William Sales Oral History

William W. Sales, Jr. is a retired scholar and activist holding a doctoral degree in Political Science from Columbia University. He is the past Chairperson of the Department of African American Studies and Director of the Center for African American Studies at Seton Hall University. At age twenty-six he served as Director of the Queens College SEEK program. Sales is a recognized expert on Malcolm X and a veteran of the Civil Rights and Student Power Movements.

As excerted from the Queens College SEEK website (https://qcseek.info/history/), "The Percy E. Sutton Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) Program was born out of the Civil Rights Movement and signed into law in 1966 by the New York State legislature as the higher education opportunity program for senior colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY). This legislation, Education Law 6452, was a result of the efforts of some of New York’s established activists and progressive politicians; Percy Ellis Sutton, Shirley Chisholm, Charles B. Rangel, Basil A. Paterson, David Dinkins and Allen B. Ballard. Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman from Brooklyn elected to the New York State Assembly often said that her greatest political contribution was getting the SEEK Program into law. Their collective vision was to provide access to CUNY for economically disadvantaged students who graduated from high schools that had not prepared them for the rigors of college.The program became vital to making CUNY more representative of New York City, bringing in African American, Latino, working-class and immigrant students and supporting them in college studies – a role it continues today."