{"id":19233,"date":"2026-05-01T12:20:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T12:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=19233"},"modified":"2026-05-01T13:01:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:01:02","slug":"life-in-rhythm-part-ii-bgsu-ethnic-studies-as-a-living-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/01\/life-in-rhythm-part-ii-bgsu-ethnic-studies-as-a-living-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in Rhythm, Part II: BGSU Ethnic Studies as a Living Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"By Asia Nail<\/strong><\/em>
\nThe Truth Reporter<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Transformation does not always announce itself.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it hums first, low, uncertain, like a bassline searching for its place. Then, when enough people have listened long enough, it rises. It gathers breath. It becomes undeniable.<\/p>\n

For Robert L. Perry<\/strong>, PhD<\/strong>, that rising came in 1970, not as an invitation, but as a necessity.<\/p>\n

America was restless. The Vietnam War stretched on like a wound that refused to close. Campuses pulsed with dissent. And after the Kent State shootings, the illusion that education existed apart from violence could no longer be maintained.<\/p>\n

At Bowling Green State University<\/strong>, students gathered not simply to protest, but to insist that education must speak to their lives, or it is not education at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got a call,\u201d Perry remembers. \u201cThey were having protests\u2026 students wanted a curriculum related to their lived experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

What they wanted was recognition.<\/p>\n

What they received, though few could have named it then, was transformation.<\/p>\n

Student Fire: The Movement Before the Department<\/strong><\/p>\n

In April 1970, the Black Student Union <\/strong>(BSU), led by Robert Horne<\/strong> and its executive council, delivered a list of demands that would reshape the university\u2019s moral and academic landscape. They called for Black faculty and administrators, a Black Studies curriculum, increased Black student enrollment to 10 percent, financial support for student organizations, cultural representation in campus life and spaces where Black students could gather, belong and breathe fully inside the institution.<\/p>\n

These were not symbolic requests. They were structural demands for life inside a system that had historically treated Black presence as optional.<\/p>\n

Among their priorities was the creation of scholarships for Black students, a Black student newspaper\u2014The Obsidian<\/em>, which would later become a sustained publication\u2014and institutional accountability for recruitment and discrimination practices.<\/p>\n

What emerged from this pressure was not simply a program, but a philosophy: that representation without transformation is decoration.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Curriculum That Refused to Lie<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It is one thing to be invited into a room.<\/p>\n

It is another thing entirely to rearrange the furniture.<\/p>\n

When Robert Perry arrived, Ethnic Studies was not yet a discipline. It was a gesture. A center. A temporary accommodation to unrest, designed, perhaps, to quiet the noise without altering the structure.<\/p>\n

But Perry had lived too long and seen too much, to confuse quiet with justice.<\/p>\n

What many did not expect was how he anchored those commitments in academic life itself, tying them not only to practice, but to coursework, institutional frameworks, and the pursuit of degrees.<\/p>\n

In that decision lies a kind of courage that rarely announces itself. Because institutions can tolerate conversations.<\/p>\n

They struggle to tolerate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe in symbolic gestures,\u201d Dr. Perry says, his voice carrying no trace of bitterness, only clarity. \u201cRepresentation without transformation is decoration.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so he did not decorate.<\/p>\n

He built.<\/p>\n

Between 1970 and 1978, what began as a temporary center became an Ethnic Studies program, and finally, a historic Ethnic Studies Department<\/strong>, rooted not in sentiment, but in structure. Not in permission, but in insistence.<\/p>\n

Perry understood what many still resist understanding: knowledge that threatens power is not distributed, it is restricted.<\/p>\n

Building the Architecture: Ethnic Studies as Action<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Out of this knowledge grew one of the most distinctive Ethnic Studies programs in the country, built not only in classrooms, but in community spaces, homes, bars, churches, and cultural centers like the Frederick Douglass Community Association<\/strong> in Toledo.<\/p>\n

Projects like Project Search<\/strong>, led by John Scott<\/strong>, PhD, a playwright of culture and an early architect of Ethnic Studies thought, alongside researchers Robert Horne<\/strong> and Clarence Daniels<\/strong>, surveyed campus life to measure support for Black students and faculty. It was both research and revelation, exposing the gap between institutional language and real life experience.<\/p>\n

