplated a symposium on African arts and a symposium on

93

the music of black Americans to be sponsored by the
center.[58] Rose also developed an agenda for a meeting with
Gullen and Cambel, probably on April 27, that ran to 15
items, one of which listed 13 subitems, and included a
binder of supporting material nearly as thick as his
committee's African Studies proposal two years earlier.[59]
Among the agenda items were the two symposia; a proposed
constitution for the center; proposed contracts for the
assistant director, research director and research fellows;
office space for the center; relationships with black
students; the advisory committee; appointment of an
executive committee; a proposal to bring Julius Nyerere,
president of Tanzania, to campus as commencement speaker;
and updates on discussions Rose had had with a host of
government and foundation officials in Washington and
Lansing. It was a busy spring.

But the launching of the Center for Black Studies was
not smooth. Although the center nominally opened March 1,
Rose essentially was the center throughout the spring and
into the early summer. And although the administration's
interest had clearly been stronger in the area of
Afro—American Studies (witness the "Black Studies" in the
center's name) Rose continued to emphasize ideas aimed at
building direct contacts with Africa. He traveled in early
April to Washington, where he met with officials at several
agencies involved with international economic and

educational development. Within several weeks, he had won

94
tentative commitments from the Agency for International
Development and the Michigan Department of Education to
participate in a program of in-service training institutes
for Michigan public school teachers, linked to a summer
African tour, which had been one of the African Studies
Committee's proposals.

However, the center's budget continued to be a big
stumbling block. Money was needed to hire staff and initiate
programs like the symposia and the in-service institutes.
But in late April, Rose wrote a memo in response to a series
of pointed questions from the Liberal Arts Student Board in
which he told the students that, "As of now, the Center has
no budget."[60] He said he expected to submit a proposed
budget to the administration within a few days. This was
probably the budget that projected $231,275 in spending for
1972-73. By late May, that figure had ballooned to $438,275
with the addition of the in-service project and a proposal
to hire seven new Black Studies faculty members, one each in
the departments of history, sociology, economics, political
science, English, psychology and music.[61]

Just how far apart were Rose's ambitions for the center
and the university's priorities was made clear in June, when
the Board of Governors adopted a 1972-73 university budget
that included just $150,000 for the Center for Black
Studies.[62] The center's full-time staff, under the final
budget, included a director and assistant director (who was

to receive $10,000 in_pay and benefits, instead of the the

95
$21,850 Rose had proposed) and only one secretary. The
second secretary was deleted as was the research director;
the money requested for student assistants and research
fellowships was cut by 57 percent. The $126,000 proposed
allocation for additional Black Studies faculty was gone
altogether, and the $44,000 requested for the in-service
institutes was trimmed to $30,000, with the notation that
this money was "a minimum contingency fund" pending approval
of a three-year, $430,000 grant requested from the federal
government. In a memo to Rose, Ronald Haughton, vice
president for urban affairs, acknowledged that the board's
allocation was "essentially a skelton [sic] budget" but
promised that once the center was up and running, he, Rose
and perhaps others, "will get together with a view to
raising additional money from outside sources, both
government and private, to expand the program of the
Center."[63]

It may be that Rose saw this budget disappointment
coming, or perhaps he was simply frustrated that so little
had come of all the effort he had put into the African
Studies Committee. In any event, by late May 1972, he had
decided to leave Wayne State for a position at the
University of Miami the following September.[64] Over the
summer, John Edward Simpkins, the chief negotiator for the
Philadelphia public school district and former director of
Harvard University's Center for Urban Studies, was hired to

replace Rose as director of the Center for Black Studies.

96

Simpkins said his contact with Rose was very brief, but that
he came away with the impression that Rose "was leaving here
very bitter, that it had been a very bitter experience for
him at the end of his career . . ."[65] And so Simpkins took
over the center and brought with him a decidedly negative
attitude toward Black Studies but also a determination to
accomplish as much as he could with the resources available.

