Willard Straight Hall Occupation Study Guide: Key Books

This book looks into the Black Student Movement of the 1960s. Edwards, a graduate student at Cornell University when Black students seized Willard Straight Hall, this book provides a detail account of events surrounding the Straight occupation on April 19, 1969.

This book is a historical overview of the Willard Straight Hall takeover. Donald Alexander provides eyewitness accounts and retrospective interviews with various people who took part in the takeover. The author also gives information about key issues that surrounded the takeover as well as an analysis of its aftermath. Online Copy

This is a memoir by Thomas W. Jones, the story of an African American who engaged in one of the most searing and traumatic campus confrontations of the 1960s in 1969 at Cornell University, and then transitioned to being one of the first wave of African Americans attempting to climb the ladder to the top ranks of corporate America. The first chapter, “Guns at Cornell” provides a firsthand account of the occupation of Willard Straight Hall on April 19, 1969.

Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick examine the institution in the context of the emergence of the modern research university. The book examines Cornell during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, antiapartheid protests, the ups and downs of varsity athletics, the women's movement, the opening of relations with China, and the creation of Cornell NYC Tech. It relates profound, fascinating, and little-known incidents involving the faculty, administration, and student life, connecting them to the "Cornell idea" of freedom and responsibility. In addition, Altschuler and Kramnick a great depiction of the Willard Straight occupation and its aftermath. Online Copy

This book is both a reader and an introspective tribute, comprised of writings by James Turner and commentary from several of his former students. The book strives to underscore critical connections between multiple dimensions of Turner's legacy (as scholar, activist, institution-builder, teacher, and mentor), while also aiming to contribute to the growing historicized literature on the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A surge of African American enrolment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programs are taught at more than 1,300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened. Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come.

This book is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration.

First published in 1993, this is a new edition of the classic text in which Clenora Hudson-Weems sets out a paradigm for women of African descent. Examining the status, struggles and experiences of the Africana woman forced into exile in Europe, Latin America, the United States or at Home in Africa, the theory outlines the experience of Africana women as unique and separate from that of some other women of color, and, of course, from white women. Differentiating itself from the problematic theories of Western feminisms, Africana Womanism allows an establishment of cultural identity and relationship directly to ancestry and land.

With an all-star cast of contributors, The Black Studies Reader takes on the history and future of this multi-faceted academic field. This authoritative collection takes a critical look at the current state of Black studies and speculates on where it may go from here.