The early Ethnic Studies movement at BGSU was never confined to academia. It was movement work. Meetings happened wherever people could gather truthfully. Faculty and students collaborated across city and campus lines, producing a model of scholarship rooted in engagement rather than detachment.<\/p>\n

Even entertainment was intentional. Cultural programming brought jazz musicians, theater artists, and national intellectuals into the same space. Jazz names like Les McCann<\/strong> and Ramsey Lewis<\/strong> moved through the imagination like memory made audible, while the intellectual and political fire of figures such as Stokely Carmichael<\/strong>, Cornel West<\/strong> and Toni Cade Bambara<\/strong> lingered in the same atmosphere of inquiry. The line between cultural performance and political education, blurred by design.<\/p>\n

As Perry often emphasized, Ethnic Studies was never simply about inclusion. It was about restructuring what counts as knowledge.<\/p>\n

When James Baldwin Took a Seat at the Table<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Every now and then, a voice enters a space and rearranges its gravity.<\/p>\n

In 1976, that voice belonged to James Baldwin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He came, at first, as many great men do, briefly, cautiously, called by invitation and curiosity alike. A lecture. A single appearance. A moment.<\/p>\n

But something in Bowling Green spoke back.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Ernest Champion<\/strong>, a professor and founding member within the Department of Ethnic Studies, first invited Baldwin to deliver a lecture,\u201d Perry recalls. \u201cThen he came back\u2026 again and again.\u201d<\/p>\n

From 1976 to 1981, Baldwin returned as an educator. He taught in the evenings, when the day\u2019s noise had quieted and truth could be heard more clearly. The university adjusted itself to his rhythm, a small but telling reversal. Because Baldwin, like jazz, refused confinement.<\/p>\n

He stayed not in isolation, but in community. In homes. In rooms where conversation moved without script. In those spaces, his presence carried the weight of what he had already written in The Fire Next Time<\/em>: \u201cNot everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.\u201d At Bowling Green, that facing was not abstract, it was immediate, spoken across tables and classrooms where students were no longer observers of history, but participants in its questioning.<\/p>\n

And still, he widened the demand beyond intellect into something more human, more dangerous, more necessary, what it means to remain open in a world trained to close you. \u201cLove takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,\u201d he wrote, and in that spirit his classroom at Bowling Green became less a lecture hall than a mirror held up to a country still learning how to see itself without flinching.<\/p>\n

History, in those moments, was no longer something students studied. It was something they encountered.<\/p>\n

And perhaps that is the most radical thing of all.<\/p>\n

Knowledge Must Do Something<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There are philosophies that decorate walls. And there are philosophies that move people. Robert Perry belonged to the latter.<\/p>\n

\u201cEducation for the beauty of it is not enough,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n

He repeats it, with the knowing that repetition might make it harder to ignore:<\/p>\n

Knowledge must do<\/em> something to make things better.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And so he taught not only theory, but application. Not only history, but responsibility.<\/p>\n

He brought the community into the classroom and the classroom into the community.<\/p>\n

He invited students into hiring decisions, not because they were experts, but because they were stakeholders.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents need to feel they have input,\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n

This was not a \u2018how-to\u2019 as performance. This was education as participation.<\/p>\n

And in that participation, something rare took place: Students did not simply receive knowledge.<\/p>\n

They recognized themselves within it.<\/p>\n

A House Full of Voices<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There are institutions, and then there are living rooms.<\/p>\n

Dr. Perry understood the difference.<\/p>\n

Over the years, voices passed through the Ethnic Studies program like a procession of witnesses:<\/p>\n

Maya Angelou<\/strong>, whose words could lift grief into song.<\/p>\n

Cornel West<\/strong>, whose questions refused to settle.<\/p>\n

Kwame Ture<\/strong>, whose voice carried the urgency of a people unwilling to wait.<\/p>\n

Nikki Giovanni<\/strong>, whose poetry held both fire and tenderness in the same breath.<\/p>\n

