Carolyn Parker-Fairbain

Carolyn Parker-Fairbain is a PhD student in the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University. With an academic background in multicultural theater, history, and Black studies she engages Black and Indigenous histories and communities within the bounds of the U.S. and the Caribbean. They are particularly interested in sites of opportunity where Black and Indigenous communities cultivated potential visions of the futures that did not come to pass, through activism, agriculture, education, performance, ceremony, and other life ways. Parker-Fairbain is grounded by the implications these narratives have on current conversations and movements to build resilient futures as seen in initiatives for reparations and Land Back. Before beginning at Boston University Parker-Fairbain worked in public programming and arts education in museums and, most recently, in journalism and farming.

New Africa House: Visions Realized, Dreams Deferred

The college campus is a politicizing sphere, especially for the generation of Black students entering and in college during the 1960s and ‘70s. They were socialized by the Civil Rights Movement and influenced by the integrationist plans of the era. This period was marked by the direct action of Black students, their reinvestment in Black communities within and outside of institutions of higher learning, and students’ institutional demands. These actions led to many changes at colleges and universities across the nation, most notably in the creation of Black Studies departments.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), a predominantly white land-grant institution, Black students charted a revolutionary course from 1966 to 1975. The early period between 1966 and 1968 was marked by the creation of the Student Afro-American Organization through the leadership of Cheryl Evans and other Black women. Evans stated, “I was immersed in the movement and just because I was in Amherst the movement didn’t end.”^[1] They worked alongside faculty and staff, toiling to increase the Black student population and organizational capacity. Students carved out a space of their own, grounded in values and practices that reflected their desires as scholars and community members. Organizing for a robust Black campus life, they refashioned the residential building Mills House into New Africa House–an incubator for arts, community, and self-determined scholarship.

The 1968 academic year saw the fruits of that labor as well as drastic change. This change manifested in a transfer of the organization’s leadership and campus demonstrations, which led to the development of a Black Studies department over the next two years. Within New Africa House, the proving ground and workshop of their making, Black women further developed the tools and the ethos that enabled the creation of the academic citadel of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies in 1970, an academic space deeply radical in its inclusion of non-traditional faculty, such as artists, and community members. At this crucial juncture the women were no longer in formal leadership within the Student Afro-American Organization. As the department and communal space of New Africa House was developed between 1970 and 1975, participants, faculty, students, and community members, forged new visions, manifested in initiatives such as the Black Mass Communication Project and the Che Lumumba Day School, encapsulating the charge of the women who had created its foundations.

Contemporary re-examinations of the late 1960s and ‘70s, of which this article is a part, show a reclamation of the legacy of those who began the work which enabled the creation of New Africa House and the W.E.B. DuBois Department.[2] From 2012 to 2021 a new archive was created which recenters women’s key contributions to those pivotal years.[3] This archive consists of oral histories collected at the direction of past and present students, including Cheryl Evans in the Black Pioneers Project and the Black Presence Project, spearheaded by the late Dr. John Bracey.[4] It includes public talks such as the “Art, Legacy, and Community” conversation on student activism held in the Augusta Savage Gallery and the “Gathering of the Grandmothers” talk facilitated by Judyie Al-Bilali’s theater for social transformation class, Brown Paper Studio.[5] This archive’s creation is wrapped up in New Africa House’s legacy of the arts as focal point, as the latter public talks were produced by a coalition of theater makers and Black studies scholars.^[6] These first-person accounts read alongside archival materials in newspaper articles, pieces written by department faculty, university records and collections, such as the Cheryl L. Evans Papers enable new understandings of the 1966 to 1975 developments in New Africa House.[7]

New Africa House was part of a national movement utilizing direct action in the ‘60s and ‘70s; the country saw heightened public demonstrations and coalitions of the anti-war left, largely including student organizing on the part of involuntarily marginalized actors. At Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), public universities, and Ivy League institutions, including Howard University, San Francisco State College, and Harvard University, a diverse group of Black students organized at institutions of higher education as Martha Biondi chronicles in her book, The Black Revolution On Campus. In it she highlights the conditions, attitudes, and actions of Black college students during the late sixties, marking 1968 as a year of the “explosion of Black student activism.”^[8] In marking these movements as a revolution, she grapples with contradictions, (how can a revolution demand participation in the status quo), she takes account of the expansiveness of student demands, and registers the potential of these upheavals. By defining revolution by radical inertia and student audacity the achievements of those activists’ whose dreams in retrospect were deferred become legible.[9] In the face of the assassination of movement leaders, disillusionment from the previous generation’s fight for Civil Rights, and experience with inequitable integrationist politics, many Black youth entering college at the time were radicalized by their conditions and discord within higher education. As Biondi writes, “Student activists were a mix of pre-affirmative action children of college-educated parents, first generation college students from migrant, working-class families, and some (hailing from either group) who had already had some experience in the Black freedom struggle.”^[10] The students were widely concerned with expanding opportunities, such as access to higher education, relevant and creative courses, and meeting community needs, representing continuity with the previous era which Belinda Robnett explores in How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. Utilizing hundreds of hours of interviews in her book, Robnett uplifts the voices of women in, what she terms, bridge leadership during the Civil Rights Movement examining the links Black women forged, mobilizing the movement by bridging the local to the national, the political to the personal.[11] Robnett merges social history and social movement theory, including a critical consideration of spontaneity as significant to movement organizing as much as strategic planning, providing a lens to grapple with the shift in leadership at UMass Amherst. Biondi likewise contextualizes a tumultuousness in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Robnett’s expansion and application of social movement theory to Black women’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement and Biondi’s focus on campus organizing while unsettling ‘revolution’ allow an embrace of the continuities of Black women’s organizing in the late ‘60s and ‘70s at UMass Amherst and broaden an understanding of the movement’s successes.

