This is the question that Bobby Wilson and Herman Jenkins posed as the opening sentence for their 1972 essay in Antipode. ¹ In the essay, Wilson and Jenkins (1972) discussed the symposium titled “The present and future state of geography: Some black perspectives” that was held March 9–11 in 1972 at Clark University. The symposium had been organized by Donald Deskins, Jr., urban geographer and sociologist, whose efforts to increase Black geographers included his leadership of the American Association of Geographers’(AAG’s) Commission on Geography and Afro-America (COMGA). Wilson and Jenkins noted that the question they posed was one often raised in discussions by them and other Black students in the Graduate School of Geography (GSG) at Clark University (Kobayashi 2014). They index the pervasiveness of the question to the theses and dissertations addressed to the question of race, and the fact that most of the antiracist research and work critical of segregation was being done by graduate students who were in the COMGA Program (Choi 2018). Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) related that the question posed was “implicit in the conflicts that sometimes occur between the Black students and departmental faculty and administration.” These conflicts had much to do with the Black students’ presence at Clark, a predominately white institution. Even as Saul B. Cohen was attempting to increase Black American graduate student enrollment through the AAG’s COMGA Program and Clark’s own Teachers Teaching Teachers (Triple T) Program, faculty across Clark’s campus openly expressed support for Jim Crow policies and scientific racism (Choi 2018). Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) noted what they saw as the main question facing Black academics entering geography, then a very new profession for them:“should black geographers address themselves to the profession as an organized group or as individuals?” As they remember it, this question permeated all the sessions at the symposium just as it did the daily lives of Black students at Clark. Wilson and Jenkins saw two schools of thought: one that argued for intra-racial unity as the basis of a Black social consciousness that would drive social change; and another organized around a philosophy of individualism that rationalized internalized antiblackness. They expressed frustration with some Black geographers, who based on “perceived status (real or fancied) in the geographic establishment” saw “themselves as something akin to plantation straw bosses resisting attempts by malcontent field hands to change the pattern of things”(Wilson and