Scholarship and intellectual communities are only viable if they are dynamic and contested spaces for critical thinking and debate. Black studies began in heated struggle. Here in Chicago, Malcolm X College was founded with a Black studies curriculum, and protests at Evanston’s Northwestern University followed suit. At the University of Illinois Chicago, then called Circle Campus, theater and speech professor Grace Holt became the founding director of Black studies in 1974. Hundreds of departments now exist around the country, and the field has had a powerful impact on higher education.

Today, Black studies is under assault. Unfounded criticisms of Black studies and theories and paradigms emerging from it, like intersectionality and critical race theory, have made headlines. For example, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, with no background or content expertise in these subjects, famously and scurrilously targeted so-called “woke” scholarship and teaching, threatening to ban academic literature in his state that did not meet his criteria for legitimacy.

A number of states have followed suit, imposing restrictions on the teaching of various aspects of Black studies curricula. Organized resistance to DeSantis’ attacks culminated in a “National Day of Action for the Freedom To Learn” on May 3, led by prominent Black studies professors.

As an interdisciplinary field, it began in 1968 at San Francisco State University, with rumblings at other schools around the country resulting in similar programs soon after. During the tumultuous social movements of that era, students demanded inclusion, correctives to racist and exclusionary narratives and syllabi, and a rethinking of how Black people had been distorted and/or erased from larger histories and canons.

Why Black studies? Any serious student of U.S. history knows our country’s long and violent history when it comes to race. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, political disenfranchisement are all hallmarks of our racial past. Mass incarceration, unequal access to healthcare, housing and education, the racial wealth gap and racial profiling are all continued evidence of persistent racism. Higher education is a part of that history. For most of this nation’s history, Black scholars and students were either excluded, openly discriminated against or tokenized. The Black freedom movement of the 1950s and ’60s forced open the doors of public education and higher education for Black scholars and students. And so, with them came the demand for more inclusive curricula and research opportunities. This was the impetus for Black studies.

Black studies as a field did more than meet the demands of Black faculty and students. The creation of Black studies was an impactful intervention in the writing and teaching of American history, culture and politics in general. The New York Times' highly touted “1619 Project” created a stir because it challenged the dominant and sugar-coated narrative of the U.S. past.

As Northwestern University historian Martha Biondi points out in her book, “The Black Revolution on Campus,” the establishment of Black studies challenged universities to critically rethink fundamental questions, insisting “that public universities should reflect and serve the people of their communities, that private universities should rethink the mission of elite education, and that historically Black colleges should survive the era of integration.” All of those goals have certainly not been fully achieved, but Black studies’ initiatives have changed the way we think of new knowledge production, meritocracy, pedagogy, university governance and even epistemology (our theories of knowledge).

Black studies as a field has done a lot of intellectual heavy lifting in the past 50-plus years, producing award-winning scholarship, a generation of critical thinking students and models of institutional change. Still, there is so much more ground-breaking work to do over the next 50 years.

This commentary is also posted on ChicagoBusiness.com