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst is part of a unique context. The Upper Connecticut River Valley holds isolated pockets of urban life outside of its main cities of Holyoke, Springfield, and Chicopee, clustered around academic centers in an otherwise rural area of western Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a land-grant university. It was founded on 310 acres in Amherst, the ancestral homelands of the Pocumtuc, Nipmuc, and Nonotuck nations, occupying 366,711 acres of the lands dispossessed of Indigenous nations in the Midwest, as part of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and was named the Massachusetts Agricultural College.^[12] Four other colleges were erected in this valley, three in the 1800’s: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), Amherst College, and Smith College. Hampshire College, nearly a century later, welcomed its first students in 1970.^[13] These schools linked by place together make up the Five College Consortium, at times excluding Hampshire College it is noted as the Four Colleges. The consortium includes an intercollegiate study program connecting a student-faculty network that ensures the spread of information between the schools, fostering a reputation of academic prestige and bolstering students’ organizing capacity.

The college held its first classes in 1867 and incorporated graduate programs in 1892. In 1875, Lousie Mellicent Thurston was the first known woman to attend. Later, the college admitted its first Black student, George Ruffin Bridgeforth, in 1897.^[14] In 1931, reflecting the needs of the growing student body, the Massachusetts Agricultural College became Massachusetts State College, expanding its offerings.^[15]

Nearly two decades later the campus continued to shift and expand. In 1948, the Central Residential Area was constructed with seven residential dormitories including Mills House, which would later become New Africa House, the center of Black radicalism on campus.^[16] In the 1960’s, student populations increased drastically, at UMass Amherst student enrollment jumped from 4,000 in 1954 to 18,000 in 1965, including .27% Black students.^[17]

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Cheryl Evans came to the university as a freshman in 1964 from Medford, MA where she had been active in community work. The first in her family to attend college, Evans was part of UMass’s largest undergraduate class at the time but remembered being one of twelve African American students.^[18] She said in an interview for the Black Pioneers Project in 2018, “I remember walking around campus and I’m sure I saw a couple of faces, but they were at a distance and I felt like pepper in a salt mine, so I felt invisible.”^[19] Despite the university’s proximity to urban centers like Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee, the Black campus population was small.^[20]

After two years of seeking out Black students in response to the deep isolation she felt, Cheryl Evans decided she and her peers needed to organize.  She founded the first Afro-American student organization on the university’s campus in 1966 and began shaping the first Black student spaces on campus.

Kinard, Evans’ peer, recounted the sense of scarcity he experienced after arriving on campus in 1967. In a discussion on student activism on the campus held in 2015 Kinard remembered, “there were 40 black students on campus. It was like culture shock. Knowing you could walk for miles and not see another Black face.”^[21] “We were scattered,” Evans said.[22] But Evans pulled Black students together. Kinard said with conviction, “she molded that small community into a force.”[23]

Cheryl Evans quickly identified the necessity and role of student organizations, such as Black Student Unions and Afro-American Student Associations. Evans recounted, “we also got organized, we got busy. We formed an organization, we had meetings, we wrote by-laws, we collected dues, we planned events, and it was mostly the sisters that did the work.”^[24] Students collected signatures and wrote a constitution, they renamed the Carver Club, named for George Washington Carver the agricultural scientist and inventor, the Student Afro-American Organization (SAAO) once it became a Registered Student Organization, RSO #375. Evans served as the association’s president, Cheryl Eastmond, later Griffin, served as vice president, Paula Diggs served as treasurer, and Carol Seales served as secretary.[25] The cohort identified their first goals of the Black student community: to expand the Black population and develop the links between those students. A draft of a letter to Black alumni attributed to Evans highlights these intentions,

