Past Officers Discuss History of Afro

The struggle to establish the Afro Department and Harvard-Radcliffe Afro-American Cultural Center was minor compared to the struggle to get the University to change its investment policy, Leslie Griffin '70, former president of Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students, said yesterday.

In the final program of the Black Homecoming sponsored by Afro and the Afro-American Cultural Center, former presidents of Afro and other black alumni told of the difficulties encountered by Afro since it was founded in 1963.

Afro was influential in the successful 1968-69 campaign to bring black studies and a black cultural center to Harvard. Afro's 1972 effort to force Harvard's divestiture of Gulf Oil holdings--marked by a takeover of Mass Hall--met with only limited success.

Because Afro's constitution restricted membership to blacks only, the administration refused to recognize the group in the spring of 1963. It was not until December 1963 and after Afro changed its constitution opening its membership to all Harvard and Radcliffe students "by invitation only" that the administration officially recognized the organization.

In the early years of Afro, the organization's leadership considered it mainly a forum for the discussion and dissemination of ideas relevant to blacks in the Harvard community, David L. Dance '74 said yesterday.

The influence of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King moved the focus of Afro toward a more political stance, former president Griffin told the gathering.

As black enrollment within the University increased, students of the various faculties began to form their own organizations. To lessen fragmentation, all the black student organizations within the University formed the Organization of Black Unity in the fall of 1969.

"When we helped establish the department and the cultural center, we never thought their existence would be threatened as it is today," Griffin said