RPAATH as a Tool for Recovering and Preserving UCSC’s Black Cultural Memory and

Prominence from 1967-1980s.

Slides by Moses J. Massenburg

UCSC, Class of 2010.

Bettina Aptheker and Moses Massenburg at

the

Purpose(s) of Today’s Talk

• Contextualize UCSC within several social and academic movements for the liberation of Black people from different forms of oppression. (Black Power, Black Studies Movement, Black Feminist Thought, Civil Rights, Black Arts, Black Student Movement, etc.)

• Articulate RPAATH as an interpretive space for the Study of African American Life and History.

• Empower Black Students and their antiracist allies.

Overview of Black History Month and the Early Black History Movement.

• Organized by Historian Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) founded Chicago in 1915.

• Black History Month Started in 1926 as Negro History Week. • The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is still active today.

Woodson Home Office

• Served as a meeting place for activists and community organizers.

• Clearing house for the professional study of Black History.

• Nurtured Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis, and thousands of other Black innovators.

Rosa Parks

• Who was Rosa Parks? Answer without thinking about a public transportation, the Civil Rights Movement, or elderly persons.

• Training Group at the Highlander Folk School, SUMMER 1955, Desegregation workshop six months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

• Founded in 1932, the school continues to operate. Visit Highlandercenter.org

Recommended ReadingPublished in 2013 Published in 2009

What does Rosa Parks have to do with UC Santa Cruz?

Septima P. Clark at UCSC

Septima Clark Again

What was/is Casa Septima?

• Why was Septima Clark at UCSC?

• Who are the students in these photos?

• These photos are courtesy of the UCSC Library Special Collections and the Santa Cruz Public Library. Find the answers to these questions in those spaces.

Septima was to Rosa what Rosa was to Malcolm. Mentors and Supporters.

Septima Mentored and Admired Rosa

Rosa Mentored and Admired Malcolm

Malcolm X College, UCSC

Malcolm X College, College 71969

• The UC Regents voted against naming C7 after Minister Malcolm as several U.S. politicians and the FBI still believed he was a domestic terrorists.

• No Black Studies, Black Faculty, or Architects. No West Coast HBCU

• Oakes College was selected at the requests of C7’s financial sponsors.

Dr. Herman J. Blake

• Founding Provost of what is now known as Oakes College.

• Active during the Black Power Era and heavily involved in Black Student Activism at UCSC during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era.

• Friends with various revolutionaries including Septima Clark, Alex Haley, Angela Davis, and Akasha Hull.

Huey P. Newton, Black Panther Party Co-Founder

Huey P. Newton receives his doctoral degree from UC Santa Cruz on June 15, 1980. At left is Newton's sponsor, Triloki Pandy, assistant professor of Anthropology. Chronicle file photo by Frederic Larson.

Dr. Pandy’s UCSC affiliations include American Studies, South Asia Studies, and Legal Studies. The Social Sciences website indicates that he still teaches at UCSC.

Huey P. Newton

• "Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) earned a bachelor's degree from UC Santa Cruz in 1974. He was enrolled as a graduate student in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 1978, when he arranged to take a reading course from famed evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, while in prison. He and Trivers became close friends. Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at UCSC in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled 'War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.' Later, Newton's widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband's often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN's "American Perspectives" program on February 18, 2006." 

Dr. Robert Trivers

RobertTrivers.com

• Unlike many famous scientists, Dr. Trivers has spent time behind bars, drove a getaway car for Huey P. Newton, and founded an armed group in Jamaica to protect gay men from mob violence. Somewhere in this sequence of he taught at UCSC from 1978 to 1994.

bell hooks

• Considered one of the foremothers of Black Feminist Thought and Theory.

• Iconic is an understatement.

• Completed her graduate work at UCSC at Kresge College two years before the departmentalization of what is now Feminist Studies.

Dr. Angela Davis

• Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.

• Close friends with Dr. Bettina Aptheker. The entire Aptheker family took on active leadership roles on the Movement to Free Angela Davis. All were active in the American Communist Party.

• Read, When Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, by Bettina Aptheker.

Akasha Hull/Gloria Hull

• In 1989 Hull was hired as the second full-time faculty member in what is now called the Feminist Studies Department. Bettina Aptheker demanded that the UCSC fill the position with someone trained in African American Women’s Studies regardless of the discipline.

Hull Continued

• Dr. Hull has also been a professor of women's studies and literature at the the University of Delaware, and the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica.

• She has published four books, a monograph, three edited collections, over twenty articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, numerous chapters in a dozen volumes, fifteen book reviews, poems in more than thirty magazines and anthologies, and two short stories. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Co-edited All of the Women Are White, All of the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. (1982)

•Hull was a member of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group active in Boston in the late 1970s. Membership in the collective catalyzed her focus as a scholar, activist, and critic.

Dr. Bettina Aptheker

•Active member of the American Communist Party.

•Founding faculty of the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC.

•Prominent scholar in the fields of Women’s and Gender Studies, African American History, and African American Women’s History.

Alex Haley at UCSC

• Author of the American Television series and literary classic, Roots.

• Brain behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as Told by Alex Haley.

• Friend and Supporter of Dr. Herman Blake and the Early Black Studies Movement at UCSC.

Early Black Life and UCSC

Early Black Brilliance at UCSC

Black Scientists at UCSC

Dr. Grant D. Venerable, 1978-1980 Dr. Paul Tia

Cowell Culture Break, Black Power Era, Black is Beautiful Movement, Black Arts

Movement.

Early Black Life at UCSC

Black Youth on a tour, Pre-DHE with

Dr. Herman BlakeProfessor Doyle

Foreman

Alex Haley Audience(?) Members

Cowell College Culture Retreat

Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) at UCSC, It’s Nation Time

Develop Cross-generational Friendship and Identify these people. PLEASE!!!

WERE THESE ADMINISTRATORS? WERE THE WHITE FOLKS MEMBERS OF THE WHITE

PANTHER PARTY? WHO ARE THE STUDENTS?

Dr. Herman Blake’s Junior Leadership Program

Herman Blake’s Junior Leadership Program, Black Power Era

Sonia Sanchez and John Bracey

Myself, Sonia Sanchez, and John Bracey, before a bust of W.E.B. Bu Bois at Clark Atlanta University, 2015.

THANK YOUALWAYS ASK QUESTIONS