Celebrating
‘City
of
Roses’
BLACK
HISTORY
MONTH
Volume XLVIII • Number 9
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • February 27, 2019
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
photos courtesy p ortland s tate u niversity
Portland State University faculty member emeritus and former longtime Black Studies Chair Darrell Millner lecturing in a PSU classroom in 1975.
50 Years of Black Studies
PSU department was
first in Northwest
by d anny p eterson
t he p ortland o bserver
50 years ago, Portland State became the
first college in the Pacific Northwest to of-
fer a program in black studies following
the greatest decade of change for African
Americans since the Civil War
Over the years, it went from being an
experimental program that was criticized
by some in the academic community who
questioned its legitimacy as a discipline to
a full-blown--and accepted--department.
After a half-century, it remains unique to
the region.
“I think not only Portland State, but
the whole Portland community should be
proud of that,” PSU professor emeritus and
former department chair Darrel Millner
told the Portland Observer.
While other universities in the North-
west offer courses in ethnic studies or Af-
rican-American studies, PSU is the only
one with a full degree-granting department
with the word “black” in its name.
“At the time of our founding, ‘black’
was a very powerful and political term,”
said current department chair Shirley A.
Jackson. “It was a way of throwing off the
older ways of referencing people who had
black skin.”
An influential assortment of students and
faculty pushed the idea of starting the pro-
gram in 1968 and 1969 as part of a wave of
other universities around the country doing
the same. Millner, who joined the depart-
ment in 1975, said the effort was a product
of the often student-led movements that
characterized the civil rights and anti-war
efforts of that era.
Portland State— which had just gained
university status — approved the Black
Studies program as an “experiment” on
c ontinued on p age 5