Black History Month has drawn to a close, Black Studies having dominated headlines for the wrong reasons this month, so I thought I’d take time for the right ones.

As you may know, my master’s degree was the nation’s first graduate degree in Black Studies. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. My degree (Mills College, Oakland, CA, M.A. ’70) was inspired―and made palatable to college administrators―by events across the Bay at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).

There, on November 6, 1968, the longest student strike in U.S. history changed the world. It redefined racist and sexist notions of what is and is not “of educational value.”

(Sound familiar? Like recent attacks on Black Studies for Black History Month?)

When the SFSC strike ended four months later, its victories included the establishment of the first College of Ethnic Studies at a majority White institution. Not only would Black Lives Matter educationally; Indigenous, Asian, Chicano and Latino lives would, too.

The “right reason” for this letter is to remember and thank those activist students of San Francisco State—many of whom were arrested, beaten by police, and imprisoned for disrupting status-quo suppression. Their courage and the righteousness of their demands in a just cause gave me the courage to think that I, too, could do something as “radical” as study not just White history and culture, but Black history and culture.

They inspire me still. But who inspired them?

Thank you to the shero who would, a few years later, become my dear sisterfriend: poet and professor Sonia Sanchez. Hired to teach writing and English literature at State, she is credited with establishing Black Studies.

To be sure, HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) taught the writings of a few Black authors. But the course work of HBCUs beholden to White donors and White accreditation, was also Eurocentric. “Sister Sonia,” as she is known, beloved and revered, didn’t just include a smattering of authors, inventors and dates; she launched Black Studies as an academic discipline. She was also the first to introduce a course in Black women’s literature.

In an America where noted scholars still proffered racist notions that Blacks “had no history and culture,” her approach was not only revelatory; it was revolutionary.

Early in her tenure at State, she put a long list of names on the blackboard. Students only recognized two names: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Don’t worry, she told them, “By the end of the semester you will not only recognize these people, but you’ll realize just how we got a Malcolm and a Martin in a place called America.”

Tears in their eyes, her students couldn’t believe they’d been deliberately denied knowledge of the very existence of African American literature and thought, that they’d been denied the right to learn the history of an America that included people who looked like them.

They were not alone.

Professor Sanchez’ class of mostly Black and Latino students also had a few Asians and Whites. An assignment to research California history uncovered posters about Japanese internment during World War II. Two Japanese-American students balked at such an impossibility; only to return to class the next week in tears. Their parents—still feeling the shame of the shameful thing done to them—revealed they’d been rounded up under suspicion of being “un-American” and forced into concentration camps.

As Sister Sonia told reporter Fern Gillespie, recalling her role as educator and mentor: “It was like you understood the calling; you understood why you were there. I vowed that we would never have [students] leave the classroom without knowing how they got there and not knowing the names of people who had come before. We will never let that happen again. You will know your herstory and history.”

Now, at colleges and universities nationwide, students know. There are Black Studies departments, graduate degrees; Ph.Ds to expand the field, and courses that teach the teachers charged with teaching us all.

For Black Studies and Women’s History Month, for Women’s Studies too, thank you, Sonia Sanchez!

Janus Adams hosts “The Janus Adams Show” on Saturdays at 12 noon on Radio Catskill, 90.5 FM. Learn more at janusadams.com.