Description: Offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all.
LONGLISTED: 2025 PEN American Open Book AwardWINNER: 2024 Best Indie Book Award in Non-Fiction: History, Politics, and Social Sciences Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974-94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates. Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.
Brief description: DONNA J. NICOL is Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, CA.
Review Quotes: Black Woman on Board is a well-written, provocative, and detailed history of the role of Dr. Claudia Hampton. Nicol's work is important in light of the history of affirmative action in recent decades, including California's 1996 Proposition 209, which erased nearly thirty years of affirmative action, and the recent surge in moves to dismantle affirmative action in education.-- "THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY"