Black Student Power: Re-Centering Black Youth in the Historical Narrative

• In Event: Black Power Reconsidered: Rethinking the Provenance and Paths of Black Power Thought and Praxis

Abstract

This presentation will rethink the Civil Rights/ Black Power movements by focusing on African American activism on college/university campuses. It attempts to highlight youthful members of the black intelligentsia in an earlier era while drawing connections to current activists. By employing what the presentation refers to as “Black Student Power,” young learners at the nation’s predominantly white institutions of higher education used their race and status as students to advance the Black Freedom Movement. In the postwar era, student-activists did so by protesting and demonstrating on campuses to improve black admissions, hire black administrators and faculty, and enhance the curriculum. The presentation will focus specifically on the activism of black students at Ivy League universities. By detailing events that occurred on the nation’s most elite campuses, the paper will show the invasiveness of institutional racism and the expanse of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Scholarship covering the Black Power Movement has not typically underscored the activism of black students on campus. Much of the literature has emphasized the campaigns of SNCC, which frequently took place in venues off campus. Until scholars like Joy Ann Williamson, Ibram Rogers (now Kendi), and Martha Biondi released their field shaping works, the scholarship pertaining to student activism has focused mainly on white student radicals and organizations such as SDS. This presentation will place black students squarely in the center of the Black Power and Student movements of the 1960s and of the current movement for Black Lives.

Author

• Stefan Bradley, Saint Louis University