SHS Oral History Program releases African and African American Studies Project for public access

The Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program has recently made the interviews conducted for the African and African American Studies Departmentalization Project available for public access. Interview recordings and transcripts can be viewed on the society’s digital exhibits website.

The interviews capture Stanford students’ efforts to organize on behalf of departmental status and to collaborate with groups across campus, including the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), Stanford Solidarity Network, and the Stanford Graduate Workers Union; faculty members’ experiences teaching in and leading the program over the past decades; and staff members and post-doctoral students’ support in the most recent effort.

Project coordinators Casey Patterson and Makeda Barr-Brown started this effort in the summer of 2022. They hoped to record the steps organizers took to achieve their objectives, the impact of departmentalization on Black studies at Stanford, and its potential reverberation on other cultural and ethnic studies programs.

Patterson spoke about the significance of the successful departmentalization campaign effort on campus in his interview for the project:

“One thing that I hope emerges from it is an opportunity to really critically assess what the value is of departmentalization for all of us because before they were trying to convince us that there would be fewer resources for everybody else if Black studies got more departments. But really, what departmentalization does is that it guarantees a steady stream of resources as a matter of institutional structure. When nobody has a department, then that scarcity mindset works. But when everybody has a department, then everybody has a guarantee of institutional futurity.”

The first iteration of the AAAS program started in 1968 under the leadership of Professor of Anthropology James L. Gibbs. The program was a direct result of student activism, including the  “Taking the Mic” protest, when a group of Black students took the microphone from then provost Richard Lyman during a convocation held in the days following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Frank J. Omowale Satterwhite, one of the student activists, read a list of ten demands urging the university to support minority students and institute new policies relating to the admission of students and recruitment of faculty of color. Learn more about the contexts and issues in the SHS Collections or Black @ Stanford.

Early leaders of the program include Dr. St. Clair Drake, who served as the first chairperson of the program, and Professor Sylvia Wynter, who served as director of the program from 1976-1979. The AAAS program continued to succeed under various directors and in 1997 became part of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In the 2020-2021 academic year, then provost Persis Drell announced the creation of a task force to reevaluate the study of race at Stanford. This was in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests following the murder of George Floyd, as well as decades of organizing led b y students, faculty, and staff advocating for departmental status—many of whom were interviewed for the oral history project. In February 2021, the task force recommended the departmentalization of AAAS. Professor Ato Quayson from the English Department was announced as the inaugural chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, which launched on January 1, 2024. 

Currently nine interviews from the project are available, with an additional interview with Dr. Michele Elam being processed for public access. The project organizers hope the oral histories will be a useful resource for the discipline of Black studies and for those who are interested in departmentalization at their own universities and that they will be relevant as discussions about the status of other cultural studies programs at Stanford continue.

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