The Black Study Group That Transformed a Generation: The Afro-American Association

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

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

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Revisiting “Late Victorian Holocausts”

Posted on February 12, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I’m not going to write a full analysis of the late historian Mike Davis’ exceptional book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.” I do, however, want to revisit it and emphasize a few points Davis made about European colonialism in the late 19th century.

Davis’ examination of famines and droughts in Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and Latin America underscored how indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land; and their time-honored farming traditions were also dismissed. It created ecological and environmental problems we now deal with today but rarely think about.

Davis acknowledged that land theft, the closing off of common farming areas, and violence against these populations were key components of European colonization and expansion, but he added one more element—the weather.

European colonizers studied El Niño weather patterns to determine when populations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, China, and etcetera, would be at their most vulnerable.

El Niño is part of a long-existing and large weather pattern. During El Niño, areas of the Pacific Ocean experience unusually high surface temperatures. El Niño disrupts typical weather patterns, affects rainfall, temperatures, and etcetera. The period when these waters are much cooler is called La Niña.

Europeans studied when the weather was working against the people and the lands they wished to colonize—The colonizers struck most often at those times proving that famines are human-made.

The book’s preface offers a detailed account of former U. S. President Ulysses Grant and his family on vacation in 1877 after he left office. He and his family visited Europe first, but soon ended up visiting places devastated by famine. Grant took notes about what he saw, but he did not report the degree of ecological destruction he witnessed.

Davis’ book was published in 2001 and it remains a rare gift because his research proved that heads of state and monarchs in the western world tended to ignore the long-term ecological damage from their destruction of natural resources. Indigenous populations were seen as inferior, therefore their farming techniques and cooperation with their native ecologies were dismissed by Europeans as well.

The fires that recently destroyed homes and huge areas of California were made worse by what is called “Hydroclimate Whiplash.” When heavy rains due to El Niño soak the ground leading to the excessive growth of vegetation, what follows next are extremely long dry spells.

The dried up vegetation becomes little more than fuel for fires. The results of El Niño are much more troublesome now due to climate change. It’s not just happening in California. It’s happening everywhere around the world.

What is often left out of discussions about climate change and the usage of El Niño’s disruptive weather patterns, is the racism against and the subjugation of peoples of color by Europeans and others that has aided and abetted climate change crises around the world.

Davis was not the first historian to understand what European colonialism did to the natural environments of countries around the world, but his book “Late Victorian Holocausts” is one of the few histories to recognize that the routine and natural disruptions of El Niño were deliberately weaponized against Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in horrific ways that few individuals realize.

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

Cisgender Women Pay Attention!

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

This essay is specifically directed to cisgender women. I have heard all of the debates about that term “cisgender.” For the record, I am a Black cisgender woman which means I was assigned the biological designation of “female” at birth and identify as a woman.

I am not a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I am a feminist who welcomes anyone, cisgender or transgender, who identifies as a woman and who is trying to help us women out. I welcome the guys too. The more inclusive you are, the more you learn.

Too often, we cisgender women assume that transgender women’s problems and issues (i.e. access to healthcare, safe housing, safety from violence, the ability to play sports, and etcetera) have nothing to do with us. We could not be more wrong.

I recently read a fantastic and disturbing essay on Substack by Kira Rosa titled “The Dismantling of Reproductive Rights is More Insidious Than You Think.” It is her analysis of how cisgender women’s right to control their own bodies has been steadily eroded over time.

What caught my attention in her essay was her analysis of Felon 47’s Executive Order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” I know that’s a mouthful.

The order is designed to make trans women disappear by virtue of eliminating any accurate human definition or category for them. You’re either male or female which is biological fiction. This leaves intersex individuals in the lurch. I encourage you to do your own research about intersex individuals and also research what hormone therapy does to and for a transgender woman’s body.

When you consider that less than 1 percent of the US population is transgender; along with the fact that only 10 transgender athletes currently play on the collegiate level, you should know by now that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to meet a transgender person in your lifetime. You may meet them, but you may never know they are transgender.

