No topic illustrates more cogently the question of “What is radical about radical geography?” than that of race. Radical geography began with common cause between the Civil Rights movement and the anti‐war movement. One of the first overt and public acts was to move the annual meeting of the AAG from Chicago to Ann Arbor after the use of police force at the 1968 Democratic Convention, a geographical act that was worthy of the origins of radical geography. Haynes Johnson (2008) writes:
The relocation of the annual meeting and attendant discussions mobilized concerned geographers to address questions of racism in relation to the discipline of geography, but the radical focus soon shifted to class. A few activist geographers of color, such as Thelma Glass in Alabama, were passionate – and radical – activists within the Civil Rights movement, but their work has been little recognized, much less theorized, in the literature. Nor, for the most part, were they strongly represented in the political movement that became radical geography. According to my informal interviews with those who were around at the time, many geographers participated in either civil rights or anti‐war marches, or even joined the Students for a Democratic Society, but such activities were in the main considered personal (and political) rather than academic. In this chapter I attempt to recognize the work of such activists, including activists of color, who are seldom acknowledged when the term “radical geography” is invoked, and then to untangle the complex relationship between the concepts of radicalism and anti‐racism. I show that, in established urban geography, the dominant issue has been the relationship between race and class, which has tended to leave many of the geographers of color out of the picture. Relatedly, early radical scholars who recognized the link between racism and colonialism either did not link, or were not seen to link, the structure of inner cities and global colonialism. Now, many years later, the work of anti‐racism in geography is ongoing, and the social events that anti‐racist geography addresses are as urgent and challenging as ever.
Early Activism in the Discipline
The issue of “race” was high on the agenda of the AAG throughout the 1960s. In 1964–1965, President Gilbert White appointed Saul Cohen, then at Boston University, as the Executive Officer of the AAG. As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum, Cohen toured the historically Black universities of the south, and then applied to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding to enhance graduate training in geography with a view to enhancing – or in some cases establishing – Geography curricula in those colleges (AAG Diversity Task Force 2006; Waterman 2002). Cohen received a call from the NSF to say that the funding had been approved on the condition that the program be aimed at students from “small Southern colleges” rather than “black students.” The NSF thus funded the Commission on Geography and Afro‐America (COMGA), tasked with sending undergraduates from these colleges to Northern universities. Don Deskins, a faculty member in Geography at the University of Michigan, became the first COMGA Director in 1968. Eventually, 20 students (19 Black and one White) were recruited to undertake training at Clark University (Cohen, personal interview, March 12, 2014).
At a 1968 meeting of the AAG Executive Committee (prior to the annual meeting), plans were still being made for the meeting to take place in Chicago, but issues of racism were not absent (The Professional Geographer 1968). In addition to the COMGA activities:
Alan Pred was appointed as the first Chair of this committee, titled the “Southern College Program,” and a place was created in the Washington office for a committee administrator who would organize an inventory of geographers and geography, create a newsletter, and encourage exchanges and curriculum development. The agenda was forthrightly a liberal one, meant to bring a greater diversity of students into the academy, and especially to allow them to enter the public education system. Yet there is no mention of race‐related research, or of a role for geographers to address the fundamental social conditions that the Civil Rights movement addressed.
Meanwhile, a series of meetings occurred in Michigan under Deskins’ leadership that culminated in a “Proposal for the AAG session on ‘The Status of Negroes in American Geography’” (AAG Archives, B188 F13) to recognize that “many of the AAG’s current activities are pertinent to recruiting more Negroes into geography, to strengthening and expanding geographic activity in predominantly negro educational institutions, to increasing the interaction between black and white geographers, and to making geography more relevant to the pressing social problems of the nation.” This group made a number of suggestions aimed at changing the institutional ethos of the AAG, including “personal commitment,” also encouraging new approaches to teaching. Organization occurred using a mailing list containing 41 names – many of them known to this author – among whom 29 were white, male, early‐career university professors, 7 were white, male graduate students, and 5 (two of whom were women) of unknown affiliation, who may have been undergraduate students.2 An evening “open forum” was planned for the annual meeting in Washington in 1967, consisting of three paper presentations: “The geographic dimension of race relations – urgent research” (Richard Morrill); “Recruiting Black American Geographers” (Theodore Speigner); and “The Geographer in the Community” (William Bunge), with commentary from Don Deskins (“Washington Meeting: Special Session on ‘The Status of Negroes in Geography’” AAG archives B188 F13). Ron Horvath, then at Michigan State, also presented a position paper in which he wrote:
Horvath’s data came from surveys conducted in Northern, predominantly white, geography departments with graduate programs, subsequently published (Horvath et al. 1969; Deskins and Speil 1971). The initial survey had found only two black geographers with Ph.Ds teaching in Northern established geography departmen...
