"It Was a Time When Real Change Was Envisioned as Possible": Black Students and the San Francisco Bay Area Black Education Movement, 1961-1969

Led by black students, the 1960s-era Black Campus Movement (BCM) at American colleges and universities resulted in increased enrollments of African American students, the establishment of courses in black history and culture, and increased black representation among faculty, staff, and administration. Scholars including Joy Williamson-Lott, Stefan Bradley, Ibram Rogers (Kendi), and Martha Biondi have produced works detailing the BCM at various campuses across the nation. Surprisingly, despite the importance of the San Francisco Bay Area in sparking the Black Campus Movement, no scholar has written a comprehensive history of the Bay Area movement. It is in the Bay Area where black student activists were responsible for the nation’s first Black Student Union–the organizational base for the students’ activism–the first Black Studies programs and departments, and the first Colleges and Divisions of Ethnic Studies. It was also the Bay Area’s black students who crafted the foundational principles and goals of the Black Campus Movement, including (re)turning to Black Nationalism as a guiding political ideology, dedicating themselves to establishing courses in black history and culture, and formulating the praxis of serving the black community off campus. This dissertation, “It Was a Time When Real Change Was Envisioned as Possible”: Black Students and the San Francisco Bay Area Black Education Movement, 1961-1969, is the first to tell the story of the very first Black Campus Movement(s) that spawned black student activism for education reform at nearly 1,000 colleges and universities during the mid to late 1960s.