Department of Africana Studies records

Founded in 1969, the Black Studies Department at UNC Charlotte stood at the center of a nationwide mobilization marked by community struggles and student movements, which compelled the academy to acknowledge the need for academic units devoted to the study of the African American experience, past and present. As elsewhere, the emergence of Black Studies at UNCC was tied directly to student activism for a greater voice in university affairs. African American students, led by Benjamin Chavis, pushed for the recognition of a Black Student Union early in 1969. Initially rebuffed by the Student Legislature, the students took their demands to university administrators, where the students were again met with reluctance. On March 3rd, 1969, Chavis led a commemoration of the students who were killed during protests outside of a segregated bowling alley in South Carolina a year earlier. A group convened around the flagpole at UNCC to raise a black liberation flag to half mast in honor of the slain South Carolina students. At this forum, linked but discrete agendas blended into one demonstration of protest as black students simultaneously grieved their slain peers, demanded the right to unity under an official organization, and pressed for the inclusion of Black Studies in the university curriculum. The action precipitated the formation of a Black Studies Committee, and by the fall semester, UNCC had both a Black Studies Department and a Black Student Union. The first chair of the department was Dr. Bertha Maxwell Roddey who, besides constructing and propelling a curriculum, searched for an accrediting body to review the new unit. Finding none, she began a process of national dialogue with other scholars in the field that resulted in the 1975 formation of the National Council for Black Studies, an organization that continues to guide and promote black studies. Dr. Mario Azevedo arrived at UNCC in 1986, eventually leading the department through its most recent transition to a Diasporic teaching framework, symbolized by the name change to Africana Studies in 2005.