Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

3 .
or more white and one or more black schools could be created
solely for the purposes of recruiting black students . Through some
pooling of funds (mostly yours in the Narth ) , black students
could then be approached with this offer : Here are the funds you
need to go through college. You can use the money to attend (for
example) Morehause, Dillard, Cornell or the University of Illinois .
If you choose a black school we ask only that you agree to spend
one of your years on the predominantly white campus, strengthening
your brothers there. If you choose an overwhelmingly white
school, you will have the privilege of going "home" for a year. In
this way black students could take the money from white schools
and use it in any way they choose . Besides, under the new conditions
now prevailing in both black and white institutions, the exchange
could not help but be fruitful .
The issue of finances is a crucial one, especially as it relates to the
future of black colleges . Some institutions would obviously serve
the cause best if they merged with other schools to create new
strengths and expanded facilities . But even those which remained
need to be enlarged and endowed in ways that black schools have
not known up to now . Why, for instance, should it not be possible
for prestigious northern schools to use their prestige to help obtain
special research grants for certain work which can be done well
only by black scholars? Or why should your more aHiuent northern
institutions not be pressed to make other significant financial
contributions to the life of these schools they now so blithely seek
to rape? The United Negro College Fund might be one general
depository . Others can be found. Perhaps an autonomous but well
funded black educatianal foundation ought to be established, with
its single mission the financing of creative ventures in black education
. (This would not exempt the existing white foundations, of
course ; it would simply mean that this black institution would be
able to give all of its time and energies to the task . ) So far it has
been relatively easy to get white institutions to perform certain kinds
of money-producing acts on behalf of black education on their
own campuses . Perhaps the time has come to press them to use
part of their budgets, even sections of their endowment funds, to
help establish such a foundation, or otherwise to make long-term
substantial investments in the black academic institutions . These
would, of course, constitute no more than preliminary steps towards
restitution .
(Certainly it is no accident that such proposals, fit the
pattern of what the former colonizing nations must do to be of
significant assistance to the areas they crippled . )
4. Finally, it is apparent in the current rush to blackness on the part
ly March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST