Present. Host and what is your answer to the question on the seminar you teach is america postracial and first of all what is happening, postracial . What does that mean . Guest the course interrogates this idea that began to circulate after the election of barack obama to the presidency that a black man was in the white house that perhaps United States had over toms long history of racism and segregation and White Supremacy and so there was a lot of attention to that question after he was first elected. Tragically and very sadly in our recent time we have seen very unfortunate and dramatic illustrations that thats absolutely not the case. The courts really explored the whole range of issues from affirmative action in Higher Education to police violence, police brutality, boater laws to take up this question of what is the extent of Racial Disparities in American Life . Host Martha Biondi some people might be watching this per gram of tissue supervisor of africanamerican studies. Guest the field of africanamerican studies was fought for by black students and some black scholars and i was a quest to really redefine and reshape the teaching of American History and to really gain control over the subject of black history. Selfdetermination was really the watchword of the struggle and its been a field that has largely been written by and top five africanamerican scholars that there has always been a tradition of openness in the field, and i mean the goal has been to narrate the United States and World History from the perspective of black people and lack subjects. The vast majority of the writing in the teaching has been done by black people but there has been a minority of nonblack scholars in the field. Host we invited you on booktv to talk about this book , the black revolution on campus and one of the things you write about is the creation of ethnic studies in this book. Guest yeah, at extent these was born out of the black Liberation Movement of the early 70s and i was drawn to write about it because i thought this period of the black freedom struggle had been greatly misunderstood. Sometimes known as the Power Movement and i think Many Americans associate black power with violence, with destruction with this array and in fact one of the court holes and aspirations of the black Power Movement with access to Higher Education. The quest for education was really at the center of the Power Movement and i dont think Many Americans have really appreciated that were understood that. In fact we have i think part of the mythology of American Society is democrats have valued education, and there had been a socalled model minorities whether they are asianamericans are Jewish Americans who are presented as the kind of struggling minority group. Africanamericans are rarely portrayed this way. They are often portrayed as not valuing education. Their black culture is often portrayed as an antiintellectual culture and i felt that those were roast is portions of our history and what was extraordinary to me about the late 1960s was this was a period period in which young black people risk their lives to go to college. We dont often comment that is not whats often taught in schools about africanamericans and education but they went on strike. They had sedans, they had protests and demonstrations and even risk their lives to open up the doors to Higher Education much more broadly. Host in the black revolution on campus while the white student has garnered much more tension black students produce greater campus changes. Guest i think when many people think of Student Activists in the late 1960s they think of the students for Democratic Society for example and they think of the fight to end the war in vietnam were other issues like that but i think the Student Movement which took place at colleges large and small public and private all over this country 1868 in the 199, 1970 actually produced more wideranging comprehensive campus reform in the white new left so i think for many people thats an untold story. Host are some of those reforms to present today . Guest many of them are. Sadly many have also been under attack or years particularly affirmative action in College Admissions whether its through a Ballot Initiative that we saw initially in our corner of her court decisions. There have been many conservative groups, white americans who see affirmative action admissions as a threat to white prerogatives even though as many soshi logical studies have revealed the opportunity structure and american Higher Education is so weighted towards whites whether its because of wealth or because of legacy admissions. Affirmative action in many ways was meant to be in a very modest minor corrective to this opportunity structure that long disfavored people of color. So that has been under attack. Open admissions with was another extraordinary achievement of this era in public universities public Higher Education. Many Student Activist said that you graduate from a Public High School and you want to go to college why not . You should be able to go to college. Why do we want to not let kids want to go to college but callers said they felt taxpayerfunded institution should be open to all qualified applicants who graduated from high school. So they won back. Who is known as open admissions and it was achieved in san francisco, chicago, new york and in many places as famously in new york it became very controversial. It was seen as watering down the degree and so was actually under the mayors republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani in new york city was repealed after undergoing controversy for many years. The time it did exist open admission in places like new york city was it did help to change the opportunity structure. And there is black studies the most wellknown and famous and longest lasting achievements of this period of student activism from the late 60s and early 1970s. When students opt for changes in the curriculum it was very controversial and i think this is something Many Americans that kind of forgotten and forgotten how eurocentric the curriculum was. Im not talking about a handful of universities by the all these colleges and universities large and small public and private at a literature professor ask why are there no writers on the syllabus quiz where is Richard Wright are wheres Langston Hughes or james old went you would probably be told that they werent worthy of inclusion on the college curriculum. So students really had to fight. Had to fight for their own education and i think what they want has enriched american Higher Education and lead to a transformation in American Intellectual life, a transformation in knowledge production and College Teaching that certainly influenced black studies and latino studies but all the disciplines in liberal arts have been impacted for the better. Host in your books the black revolution on campus you address some of the critiques of ethnic studies as not being intellectually rigorous. Guest when the students when these demands and they were one after first the students started by just negotiations and meetings and trying to do research and to demonstrate to the faculty and to demonstrate to administrators that this was an appropriate area of inquiry but in light of footdragging and a lack of change students decided in the late 1960s it was time to escalate their tactics. Then they engages in direct action protest which was a classic form of protest in the civil Rights Movement. They went on strike. They occupied buildings. They organize demonstrations and i think because this was a time in American Society where we had summer after summer of very serious urban unrest many College Administrators were nervous. They were nervous about the urban unrest coming in to campus. They were nervous about escalating protests and they granted, they ultimately granted many of the student demands. Most notably the demand for