Simpkins was not a believer in Black Studies. His
attitude was so negative, in fact, that Rose opposed his
appointment at Wayne State.[66] Simpkins recalled serving on
the search committee that had tried to hire John Hope
Franklin to head Harvard's new Black Studies Department.
Franklin turned Harvard down, Simpkins said, because they
wanted him for Black Studies, rather than offering him a
position in the History Department. Simpkins continued:

And I felt the same way, that black scholars

should not be put into some less-than-mainstream

area of the university. . . . And Rose was

quite right in saying that I was negative about

the Department of Black Studies. But I told the

university that, even when I interviewed. But

if you're going to have one, then I thought it

ought to have its own faculty.[67]
Of course, he realized, "You can't hire any faculty with
$150,000." So he set about looking for ways to use the money
to maximum effect. The center used about $60,000 of its
budget for fellowships, mainly to graduate students, and
when necessary paid various departments for pieces of a

faculty member's time. Of necessity, the center's focus was

much more local. About $10,000 was transferred to Monteith

97

College for the design of a new Black Studies seminar to be
offered jointly by Monteith and the College of Liberal Arts
and taught by several of the center's fellows.[68] The
center also began working with students and faculty in the
College of Education to develop "a pilot program for
attacking reading deficiencies" at Duffield Elementary
School in Detroit. That project was co-sponsored by Calvary
Baptist Church and was funded by a grant from the federal
Model Neighborhoods program. The center continued to work at
cultivating African contacts but the effort was much
diminished. The Agency for International Development turned
down the funding request for the in-service institutes in
1972, but the center was preparing to revise the proposal
and resubmit it for 1973. And Simpkins continued to struggle
with the skepticism of the university's black students.[69]

But by the end of 1972, Wayne State's Center for Black
Studies was up and running. Walking might be a better
description, or even crawling, given the extremely limited
resources available. The center's budget for its first full
year was far below the first ABS proposal in the spring of
1968, and nearly 25 percent lower than the lowest figure
contemplated by Rose in any of his proposed budgets. And as
a result, the center itself was a mere leaf on the imposing
new branch of the academic tree that ABS had proposed. It
bore only a faint family resemblance, as well, to the
ambitious programs advocated by Rose, through his African

Studies committee and in his budget proposals following the

98
center's approval by the Board of Governors. But nearly five
years after the first ABS proposal to President Keast, and
more than five years after the first surge of intense black
student activism began to reshape the campus consciousness,
a tangible Black Studies program existed at Wayne State

University.

CONCLUSIONS

In the four years of negotiation, debate, study and
discussion that preceeded the creation of Wayne State
University's Center for Black Studies two events had a
profound effect on the long—term future of the center. The
first was the decision, in January 1969, by the Association
of Black Students to pursue creation of an autonomous Black
Studies institute off-campus. The second was the decision by
George Gullen, shortly after he became acting president in
July 1971, to push ahead unilaterally with creation of a
Black Studies center on campus. In the first case, the
importance of the ABS action was that it underscored the
inability of the black students and the university
administration to come anywhere near a meeting of the minds
on the issue of control over the center. Their impasse on
this point delayed creation of the center at least three
years into a harsher economic climate that undercut the
ability of the center to compete for declining university
resources. In the second case, Gullen's decision to create a
Black Studies program with a minimal budget in the center
format, which was clearly on the periphery of the academic
structure, established the Center for Black Studies in a
tenuous position in the university. Both events made it

exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to develop a

99

100
consensus in support of Black Studies at Wayne State.

The stalemate in talks between Keast and ABS was
unfortunate and ironic, in that it left Wayne State, which
had one of the largest black enrollments among the nation's
predominantly white colleges, without a Black Studies
program. The absence was particularly remarkable because of
Wayne State's location in a city whose population was, at
that time, nearly half black. But that very fact provided
another ironic twist. For it was the proximity of a large
black community, and the many political and social activists
who lived there, that both encouraged the black students in
their demands for self-determination on campus and, when
that effort was stymied, provided a realistic hope of
autonomy off-campus. The rhetoric of black nationalism and
self-determination was strong in Detroit's black community
in the late 1960s. Wayne State's black students were of that
community and looked to their activist elders there for
direction and counsel, so it is not surprising that
self-determination was an important issue for them,
especially in relation to Black Studies, which cut
straight to the root of personal and cultural identity. For
the students of ABS, to concede control of a Black Studies
program to the white administration of a white university
was to continue a system of social oppression by allowing
whites to define blacks.

But control was no less a fundamental issue for the

university. Student control is not unheard of in the Western

101
tradition of higher education, such as at the medieval
University of Bologna, which was organized as a guild of
students. In United States universities, however, students
had long since moved to the bottom level of the power
structure, beneath the administration and the faculty. Some
of that structure was merely traditional and discretionary,
but its core had become firmly established in the laws
regulating public universities. For Wayne State, the basic
principle —— the vesting of ultimate authority and
responsibility in the Board of Governors, and through them
the university's administration -— was enshrined in the
state's Constitution. What the black students were demanding
was not simply a radical change in the university's
curriculum but a fundamental shift in authority over the
university's functions. It is hard to see what concessions
the university could have made on this point that would have
satisfied both the demands of the students and the
requirements of law.