Our group was formed out of the necessity for unity and communication among the black students, though still only .004% on this campus…The primary goals of the organization are to provide “soul” social activities, find jobs for black students, and provide stimulating programs with knowledgeable black speakers…We are attempting to build an oasis of refuge to offset the pressures on the black students at the white school.[26]

The organization challenged isolation and supported the belonging of those students by linking the students in rural Massachusetts to each other and to students at schools across the country.[27] Cheryl Griffin recalled, “we were doing our thing up here and the students were doing their thing in the south…So we were all connected…we were doing our part to get, you know, our curriculum and more Black students on campus.”[28]

Centrally, SAAO also carved physical space for students in gathering places and through programming, such as the Springfield Black Arts Festival in April 1968. The two-day event was co-produced by the Afro-American societies of the four colleges, Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and UMass. The festival included theater, dance, and music performances, notably Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Babatunde Olatunji, renowned Nigerian drummer, and the Archie Shepp Jazz Quartet, as well as workshops on writing, dance, and politics.[29] It took place in the immediate wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Though grieving the festival went on emphasizing the artist’s role in political struggle. As The Amherst Student photo essay on the festival noted, “[c]onsidering the circumstances of our country today, the artist as any man is forced to take a stand. For the black artist the situation is more crystalline and his direction more certain.”[30] The SAAO imbued their political work with a keen value for arts and community.

Simultaneously, SAAO continued work to expand the campus’ Black population. SAAO organizers held an Afro-American Committee meeting with Dean William Tunis to propose the student-led recruitment of Black college applicants. Evans recalls they asked for no funding or personnel from the university. Black faculty supported the SAAO’s goals, including professors Lawrence Johnson, William J. Wilson, Edwin Driver, William Darity Sr., and Randolph Bromery, who became the university chancellor in 1971. They created the Committee for the Continued Education of Negro Students in 1968, which later became the Committee for the Continued Education of Black Students (CCEBS), a recruitment program with financial aid attached. The CCEBS program recruited large numbers of Black students to the university from Springfield and Roxbury, two predominantly Black communities in Massachusetts. The Black student population grew from around 45 to 50 students in 1967 to around 125 in 1968 to nearly 500 in 1970 as a result of this coalition.^[31] The increased Black student population bolstered the organizing power demonstrated in those early years, with SAAO boasting 200 members by 1968.[32]

Leading up to the fall semester of 1968, Evans, having graduated and taken on the role of assistant area coordinator in Orchard Hill Residential Area, began serving in an advisory role to the students, as Cheryl Eastmond took on the presidency of SAAO. In preparation to welcome the students that fall, Evans along with John Messinger, a white area coordinator for the university’s Central Residential Area, established an arrangement to make the unused spaces in Mills House dormitory available for Black students and SAAO use. New and returning students were welcomed to the dormitory’s communal spaces that fall. Kinard, a former resident of the dorm conveyed the vibrancy of Mills House. He recollected, “Where we were, was right here in what was then called Mills House. This was my apartment. This was my bedroom right here…We started meeting here, we had parties here. This became like our center […] we called it the coffee shop.”^[33] Through the work of Cheryl Evans and others there was energy in the multi-use space that provided the intellectual and social meeting ground for Black student life to flourish. As students established their relationship and usage of the building a catalyst convulsed the campus.

The story goes, following Nixon’s election on November 5^th, on the evening of Thursday November 7, a white student, unnamed in the records, and a Black visitor, James Hall, were followed by four or five white students on the campus. One of the five called Hall a racial slur and said that Black people “don’t belong at UMass anymore.”[34] Then, “[t]he five overtook the visitor…Words were exchanged and one of the five whites struck Hall,” a Massachusetts Daily Collegian article noted.[35] The beating left Hall and his companion in the infirmary, the article reported. “This was a very tense time on campus for students,” Kinard said, describing the November incident,

There were little racial tensions all over the place. And I remember vividly someone came in and said that somebody had been attacked. We had mobilized students and we began to gather that evening. We questioned if we should go right back out and fight. It could have been a very explosive kind of situation.^[36]

The Black students, including residents and members of SAAO, barricaded themselves in Mills House and strategized. Michael Thelwell, a former SNCC organizer who at the time was a graduate student in English, recounted, “when we heard that a brother had been set upon by white students and beaten, we were enraged. We came together immediately and marched on the administration.”[37] That morning Black students and faculty marched to the Whitmore Administration building, but with a new leader at the head of SAAO.