Danny Glover<\/strong>, whose presence blurred the line between art and action.<\/p>\n

Johnnetta Cole<\/strong>, whose scholarship carried the weight of lived truth.<\/p>\n

Even Yolanda King <\/strong>and Attallah Shabazz<\/strong>\u2014daughters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X<\/strong>\u2014appeared together at BGSU in 1984 through their theater project Nucleus<\/em>, embodying the possibility of dialogue across historical fracture.<\/p>\n

These were not events. They were encounters with history still speaking.<\/p>\n

LaRouth, Baldwin and the Architecture of Belonging<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the center of everything that would later become university, lectures, national conferences, and the language of departments and disciplines, there is Perry\u2019s wife, LaRouth.<\/p>\n

LaRouth Perry, PhD, <\/strong>is the quiet architecture beneath the visible structure of a life that would later be named, studied, and archived. A scholar in her own right, earning her PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, she carried the work of language and education into classrooms across Toledo. She taught high school English in Toledo Public Schools<\/strong> and Africana Studies at the University of Toledo<\/strong>. She also worked in programs like Upward Bound and Toledo Excel<\/strong>, where she helped shape the minds of students who were often told, subtly or directly, that their futures were conditional.<\/p>\n

But she taught otherwise.<\/p>\n

She taught that futures are built, not granted.<\/p>\n

Alongside Dr. Robert Perry, she raised a household where intellect was not abstract, but daily practice.<\/p>\n

Their home in Westmoreland, near the University of Toledo, became more than a residence. It became a gathering space where ideas arrived with their coats still on, where artists, community leaders, and scholars moved through rooms that refused to separate the academic from the human. Beyond the campus itself, James Baldwin found another kind of refuge. The Perry home became his second home, one where conversation stretched late into the night, and music, philosophy, and laughter braided together without pretense.<\/p>\n

There, Toledo revealed itself differently to him. It was a living Black cultural ecosystem that was intimate, intelligent, and unforced. Community was practiced in real time. In that house, the boundaries between lecture and life, writer and neighbor, thinker and friend quietly dissolved. Baldwin could simply be among people who understood that the work of understanding is also the work of belonging.<\/p>\n

The measure of Robert Perry\u2019s work was never proximity to fame.<\/p>\n

It was proximity to possibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy children always joke,\u201d Perry says, smiling at the memory, \u201cthey\u2019d go downstairs and it\u2019s like\u2026 hey, Auntie Angelou or Uncle Baldwin.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a salutation.<\/p>\n

What a world.<\/p>\n

To grow up where greatness is not distant, but domestic. Where brilliance sits at the table and asks if you\u2019ve eaten.<\/p>\n

The Institutional Breakthrough: Curriculum as Transformation<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In 1993, under Dr. Robert L. Perry\u2019s leadership, Bowling Green State University made a historic curricular shift: every student was required to complete a course in Ethnic Studies<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This was not symbolic policy. It was structural change embedded into the academic core of the university.<\/p>\n

That requirement reframed what it meant to graduate. Students could no longer move through the institution without encountering questions of race, power, history, and identity. Education, in Perry\u2019s framing, was not preparation for earning a living, it was preparation for understanding life itself.<\/p>\n

This philosophy echoed W.E.B. Du Bois<\/strong>, who wrote that the purpose of education is not merely \u201cearning a living,\u201d but learning how to live, because \u201cthe man who spends his life earning a living has never lived.\u201d<\/p>\n

At BGSU, Ethnic Studies became the space where that idea was made an institutional reality.<\/p>\n

Conferences, Coalitions and National Influence<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Robert Perry\u2019s influence extended far beyond Bowling Green through his leadership in the National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES)<\/strong>, later known as the Association for Ethnic Studies (AES).<\/p>\n

He served on the NAES Executive Council, chaired sessions, and regularly presented scholarships alongside BGSU colleagues Ernest Champion, PhD; Alice A. Tait, PhD<\/strong>, and Melvin T. Peters<\/strong>. Together, they helped shape national conversations on curriculum, race, and institutional transformation.<\/p>\n

NAES conferences during this era focused on themes such as:<\/p>\n