It may be, as Patricia Coleman-Burns suggests, that some
in the university's power structure were relieved to see ABS
shift its attention toward the black community off-campus.
Some administrators worried about the influence of a Black
Studies program on campus not just because of the students,
but because of "the power and the insistence of that

' she said.

community,'
Could Wayne really have had a Black
Studies program that was not that dominated
by the community? I think they read that one

102

right. I'm not saying it's right or wrong,

but I think they would have been hard—pressed

to maintain control. Any program. Because the

movement in Detroit was so strong and so

radical and so well-organized.[l]

But it is true also that Keast demonstrated a sincere
determination to involve the university in Black Studies,
whether on campus or off. It would have been easy enough,
otherwise, for him to distance himself and the university
from the DuBois Institute once ABS decided to establish the
institute in the community. Certainly there would have been
no compelling reason for him to become, as he did, a
director of the institute. It may be that the greatest
opportunity lost during this period was the idea raised
during one of the August 1969 meetings between university
officials and institute organizers that Wayne State create a
program to be spun off later as an autonomous institute
after adequate independent financing was found. It is
unclear why this proposal went nowhere, but it probably fell
victim to the continuing control dispute. Eventually, the
institute faded out of existence and Keast departed, leaving
the issue of Black Studies to Gullen.

Personally, Gullen believed strongly in the need for
Black Studies to open up the traditional academic
disciplines to the influence of black history and culture.
In a July 1972 memo to Bohm, by then provost of the
university, Gullen wrote:

I sincerely believe that full integration

is the way to the solution to much of our
societal unrest. This integration will not,

103

in my judgment, come on its own. It must be

nourished and encouraged in every way. The

Center for Black Studies can make a great

difference in our University —— properly led

and enthusiastically directed.

I have staked much on its success. I am

most unwilling to have us relegate that Center

to a secondary position or to give it short

shrift.[2]

And yet, his administrative style and approach to creating
the center helped do precisely that. Gullen's background was
in mediation and arbitration, giving him a pragmatic
orientation toward getting things done. His impulse, as Bohm
said, was to split the difference, to get the issue
resolved. When it came to Black Studies, that meant taking
an existing entity that had been stagnating (Rose's African
Studies Committee), giving it a new charge (Black Studies),
cranking a proposal out of a few quick ad hoc sessions,
grafting on a few organizational considerations the
University Council had been working on separately, and
pushing it through the Board of Governors, all in less than
seven months.

As Rose said in his remarks to the Board of Governors
the day they approved the center, the Center for Black
Studies was Gullen's idea. Rose portrayed that as a credit
to Gullen, which it was, and said that the origin of the
center with the top administration would ensure the center's
success, which it did not. For in his rush to bring the idea
to fruition, Gullen made only superficial efforts to involve

students and faculty in the process. The students had almost

no input and Gullen's discussions with the University

104
Council appear to have been much more informative than
consultative. It may have been easier and faster to
establish a program that way, but the result was a program
that however well-intentioned, had little organized support
outside a few key administrators. The faculty had no vested
interest in a program that it had not helped create and
Simpkins, effectively the center's first director, had to
spend considerable effort in gaining the confidence of
students alienated by their exclusion from the center's
planning. Gullen's action may have guaranteed the center's
creation, but the lack of broader support did little to
ensure its survival beyond his tenure as president.

The center's isolation was compounded by its
administrative structure. A center was quick and easy to
establish, but because it was prohibited from offering its
own courses and degree programs it lacked academic stature.
The decision to create a center stemmed from the belief
Gullen clearly held that Black Studies was not an academic
discipline in itself, but a force to influence and provide
supportive direction for the traditional disciplines. That
underlying assumption guaranteed the Center for Black
Studies a place outside the academic mainstream, making it
far more difficult for the center to compete with the
established departments for money from the university
budget. And the economic situation was daunting enough
already, as the faculty layoffs of early 1972 demonstrate.

With the Oil Embargo of 1973, the fortunes of the U.S. auto

105
industry —— and with them the fortunes of Michigan and
virtually every public institution in the state -- took a
sharp turn for the worse, the first of several that would
force frequent public budget cutbacks over the next 20
years. As Ronald Haughton, vice president for urban affairs,
observed regarding the Center for Black Studies, "It was
minimally funded, but all of our centers were."[3] Haughton
said the center was seen by the administration as a first
step that they hoped eventually would throw deep roots into
the academic structure.

