In the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, Dr. Ibram H. Rogers documents
the groundbreaking impact that African-American students had on U.S. college and university campuses through their activism. By demanding and protesting for Black studies, Black cultural centers, Black faculty members and respectful treatment, Black students challenged both historically White and historically Black institutions and inspired the ideals that American colleges and universities today strive for as they pursue 21st century campus diversity.
Rogers, a Diverse blogger and an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, crafted this national study with records from more than 300 colleges and universities, including documents from 163 college archives. Recognized with the Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement 2012 Best Scholarly Book Award, The Black Campus Movement was published this past March by Palgrave MacMillan.
Recently, Diverse spoke with Rogers about The Black Campus Movement, his first book as a scholar.
DI — What inspired you to write about the Black Campus Movement?
IR —The short answer is that I became very interested in studying the first ever Black student union (BSU) at (what was then) San Francisco State College, which was founded in 1966. And it became very influential in terms of the founding of Black studies and even the Black Campus Movement in a larger sense.
And so I think through my research and interest in that original BSU, I of course began to grow interested in BSUs, student activism throughout that period and around the nation. So clearly just like when you study any topic you have to understand it in its larger context. The more I studied that larger context the more I became interested in that larger context.
