News-Letter

Media Credit: Angeli Bueno Proessor Hayes lled UCLA's Black Student Union in its efforts to bring more black professors to the University.

In November the United States elected its first African-American president, but Professor Floyd W. Hayes III, a former student activist and avid follower in the Black Power movement during that period, will never forget the fight fought by those who lived through the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s and made Obama's successful campaign possible.

Hayes, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and undergraduate studies coordinator in the Center for Africana Studies here at Hopkins, grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended a Santa Barbara elementary school. In the mid-1950s, when he was in middle school, he experienced his first direct encounter with racism.

"I had a white male teacher who looked at me and pointed at me and said, 'You're a Negro, you have no history,'" Hayes said. "That was humiliating. But over the years that was quite angering because his attempt was to humiliate me, to tell me that black people had no history."

Hayes became interested in the political climate in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an era in which Africans were struggling to overthrow the European colonialism that had plagued them for centuries.

"In the summer of 1960, I saw a picture in the Los Angeles Times of an African leader who was tied up in the back of a truck," Hayes said. "I wanted to find out who this person was. It turned out that it was Patrice Lamumba, the recently elected leader of the Congo."

Lamumba, who aided the Republic of the Congo in its quest to win independence from Belgium in June of 1960 and was the nation's first elected Prime Minister, was later assassinated by the Belgians under circumstances that still remain unclear and may have involved the United States.

Hayes's early fascination with Lamumba's plight and the political struggle in the Congo helped to shape his academic career along with his later activist efforts.

He attended the historically black North Carolina Central University, where he pursued degrees in French and political science. It was there that his interest in Black Power and black rights began to fully manifest.

"I took a number of courses in African history, which piqued my interest in Africa," Hayes said.

Continued...

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