But Simpkins said the Center for Black Studies "was a
concession to the times, and it was not a concession that
was made because the university believed in Black Studies
programs."[4] It was a concession that the administration
was very unsure of, he said:

I believed that those people were doing the

best they knew how to do. But they didn't

believe in Black Studies. They didn't know

what it was, and I don't blame them for not

believing in Black Studies because nobody

knew what Black Studies was. I didn't fault

them for that. . . .

If you understand that, then you understand

how you fund programs that you're not sure of

is you give it something, you know, you put it

out there. I believed that after a year the

program deserved to get additional funding, but

they started to cut it the second year. I think

they cut it to $140,000. And I think they

continued to cut, even after I left.[5]

Simpkins may be closest to the heart of the matter when he
says that nobody knew what Black Studies was. ABS had one

definition, but even that was not universally shared, as the

split between Peek and Bonds and the others demonstrated.

106
Keast had a different view, and Rose had a vision of his
own. Simpkins frankly opposed Black Studies. Gullen believed
a Black Studies program was needed and found himself in a
position to impose the definition he thought would be most
useful and most expedient. But in his sincere effort to make
the university a more open and representative institution,
he undercut the progress he sought. Acting more like an
arbitrator than a mediator, he slammed shut the debate over
the issue of control, which was, after all, about who would
define Black Studies. By dictating a definition that lacked
broad support within the university, Gullen assured the
Center for Black Studies a tentative existence for a long

time to come.

NOTES
Introduction

1 Cassandra Spratling, David McHugh, L. Carol Ritchie,
Darryl Fears and Margaret Trimer, "WSU Black Protesters Take
Over A Building," Detroit Free Press 13 Apr. 1989, metro
final ed.: 1A.

 

2 Spratling, et. al. 1A.

3 Jim Finkelstein, "WSU Is Fulfilling Pact With
Protesters, Officials Say," Detroit Free Press 30 Sept.
1989, metro final ed.: 4A.

 

4 Spratling, et. a1. 1A.

5 Ronald W. Haughton, memo to Alvin W. Rose, 19 June
1972, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 22 Aug. 1975, Box 4, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

6 Alvin W. Rose, undated memo, c. March 1972, files,
Office of the Provost, shipment date 23 July 1976, Box 3,
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

7 Association of Black Students, memo to William R.
Keast, 6 June 1968, files, Office of the President,
President Keast, Box 64, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

Chapter One

1 Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement (New York: Free Press, 1984) 51-63; and Martin

Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1958) 43—89.

 

 

2 Clayborne Carson, In Struggle (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard UP, 1981) 9-30.

 

3 Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford UP,
1988) 161—232.

 

4 Talmadge Anderson, "Black Studies: Overview and
Theoretical Perspectives," Black Studies: Theory, Method,
and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Talmadge Anderson (Pullman,
Wash.: Washington State UP, 1990) l.

 

 

107

108
5 Anderson 2.

6 Nellie Varner, "Initial Report Assessing Available
Courses and Alternative Approaches to the Creation of a
Program in Afro—American Studies," Sept. 1968, files,
College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Michigan
Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

7 Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster and Donald H.
Ogilvie, eds., Black Studies in the University (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale UP, 1969) 225.

 

8 "Student Strikes: 1968-69," Black Scholar 1.3—4
(1970): 66-67.

 

9 Anderson 1—2.

10 Nick Aaron Ford, Black Studies: Threat-or-Challenge?
(Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1973) 191—95.

 

11 Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here:
Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) 43.

 

 

12 Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black

Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York:
Random House, 1967) 37.

13 Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black
Panther Party (San Francisco: Ministry of Information, Black
Panther Party, c. 1970) 12; Special Collections, Michigan
State University Library, East Lansing.

 

 

14 Bayard Rustin, introduction, Black Studies: Myths &
Realities (New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund,

 

 

1969) 5.

15 Kenneth B. Clark, "Letter of Resignation From Board
of Directors of Antioch College," Black Studies: Myths &
Realities (New York: A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund,
1969) 33.

 

16 Roy Wilkins, "The Case Against Separatism: 'Black
Jim Crow,'" Black Studies: Myths & Realities (New York: A.
Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1969) 38-39.

 

l7 Carmichael and Hamilton 44.

18 Robert Blauner, "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto
Revolt," Social Problems 16.4 (1969) 394—95.

 

19 Maulauna Ron Karenga, "The Black Community and the
University: A Community Organizer's Perspective," Black

109

Studies in the University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1969)
37-38.

 

20 Eldridge Cleaver, "Education and Revolution," Black
Scholar 1.1 (1969) 51.

21 Bobby Seale, "Revolutionary Action on Campus and
Community," Black Scholar 1.2 (1969) 5.

 

22 Stephen Lythcott, "Black Studies at Antioch," New

Perspectives on Black Studies (Urbana, 111.: University of
Illinois P, 1971) 126—27.

