We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989
by Joshua M. Myers
NYU Press, 2019
[Publication date: December 24, 2019]
The Howard University protests from the perspective and worldview of its participants
We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos.
At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.
by Joshua M. Myers
NYU Press, 2019
[Publication date: December 24, 2019]
The Howard University protests from the perspective and worldview of its participants
We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos.
At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.
REVIEWS:
"We Are Worth Fighting For reminds us
of the insurgency of Black college students in the late 1980s and early
1990s that inspired a generation. Thoroughly researched and well
constructed, this book illuminates how Howard students inspired the
political and cultural rebellion of the time and shines light on this
period of the Black freedom struggle." --Akinyele Umoja, author of We
Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
"Like the students whose stories populate its pages, We Are Worth
Fighting For provides a challenge. It challenges conventional narratives
about Howard. It challenges understandings of Black student protest in
the ’80s. And it challenges the reader to wrestle with the uses and
meaning of history. Cover to cover, this book reflects the state of
Black Studies―a discipline that has come of age." --Jonathan Fenderson,
author of Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural
Politics of the 1960s
"This riveting, exceptionally well-written
book is a major contribution to Black Power historiography and the
history of Black student activism. Featuring appearances by future
mayors of Newark and Atlanta and pioneers of hip hop, this study holds
important lessons for today." --Gerald Horne, author of Fire this Time:
The Watts Uprising and the 1960s
"We Are Worth Fighting For is a
book about the problematics of, and is a writing against, the terms of
American order that elaborates their relation to Black radicalism. The
1989 student occupation at Howard is part of the genealogy, the
tradition, of Black radical struggle. It is necessary and urgent for
understanding that which American order responds to, the ongoing nature
of Black radical struggle. It is a radicalism worth cultivating, tending
to, and fighting for." --Ashon Crawley, author of Blackpentecostal
Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshua M. Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of
Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial
board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary
Journal.
His research interests include Africana intellectual
histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as
well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has
been published in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, The Journal of
African American Studies,The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African
Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review,
Liberator Magazine, and Global African Worker, Pambazuka, Burning House
Press, among other literary spaces. A current book project, Cedric
Robinson: Black Radicalism beyond the Order of Time is under contract
with Polity Press.
In addition to serving on the board of the
Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the
editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study
of Classical African Civilizations, he is the senior content producer
at the Africa World Now Project, a and served as the co-coordinator of
the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project
and as an organizer with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action.
A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to
knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a
deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely
interprets what is around us, but can transform and renew these spaces
we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.