There was a call to action today as Los Angeles civil rights
activist Danny Bakewell spoke at the African American studies
interdepartmental program’s 30th anniversary celebration in
the faculty lounge.
Students, staff and faculty of various ethnicities gathered to
hear the keynote speaker urge the black community both at UCLA and
in the greater Los Angeles area to organize and create change.
“It’s not enough to celebrate the
anniversary,” Bakewell said. “But you have to do
something that’s going to shake and impact those that will
come after you.”
This was a general theme of his speech, which emphasized
individual participation in activist organizations both in the past
and the future.
Bakewell, who participates in many community organizations,
founded the Brotherhood Crusade, a nonprofit organization dedicated
to raising money to help African American communities in need. He
is also the owner of the Los Angeles Sentinel, which he said is the
oldest and largest black newspaper west of the Mississippi.
He went on to suggest different areas in need of reform on the
UCLA campus itself, including the dwindling number of students in
African American studies due to the abolition of affirmative action
and the lack of black faculty at the University Elementary
School.
“There’s always something happening in the community
that you can pick and choose to get involved in,” he
said.
But former UCLA student Alicia Holeman Sproul called the latter
issue “trivial” with respect to the lack of a UCLA
doctorate program in African American studies.
Newly named African American studies director Brenda Stevenson,
on the other hand, had a more positive reaction to the speech.
“It was an important and dynamic talk about the
application of African American studies in the community,”
she said. “It was exactly what we wanted.”
Claudia Davis, a third-year doctorate student in the UCLA School
of Nursing, said she was particularly affected by Bakewell’s
emphasis on personal responsibility as a student, referring back to
Bakewell’s statement that “you cannot just be a Bruin,
you must demand and define who you are as a Bruin.”
The African American studies program is especially notable for
its activist roots. It once acted as a center for the Black Power
movement, and formerly boasted of being ranked third in the
nation.
In recent years, however, due to budget restrictions and
declining admissions of black students, the ranking has dropped to
become what administrators say will be somewhere in the top 10.
“I am not sure how this can be justified,” Bunche
Center Board member Daniel Johnson said. “Students need to
try to present answers to this problem.”
Events relating to the anniversary will continue through next
fall with a different event each quarter.