Twenty-five years of history
African-American studies: remembering the journey
By Nancy Hsu
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
J.Daniel "Skip" Johnson ate his lunch with a dozen other
African-American students and a professor outside Ackerman Union
one hot summer afternoon. The year was 1967 and the topic wasn’t
the upcoming midterm. It was racism.
"What are we going to do about this stuff?" Johnson asked his
peers. "The racism, the riots, brothers are pissed off. It looks
like we’re getting ready for a race war and what are we going to do
to stop it?"
To head off rising tension, Johnson and other members of the
UCLA community between 1966 to 1969 proposed the establishment of
an Afro-American studies program, the first of four ground-breaking
ethnic studies centers. This year, the campus celebrates the 25th
anniversary of the Afro-American, Asian American, American Indian
and Chicana/o studies programs and the student activism that made
them possible.
"We weren’t just talking about Watts or South Central (Los
Angeles)," Johnson recalled in a recent interview. "We were talking
about what we were going to do about black problems worldwide. We
all believed in a nonviolent approach, but none of us were afraid
of violence. Discord was all around us."
Johnson, 47, came to UCLA from Mobile, Ala., in 1964. He majored
in political science when he joined Harambee, later known as the
Black Student Union. Students there began discussing the creation
of an Afro-American studies major.
While taking classes at UCLA, many of the African-American
students on campus felt students of other ethnicities were ignorant
about black history, Johnson said. Something had to be done to
change the curriculum.
The motivation behind a studies center was to educate the rest
of the student body "so they would not grow up ignorant and
racist," Johnson said. "Our focus from day one was to eliminate the
racism of the student body by giving them the knowledge we already
had."
Students held a protest in mid-February of 1967 during "Negro
History Week." Hundreds lined Bruin Walk, carrying signs in support
of Afro-American studies — some of which read "Why one week?"
Most of the student body supported the idea of a black studies
program, Johnson said. In January 1968, students, faculty and
administrators held a colloquium to discuss the issue of black
power, then being espoused on television sets across the country by
Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party. Students also
presented a proposal to then-Vice Chancellor Charles Young for a
class on African American history that would serve as the first
step to a major.
Johnson said Young, who was named chancellor by the Board of
Regents in July 1968, put together a multi-ethnic task force and
sat with students on the steering committees of all four
centers.
"He’s never gotten credit for what he did," Johnson said. "He
was so positive for student-oriented programs. However, he was only
for responsible programs. Just because students proposed it doesn’t
mean it’s a good program."
Things were going well for Black Student Union members and
students of other groups in their push for Afro-American studies.
Dialogue between students and administrators began to turn into
written proposals. Near the end of the summer of 1968, Young
endorsed the ethnic studies programs and the creation of an
American cultures institute to act as the programs’ umbrella
organization.
One major point of consensus was for visiting professor Charles
Hamilton, the author of "Black Power," to be the director. However,
student requests fell through and Hamilton didn’t come to UCLA. The
search for a new candidate began to divide students.
The selection of a chair was critical to the center’s
development, Johnson said. The chair dictated the new center’s
shape, how it would influence the community and what kind of a
precedent it would set for other schools. Since UCLA was one of the
top universities in the country, the chair would be on the
forefront of the African American political movement.
Students began to meet separately, devising ways to resist a
candidate another group had selected. Reports surfaced that
students were locked in rooms by members of US, an African-American
community organization, and harangued endlessly, Johnson said.
"There were a series of meetings all around campus," Johnson
said. "We met in an apartment on Kelton Avenue, we met on campus,
we had these almost around the clock. We were attempting to
exercise our free and independent thought. We said ‘you’re not
going to force us to accept anyone. The decision must come from the
students.’"