 

23 Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Studies: An Overview,"
Three Essays: Black Studies in the United States (New York:
Ford Foundation, 1990) 15.

24 Nellie Varner, personal interview, 19 Feb. 1992.

25 Wilkins 39.

26 Rustin 6.

27 Hine 17.

28 Suzanne Schuelke, "Wayne State University Student
Political Activities 1967-70," unpublished senior honors
essay, 1977, Student Activities vertical file, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

29 William R. Keast, telephone interview, 13 Nov. 1992.

30 Keast, interview.

31 Wayne State University Self-Study 1976 (Detroit:
Wayne State University, 1976) 44.

 

32 Self-Study 29.

 

33 Self—Study 18.

 

34 Self—Study 33.

 

35 Patricia Coleman-Burns, personal interview, 19 Nov.

1992.

36 Keast, interview.

37 B.J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class
Violence (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989) 167.

 

38 Coleman-Burns, interview.

110
39 V. Lonnie Peek, personal interview, 3 Nov. 1992.
40 Coleman—Burns, interview.
41 Keast, interview.
Chapter Two

1 Patricia Coleman-Burns, personal interview, 19 Nov.
1992; Walter Grant, "The Official End of Non-Violence,"
South End, 8 Apr. 1968: 5. Coleman-Burns was uncertain of
the date, but recalled a morning memorial gathering soon
after King's assassination; Grant's report does not give
details but mentions a morning memorial service the day
after the assassination.

 

2 Coleman-Burns, interview.

3 Coleman-Burns, interview.

4 Henry V. Bohm, personal interview, 5 Nov. 1992.

5 Nellie Varner, personal interview, 19 Feb. 1992.

6 Henry Vance Davis, "From Coloreds to
African-Americans: A History of the Struggle for Educational
Equity at the University of Michigan and an Agenda for the
Pluralistic Multicultural University of the Twenty-first
Century," Sankofa, a conference report (Ann Arbor: Office of
Minority Affairs, University of Michigan, 1991) 37—45.

7 Coleman-Burns, interview.

8 Bohm, interview; Coleman—Burns, interview.

9 V. Lonnie Peek, personal interview, 3 Nov. 1992.

10 Peek, interview.
11 Peek, interview.
12 Peek, interview.
13 William R. Keast, telephone interview, 13 Nov. 1992.
14 Peek, interview.

15 Keast, interview.

16 "WSU Students Ask For Afro-History," Michigan
Chronicle 16 Oct. 1965: A12.

 

111

17 Geneva Smitherman, "Focus On Black Instructor,"
South End 21 Oct. 1968: 1.

 

18 Lonnie Peek, letter to William R. Keast, 22 Apr.
1968, files, Office of the President, President Keast, Box
64, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit.

19 William R. Keast, letter to Lonnie Peek, 13 May
1968, files, Office of the President, President Keast, Box
64, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit.

20 Wayne State University Board of Governors, minutes,
9 May 1968.

21 "Proposal For Five Year College Program Background,"
3 June 1968, files, Office of the President, President
Keast, Box 64, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

22 "W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Black Studies," 6 June
1968, files, Office of the President, President Keast, Box
64, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit.

23 "Proposal," 3 June 1968.
24 "Proposal," 3 June 1968.

25 Donald Hagerty, "Wayne Students Detail Hopes for
Unique College," Michigan Catholic 3 Oct. 1968: 9.

 

26 Hagerty 9.

27 Hagerty 9.

28 Keast to Peek, 13 May 1968.

29 William R. Keast, "The President's Report to the

Faculty," speech to Wayne State University faculty
convocation, 4 Dec. 1968, Wayne Report 30 (1968-69): 65.

 

30 Keast, "President's Report" 65.

31 Gary Blonston, "Wayne Negroes Press for College of
Black Studies," Detroit Free Press 20 Sept. 1968: 12A.

 

32 Keast, "President's Report" 65.

33 Keast, "President's Report" 64.

112

34 Wayne State University Self-Study 1976 (Detroit:
Wayne State University, 1976) xvi-xvii.

35 Keast, interview.
36 Peek, interview.

37 John Edward Simpkins, telephone interview, 5 Nov.

1992.

38 Roger Rapoport, "Black Institute Studies at WSU,"
South End 22 Jan. 1969: 17.

 

39 Peek, interview.
40 Keast, interview.

41 "Black Students Decide on Independent Institute,"
Michigan Catholic 16 Jan. 1969: 5.

