The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972

by Ibram X. Kendi

Northeast Black Studies Association (NEBSA) 2013 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize
Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement (DISA) 2012 Best Scholarly Book Award Winner
Between 1965 and 1972, African American students at upwards of a thousand historically black and white American colleges and universities organized, demanded, and protested for Black Studies, progressive Black universities, new faces, new ideas--in short, a truly diverse system of higher education relevant to the Black community. Taking inspiration from the Black Power Movement, Black students drew support from many quarters--including White, Latino, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American students--and disrupted and challenged institutions in nearly every state. By the end, black students had thoroughly reshaped the face of the academy. The Black Campus Movement provides the first national study of this remarkable and inspiring struggle, illuminating the complex context for one of the most transformative educational movements in American history, and providing a groundbreaking prehistory of black student activism from abolition through the 1960s. The book synthesizes records from more than three hundred colleges and universities, including documents from 163 college archives, into one national story. This authoritative study is essential to understanding modern American higher education.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Education, Race, American History, African American

249 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2012

About the author

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast, Be Antiracist.

Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest ever winner of that award. He had also produced five straight #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Black Campus Movement" makes several important and exciting contributions to the study of student movements, universities, and black radicalism in the 20th century. Ibram X. Kendi dramatically extends the timeline of black student activism backward into the early 20th century, chronicling the self-activity of The New Negro College Movement as well as similarly understudied black student activism in the 1930s and 1940s. This alone would make this text a valuable one, but Kendi also offers a deeply researched account of black student organizing in its more conventionally recognized high-water mark, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, with an impressive breadth and depth of archival research.

I do have several criticisms of this book. Some are merely stylistic - at only 169 pages of text, (itself a feat,) one would hope that there would be room to avoid the idiosyncratic and distracting acronym system that the text adopts, rarely spelling out school names in full and instead relying upon a strange system of proper name plus hyphenation plus first initial of the type of institution, e.g., Cornell-U, Spellman-C, etc. There are also some problems with word choice, as when the author several times uses the word "rampage" to refer to black student protests. (This is problematic because of the racialized and animalized etymology of the phrase.). Both of these seem to me to be editorially-induced problems, and I hesitate to raise them here for that reason.

Kendi outlines four pillars against which the black campus movements organized - the "moralized contraption," the "normalized mask of whiteness", the standardization of exclusion, and "ladder altruism." While the underlying concepts here are strong and helpful, the nomenclature is at times counterintuitive. Why altruism? Why contraption? Whether these were terms students themselves used or terms Kendi has himself fashioned is unclear in the text. Assuming the latter, the decision to go with "moralized contraption" over "moralizing ideology" remains curious. Kendi uses "ladder altruism" to describe an ideology of trickle-down leadership and hierarchy that conservative HBCUs sought to instill in students. He transposes ladder altruism against the "grassroots altruism" of student It's an important and useful concept, but again there is no explanation of why "altruism" is the relevant idea here and where this converges and where it breaks with other such ideologies of leadership, service, and power.

There are other, more theoretical questions -- the relationship between revolutionary nationalism and Marxism-Leninism/Maoism and Cedric Robinson's Black Radical Tradition, that might have been taken up more as well. However, this remains an important and impressive work of historical scholarship, particularly exciting for its highlighting of the long black campus movement's roots in the early decades of the 20th century.

[Stephanie Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a fan of Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, so I was interested in trying his earlier historical work on the Black Campus Movement. There were some things I liked about the book. His historiography explains the fours ways America’s universities and colleges treated black students since Reconstruction: the moralized contraption, standardization of exclusion, normalized mask of whiteness, and ladder altruism. These terms are of his making, and he explores these ideas in his history of black campus activism. In addition to predominantly White institutions, I appreciate that he researched and included activism at historically Black colleges and universities. I learned why HBCUs struggled financially, and how that lack of funding affected its facilities, services, and hurt their enrollment in the long-term. Finally, his primary and secondary research is thorough and impressive. He’s combed through many university archives and synthesized secondary literature to write a comprehensive history of black campus activism since the 1800s.

In terms of readability, it was a mixed bag. Lots of acronyms and terms that were sometimes defined or not defined, like black suasion or white suasion. He never really defined what he meant as “the racial reconstitution of higher education.” I wish there were subtitles within the chapters to serve as guideposts for readers to understand the larger historical narrative. Much of the historiography, although comprehensive, is descriptive. The narrative is focused on covering a wide number of activists, incidents, and events on a variety of historically white and historically black colleges and universities. The two strongest chapters are six and eight because they organize the Black Campus Movement into emerging themes. For example, chapter six offers the reader a broad sense of student activists’ demands and the nature of protests. Chapter eight, he circles back to analyze how the Black Campus Movement challenged higher education’s moralized contraption, standardization of exclusion, normalized mask of whiteness, and ladder altruism. Although it is a dense read, it’s still a significant piece of scholarship that illustrates how black campus activists challenged exclusionary and racist practices of American universities and colleges.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished Ibram X. Kendi's The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Radical Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. For a book that is only 169 pages long, Kendi sure covers a lot! He even starts his study in the 1800's. His research was obviously exhaustive, but page count alone limits how deeply in depth he was able to go. I wish he could have given more time to individual incidents, but at least this gives me a jumping off point as I look for for more information. The writing didn't flow as smoothly as it does in his later works making it a bit of a slow read for me, but I learned a lot and Kendi's chronological approach helped give context and proper placement to the historical events I was familiar with. I came away with a feeling of indebtedness for the individuals who worked so hard for change as part of the Long Black Student Movement.

[Minaeliza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I love Kendi’s writing style and the information he decided to include. I appreciated how he named so many people you don’t get to learn about in other history texts. This was informative and an excellent compilation of primary source material. My only thing is that, I wish he had put in some maps or graphs or timelines as some of the chapters reference different decades when talking about the same person or a relationship between events or people. It could get difficult to follow if you aren’t already marginally familiar with the events of the time period.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in 2018 for my history class--I'm afraid when I deleted my "grad school readings" shelf, I deleted a lot of books. Ugh.

This was the first text by Kendi I'd read, and this book is important, because the Black Campus Movement was an important part of the larger Black Power Movement. I learned a lot, and it was great to see a mention of my alma mater, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and its role in the movement.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a whole to read because he gets bogged down in some strange abbreviations and repetition. Solid, though depressing, point about the origins of campus activism going back to the 1920s and tying into current problems that linger. M

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searing, enlightening work of nonfiction narrative mastery, packed with thorough research and organization featuring countless mic drops of truth and passion throughout the experience.
The reading was often difficult in demands of focus as well as emotional energy (self deprecating - ‘ oh no, did it make me ‘feel bad’? Boo to the hoo oo oo’ ), but every single time I reread a page or two to steady my footing I would remember what I had read, but felt as if I needed to experience the layers that were being conveyed as such small passages contained mountains of weight. A well executed piece of lesser studied, essential history demanding analysis of the present. I was consistently floored.

[Person Urqy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! It introduces lots of important people to the movement.