Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

~5~~ ;~~iE March 1968 edition
Of NEGRO DIGEST Ori
The Black University
celebrates a significant
turning point in the
history of American race relations .
Taken together, the articles in that
edition constitute the most compact
statement extant of the quest on the
part of young black intellectuals for
self-definition in the realm of educational
theory and technique .
Confronted with the intractable
facts of history and culture, an apparently
growing number of black
thinkers re-opened with fresh intensity
the old debate regarding the
purpose and strategy of education
for Black Americans. Disillusioned
with both the conceptual depth of
integration as an intellectual construct,
and with its slow growth as
a social reality, increasing attention
is now being given to the internal
dynamics of the black community
itself .
Whether this re-focusing of vision
will aid the struggle for black
freedom will depend very heavily
on just how faithful it is to the
"regimen of fact and logic" in the
black community. For this community
is not the simple phenomenon
that many white and some
black writers have taken it to be .
Carter G. Woodson very aptly asserted
in his book, The Mis-Education
of the Negro, that :
~a
President, Benedict College
"the Negro community suffers
for lack of delimitation because
of the various ramifications of
life in the United States . . . The
Negro community, in a sense, is
composed of those around you,
but it functions in a different
way. You cannot see it by merely
looking out of the window of
the school room . This community
requires scientific investigation
."'
Similarly, the black college is a
complex datum requiring the disciplined
approaches of sound
theory, technique and insight if the
realities of its past, the dynamics of
its present and the promise of its
future are to be accurately gauged .
Whether we like it or not, what has
always been-and what will likely
continue to be-af critical importance
are the interconnections of
the black college with the world
around it, the white world as well
as the black world. A fundamental
assumption of this article is that
no important institution within any
community-white or black-can
be adequately understood through
a process of violent abstraction
from the setting in which it "moves
and lives and has its being."
The article by J . Herman Blake
on "The Black University and Its
Community" gives us valuable information
about some of the socio-
March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST