by © Leslye Joy Allen
The photo below of Don Warden is from the archives of Khalid and Jamila al Mansour. Don Warden was one of the founders of the Afro-American Association at the University of California at Berkeley. The other founding members were Donald Hopkins, Otho Green, and Henry Ramsey.
This organization formed in late 1961 and began as a student study group in 1962 at the University of California at Berkeley when there were literally no identifiable Afro-American and African Studies programs on any U. S. college and university campus. The group devoured works by Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois and other Black scholars that were left out of many colleges curricula. Study meetings of its members initially began at the off-campus home of a UC Berkeley student, and grew from there. In fact, chapters of this organization appeared on hundreds of college campuses in the United States with members numbering in the thousands by the mid-1960s.
The objective of the group was to read and study about the Afro-American, African, and Afro-Diasporic past in order to confront the institutional racism, colonialism and bigotry found in the United States and throughout the world.
Warden, a UC Berkeley law student, regularly went into Black neighborhoods and literally spoke to young Black citizens directly on street corners or wherever they were. He encouraged them to study about Afro-American and African history in order to fight against their feelings of worthlessness that often accompanied experiencing chronic racism.
He listened to them tell him about their problems of unemployment, poor housing, you name it. He, like most of his members, espoused that in order to change all systems of oppression, one needed to study about the past in order to do so. Warden eventually became a lawyer for the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense as well as granting legal assistance to the Nation of Islam when Malcolm X was still a member of the group.
The Afro-American Association was heavily influenced by the ideologies of Black American activists Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X. The AAA understood that only sustained study of Black people/s would foster the kind of thinking and strategies for combating systems that sought to suppress and control Black and Brown communities all over the world. Only deep research would correct the far-too-often feelings of inadequacy that came with being Black and oppressed.
In 1962 when this study group, that was soon named the Afro-American Association, began its study group meetings at UC Berkeley there were roughly only about 100 Black students out of 20,000 white students. And in 1962 there were only two members of the group that were not born in the United States. One was from Jamaica; the other was from India.
In 1962 this tall, skinny, young Black man from Orange Hill, Jamaica and this petite and short, very brown young woman from Chennai, Tamil Nadu (in Southern India) dressed in her Sari and sandals met in an AAA group meeting.
The young man from Jamaica gave a pristine evaluation of how Great Britain had created a rather stiff and proper group of elite Black Jamaicans that often mimicked the mores and habits of British society. It was done, he said, to shield the world from knowing how racist the British empire actually was. The young man was calm, studious with very edgy ideas about the colonization of Black people/s around the world.
The young brown woman in her Sari and sandals was intrigued. She too had been a British subject in her native state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. She knew something about what this young man spoke of, but not all of it. Back then, the typical path for academically talented Indian and Jamaican students was to study in England, that is if they could secure a path to graduate school.
She rejected that path because there was no major in Biochemistry in India or in the UK that would have been available to a female. The skinny guy from Jamaica also rejected the educational path to the UK. His decision was so unusual that the approval for his exit from Jamaica took so long that he arrived at UC Berkeley two weeks after the Fall 1961 semester begun.
He, Dr. Donald Harris became a leading economist and she, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris became a leading biomedical scientist, a contributor to the identification of the function of rMNA, which greatly improved treatments for breast cancer.
The early members of the Afro-American Association described her as warm, funny, “down for the cause” of Civil Rights and an end to colonialism, and also a fiery debater. At first one member of the AAA noted that some of them thought she was royalty because of the way she carried herself. Yet, she fit right in, several members noted. He was described as professorial even though he was in his early 20s. While their eventual marriage didn’t last (they married roughly 10 months after meeting), their firstborn daughter Kamala noted that she knew they loved each other and felt that if they had been a bit older and a bit more emotionally mature they might have made it.
She cited them both as activists, and remembers going to protest marches with her parents in a stroller. The blueprint for their activism and for the creation of Afro-American and African Studies as disciplines were rooted in the activities in the Afro-American Association. While at UC Berkeley, Shyamala met and influenced arguably, one of Afro-America’s most important philosophers, Cedric Robinson.
Robinson’s book Black Marxism, first published in 1983, remains one of the most brilliant critiques and reassessments of the Eurocentric theories of Marxism. It has become a must-read in the literary canons of both Afro-American and African Studies.
It was Robinson who coined the phrase “Racial Capitalism.” He argued that capitalism was always based on race and race came before capitalism. Importantly there never was a clean break from European feudalism. He was one of the first Black scholars to identify “race,” as a component that European empires used when feudalism morphed into capitalism.
Any study he maintained had to be central to Black people/s’ lived experiences wherever they were in the world. When I first read him, it became apparent that European Marxist scholars either forgot or tried to ignore that the peoples of Europe were once considered “races,” races and national identities that were eventually erased in exchange for their being identified as “white” which served the interests of European countries in their quest to colonize and dominate large portions of the world.
In 1959, Shyamala Gopalan was standing in line behind Cedric Robinson while they were both registering for classes. Both became members of the Afro-American Association. In the first edition of Black Marxism, there was only one person who was not a Black American listed in his group of early friends that Robinson acknowledged as influential on the development of his ideas. That person was Dr. Shyamala Gopalan-Harris.
So here’s a brief mini-history of the continuing of the Afro-American Association of University of California at Berkeley. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who founded the Black Panther Party became members. Huey dared to show up at a meeting of AAA without having read the book assigned for that session. The members sent him home. He never showed up again unprepared.
Future Congressman Ron Dellums was a member of the AAA at one time as was Kenny Freeman, a contributor to the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan. The AAA literally laid the academic groundwork for Afro-American and African Studies programs throughout the nation as underscored by historian and author Donna Jean Murch who traced the evolution and development of the Black Panther Party from its roots in the Afro-American Association. None of it began without the required reading and research and the on-the-ground grassroots activism that met Black communities in the Oakland area where they were.
I could go on about how police monitored the group’s members particularly when they spoke on street corners, or visited high schools to encourage reading and research among members of the Black community. Yet, I will not do that mainly because well-meaning, good people have started to use the internet like an online set of Cliffnotes.
If you’re old enough to remember Cliffnotes you also remember that occasionally they were used instead of reading the actual book or doing the actual research. Yet, your ass was grass when a teacher or professor asked you a highly specific question that Cliffnotes did not cover and you hadn’t bothered to read the whole book.
So there’s a small bibliography below with a list of books that are worth your time. The message is clear: Either you put in the time and read or you remain a dilettante on matters that you need to know both for your safety and your sanity.
This essay was previously posted on Substack on January 22, 2026.
I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.
Recommended Readings:
Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California by Donna Jean Murch
Fanon for Beginners by Deborah Baker Wyrick
Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era by Ashley D. Farmer
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson
Oregon Police Department Surveillance Files on Donald Warden and the Afro-American Association which kept surveillance documents on Donald Warden when he visited Oregon to encourage students to read and research.
The Afro-American Association: Forerunner to the Panthers
“How Kamala Harris’ Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group” by Ellen Barry, September 13, 2020, New York Times.
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
Remembering Cedric Robinson: Humanistic Imaginaries and the Black Radical Tradition
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