Rampersad

Arnold Rampersad, the Columbia professor Harvard hopes to lure to Cambridge for a joint appointment in the Afro-Am and English Departments, says his interest in Black literature was born during the political turmoil of the late 1960s.

Rampersad, whose recent biography of Langston Hughes is "the founding work in Afro-American literary biography," according to University of Pennsylvania Professor Houston Baker, is part of a new generation of Black scholars, educated in top-flight universities around the period of the Civil Rights movement and the student anti-war movement.

A graduate student at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, Rampersad says his experience in academia has been typical of his generation. While at Harvard, Rampersad for the first time encountered Black literature in the classroom--as a section leader for Roger Rosenblatt's course on Afro-American fiction, which was the first course of its kind taught at Harvard.

"I had already gone into Widener on my own and read [Black authors]," he says. "But Rosenblatt's course was the first time that literature was brought into the classroom for me, and I just kept on with it."

Rampersad says that the large extent to which undergraduates were involved in the discipline's formation has affected the future course of Afro-American studies. For example, Rosenblatt's course on Black fiction was brought into the curriculum as a result of lobbying efforts by students, he says.

Student activism at Harvard in those years was not always so peaceful, as Rampersad recalls, and the more militant student actions also influenced the new generation's perspective on academia. When members of Students for a Democratic Society took over University Hall in April, 1969, Rampersad was there--though he was "just going to observe."

"It was a wonderfully exhilarating time," he says. "It served to broaden the way people conceived of our culture, and it educated us in the political importance of the task."