Fusing black history and American history can be a challenge. Tunde Adeleke, director of the African-American studies program, has set for his office the goal of empowering students to forge these raw materials into a history of everyone.

“Black history is American history,” Adeleke said. “What I would like to see happen is to use a program like this to begin a process of revolutionizing consciousness, such that over time, when students leave middle school or high school, what is called black history is very much part of their history.”

It is a big goal, but one Adeleke, who was born in Nigeria and has spent his career studying connections in the black experience across the world, is ready to take the first steps toward achieving.

“That is the goal of any African-American studies program, not just educating the person theoretically, but applying the knowledge,” Adeleke said.

Adeleke took over the program and responsibility for its minor in African-American studies in August 2006. The job at Iowa State brought him to his seventh campus in North America since graduating with a degree in African history in Nigeria. In his native country, Adeleke shared a home with 17 brothers and sisters and other extended family. As he worked on his Ph.D. in Canada, he adjusted to the nuclear family and more individualistic culture he encountered, but Adeleke was already finding parallels in the scholarship he began in Africa.

In the 1970s, he said, African historians were enthusiastically beginning to search beyond their colonial past and seek out the common experience of Africans who had taken root around the world.

“One of the issues that we looked at in my senior year of African-American history was that you cannot fully understand history, at least you cannot understand your history until you understand what happened to Africans in the rest of the world,” Adeleke said. “You have to emphasize that connection between African history and history of blacks in North America, blacks in Europe, blacks in other parts of the world. I became interested in that connection. After my degree in African studies I decided I need to understand what happened to those blacks who were taken to the new world.”

Arriving in North America, Adeleke said the more global prospective of his Nigerian education helped to dull some of the culture shock. He even served as a teaching assistant to a course in American history. What did surprise him was that black scholars around the world had been emphasizing their connection with Africa as long ago as the 1800s.

“You find that among blacks here and in North America and even in Europe, there was already a much deeper awareness of the linkage between the two histories than we were aware of in Africa,” Adeleke said. “The movement for what is called ‘pan-Africanism’ developed among blacks in the new world, not in Africa.”

Working at several colleges, Adeleke continued contributing to history, teaching and writing books about the African experience. He said one of the goals of African-American studies has always been helping effect change in society. After building his career unifying the history of Africans with each other, he sees the ultimate goal as unifying that history with the rest of the world.

“Something that I would like to see happen is us no longer looking at black history as something that no longer happens once a year,” Adeleke said. “It should be a year-round experience, not just something we isolate to one month.”

At Iowa State, he wants to begin facilitating that plan by building onto the African-American studies minor to create an African-American studies major.

At the University of Montana, Adeleke spearheaded the creation of an African-American studies minor. Michael Mayer, a University of Montana history professor, aided Adeleke in the process.

“For a long time [African American Studies] was a program just in name only, but Tunde turned it into a real academic minor,” Mayer said. “He has an enormous amount of energy and drive. It took that and a lot of patience to get a minor here.”

Adeleke already knows where he will first apply his energy at Iowa State, in hiring new faculty and developing new classes.

“You cannot generate and sustain student interest if you have no faculty. When you have stellar faculty in a program, they will attract students,” Adeleke said.

Job descriptions are currently being created for the first two new positions. Adeleke said he sees “much to praise” in the current program, which, among its functions, operates three organizations that assist incoming African students.

In developing an African-American studies major, Adeleke said it will be important to work in tandem with the program’s parent office, the Center for American Intercultural Studies, which is working on creating its own degree in intercultural education.

“This program cannot develop in isolation,” Adeleke said. “We are looking at this in terms of what some people call ‘trans-cultural discourse.’ My goal is to have students come into this program to experience this trans-cultural dialogue and become part of it.”