It had been but one year since black students had successfully lobbied the Cornell administration to have the Center funded and its first director, James E. Turner, hired. (See Willard Straight Hall site history.) “This arson assault upon the property and possessions of the black people making use of that facility is the most recent of a continuing current of violent attack and threat upon the lives of black people in this community,” pointed out Turner. He cited fires at the Southside Community Center and Wari House, a women’s cooperative house for black students. Turner and students pressed for a more secure location for the Africana Center. By the fall semester, the university had remodeled a former fraternity house on North Campus at 310 Triphammer Road for the Center’s office and research space, a site it continues to thrive in today.

Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center arose out of the advocacy of black students at a time of nationwide student protests in the 1960s—for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. In particular, the Black Studies Movement called for universities to incorporate research about the social, political, and economic forces that affected Africans displaced by the global slave trade. Black Studies, and the ASRC at Cornell, supported “the development of a Black consciousness,” promoted the educational progress of black students, and fostered the research and careers of black faculty. In addition, the Center hoped to provide students with service opportunities to address problems faced by black communities.

The early days of the ASRC met with opposition from some faculty members, who expressed criticism of its initial exclusion of white students and concerns about the scholarly expertise of its professors and their political stances. In addition, ASCR faculty and staff have resisted perceived threats to its administrative independence, including proposals to move the Center closer to the center of campus and a cost-cutting plan in 2010 to fold it in into the College of Arts and Sciences.

Despite some initial skepticism from within academia, the Center has had administrative support and long-term success.

“We have created a discipline,” later recalled Turner, who coined the term Africana Studies and served as ASRC director until 1986. Before 1969, “there was no Africana or African American Studies in any American institutions outside of Black institutions. . . . There is a growing and impressive bibliography of scholarship that has just expanded and exploded. . . . It has been the movement of Black students and the Black Studies Movement . . . that said to American institutional education that, ‘you can no longer have a white exclusive academy,’ that ‘you have to, even if in modest and token form, show some commitment to inclusion and diversity.’ And that all comes from that movement and in that sense it was one of our most radically successful movements in American history.”

What was initially criticized as separatism in fact ushered in an integration of new disciplines into academia, argued John Henrik Clarke Africana Library Director Eric Acree. “You now have recognition that other people need to be studied—women, gays and lesbians, Latinos, Asian Americans—and all of that is an outgrowth of the black studies movement,” noted Acree.

A 2005 addition to the Center created an expanded facility for the ASRC’s John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, which contains more than 22,000 volumes focused on Africana history and culture. Its light-filled stacks provide a welcoming place to read and study. The library’s namesake, historian Clarke, was a pioneer of Africana studies who helped found the African Heritage Studies Association and taught at Cornell as a visiting professor.

The ASCR hosts a regular slate of events open to the public, including lectures, film screenings, and literary salons. Over the decades the Center has hosted noted cultural figures, including James Baldwin, and continues to bring scholars and thought leaders to the Cornell campus through the annual Reuben A. and Cheryl Casselberry Munday Distinguished Lecture.