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>-A language course at Indiana University taught by Orlando Taylor, an assistant professor of speech. "Blacks are traditionally taught that phrases like T busy' and 'I be busy' are grammatically wrong," says Taylor. He relishes the effect when he tells students that such speech forms come directly from the language of their West African forefathers and are not a corruption of European usage: "Suddenly this causes the black students to feel that their language isn't so inferior after all. This is psychologically important —the black doesn't have to feel he is stupid."
> A history course at U.C.L.A. called "Racial Attitudes in America," taught by Gary B. Nash. The course examines American racial thinking from the first English contacts with Africans and Indians in the 16th century. It also includes an inquiry into the Kerner commission report and a reading list that includes Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Gordon W. Allport's Nature of Prejudice and John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town.
Those planning the new programs share the students' concern for learning that has practical application. Robert Singleton, 33, a black associate professor of economics, hopes to have U.C.L.A.'s planned Afro-American Studies Center in operation next fall as a complement to the university's intellectually distinguished ten-year-old Center for African Studies. Singleton sees the new center as "an evolutionary laboratory in which to design alternatives to current social institutions, a base from which to test these alternatives in nearby communities and a classroom in which to convert field findings into new courses back on campus." An obvious possibility: teaching white teachers how to teach Negro children.
Not every school is eager for such a pragmatic approach. Says Assistant History Professor John Willis, a member of the faculty-student committee now making final plans for an Afro-American studies department at the University of Wisconsin: "Students have asked for an action-oriented program while serious academicians want a department oriented toward scholarship." Though Willis himself is black, he goes along with the professors because "I'm an academic Tom—I can see the quality angle."
Jim Crow Revisited
The push for black studies is without geographical bounds: even the University of Alabama has started a course in Afro-American history (attended mainly by whites). Stanford offers an interdisciplinary major in African and Afro-American studies. Harvard, Yale and Columbia, among other
Eastern schools, are readying major departments of black studies for the coming year. Eventually, Harvard hopes to help create a Boston-area consortium of university Afro-American resources.