[3] When Ernie Davis became the first Black football player to win the Heisman Trophy in 1961, it was a major landmark for progress for African Americans in higher education.
[4] Syracuse alumnus Joe Biden noted in a tribute speech in 2011, that Ernie Davis "gave a whole group of people hope".
By the opening pre-game of the season, tensions were so high that they resulted in a confrontation between nearly 100 policemen and at least 400 students at the football stadium at Syracuse University.
[3][6] Due to increasing racial tension and in response to the civil rights movement, in 1968, Black students at Syracuse University staged a protest outside of S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, demanding that the university offer Black Studies classes that highlighted and included the intellectual, historical and cultural contributions of African Americans.
[14] In 1989, 120 SAS member students confronted Chancellor Melvin Eggers at a round table meeting in order to air their grievances.
[citation needed] CFAC is an extension (unit) of AAS founded in 1972 by Herbert T. Williams and Harry Morgan that aims at showcasing Black art and artists from underrepresented groups.
[26] The department's interdisciplinary curriculum enables students to engage, analyze and create knowledge involving African Americans, and make linkages with areas of Latin America, the Caribbean and continental Africa.
[26] The Department received a Ford Foundation grant in order to support the development of gender and environmental justice in Africana studies nationally.
[26] The Ford Foundation also awarded support towards a postdoctoral program focusing on civic engagement in the arts, public humanities, architecture and the media.
Whereas most programs concentrate on history and biographies, it focuses on the linkages between Africa and the African Diaspora from a multi-disciplinary approach involving cultural, social scientific, political, economic and environmental perspectives.
[34] The Program has an experiential component through affiliations that the department has with institutions abroad that leads to all students studying in Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, or African American sites.
AI aims at spearheading revitalized interest in Africa, which has declined in many United States institutions of higher learning since the end of the "Cold War.
The lecture series was named after the founder of Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), Eduardo Mondlane, who was also a former professor at Syracuse University.
It is during one of these lecture series on February 20, 1970, that Guinea-Bissau nationalist Amílcar Cabral delivered his famous speech "National Liberation and Culture" at Syracuse University.