In Evans’ memories of that evening, she noted that SAAO’s president, Cheryl Eastmond, was removed from her position as vocal members called for new leadership.^[38] Evans recalled, “These brothers essentially said, out loud, right now what’s needed is male leadership, and so we’re taking over Afro-Am.”[39] The attack, referred to as the Chubby Hall incident, was later discovered to be false. [40] Kinard related, “I believe that there were people within our ranks that were here tried to incite things and tried to really create some real racial confrontations on campus.”[41] Whether or not the attack was real, the impact was tangible and tumultuous, resulting in spontaneous action. The discontent Kinard alluded to existed prior to the Chubby Hall incident. The hopes for institutional changes had likewise been in the minds and discourse of SAAO members prior to the strategizing session on November 7. All this was shaken loose by the incident, cascading into a mobilizing inertia. The justifications and aims are up to further exploration with a variety of ways to interpret and question these events–was it male leadership some members thought would bring change, or one particular person whose dynamism they were calling for? Was Eastmond not the leader some SAAO members thought they needed for such convulsive times? Why?

In her oral history Cheryl Griffin, formerly Eastmond, does not include direct reference to the coup or much detail about her role in SAAO. She responded to some prompts saying she no longer remembered much of the minutiae of her time at UMass. Fifty years had passed. She did mention her point of pride, having been a part of the SAAO. “I was president of that, and actually that’s how we ended up making our demands…There were nineteen, I don’t remember all of them.”[42] Her recollection of nineteen of the demands aligns with the drafted statement and list of demands in Evans’ records, “Grievances of the Afro-American Students at the Univ of Mass.”[43] Perhaps she was not present or engaged when the group arrived at the finalized twenty-two demands that were brought to the administration the next day.[44] Or perhaps the omission in memory or in recording reflects her desire to simply celebrate the organization’s successes. She noted, “especially when we had so much come into fruition, you know, it was really very enlightening and just really made us feel proud.”[45]

Though the specifics of what transpired between SAAO members that night may be lost to the record, the coup marked a shift in campus organizing. A freshman Robert Henderson, one of the dissenting voices who called for the change in leadership, took the fore as the Student Afro-American Organization’s “spokesman” and leader.[46] Evans recalls that she and the other Black women organizers “let them do that.”^[47]

The foundations laid by Black women’s organizing within SAAO and on the campus were not completely diminished by the coup. The organizers harnessed the revolutionary fervor on the campus to develop pre-existing visions and push the university to implement them. The significance of the project the collective was undertaking should not be discounted, but rather enhanced through the incorporation of the recently available oral histories of women organizers and participants. Though leadership changed and organizational strategy shifted as the organizers worked toward the creation of a Black Studies department, those efforts continued the work of Evans’ cohort.

The occupying students, with new leadership, and advising faculty harnessed the energy, the disillusionment, and agitation brought to the surface by the Chubby Hall incident and transformed it into a possibility. “The incident on Thursday evening was not the first, as some people believe,” a handwritten draft of student grievances notes the years of physical and verbal abuses. [48] “Now that 125 black Freshman, along with black grad and undergrad students, plus black faculty are here we no longer have to swallow our disgust and walk away,” the document continues.[49] The group marched to the Whitmore Administration building that Friday. They presented a twenty-two-point list of demands to the university’s administration that took the work of the CCEBS program, the Student Afro-American Organization, and the budding community in Mills House further. Students demanded actions in the aftermath of the Chubby Hall incident. Kinard said, “we came together as a community, we organized, and we put something together, things that we had been talking about all along.”[50]  They included changes in policing, racial bias trainings for various campus demographics, greater Black representation on campus and in administrative decision making, academic safeguards and guarantees for Black students, student determination, as well as the securing of Black cultural spaces and their funding.  Eight notable demands were:

4. Black curriculum with black teachers.
5. Recruitment of out-of-state both black students, disregarding 5% rule.
6. More money for student Afro-American organization.
7. Afro-Am will remain in Mills House. Money from University for refurbishing of Mills House.
8. Money from University for black arts festival.
9. More black administrators, staff, (counselors, heads of residents, food services, student personnel, athletic staff).
10. Representative of Afro-Am to be on interviewing board for any black staff and faculty and reviewing committee for any outline for black curriculum.
11. Meeting with Board of Trustees and black students.^[51]

These demands emphasized student commitment to each other and local community members. They declared the terms necessary to support Black life at UMass, notably cementing Mills House as a Black space and supporting the developing project of Black Studies.

The students and supporting faculty presented the list to President John W. Lederle and Dean of Students William F. Field. A November 8^th Massachusetts Daily Collegian article reported on the march and demands, including the president’s response to “sympathetically look at these,” while criticizing what he perceived as militant dogmatism.^[52] Lederle represented an institution grounded in its own dogmatism, upholding the university which made the students marginal.