The Executive Order says virtually nothing about transgender men. Trans men are ignored because the point of the order is to restrict and control all women’s reproductive choices.

Rosa pointed out that the language in this executive order establishes that a person is formed at the moment of conception. The order insists that anything blocking or interfering with the process of reproduction is against this order. In other words, she argued that this anti-transgender order can just as easily be used as an anti-abortion and an anti-birth control directive against cis women.

Individuals who seek to control the reproduction of cisgender women use people’s biased and misinformed opinions about transgender women as litmus tests before they place restrictions on cisgender women.

Felon 47 and Republicans have used transgender women as their political football for years now. They are obsessed with cis and trans women’s bodies. Yet, this obsession begs the question: Exactly how do they (or you) know whether a woman is transgender or cisgender?

I have had transgender friends and students, but I did not always know they were transgender until they told me. I have also met many cisgender women who looked like men to me. So I stopped making any assumptions about gender based solely on appearances over 30 years ago.

Right wing nuts will eventually insist that there is only one way to absolutely determine whether a woman is trans or cis; that proof will most certainly require that their genitalia be examined.

So, are we prepared for our little cisgender, but tom boyish, daughters to have to drop their panties for anyone who demands it? Are any of you willing to expose yourself on demand? Do these kooks in the Republican Party really think they will easily get away with this?

Republicans, Felon 47, and huge numbers of White Christian Nationalist wackos want cisgender women to believe that transgender women are their enemies, or worse, that trans women are actually men just waiting to sexually assault you when you use a public toilet. I urge you to research what happens to the penis of a biological male transitioning to female.

It is these hyper-masculine Republican kooks who are the ones that cis and trans women need to be afraid of. Let’s face it, anyone obsessed with another person’s genitalia is up to no good. Anyone obsessed with controlling a woman’s reproductive organs has an agenda.

The hard truth is people classifiable as “white” are disappearing. The world has always been majority people of color. Right now, however, the average ages of peoples in countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa range from 20 to 30 years of age. The average age of a European is 44 years old with one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

The negative reactions to transgender women, birth control and abortion are not anchored in any religious beliefs coming from the political and religious Right. They don’t give a damn about cisgender or transgender women of color. They only care about whether white cisgender women reproduce babies. Trans women are seen as not reproducing babies, but that’s not always true.

Let me paint another scenario. Imagine you are a cisgender woman or girl who, by ordinance of Felon 47, has to be either physically inspected by some government-appointed matron or carry some card verifying that you are a cisgender woman before you are allowed to enter a women’s public restroom to simply urinate.

Imagine the requirements for receiving a gender identity card are achieved by having your DNA, your genitalia, and your hormones tested. God forbid you are a cisgender woman whose body naturally produces high levels of testosterone. Two cisgender women athletes were disqualified from competition at the Olympics because their bodies naturally produced more testosterone than the Olympics deemed acceptable. And that’s the problem.

Felon 47 and his henchmen (and women) not only want to invalidate the identities and lived experiences of trans women, they want to create a single standard for who and what a cisgender woman is when there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what a woman is. Women come in a variety of shapes and sizes with bodies that generate different levels of hormones that vary throughout the year, and vary from one woman to the next.

What’s next? Do they throw menopausal cisgender women under the bus because they no longer have the capacity to reproduce or because their hormone levels have certainly dropped since they were in their childbearing years?

Are cisgender women slowly losing the right to determine our own gender identities without the interference of men in power who don’t have a clue what being a woman means to each woman individually? Do we cisgender women attempt to deny gender dysphoria (look it up) as a real condition in some vainglorious attempt to deny womanhood to transgender women who we don’t always understand?

We lose nothing by protecting the rights of transgender women. But we could lose everything ignoring our connections to trans women and the policies that affect their health and well-being, and ours.

Additional Resources:

I wrote a little micro-history about various gender identities in world history. If you would like to know more. Just click anywhere in this paragraph.

For a brief explanation of what gender dysphoria is, click anywhere in this sentence.

No Contradictions

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

When I started to hear negative commentary about Kamala Harris’ racial and ethnic background, I started reevaluating how “White Supremacy” works again.

