Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

them, there just aren't enough
black scholars to go around!
Although I can appreciate the
current emphasis on blackness, and
the much discussed black university,
I am mighty glad that I didn't
have to wait 70 years for someone
in the late 1960's to teach me to
appreciate being what I amblack!
My mother, unlettered and
untutored, did say many times to
her children, "You are as good as
anybody." This was helpful to me,
although the white world did not
accept my mother's philosophy!
My heroes were black. In my native
South Carolina, fairly often
some Negro would come along selling
pictures or pamphlets of a few
Negro leaders ; and pictures of Fred
Uouglass, Booker T. Washington,
and Paul Laurence Dunbar hung
on our walls . In my high school
Dean, Special Projects,
~:~-"'c .,~ "~HE emphasis that the
young blacks have
placed upon the dis
covery and promul-
~'" gation of the truth
about the Afro-American community
is refreshing . For so many
years, the vast majority of us have
been in such hot pursuit of the
norms of the majority culture that
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969
~.Jcttrtttc~~ . ~~t°odor
days, Booker T. Washington meant
more to me than George Washington;
Frederick Douglass, the unyielding
Negro abolitionist, was
more of a hero to me than William
Lloyd Garrison, the fanatic white
abolitionist . Dunbar as a poet inspired
me more than Longfellow . I
heard about Crispus Attucks and
was thrilled . The Negroes in the
South Carolina legislature, during
Reconstruction and in the post-
Reconstruction years, were men
who were held up to us in high
school history classes as being
great men, and not the Negrohating
Ben R. Tillman and his
kind . I had identity . The thrust
now is toward black identity and I
have no quarrel with those who
advocate it . Fortunately, I have always
had black identity.
University of Wisconsin
we have-perhaps unwittingly-forsaken
our own identity and assumed
a false super-ego that leaves
us fragmented persons . I say, the
vast majority .
This is by no means
true of all blacks. In 1940-41, I
had to take "Negro History" as a
requirement for the A. B. at Virginia
Union University . In 1942-
43, I had to take "Negro Litera-
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