A week of rallies and negotiations followed. The organizers returned that Monday and again the next day, conducting a rally and sit-in with 150 participants on November 12th to further discuss the demands with president Lederle. That Wednesday, school officials and Afro-American Organization representatives spoke further at a student senate meeting, clarifying the content of several demands. Among the daily coverage the organizing students were supported by other student groups and commenters linking the students on the campus to broader networks of solidarity. One such was the UMass Organization of Arab Students. Their statement read, “[w]e fully support their demands…thus we stand, in spirit and in deed if needed, with the black students, expressing at the same time the support of thousands of Arab students in different campuses who have joined their black brethren in an expression of solidarity and common struggle.”[53] The Graduate Student Senate also voted to support many of the SAAO’s demands.[54] The discourse regarding the Afro-American Student Organization’s calls for change remained front page news for several days.

That November marked a turning point in university and student history as SAAO’s program for reform and radical change coalesced. Kinard reflected, saying:

I think the university understood that our demands were relevant also because they agreed to accept them and address them. I think that that was the first real substantive conversation with students and the university administration about beginning things, to do things to change the face of the university.^[55]

Kinard partially attributes the administration’s ultimate decision to a benevolent understanding.  However, it was the pressure leveraged by students and faculty supporters, especially CCEBS members including the chairman Dr. Randolph Bromery, that led to the university’s verbal compliance.

Rapid change followed, bringing some of the student’s demands to fruition. At the center was Mills House, the growing hub of Black cultural and academic life at the university. A significant number of Black students and faculty came to the university as plans for a Black Studies program continued, led by graduate student Michael Thelwell from Jamaica. Students secured funding from the Ford Foundation, CCEBS, the Department of Education, and university administration. Kinard, Evans, as well as graduate students, Thelwell, and Bernard Bell in English, among others in the School of Education and the Liberal Arts College developed proposals for various Black Studies entities: a program, a department, an institute, a center and a college.^[56] Between May 1969 and February 1970, Black students, with Thelwell at the forefront, negotiated with administration and submitted proposals for the projects.^[57] While awaiting approval for a department, an Afro-American Studies program began within the English Department in 1969, home department to Bell and Thelwell.^[58]

While Evans and other Black women were still a part of the organizing process, Bell and Thelwell are credited with leading department planning. As program development continued, Thelwell began recruiting scholars, setting a revolutionary and unorthodox precedent for the budding DuBois department. Dr. John Bracey said in recollection, “It was a movement department. The people that were here when I got here were people that Mike had gathered from various parts of the Civil Rights Movement.”[59] He recruited four visiting lecturers from 1969 to 1971. Two were lecturers in political science; Cherif Guellal and Ivanhoe Donaldson, both university graduates. Guellal was a prominent actor for Algerian independence, and the nation’s ambassador to the United States; he taught “The Writings of Frantz Fanon and Revolution in the Third World.” Ivanhoe Donaldson, a Civil Rights activist and SNCC field secretary, taught “Introduction to Afro-American Political Science.” The other two appointed were historians, Playthell Benjamin and Herbert Aptheker. Benjamin was one of Thelwell’s most nontraditional recruits, as a college dropout, Benjamin was an exceedingly well-read scholar of African and African American history. Dr. Herbert Aptheker was a well-known Marxist and the literary executor of DuBois’s papers and played a vital role in UMass’s later acquisition of the documents.^[60]

In 1970, with the pressure of student petitions to the school administration, the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies was approved, and a renaissance of Black scholarship erupted in the valley. Dr. Carlie Tartakov, who came to the university in 1968 said in “A Gathering of Grandmothers” in 2021, “a wealth of talent came through New Africa House.”[61] A tide of exceptional Black scholars was drawn to Amherst and to New Africa House making it a center of intellectual and cultural production. When full tenure track positions became available, Dr. Josephus Olufemi Richards, Africanist and textile artist, and Dr. Johnetta Cole, anthropologist and, later, the first Black woman president of Spelman College, were appointed. Recruitment from the Institute of Black World brought Chester Davis and William Strickland. In that first decade, a breadth of scholarship was incorporated with the recruitment of several full-time faculty, many involved in the Civil Rights Movement and several artists. All were pioneers in their fields, such as dancer Diana Ramos, renowned playwright Aishah Rahman, writer Julius Lester, musician Max Roach, musicologist Shirley Graham DuBois, later the curator of the National Museum of African Art, Roslyn Walker, distinguished visiting scholars Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin, among many others.^[62]

As the department established itself in the 1970s, Black women came seeking a place that valued their contributions and scholarship. Black women’s contributions to New Africa House propagated multiple forms of scholarship, acknowledging traditional academics and solidifying the arts as essential branches of Black Studies. Student-faculty relationships produced the Black Repertory Theatre founded in 1968 by Esther Terry, who began as graduate student in English and later became an administrator, the Drum Magazine, founded by Robyn Chandler in 1969, the Black Mass Communication Project, a student run radio program from 1970 to 1985, the Augusta Savage Gallery in 1971 and Third World Theatre, which became New World Theatre, an acclaimed theater company devised by Roberta Uno.^[63] New Africa House supported these radical discoveries as a studio space for these collaborations, scholarship, and culture-making to take form. In the decades to come the New Africa House dedicated further spaces to women’s legacies of arts and scholarship including the New Africa House Theater, revived through the work of Judyie Al-Bilali and dedicated students, as well as the Shirley Graham DuBois Reading Room.[64] Like so many organizers in the national movement, the campus’s women organizers built power in community, through the arts in theater, radio, and gallery. These women greatly impacted and altered the potential of the department, though many were not retained.[65]

