In November the United States elected its first African-American president, but Professor Floyd W. Hayes III, a former student activist and avid follower in the Black Power movement during that period, will never forget the fight fought by those who lived through the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s and made Obama's successful campaign possible.
Hayes, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and undergraduate studies coordinator in the Center for Africana Studies here at Hopkins, grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended a Santa Barbara elementary school. In the mid-1950s, when he was in middle school, he experienced his first direct encounter with racism.
"I had a white male teacher who looked at me and pointed at me and said, 'You're a Negro, you have no history,'" Hayes said. "That was humiliating. But over the years that was quite angering because his attempt was to humiliate me, to tell me that black people had no history."
Hayes became interested in the political climate in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an era in which Africans were struggling to overthrow the European colonialism that had plagued them for centuries.
"In the summer of 1960, I saw a picture in the Los Angeles Times of an African leader who was tied up in the back of a truck," Hayes said. "I wanted to find out who this person was. It turned out that it was Patrice Lamumba, the recently elected leader of the Congo."
Lamumba, who aided the Republic of the Congo in its quest to win independence from Belgium in June of 1960 and was the nation's first elected Prime Minister, was later assassinated by the Belgians under circumstances that still remain unclear and may have involved the United States.
Hayes's early fascination with Lamumba's plight and the political struggle in the Congo helped to shape his academic career along with his later activist efforts.
He attended the historically black North Carolina Central University, where he pursued degrees in French and political science. It was there that his interest in Black Power and black rights began to fully manifest.
"I took a number of courses in African history, which piqued my interest in Africa," Hayes said.
"In addition, I was listening to Malcolm X and began to pay attention to him. He was outspoken, courageous, well-read and a person of supreme dignity. For me and for a lot of young people who became activists in the Black Power movement, Malcolm X was a major articulator of what became Black Power later on."
It was only fitting that Hayes's interest in the African and African-American struggles intensified at college.
During the years that Hayes was an undergrad student, the Civil Rights movement in America took powerful hold over the nation as activists like Stokely Carmichael and James Meredith strove to reach out to Southern blacks who were tired of being physically and emotionally assaulted and beaten by whites.
"By 1966, Carmichael and Willie Ricks had articulated the concept of black power," Hayes said.
He described the pivotal March Across Mississippi event, directed by civil rights activists including Carmichael.
"At that event, Carmichael and Ricks began to chant to the crowd, 'What do we want?' and the answer was 'Black Power!'" Hayes said.
According to Hayes, that term caught on, and from the mid-'60s on, black people even began to reject the term "negro."
"[Negro] became a term of derision," Hayes said. "But black power meant self-determination for black people, an economy of self-sufficiency and an effort to solidify the black family . . . it meant a struggle for quality education and a battle for human dignity on the part of black people. The period of segregation and the fight for civil rights was severe. It was a moment to overcome."
Hayes himself became involved in the Black Power movement when he went to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to work toward an Masters of Arts in African area studies in 1969.
Upon entering UCLA, he joined what later became the Black Student Union (BSU), although when he initially entered the group it was known as "Harambe," meaning "Let's work together" in Swahili.
In early 1968 the group voted to change the name to join the effort started by Jimmy Garrett at San Francisco State University, where the first BSU had emerged. Hayes became president of the BSU in 1968, a position he maintained until November of that year.
Hayes's role in the BSU helped him in his quest to join the black power movement. Propelled by Malcolm X's push for black liberation, as well as by the politics of liberation taking place throughout the less developed and in the now independent African nations, Hayes began to push for stronger black representation on UCLA's campus.
"During my administration, we had three major goals," Hayes said. "We demanded that there be more black students at UCLA, more black professors teaching on campus and more focus on black studies."
Hayes and the BSU started an advisory unit and began to collect resumes of black professors available to add to the University's faculty.
Hayes also made a list of books written by black writers about the black struggle to add to the university's library, which was sorely lacking in books on the subject of black Americans. "Ultimately," Hayes said, "centers for African Studies, Latino Studies, Asian-American Studies and Native American studies came into existence as a result of our activism."
When citing some of the sources that influenced his activism as a student, Hayes notably left out Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been widely considered one of the most defining leaders in the Civil Rights movement.
"I have respect for King and the Civil Rights movement, but I was not interested in that movement," he said.
"I saw that as one in which King and others kneeled down praying, while white people assaulted them with various sorts of weapons and cattle prods. I couldn't imagine myself submitting to that kind of non-violent activity. I found it degrading and refused to be a part of that."
Instead, Hayes mentioned such influential black politicians, writers and revolutionaries as Qwame Kruma, the first Prime Minister of Ghana and Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquian psychiatrist who later became an activist in the Algerian Revolution.
"Those of us who were involved in the Black Power movement and the Black Student Union saw ourselves as revolutionaries, even if we weren't," Hayes said. "We were student activists, we were involved in protest, and we saw that as a revolution. We were involved in a struggle. We participated in community organizations, we were involved in a literacy program, and we worked with young people. We weren't ultimately revolutionary in that we didn't change society, but we thought we were."
When asked how he felt about the current young generation's activism on college campuses, Hayes was particularly passionate.
"Twenty years ago, I thought that by the time I reached the point where I was teaching students, they would be more radical than I," Hayes said. "I am trying with a great amount of concern to understand political movements of black and Latino students today."
He pointed to the absence of "liberation movements" among the college-age students today.
"Racism and racial chauvinism exist, but there is a relative silence among young people in the face of these evils," Hayes said.
"Liberation struggles in general have faded, the term 'liberation' has disappeared, and struggles in general have declined. The BSU in its early years was radical and a political organization, not a social club."
Hayes added some advice for today's generation straight from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.
"'Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it,'" he quoted. He added, "I was proud to have been an activist in the 1960s. My hope is that your generation will discover what it is."