Many people are completely unaware that when the Greek explorer Herodotus named the continent “Αἰθιοπία” (romanized as “Aithiopía”), his definition included the continents of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Herodotus’ term literally means “Land of Burnt Faces.”

Those kinds of cross-cultural connections and collaborations do not help white supremacy to flourish which is why you rarely hear anything about them. The objective of white supremacy is to make certain that peoples of color look to white folk, and white men specifically, for acceptance, guidance, deliverance, and redemption, but not to each other. Sexism works exactly the same way. A man, not a woman, may rule you and grant you favor in some screwed up patriarchal world as sexists imagine it.

African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois’ heir apparent Vijay Prashad noted that many Indian men arrived in the USA in the late 18th and 19th centuries, married Black American women and disappeared from most histories. Suraj Yengde, both in his books and in his portrayal of himself in Ava DuVernay’s masterpiece film “ORIGIN,” noted that we must find reconnections with each other. His research on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is fascinating.

Ambedkar was a Dalit, or as he was once called, an “Untouchable.” He wrote India’s constitution. He earned two doctorate degrees and when he came to the United States he wanted to meet his fellow American untouchables. So, he visited Harlem where the Black folks lived. (FYI: Martin Luther King, Jr. was introduced as a fellow “untouchable” when he visited India.)

This is exactly what Shyamala Gopolan-Harris did when she left India to go to school in the United States. She gravitated toward communities where she was less likely to be mistreated. So, she headed to Berkeley, California which was a hotbed of activism—there were Civil Rights protests, anti-Vietnam protests, the Free Speech Movement and the work of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland was the world that her daughter Kamala Harris grew up in.

I bring this up because we know so little about our early histories and connections. I don’t bring this up with any foolish idea that everyone is going to suddenly start singing “Kumbaya” and start getting along all the time. Yet, we know more about what Prashad accurately identified as white power structures that, during the late 20th century, deliberately created the myth that “Southeast Asians” were a model minority, a minority he emphasized that was designed as a weapon against Black Americans.

Felon 47 and his minions have lined up a small cadre of Southeast Asians to serve in his administration to do two things: 1) make the administration look less racist than it is and, 2) to also entice India, which now has a larger population than China, that its population is seen somehow as superior. South Africa did damned near the same thing during apartheid.

When Black Americans visited South Africa during its apartheid era, Black American visitors were given passes written in Afrikaans that translated into English as “Honorary White Person.”

Now, the fact that I personally know at least seven Southeast Asians who identify quite accurately as “Black,” does not matter. The fact that so many folks on the continents of Africa and Southeast Asia have near identical DNA doesn’t matter either. When I read the book “A Passage to India,” I noted that an Indian character in the book was described as a “little Black man.” It was the first time I ever saw such a description of anyone outside of a specifically African or African American context. My point, however, is much simpler.

We Black Americans can continue to roll our eyes at the brown guy wearing the turban at the local gas station and vice-versa OR we can recognize and identify our participation in upholding white supremacy while its foot remains situated on both our necks. Before you bother to tell me about the guy at the gas station that you don’t like, remember that he is an employee and all you are is someone pumping gas. White supremacy makes all of us its pawns.

If you are honest, you also remember that moment when you got bad service at a Black-owned business and thought to yourself that you got bad service because the business was Black-owned. The fact that there are, were, and will be folks who simply are not good at customer service regardless of their race or ethnicity or nationality did not enter your mind. That kind of thinking is white supremacy in action too.

Kamala Harris knows this better than anyone. She knows who she is and she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she is. The fact that anyone dared define her speaks not only to their arrogance, but also to their presumptions that they actually have such a right to do so.

She was perceived by some folks as a contradiction and by some folks as having split loyalties. The only thing that actually requires split loyalties is white supremacy. It cannot thrive or survive without its clear contradictions. Let me write that again—It cannot survive or thrive without its clear contradictions. It functions with the assistance of the people who it is designed to either oppress and/or control and/or regulate. Repeat that until you get it. So, no contradictions.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Tag Archives: Southeast Asia

Revisiting “Late Victorian Holocausts”