Fueled by a comprehensive, holistic vision of African-American studies, the doctoral program at University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) was developed by visionaries determined to train the next generation of scholars.
All first-year graduate students in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst take a year-long course of study titled “Major Works in Afro-American Studies,” a team-taught seminar in which they read more than 50 books spanning a diverse range of subjects. At the inception of the doctoral program in 1997, the founders had a lofty goal: a work by a graduate of the program would someday be added to the Major Works reading list.
About four years ago, a book by Dr. Shawn L. Alexander — who received his doctorate in 2004 and is now an associate professor of African and African-American studies and director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas — achieved that honor when his book, An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights Before the NAACP, replaced Dr. August Meier’s Negro Thought in America 1880-1915.
“We wanted people who could do the work we thought needed to be done and they’re doing it,” says Dr. John H. Bracey Jr., one of the founders of the doctoral program and one of the nation’s most prominent historians of the African-American experience.
Unique vision
UMass Amherst’s W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, named for the Massachusetts native who believed social justice must be rooted in exemplary scholarship, began as a program in the university’s English Department in the late 1960s and became an independent department in 1970. Although a predominantly White university located in a somewhat rural White community, the department attracted renowned Black intellectuals and artists such as James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe and Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, who were all on the faculty across the decades.
In the early 1990s, Bracey says the members of the department realized they had a new mission: to train their successors. In 1996, he outlined his vision for a graduate program.
