As part of SAGE’s mission of building bridges to knowledge and commitment to fostering a more inclusive and diverse publishing community, SAGE Journals is adding Plain Language Summaries (PLS), or nontechnical abstracts, as an option authors can add to their articles for select journals participating in the pilot. The summaries will appear wherever abstracts are available (just below the abstract) and are open to all readers. As an initial priority, SAGE’s goal is to add the PLS function to a limited trial of journals that highlight research representing oppressed, marginalized or otherwise silenced communities.

The idea of the Journal of Black Studies (JBS) was born in 1968 when a young academic named Molefi Kete Asante approached SAGE founder Sara Miller McCune with an idea for a journal that would respond to the Black studies movement as well as a public call for equality, justice, and nonviolence. At the time there was no comparable journal, and Sara saw this journal as a vital addition to social science scholarship. The first full volume was completed in 1971. (Read the full history of the journal at Social Science Space.)

50 years later, JBS continues to publish research that shapes not only the academic field, but ultimately lived experiences as it provides dynamic and creative analyses of many aspects of the Black experience.

“With the publication of JBS in September 1970, the academy and the field of social sciences had opened a new door into the lived experiences of Africans in America and indeed throughout the African diaspora,” commented Dr. Asante. “This was not to be a field defined simply by the discipline of history but we sought to sustain a ‘full analytical treatment’ of African people.”

We’re celebrating the anniversary with free-to-read JBS articles, a podcast, and video messages, and through the endowment of a new scholarship – the SAGE Asante Award – at Temple University.