The significance of the arts and community in the developing department represent the continuation of Evans’ and other Black women’s work in the early years as new students and faculty painted their own vision for New Africa House. Kuji Theresa Gordon Cooper, who was a graduate student in the school of Education, Dr. Terry Jenoure, who later became the director of the Augusta Savage Gallery, Dr. Carlie Tartakov, who taught in an elementary school, and Sister Nobuntu Ingrid Askew, a theater maker and cultural activist, were early participants. They convened for “A Gathering of Grandmothers,” reflecting on the role of New Africa House as a meeting ground for Black students, faculty, and community members.^[66] Askew noted, “it was like a community center, and it wasn’t just open for the students and students of color to have a place to congregate and be together. It was also for community members of color to find a communal spot, so I used to go to New Africa House all the time.”[67] The group discussed the resources New Africa House provided and the centrality of women, like Evans and Terry, to that work.

Organizers fostered community through spaces within New Africa House such as a barbershop, Yvonnes’ Kitchen, a Caribbean restaurant in the building, and the Che Lumumba Day School, a teacher-parent cooperative.[68]  Dr. Sonia Nieto, who began doctoral studies in education at UMass in 1975 conveyed the day school’s purpose: “To serve the needs of families of color…We were mostly African American and Puerto Rican. These were families who wanted or needed a more nurturing environment for their kids.”[69] The convergence of care and gathering spaces built organizational capacity which in turn built power among other student groups. Dr. Bracey noted, “Latino kids started in New Africa House, Asian American kids started in New Africa House, Josephine White Eagle came and did, Native American kids started in New Africa House, so we helped everybody else get their space.”[70] The late ‘80s coalitions established the Latinx American Cultural Center, the Yuri Kochiyama Cultural Center, and the Josephine White Eagle Cultural Center, where in the mid-‘60s there were none.[71]

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The ‘60s and ‘70s were decades of national transformation especially through Black organizing. As a young student Cheryl Evans connected the national movement to UMass Amherst, harnessing the radical potential of the time. “I could have gone through and just gotten through. I could have left. But I decided to do what I could to make it better, to make it a better place,” Evans said. [72] She and her peers laid the groundwork for the creation of a nexus of Black culture and scholarship in New Africa House. They began by building connections and seeking representation on campus, soon creating Black organizations in the Student Afro-American Organization, and communal spaces in New Africa House. “And for a number of years UMass really had a vibrant African American cultural and academic life, there was a lot going on. And I felt that we played a part in making that happen.”[73]

We cannot know how things could have developed differently had Cheryl Eastmond not been deposed from SAAO leadership, or the effects the transition had to visions unnamed by those organizers. However, leading up to 1968 the women organizers of SAAO laid the foundation for the project represented by New Africa House. Those who came after them, including students and faculty members, marched into that legacy.  The New Africa House of today is made up of these multiple inheritances. As explored in “A Gathering of Grandmothers,” New Africa House itself is just a building—it is those who pass through its doors that breathe life into it, that transform it into a place with radical potential.

^[1] Cheryl Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history with Peter Kleeman, December 13, 2018, Video, December 13, 2018, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries RG 050/9, Black Pioneers Project Records, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/murg050_9-i006.

[2] I am indebted to Iya Judyie Al-Bilali for imbuing the principle of Sankofa in her work and offerings to students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and beyond. For further discussion on past as present, complicating time, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Stefan Tanaka, History without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11418981.

[3] For works on the history and ideologies of women’s activism in the long Civil Rights Movement and early Black Power Era, see: Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203954928; Alice Walker, Meridian, First (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

[4] “Black Pioneers Project Records,” Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, 2018, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/murg050_9; “Voices, Black Presence Project,” Office of Equity and Inclusion, 2021, 2020, https://www.umass.edu/diversity/blackpresence/voices/all.

[5] Stanley Kinard, Michael Thelwell, and Talvin Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism” (Augusta Savage Gallery, New Africa House, University of Massachusetts Amherst, March 12, 2015), http://artlegacycommunity.weebly.com/black-power-and-the-spirit-of-student-activism.html; Brown Paper Studio, “A Gathering of Grandmothers” (University of Massachusetts Amherst, May 2, 2021), https://www.rightsofspringumass.com/a-gathering-of-grandmothers.