 

42 William R. Keast, statement released by Wayne State
University, 10 Jan. 1969, files, Academic Administration,
Associate Provost E. Burrows Smith, Box 7, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

43 Keast, interview.
44 Peek, interview.

45 "ABS Fires Daniels, Black Studies Head," Michigan
Chronicle 22 Feb. 1969: A6.

 

46 Peek, interview.
47 Peek, interview.

48 Senator Coleman A. Young, et. al., telegram to
William R. Keast, 16 July 1969, files, Academic
Administration, Associate Provost E. Burrows Smith, Box 7,
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

49 Mildred L. Peters, memo to William R. Keast, 23 Jan.
1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

50 J.T. Daniels, letter to William R. Keast, 3 Feb.
1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

113

51 Richard Strichartz, memo to William R. Keast, 18
Feb. 1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost
E. Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

52 Richard Strichartz, memo to President's Staff, 22
Apr. 1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost
E. Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

53 "W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Black Studies Progress
Report: August 1968 to June 1969," June 1969, files,
Academic Administration, Associate Provost E. Burrows Smith,
Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit.

54 Ad Hoc Black Studies Committee, minutes, 31 July
1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

55 Ad Hoc Black Studies Committee, minutes, 21 Aug.
1969, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

56 Keast, interview.

57 Peek, interview.

58 Keast, interview.
Chapter Three

1 William R. Keast, letter to Alvin W. Rose, 24 Jan.
1969, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 2, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

2 Joan Rogin, memo to William R. Keast, 19 Nov. 1968,
files, Office of the President, President Keast, Box 64,
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

3 Keast to Rose, 24 Jan. 1969.

4 Alvin W. Rose, letter to William R. Keast, 5 Feb.
1969, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 2, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

5 William R. Keast, letter to Alvin W. Rose, 18 Feb.
1969, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 2, University

114

Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

6 William R. Keast, telephone interview, 13 Nov. 1992.

7 Anita Hartman, "A New Experience," South End 10 Oct.
1968: 3; Harry Clark, "Afro—Experience: Student Instructs
Peers," South End 22 Nov. 1968: 3; "Monteith: Ten-Year-Old
Experiment," Wayne Report 31 (1969-70): 55.

 

 

8 Geneva Smitherman, interview, "Focus On Black
Instructor," South End 21 Oct. 1968: 1.

 

9 Roger Rapoport, "Black Institute Studies at WSU,"
South End 22 Jan. 1969: 17.

 

10 University Committee for African Studies, report to
William R. Keast, 15 Apr. 1970, 2, files, Africana Studies
Department, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

11 Henry V. Bohm, personal interview, 5 Nov. 1992; Ali
B. Cambel, memo to George Gullen, 9 Aug. 1971, files, Office
of the President, President Gullen, shipment date 17 Sept.
1974, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library,
Wayne State University, Detroit.

12 Alvin W. Rose, letter to members of the University
Committee for African Studies, 5 Jan. 1970, files, Africana
Studies Department, Box 1, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

13 University Committee for African Studies, minutes,
19 Feb. 1970, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 2,
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

14 Alvin Rose, letter to Peter Cook, 2 Mar. 1970,
files, Africana Studies Department, Box 5, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

15 Rose to Cook, 2 Mar. 1970.

16 Committee for African Studies, report to William R.
Keast, 15 Apr. 1970, 5.

17 Allen A. Hyman, letter to Alvin W. Rose, 3 Aug.
1970, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 1, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

115

18 "Keast Announces Plan to Resign," Wayne Report 32
(1970—71): 27.

 

19 Bohm, interview.

20 William R. Keast, memo to Alvin W. Rose, 17 Feb.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 9, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

21 Alvin W. Rose, letter to Rene Wadlow, 7 Dec. 1971,
files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E. Burrows
Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit; Alvin W. Rose,
letter to Mel Johnson, 10 Dec. 1971, files, Academic
Administration, Associate Provost E. Burrows Smith, Box 7,
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

22 Alvin W. Rose, letter to William R. Keast, 16 Dec.
1970, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 9, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

23 Ali Bulent Cambel, memo to William R. Keast, 3 Feb.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 9, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

24 William R. Keast, memo to Ali B. Cambel, 12 Feb.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 9, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

25 Keast to Rose, 17 Feb. 1971.

26 Tom Raymond, "Wayne's Black Conscience," South End
18 May 1970: 12.

 

27 David Booker, interview, South End 19 Nov. 1970: 3.

 

28 Val Jones, "ABS Reorganizes —- And Grows," South End

 

