Content warning: This article contains discussions of racial violence. When Leslie Harris (Weinberg ’70) thinks back to his college years at Northwestern, he recalls an unwelcoming campus community that was at times hostile to Black students and other students of color. Harris said a white student assaulted one of his classmates from high school on.
Last year, the African American Studies Department celebrated its 50th anniversary, 54 years after Black students demanded acknowledgement of Black art, culture, literature and history during the Bursar’s Office Takeover in 1968. Following the demonstration, Northwestern hired two visiting professors, including historian Lerone Bennett, who would go on to serve briefly as the first African.
The African American Studies department will officially change its name to the Black Studies department in the next few months pending final approval by Northwestern’s Board of Trustees, according to a Thursday news release. The department’s new title aims to better reflect “the breadth of its scholarship and teaching,” according to the formal name change.
In “Occupation: Organizer,” scholar and activist Clément Petitjean outlines the history of community organizing in Chicago from the city’s “professional radical” Saul Alinsky in the 1900s to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2004.