^[6] I am indebted also to Priscilla Page, and Gilbert McCauley, theater professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose Black Theater courses I took part in. Their discussions and prompts led me here. For another work shaping how I think of art in Black movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s see: SOS — Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk2mr.

[7] University of Massachusetts (Amherst campus) and University of Massachusetts at Amherst, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform] (Amherst, Mass. : University of Massachusetts, 1967), http://archive.org/details/massachuse19681969univ; Bernard W. Bell, “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts: The W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, 1968-1971,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 1 (2012): 89–110; Cheryl Lorraine Evans, “Cheryl L. Evans Papers Finding Aid,” http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/murg050_6_e93.

^[8] Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley, UNITED STATES: University of California Press, 2012), 16,  http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=928946.

[9] Ibid., 14.

^[10] Ibid., 27.

[11] “Bridge Leaders who utilized frame bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation to foster ties between the social movement and the community; and between prefigurative strategies (aimed at individual change, identity, and consciousness) and political strategies (aimed at organizational tactics designed to challenge existing relationships with the state and other societal institutions),” Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford, UNITED STATES: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1997), 19,  http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=241458.

^[12] Robert Lee, “Morrill Act of 1862 Indigenous Land Parcels Database,” High Country News, March 2020, https://www.landgrabu.org/.

^[13] “Profile of Amherst,” Amherst College, https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/facts/profile; “About Mount Holyoke College,” Mount Holyoke, http://catalog.mtholyoke.edu/about/; “History,” Hampshire College, https://www.hampshire.edu/hampshire-experience/mission-and-vision/history.

^[14] Irina Costache, “Looking Back on the History of Black Presence at UMass,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, February 28, 2021, https://dailycollegian.com/2021/02/looking-back-on-the-history-of-black-presence-at-umass/.

^[15] “UMass History : About UMass Amherst, Our History,” University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://www.umass.edu/gateway/umass-edge/about-umass-amherst/umass-history.

^[16] “New Africa House,” You Mass, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, http://scua.library.umass.edu/youmass/doku.php?id=n:new_africa_house#dokuwiki__top.

^[17] “UMass History;” Costache, “Looking Back on the History of Black Presence at UMass.”

^[18] In collaboration with the Special Collections and University Archives in 2018 alumna Cheryl Evans launched the Black Pioneers Project, a process of preserving the oral histories of the university’s pioneering classes of Black students in the years between 1964 and 1970.

^[19]  Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history with Peter Kleeman, December 13, 2018.

^[20] Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee have significant Black communities.

^[21] Stanley Kinard, Michael Thelwell, and Talvin Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism” (Augusta Savage Gallery, New Africa House, University of Massachusetts Amherst, March 12, 2015), http://artlegacycommunity.weebly.com/black-power-and-the-spirit-of-student-activism.html; on March 12, 2015, as part of Art Legacy and Community, a discussion titled “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism” took place between Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, a Jamaican scholar, SNCC field secretary, and founding member of the department, and Stanley Kinard, who was a student activist at UMass and president of the Afro-American Student Association, exploring the inception of New Africa House and the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies.

[22] Cheryl Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018, Video, August 11, 2018, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries RG 050/9, Black Pioneers Project Records, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/murg050_9-i005.

[23] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

^[24] Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018.

[25] Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018; “History of the Department, Key Facts: The First Fifty Years, W.E.B. Du Bois Department 50th Anniversary Symposium,” UMass Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, 2020, https://websites.umass.edu/afroam50th/history/.

[26] Cheryl Evans, “Draft of Black Alumni Letter Including Contact List,” 1968, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, Cheryl L. Evans Papers  (RG 050/6 E93).

[27] Cheryl Evans, “S.A.A.O. Mailing List Names and Addresses for Communication,” 70 1969, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, Cheryl L. Evans Papers  (RG 050/6 E93); Cheryl Evans, “Afro-American Organizations, Groups, Individuals,” January 25, 1969, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, Cheryl L. Evans Papers  (RG 050/6 E93).

[28] Cheryl Griffin, Cheryl Griffin oral history with Peter Kleeman, November 27, 2018, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries RG 050/9, Black Pioneers Project Records, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/murg050_9-i002.

[29] Steve Swigert, “Afro-American Societies Sponsor Springfield Black Arts Festival,” The Amherst Student, April 4, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 41 edition, Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst Student (selections).

[30] Wayne Greenstone, “The Springfield Black Arts Festival,” The Amherst Student, April 8, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 42 edition, Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst Student (selections).

^[31]  Bernard W. Bell, “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts: The W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, 1968-1971,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 1 (2012): 99; Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018; Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

[32] Bill Dickinson, “Possible Negotiations Breakthrough Over Black Demands, Dean Field, Henderson Clarify Issues At Student Meeting,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform], November 14, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 49 edition, UMass Amherst Libraries.