20 Jan. 1971: 3.

29 Barbara Ann Decker, "5 WSU Council Members Seek
Black Study Department," Detroit News 15 July 1971: 1B.

 

30 V. Lonnie Peek, personal interview, 3 Nov. 1992.

31 Val Jones, "Black Studies Courses Established,"
South End 10 Mar. 1971: 1.

 

32 Bohm, interview.

116

33 Henry V. Bohm, memo to Alvin W. Rose, 13 July 1971,
files, Office of the President, President Gullen, shipment
date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

34 Alvin W. Rose, memo to Henry V. Bohm, 14 July 1971,
files, Office of the President, President Gullen, shipment
date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

35 Alvin W. Rose, memo to David Booker, et. al., 20
July 1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

36 Rose to Booker, et. al., 20 July 1971.
37 Rose to Booker, et. al., 20 July 1971.

38 George Gullen, letter to Alvin W. Rose, 21 July
1971, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

39 Alvin W. Rose, memo to George Gullen, 26 July 1971,
files, Office of the President, President Gullen, shipment
date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

40 Louis L. Friedland, memo to George Gullen, 9 Aug.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 9, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

41 Ali Bulent Cambel, memo to George E. Gullen, 9 Aug.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

42 George E. Gullen Jr., memo to Alvin W. Rose, 11 Aug.
1971, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

43 Alvin W. Rose, memo to Ali Cambel, 20 Aug. 1971,
files, Office of the President, President Gullen, shipment
date 17 Sept. 1974, Box 5, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

44 Yvonne Frazier, Cynthia Gray and Duane Lewis, memo
to Alvin W. Rose, 5 Oct. 1971, files, Office of the
President, President Gullen, shipment date 17 Sept. 1974,

117

Box 5, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit.

45 Ali Bulent Cambel, memo to George E. Gullen, 6 Dec.
1971, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost E.
Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

46 Wayne State University Council, minutes, 12 Jan.
1972.

47 Wayne State University Council, minutes, 5 Apr.
1972.

48 Arthur J. Lombard, memo to George E. Gullen, 1 Feb.
1972, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 22 Aug. 1975, Box 4, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

49 Wayne State University Council, minutes, 2 Feb.
1972.

50 George E. Gullen Jr., letter to Alvin W. Rose, 9
Feb. 1972, files, Academic Administration, Associate Provost
E. Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

51 Wayne State University Board of Governors, minutes,
10 Feb. 1972.

52 Wayne State University Board of Governors, minutes,
10 Feb. 1972.

53 Wayne State University Board of Governors, minutes,
10 Feb. 1972.

54 Mike Sibille, untitled news release, 10 Feb. 1972,
files, Office of the President, President Gullen, shipment
date 22 Aug. 1975, Box 4, University Archives, Walter P.
Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

55 Loretta Akers, "Black Studies Need Student
Interest," South End 10 Feb. 1972: 3.

56 Akers, 10 Feb. 1972.

57 Gene Cunningham, "Editorial," South End 11 Feb.
1972: 1.

 

58 Alvin W. Rose, undated budget proposal, circa March
1972, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 4, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

118

59 Alvin W. Rose, "Items to be discussed in conference
with Vice President Ali B. Cambel, Dean Leonard O. Roellig,
President George E. Gullen and Dr. Alvin W. Rose," c. April
1972, files, Africana Studies Department, Box 4, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,
Detroit.

60 Alvin W. Rose, letter to Liberal Arts Student Board,
21 Apr. 1972, files, Academic Administration, Associate
Provost E. Burrows Smith, Box 7, University Archives, Walter
P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

61 Alvin W. Rose, undated budget proposal, circa 22 May
1972, files, Office of the Provost, shipment date 23 July
1976, Box 3, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library,
Wayne State University, Detroit.

62 Ronald W. Haughton, memo to Alvin W. Rose, 19 June
1972, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,
shipment date 22 Aug. 1975, Box 4, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

63 Haughton to Rose, 19 June 1972.

64 Henry V. Bohm, memo to George E. Gullen Jr., 30 May
1972, files, Office of the Provost, shipment date 23 July
1976, Box 3, University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library,
Wayne State University, Detroit.

65 John Edward Simpkins, telephone interview, 5 Nov.
1992.

66 Simpkins, interview.

67 Simpkins, interview.

68 Edward Simpkins, "Report to the President and Board
of Governors, Wayne State University," 30 Nov. 1972,
vertical file, Center for Black Studies, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,

Detroit.

