African-American Studies is the Foundation of Democratic Movements and A Guide to Resistance; It Cannot Be Erased
Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
“A people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” - Marcus Garvey
When I graduated high school in New Orleans, America was a different place. Black Americans were all but locked out of economic opportunity because of the color of our skin and the racial caste system that saw us as no more than servants to White Americans; many of whom benefited financially and socially from our enslavement for centuries.
Growing up in a city rife with segregation, I channeled my frustrations into my studies. When I enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution that was built in part by enslaved people, my people, I knew the best way to reengineer the system was by understanding how it worked and its connection to the conditions of Black Americans in this country. My double major was in economics and African American Studies.
That education prepared me to become a leader who understood that, for America to progress as a nation, it had to provide pathways to financial independence, safety, and sustainability for the people who built it. It was clear to me that at every juncture in this nation’s history where African Americans began to create opportunity for themselves, the efforts were cut off systemically or with physical violence, as we saw in the case of the bombing of Tulsa in 1920.
The fallout from these events, and from policies that blocked the ballot box like literacy tests and poll taxes, has shown us that every effort to stifle us leads to cultural disarray and stalls our ability to move forward.
Yet, today, we find ourselves once again succumbing to infighting about the same struggles we could have extinguished generations earlier by tackling systemic racism and its impact on our economy, our standing in the world, and our collective understanding of one another.
We have an administration that entered a zero-sum game targeting diversity initiatives with executive orders that so thinly veil their racism it's laughable. The result of those orders has been a massive spike in unemployment, creating a ripple effect through our entire economic system. It’s been cuts to university budgets and to schools that are simply trying to uphold our nation’s values of ensuring that all Americans have access to the American dream regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or faith. Those cuts have stifled essential medical breakthroughs, cancer research, clean energy development, and the development of equitable, ethical artificial intelligence.
The next victim in the cutting spree is African-American studies.
The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Iowa, and the University of Kansas are just a few institutions that are shuddering or consolidating their African-American studies programs in this climate. Some are citing low enrollment as a reason for their reductions. But it is impossible to ignore the threats of budget cuts and the evaporation of essential federal dollars from an administration circling diversity programs like a hawk.
The restrictions have been so significant that simply mentioning the words “black,” women,” “disabled,” or “inclusion” can risk financial ruin.
But as Dr. Marcus Garvey stated, “A people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” I’d take it a step further and say that a nation without knowledge of its past, its origins, and its culture is like a tree without roots.
African-American studies teaches college students, the young people preparing to lead us into the future, why our country operates the way it does today and provides a blueprint for how to leverage our Democracy and constitutional rights to drive change.
African-American history is not only about the challenges that Black Americans have faced since we arrived in the 13 colonies in bondage; it shows the power of protesting, the endurance of community, and the meaning of community.
It’s a field of research that challenges harmful narratives, as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois did in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, overturning the prevailing racist Dunning School narrative, proving that post-Civil War democratic experiments failed not because of Black incompetence, but because white elites deliberately fractured multi-racial labor solidarity to re-establish control.
It was also the focus of Kevin Roberts's Ph.D. dissertation, the President of the Heritage Foundation. The irony of studying slave communities, kinship networks, and survival strategies in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries, while authoring Project 2025, a document designed to strip Americans of our Constitutional rights, cannot be overlooked.
There’s power in these programs and understanding Black history. There is also power to be gained by blocking an increasingly frustrated population’s access to historical practices, thereby demanding more from our leadership and government.
Philosopher George Santayana once said that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We are at a critical juncture in our history, inching toward repeating the worst parts of our past and recreating a system that serves only a few. And the only way we will survive it is by standing together. And we can only stand together by understanding and accepting the flaws of our past to build a better future.
We cannot allow a field as precious as African-American Studies to die because of political pressure. Not now, not ever.
If we do, it will be at our own peril.
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