White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education reviewed by Michael Steven Williams — January 02, 2008 Sankofa is an Akan Adinkra symbol that literally translates to “go back and fetch.” In more contemporary terms, the principle of Sankofa is used in the African American community to suggest that people should use an attention to and awareness of the past to guide them in the future (Grills, 2004). The tenets of this principle resonate through the critical discourse pertaining to the past and future of African American studies in American colleges and universities found in White Money / Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. In this work, Dr. Noliwe Rooks, associate director of African American Studies at Princeton University, unravels the complex history of the institutionalization and proliferation of African American Studies on college and university campuses in the United States. While other works address the origin of black studies programs from the black student protest movements of the late 1960s (Huggins, 1985; Hine, 1997; Reuben, 1998; Cole, 2004; Mazama, 2006), Rooks contributes to scholarship on the history of black studies by providing insight into how the events leading to and the philanthropy supporting the growth and continuation of these programs has implications for how affirmative action and racial integration are understood in colleges and universities today. She further contributes by making clear that the calls for recognition and change that spurred the creation of black studies programs were, in most instances, aided by the support and determination of other historically marginalized populations, not championed by African Americans alone. Following Chapter 1’s detailed introduction to the array of issues in this work, Chapter 2 offers a more precise focus on the student uprising that demanded and eventually won the nation’s first department of black studies at San Francisco State University. Using documents from the San Francisco State archives and articles from the New York Times to augment her refashioning of William Orrick’s (1969) account of militant black student unrest and activism, Rooks asserts that the protests that led to this monumental change were actually the work of a number of campus and community groups that wanted to see curricular and civic engagement improvements in both the university and surrounding community. Further, like other authors (Mazama, 2006; Redmond & Henry, 2005), she is careful to remind readers that the events at San Francisco State should be seen as the culmination of a decade-long nonviolent struggle for civil rights rather than a sudden surge of aggressive activity by frustrated black students. She extends these works by illuminating the multicultural character of the predominantly white Students for a Democratic Society, the mostly black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Asian, Hispanic and Native American Third World Liberation Front that were all instrumental in turning the demands for black studies into a reality. The crux of the discussion that lends the book its name comes in Chapters 3 and 4 as Rooks offers an insightful account of how McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation were essential to the survival and institutionalization of black studies programs. There was a great deal of controversy about the intellectual validity, composition, and direction of black studies programs (Cruse, 1969; Kilson, 1969; Ford, 1973), and the decision to embrace either a separatist or an integrationist view divided people as the programs began to spread. Rooks meticulously shows how the integrationist ethic won as McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation were “able to legitimize the study of people of African descent in the academy” (Rooks, 2006, pp. 77-78) through grants totaling more than ten million dollars and supporting upwards of twenty-four programs between 1968 and 1972. By selecting programs that backed the agenda they supported, “foundations were able to institutionalize their perspectives on race and racial interaction and cooperation, through the schools, teachers, classes, and courses of study they funded” (Rooks, 2006, p. 105). Only funding programs promoting the Title: White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education Author(s): Noliwe M. Rooks Publisher: Beacon Press, Boston ISBN: 0807032719, Pages: 213, Year: 2007 Search for book at Amazon.com Print Article http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=14866 1 of 3 5/11/12 10:16 AM