Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

ealize that much of your motion over the past year has often appeared to
encourage the destructi _a of those colleges and universities where some
125,00(1 black students study in the South? Besides, do you realize that
such action towards destruction puts you in league with many white,
northern, academic administrators who are ready to deny the future of
black southern education, ready to manipulate the death of potentially
powerful black institutions?
Now, let me say more fully what I mean . Over the past several years,
for dozens of good, bad and indifferent reasons, the schools of the North
have been discovering that they need black students, faculty persons and
various levels of black-oriented curriculum. (As you well know, the current
commercial value of blackness has not been one of the least of the
reasons for the belated and somewhat sudden awakening. ) As might have
been expected, these white institutions turned increasingly towards the
black campuses of the South . There they found a ready-made supply of
black faculty, and discovered the presence of some Afro-American curriculum
which had not been destroyed by "integration ." In addition, they
began to enter into serious competition with the southern schools for the
best black students.
All this action was facilitated by the ready access such institutions had
to the very financial sources which had been traditionally parsimonious in
their help to black schools for some of the same tasks . (Of course, it should
also be said loudly that the brain-draining process was significantly aided
by the great hesitancy on the part of many faculty persons and administrators
in the "predominantly Negro" colleges to realize that our experience
as a people was worthy of serious academic exploration, and by
their failure to offer the younger black scholars those encouragements
which money cannot buy. But that is another article! )
Then came the assassination of our brother in April, 1968, and many
of you stepped up the pace of your action a hundred-fold . Wherever you
were gathered on the northern campuses, whatever your numbers, you demanded
more faculty, more courses, more black students than ever before .
"Freedom, Now!" became "Blackness, Now!" So you rapped with articulate
vigor, boycotted, threatened all kinds of things, took over meetings,
classes and buildings-and generally raised hell.
Meanwhile, we watched from the South . We applauded . We laughed at
trembling white administrators who seemed ready to offer you everything
you demanded-sometimes before the words were dry on the leaflets . Occasionally
we joined in the action on your behalf, and strengthened our
own students in their resolve to their own southern thing .
As a matter of fact, when an increasingly large number of us were wafted
through the skies to visit your campuses as consultants and lecturers and
to become objects of tempting salary offers, some of our egos were mo-
March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST