Robert L. Hall '69 was planning on being a Romance Languages and Literature concentrator until he visited the department office.

As he waited, a professor he admired walked in and told the secretary, "See if you can figure out what this colored boy wants."

"I told him to `kiss my ass' and left," Hall says.

Because of this incident, Hall sought a degree in African history and became a leading member in the student movement for an African-American studies department at Harvard. Today, Hall is a professor of Afro-American studies and a historian at Northeastern University.

Although he was not one of the visible protest leaders, Hall became an active member of the Association Students at Harvard (AAAAS) and was elected executive secretary in his junior year. AAAAS, founded in 1963, was the forerunner of the Black Students Association.

"For me, my involvement in the Afro-American struggle was directly linked to my concentration," Hal says. "There were no history courses that focused mainly on the African-American experience, none."

Hall says he confronted the department's notion that African studies belonged only to the field of anthropology. "The idea was that Africa doesn't have a history. Anthropology was the history of the history-less, the tribal, non-literate people."

When he went to declare his concentration, Hall told the head tutor's assistant that he wanted to specialize in Africa. "Then her countenance drooped," Hall remembers, "and she said, 'Oh, if it's Africa you best go to the Peabody Museum."

Hall says he then started speaking in "Black-dialect, characterized by a different conjugation of to be."

"I said 'scuse me, you must be didn't hear me...I said that I want to major in history and the kind of history that I want to study is the history of Africa. You all believe Africa has a history, don't you?" Hall recalls saying.

To satisfy his academic interest, Hall says he tried to take every course at the College that involved Africa. Hall became an active member of the AAAAS Committee on Negro Studies. The committee worked to introduce more Afro-American studies classes into the curriculum and to hire more Black faculty.

"Now it seems obvious, I hope, that a course labeled American this or American that, in which the Negro receives little or no treatment, is not an intellectually valid course," he says.

Black students began to feel they had to "get off the dime," he says. "[They] felt they were irrelevant sitting around in common rooms."

Hall says he stressed to his fellow students the importance of their own education. "I said, `Don't be stupid, we need doctors, too, and lawyers and urban planners.'"

Leslie Griffin '70, the former president of AAAAS, says Hall was a historian even during his student days.