69 Simpkins, "Report," 30 Nov. 1972; Simpkins,
interview.

Conclusions

1 Patricia Coleman—Burns, personal interview, 19 Nov.
1992.

2 George E. Gullen Jr., memo to Henry V. Bohm, 21 July
1972, files, Office of the President, President Gullen,

119

shipment date 22 Aug. 1975, Box 4, University Archives,
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

3 Ronald W. Haughton, telephone interview, 2 Nov.
1992.

4 John Edward Simpkins, telephone interview, 5 Nov.
1992.

5 Simpkins, interview.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and Pamphlets

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

 

University Press, 1981).

Carmichael, Stokely and Charles Hamilton. Black Power: The

 

Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random

 

House, 1967).

Cleaver, Eldridge. On the Ideology of the Black Panther
PagEy (San Francisco: Ministry of Information, Black
Panther Party, c. 1970): Special Collections, Michigan
State University Library.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New

 

York: William Morrow & Company, 1967).

Ford, Nick Aaron. Black Studies: Threat or Challenge (Port

 

Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1973).
Frye, Hardy T., Charles Irby and John C. Leggett. Whither
Black Studies (Stockton, Calif.: Hammer Press, 1972).
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(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).

King, Martin Luther Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or

 

Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

 

---. Stride Toward Freedom (San Francisco: Harper & Row,

 

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120

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Ogilvie, eds. Black Studies in the University (New

 

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Crow,'" Black Studies: Myths & Realities (New York: A.

 

Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1969): 38-39.

Newspaper Articles

"ABS Fires Daniels, Black Studies Head," Michigan Chronicle

 

22 Feb. 1969: A6.
Akers, Loretta. "Black Studies Need Student Interest,"

South End 10 Feb. 1972: 3.

 

"Black Students Decide on Independent Institute," Michigan
Catholic 16 Jan. 1969: 5.

Blonston, Gary. "Wayne Negroes Press for College of Black

Studies," Detroit Free Press 20 Sept. 1968: 12A.

Clark, Harry. "Afro-Experience: Student Instructs Peers,"

South End 22 Nov. 1968: 3.

 

Cunningham, Gene. "Editorial," South End 11 Feb. 1972: 1.

 

Decker, Barbara Ann. "5 WSU Council Members Seek Black

Study Department," Detroit News 15 July 1971: 1B.

 

Finkelstein, Jim. "WSU Is Fulfilling Pact With Protesters,

Officials Say," Detroit Free Press 30 Sept. 1989, metro

 

final ed.: 4A.

125
Grant, Walter. "The Official End of Non-Violence," Sgpgh
Egg 8 Apr. 1968: 5.
Hagerty, Donald. "Wayne Students Detail Hopes for Unique

College," Michigan Catholic 3 Oct. 1968: 9.

 

Hartman, Anita. "A New Experience," South End 10 Oct.

 

1968: 3.

Jones, Val. "ABS Reorganizes -— And Grows," South End 20

 

Jan. 1971: 3.

-—-. "Black Studies Courses Established," South End 10 Mar.

 

1971: 1.

"Keast Announces Plan to Resign," Wayne Report 32

 

(1970-71): 27.

"Monteith: Ten-Year—Old Experiment," Wayne Report 31

 

(1969-70): 55.
Rapoport, Roger. "Black Institute Studies at WSU," South
End 22 Jan. 1969: 17.

Raymond, Tom. "Wayne's Black Conscience," South End 18 May

 

1970: 12.
Spratling, Cassandra, David McHugh, L. Carol Ritchie, Darryl

Fears and Margaret Trimer. "WSU Black Protesters Take

Over A Building,' Detroit Free Press 13 Apr. 1989, metro

 

final ed.: 1A.
"WSU Students Ask For Afro-History," Michigan Chronicle 16

Oct. 1965: A12.

Archives, Interviews and Speeches

Bohm, Henry V., personal interview, 5 Nov. 1992.

126

Booker, David, interview, South End 19 Nov. 1970: 3.

Coleman-Burns, Patricia, personal interview, 19 Nov. 1992.

Haughton, Ronald W., telephone interview, 2 Nov. 1992.

Keast, William R., telephone interview, 13 Nov. 1992.

-——. "The President's Report to the Faculty, speech to Wayne
State University faculty convocation, 4 Dec. 1968, Wayne
Report 30 (1968-69): 61-65.

Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Peek, V. Lonnie, personal interview, 3 Nov. 1992.

Schuelke, Suzanne, "Wayne State University Student Political
Activities 1967-70," unpublished senior honors essay,
1977, Student Activities vertical file, University
Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, Detroit.

Simpkins, John Edward, telephone interview, 5 Nov. 1992.