ethnic studies and black studies. I think what we found, what i found in my research is even though they granted this concession and they said okay but well give you an Ethnic Studies Program or we will give you a black studies program it didnt mean that they actually thought these deals were legitimate or serious areas of academic inquiry. They were trying to placate students and i thought maybe this will go away pig in a poke this will dissipate after while. The students will move on. This isnt a serious academic endeavor and they were absolutely wrong. What the students did was create the infrastructure for a whole new field of American Research and intellectual growth so today we see africanamerican studies African Diaspora studies is thriving at many colleges and universities. Although i should say it has remained under attack for this whole ensuing 40 or 50 years. There are many conservative legislatures who would like to cut these programs and there are im sure many faculty members who remain to this day skeptical about the legitimacy of these fields. I think the scholars in these fields are produced awardwinning scholarships. They have gained a firm place in american Higher Education so we have seen in a sense a story of incredible resilience and incredible success despite long odds and intense opposition. Host what is the picture on the front of your book . Guest that has Stokely Carmichael and Stokely Carmichael was one of the figures of the late 1960s that really inspired this phase of the freedom struggle. Black College Students across the country greatly admired Stokely Carmichael who himself was a student at Howard University when he got politicized and dropped out of college to join the Southern CivilRights Movement with the leader of snack the student nonviolent coordinating committee. I was one of the most important civil rights organizations and toppling legal apartheid in the south. After the achievement of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act stick leaders set their sights on taking the Student Movement to colleges nationwide and Stokely Carmichael was one of the leaders of that. It shifts away from the south to the north, to the west and the crisscross the country giving charismatic mesmerizing speeches that inspired students to take action to improve their own lives. Host what is the importance of the Student Movement of the late 60s and early 70s . Guest in some ways is counterintuitive at the start of colleges and universities were going to be main sites of struggle at a time when many black students were trying to widen opportunities in predominantly white institutions but what students had come to learn by the late 1960s is that integration as a was playing out in American Education and the american schooling was not a twoway street. It was really coming at the expense of black institutions. So while desegregation, equal rights, full inclusion certainly remained the main call by leaders and black civil rights leaders and leaders of Power Movement there was a concern that the brown ruling the way it had been implemented and extend it had been implemented and that have been slow in piecemeal led to the loss of black institutions and the loss of jobs for black teachers and principals and black schools had disappeared had been shut down in the aftermath of the implementation of brown pico border that at the state and local level and i think what this generation of College Students had come to understand what should have hbcus even though they might be funded by white legislatures are funded by white philanthropists were important black Community Institutions that gave crucial administrative and faculty jobs to black professionals and had a much better rate of producing black graduates than white universities particularly in the areas of law, medicine and other professional fields. Instead of integrating away these institutions they wanted to preserve and defend it that upgrade and modernize and improve black colleges and get more lack control over the funding and the running of the start way black colleges so they , students really thought to defend these schools to get our funding from the state legislature to improve the curriculum to update them for a new era and to make them serve the needs of a new generation of black students. Host professor biondi where is Jackson State College and what happened there on may 15, 1970 . Guest jackson state is in jackson mississippi and that is one case of a season of violence inflicted on black students by Law Enforcement state, local, national law Law Enforcement that it was often called then to quell student protest and that sadly led to a serious loss of life that most americans dont know about. Many people know about the poor white students killed at kent state. Few people know about the students killed at jackson state but there were at least eight black students killed, many many more wounded and injured on various College Campuses during these years. At Jackson State Police open fire into the windows of a womens dormitory. Can you imagine that, at openly firing into womens dormitory. They killed two young black man at Southern University in baton rouge in 1972. They just fired into a crowd. They killed these two students in the back that were fleeing. The same thing happened at orangeburg South Carolina in 1968. Law enforcement shot and killed three students in the back as they were running away. So this is an example of the kind of heavyhanded lethal in many cases resistance and opposition that student space to were trying to literally improve their colleges, gain access to the middle class. Colleges are seen as the bedrock of a mayer and dream. Students were trying to realize that for themselves and ensuing generations in a faced massive arrests and violence including lethal violence on many campuses. Host who is the black revolution on campus written for . This is a scholarly text for the general public . Guest i wrote it hoping to meet reach multiple levels greater wanted colleagues and historians to read it but i wanted a wider public to reach it to this is a story that many people can relate to. The 1960s are a critical time in a in history. Many of the changes in our own days, the roots are in the late 1960s affirmativeaction, black studies, at next that is, latino studies all come out of this period and what is at the heart of this is human drama. Its human stories so there are people stories in peoples lives at the center of this book. I didnt want to be filled with academic jargon even though i did want to make a scholarly intervention. Its really human story on those lives and incredible struggles and incredible aspirations and incredible contributions are at the heart of the book. Host was Northwestern University at hotspot for the black movement of the 60s and 70s . Guest surprisingly it was. You wouldnt think that quiet evanston illinois unlike michigan north of chicago would be a hot head of lack radicalism but in its own way it was and thats because i think was right next to a Major Urban Center that had an important local civil rights struggle, local black rights struggle with important leadership and is very much impacted the students here many of whom came from chicago. There was a small group of black students who were here in 1965, 1966, 1967 that have as their goal to widen opportunities to a larger group of young black chicagoans and to transform the curriculum and to convert northwestern from an overwhelmingly White University with an overwhelmingly White Eurocentric curriculum into a multiracial learning environment with much more access and opportunities for africanamerican africanamerican students, professors and administrators. So they launched a struggle in 1968. They planned a sedan. They engineered a really successful protest. They took over this building for a couple of days. They had a great media strategy. They got a lot of local