^[33] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

[34] “‘We’ll Wait For The President’ Says Black Student Leader,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform], November 12, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 47 edition, UMass Amherst Libraries.

[35] Ibid.

^[36] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

[37] Ibid.

^[38] Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Bill Dickinson, “Statement To Be Issued Today; Beating Discovered To Be A Hoax,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform], November 18, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 51 edition, UMass Amherst Libraries.

[41] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

[42] Griffin, Cheryl Griffin oral history with Peter Kleeman.

[43] “Grievances of the Afro-American Students at the Univ of Mass,” November 1968, Special Collections and University Archives,University of Masschusetts Amherst Libraries, Cheryl L. Evans Papers  (RG 050/6 E93).

[44] Ibid.

[45] Griffin, Cheryl Griffin oral history with Peter Kleeman.

[46] “‘We’ll Wait For The President’ Says Black Student Leader.”

^[47] Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018.

[48] “Grievances of the Afro-American Students at the Univ of Mass.” Emphasis in original.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

^[51] Bill Dickinson, “100 Black UMass Students Stage Whitmore Sit-In; Request Action on 22 Demands by Monday at 12 Noon,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, November 8, 1968, sec. Video still, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries RG 050/9, Black Pioneers Project Records.

^[52] Dickinson, “100 Black UMass Students Stage Whitmore Sit-In; Request Action on 22 Demands by Monday at 12 Noon.” David Corcoran, “No Official Decisions Reached Yet On University Blacks’ Demands,” The Amherst Student, November 11, 1968, Vol. XCVIII No. 17 edition, Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst Student (selections).

[53] Organization of Arab Students, “UM Arab Student Group Suports Black Demands,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform], November 13, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 48 edition, UMass Amherst Libraries.

[54] “Graduate Student Senate Vote Supports Most Afro-Am Demands,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian [Microform], November 20, 1968, Vol. XCVII No. 53 edition, UMass Amherst Libraries.

^[55] Kinard, Thelwell, and Wilks, “Black Power and the Spirit of Student Activism.”

^[56] Bell, “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts,” 92.

^[57]  Ibid., 101.

^[58] Ibid., 95.

[59]John Bracey, John H. Bracey on the DuBois Department, 2021 2020, Office of Equity and Inclusion, University of Massachusetts Amherst, The Black Presence Project, https://www.umass.edu/diversity/blackpresence/john-bracey.

^[60] Bell, “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts,” 104-107.

[61] Brown Paper Studio, “A Gathering of Grandmothers” (The Rights of Spring Festival, University of Massachusetts Amherst, May 2, 2021), https://www.rightsofspringumass.com/a-gathering-of-grandmothers; As part of the Rights of Spring Festival produced by Professor Judyie Al-bilali, “A Gathering of Grandmothers” was a student-conducted discussion exploring the cultural significance and spirit of the New Africa House.

^[62] Bell, “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts,” 107-108; Amilcar Shabazz, “History,” The W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies: The Intellectual Work of our Africana community, n.d.; “University of Massachusetts Amherst Faculty and Staff Collection Finding Aid,” Text, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries, http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/murg040_11.

^[63] Greenstone, “The Springfield Black Arts Festival;” “Notable Firsts and Other Commemorations, W.E.B. Du Bois Department 50th Anniversary Symposium,” UMass Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, 2020, https://websites.umass.edu/afroam50th/history/notable-firsts/.

[64] Cassie McGrath, “The New Africa House: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, February 28, 2021, sec. Archives, https://dailycollegian.com/2021/02/the-new-africa-house-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow/.

[65] Reasons vary for understanding Black women’s retention at UMass, from tenure battles to recruitment elsewhere. One tool for interpreting retention is through analyzing salary. For example, Roslyn Chandler and Diana Ramos were instructors in 1973. The average salary for instructors in 1973-4 was $12,129, for lecturers $12,591, $15,043 for assistant professors, $19,310 for associate professors, $25,944 for professors. “Factbook University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1976-1977” (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1977), https://www.umass.edu/uair/sites/default/files/publications/factbooks/Factbook_AY1977.pdf.; “University of Massachusetts Amherst Faculty and Staff Collection Finding Aid.”

^[66] Brown Paper Studio, “A Gathering of Grandmothers.”

[67] Ibid.

[68] Sonia Nieto, Sonia Nieto on the Che Lumumba Day School, 2021 2020, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Univeristy of Massachusetts Amherst, The Black Presence Project, https://www.umass.edu/diversity/blackpresence/voices/sonia-nieto-che-lumumba-day-school.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Bracey, John H. Bracey on the DuBois Department.

[71] “Your Cultural Centers | CMASS | UMass Amherst,” Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://www.umass.edu/cmass/get-involved/multicultural.

[72] Evans, Cheryl Evans oral history, August 11, 2018.

[73] Ibid.