Black Student Alliance Members Planning for Black Culture Week, 1979

“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of…annihilation: dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives: truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries: and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a non-conforming minority.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Transformed Nonconformist, 1954

Armstead Robinson, Founding Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia

Black Studies is Armstead Robinson’s relentless pursuit of academic excellence,  Vivian Gordon’s dedicated service,Black Voices’ joyous shots, Houston Baker’s rhetorical mastery, Joseph Washington’s theological probing, the Black Student Alliance’s refusal to accept the dictates and practices of white supremacy, Reginald Butler’s unflinching commitment to the epistemological power of the local, Kevin Everson’s unerring eye…Black Studies is ETERNAL.