Interview with John H. Bracey, early member and eventual Chair of the UMass Amherst Department of Afro American Studies. Grew up in an academic family at Howard University, went to segregated schools until junior high school; went to Howard for two years on athletic scholarship (met Michael Thelwell there) but took off to work as a mail clerk in DC, then transferred to Roosevelt College to complete his degree in 1946 with its bracing political environment; graduate school at Northwestern and activism; beginnings of Black Studies influenced by Black Power movement; interviewing for academic jobs; working at Northern Illinois with cadre of radicals and Rochester with Christopher Lasch before being recruited to new Department of Afro American Studies at UMass by Michael Thelwell, arriving in 1972. Bringing the Du Bois Papers to UMass; controversy over Herbert Aptheker coming with them; formation of Afro American Studies and great figures Nelson Stevens, Max Roach, Archie Shepp, et al.; building a first rate department; years under Provost Paul Puryear and Chancellor Randolph Bromery (African American leadership interested in diversifying the place); white resistance and open racism on campus; affirmative action, the university, and the faculty union; political fight in Massachusetts for the university; Billy Bulger and the Bulger years.
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