Afro-American Studies Program, The,

Afro-American Studies Program, The, was organized in 1969 to concern itself, the faculty committee said, ``with the history, the culture and the current situation of twenty-five million Americans of African origins.'' Earlier in the 1960s, interdepartmental interest in this field had been focused in two research conferences on scholarly approaches to Afro-American Studies held under the auspices of the Straus Council on Human Relations. In the program's first year, twenty-six undergraduates -- half of them white -- concentrated in Afro-American Studies, and more than 500 took one or more of its elective courses.

In the belief that ``the black experience is a special case of American experience,'' the program was designed to provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary and comparative study ``of the position and experience of people of African ancestry in the United States, seen in relation to the experience of black people in other parts of the world.''

The program is supervised by an interdepartmental committee and involves twelve cooperating departments and schools: Anthropology, The School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Art and Archaeology, Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Sociology, and the Woodrow Wilson School. Students enter the program through one of the cooperating departments or schools.

In the program's early years, the University received an $88,300 grant from the Ford Foundation for the development of undergraduate Afro-American studies and a $215,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the support of graduate studies and faculty research.

F. Sheldon Hackney, a specialist in the history of the American South, was chairman of the committee that designed the program. Chairmen of the program have included C. Sylvester Whitaker, Jr. (Politics), John R. Willis (Near Eastern Studies), and since 1973, Howard F. Taylor (Sociology).

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).

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