By Acsah Lemma
“A bullet can affect one life. A pen and paper can affect a lot of lives.”
The words, said confidently by Rasheed Dupree, reflect a lifetime, from overseas combat in the military to the very halls Long Beach State’s campus.
Formerly known as Sydney Lee, Dupree is the first graduate of CSULB’s Africana Studies department.
In the year 1971, a 24-year-old Dupree had already experienced more than the average college student. Having joined the Marines right after high school, he was sent to Vietnam where he received a purple heart after being shot in combat.
It was on that battlefield where Dupree and his fellow Black soldiers developed what he calls a “consciousness.” This “consciousness” invoked in him a desire to go back to school and learn.
After registering through the Educational Opportunity Program, Dupree signed up for his first Black Studies class titled “Black Man, Mass Media” taught by Professor Amen Rahh.
Rahh was an alum of CSULB, Cal State College at the time.
Graduating from the university in the Spring of 1970 with a degree in sociology, Rahh would return just a few months later in August as the first administrator of the newly-formed Black Studies department.
The creation of his position was the result of a student revolution that elected the Black Student Union President, Tony Wilkinson, to be the chair of the department after the department’s student advisory committee elected a chair who failed to show up.
The administration at the time refused to accept a student as the chair and shut down the department for a summer.
It was Rahh who reached out and became the first “unofficial” chair of the “reconstituted Black Studies department,” he said.
He recounts the department as “student driven, student supported and just growing.”
Amid the aftershock of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, and the rumblings of revolution, Dupree showed up to every class, hungry for knowledge.
“I was not trying to be the first to graduate from Black Studies,” Dupree said. “It just happened to be that I always came to my class.”
According to Rahh, in time the name of the department changed from Black Studies to Africana Studies in an effort to develop continuity among other related departments across universities nationwide.
Things never came easy to the department, however – its creation came as a result of a Black cultural movement and student demonstrations led by the BSU of that time.
Once the department leadership was deemed legitimate through the institution of Rahh, they started offering a certificate. Though a bachelor’s curriculum was created in 1972, it wasn’t approved until four years later in 1976.
Relegated to the back rooms behind the Art department, it wasn’t until years later where the department was moved to the location of the Psychology building where it lives on today.
But it didn’t stop there.
Rahh recalls a time when the History department offered an African Studies course despite his department already offering one.
“You’re not supposed to offer classes that the departments had at that time,” Rahh said. “They tried to turn back our academic power.”
Things began to change in 1989 when the university hired activist Maulana Karenga previously known as Ron Karenga to be the chair for the department, where he remains to this day. Karenga is best known for creating the African-American holiday Kwanzaa.
Rahh said that Karenga “organized and crystallized us to be academically excellent.”
“Empowered,” Dupree said. That’s how he described the feeling of being a student of the then-Black Studies department.
Dupree attributes his successful education not only to his desire to learn but to Rahh, who always stressed academic excellence.
Now age 78, Dupree calls Rahh his brother.
For Dupree it’s hard to put into words “the impact that Amen has on so many of us as students and how he has shaped our lives in terms of Black Studies and being conscientious of who we are and why we are here.”
To him, Rahh taught him the power of knowledge.
“Now, I have learned how to take a pen and put it on paper, and I can kill a lot of people with that pen and paper,” he said.