On Friday, Jan. 17, 1969, a noon-time meeting held in what used
to be a cafeteria on the first floor of Campbell Hall (across from
the now Academic Advancement Program offices on the side facing
Haines Hall) chaired by Johnson ended the hostilities. More than
150 students at the meeting had come up with a solution. They were
going to tell Chancellor Young that they wanted to re-open
endorsements for chair and to start the process over again.
Students were once again optimistic.
But around 2:30 p.m., the situation turned dreadfully wrong.
Black Panther members John Jerome Huggins, 23, and Alprentice
"Bunchy" Carter, 26, were standing near the entrance of the
cafeteria when a couple of other students walked in and "engaged
one of the students verbally," Johnson said. Someone pulled out a
.357 Magnum. Another student had a .38 revolver.
"Huggins was shot first," Johnson remembered. "Bunchy was hit
next as he tried to hide behind a chair. The bullet went through
the chair and hit him right in the chest. I pushed my wife (then
girlfriend) to the floor and I got on top of her. I was 20 years
old. It was not only scary, it was inconceivable. You just can’t
imagine what it was like."
Police issued an all-points bulletin that Sunday for George
Phillip Stiner, 22, and Larry Joseph Stiner, 21, after witnesses
positively identified them as the attackers, according to the Jan.
20, 1969 issue of the Daily Bruin. Johnson said he and a few other
students who were at the scene opted to live under police
protection for the rest of the quarter while other suspects were
being sought.
That Monday, Chancellor Charles Young formally announced the
proposal of an American Cultures Project, to serve as an umbrella
organization over the four ethnic studies programs, which would be
called "centers" after approval from the Academic Senate, the Daily
Bruin reported.
Soon after the shootings, the Center for Afro-American Studies
went through a string of directors. The first was Robert Singleton,
then a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA and now chair of the economics
department at Loyola Marymount University. Singleton was selected
by students as acting director. While in leadership, Singleton set
up a neutral selection process for the center’s first permanent
director, UCLA Professor Arthur Smith.
Heading the center was an arduous task for those who tried to
direct it.
Henry McGee, a UCLA law professor for 25 years who is now
teaching at Seattle University, came to UCLA a month after the
shootings. He served as the center’s interim director from 1974 to
1976.
"When I got to UCLA, it was a given there would be a center, but
it was a question of what form the center would take," McGee said.
"Would it be for student support, academics, support for black
faculty and just a range of stuff?"
Eventually a master’s degree and an interdepartmental program
were agreed upon. However, the center was viewed with suspicion by
many white faculty members, McGee said.
At the time he started teaching at UCLA, McGee said there were
only about two tenured African American professors. Most of the
faculty were not entirely receptive to the idea of studying African
American history.
"Almost all of the UCLA faculty thought that Negroes had no
history," said McGee. "Most thought the study of African American
history was a contradiction in terms. They simply thought that
people were less interested in academic pursuits than a political
agenda."
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, now vice chancellor of academic
affairs, served as director of the center from 1976 to 1989. She
was completing her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley when the centers
were chartered.
Mitchell-Kernan recalled the excitement of being young in
America during those years.
"There was a desire to see the country take a number of new
directions in the issues of civil rights and the (Vietnam) War,"
Mitchell-Kernan said. "The campuses were absolutely exploding with
protests. It was important to change education, to tell the story
of groups who had been neglected but very central to the
development of the country, and in many ways, to empower those
groups. To give dignity to those groups."
Today, Johnson, now a management consultant in a Westwood
office, says his greatest satisfaction is seeing his 18-year-old
son, A.J., benefit from the Afro-American studies program at UC
Santa Barbara.
What irks him, Johnson said, is a general lack of
acknowledgement for the sacrifices he and others made as
students.
"I chalk that up to institutional racism," he said. "There are
more Anglo-Saxons working in the positions we created. And in the
naming of the buildings on this campus, nobody’s ever thought once
of naming a tree after Huggins or Carter. They no less contributed
to the creation of opportunities that have benefited hundreds of
thousands of students. It is insulting and it is tragic."