The Legacy

On April 12, 2018, I stood on a stage in Claudia Hampton Hall on the campus of CSU Dominguez Hills, ready to give a joint talk on the history of Black and Filipino solidarity with my colleague Dr. Mary Lacanlale from the Asian Pacific Studies Department. After I introduced myself to the audience, I asked, “Can anyone in here tell me about Dr. Claudia Hampton, the person whose portrait is on the wall?” The only responses I got were blank stares and heads shaking no in response to my question. “Well, before I get started with my presentation, I want to let you know who she was. Dr. Claudia Hampton was the first Black woman trustee in the Cal State system. She was responsible for making sure that folks like me can stand before you as an alum of Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach and chair of the Africana Studies department, presenting my research on my local family history about Black Filipinos living in the Compton-Carson area. I am working on a book about her. By the time I am done, I hope that more people know who she was and what she did for students of color in the system.”

When I posed the question about who Claudia Hampton was to the audience, I underestimated how much more I would be learning about her and the political dynamics she faced in her twenty-year fight to save affirmative action. Though I was a CSU student during Hampton's years as trustee and have spent most of my professional career as CSU faculty on two campuses, if I had not stumbled across a photo of Hampton in a digital archive, I would have been completely clueless, just like the members of my audience, as to why my campus had a lecture hall named after Hampton. I found it peculiar how so few people on campus knew anything about her, since it took the passage of a faculty senate resolution to have a classroom named in her honor. I asked around to people who had been on campus for decades, some of whom were faculty when Hampton Hall was so named, and I could only identify one person who remembered her.