Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

First, if black college presidents
willed to be black the problem
would be very much simpler
(though by no means simple ) , for
to some extent philosophical blackness,
or Soul, exists in all of our
institutions-if not in individual
courses, then in faculty or students .
Our immediate problem, thus, is
to bring this blackness, as it were,
to a saturation point . This means
conscious reorganization and concentration
of human and other resources,
preferably, as I see it, in
several regional centers which already
exist : in the Baltimore-D . C .
area ; in the Norfolk area ; in the
Durham-Greensboro area ; in the
Nashville area, in the Atlanta area ;
in the Tallahassee area ; in the New
Orleans area, and in the Houston
area . Depending on the degree of
cooperation, they would become
centers of Black Consciousness or
units of a single de facto suprainstitutional
Black University.
The simplest thing to do, of
course, would be for college
presidents to recognize the schizophrenia
implicit in being "predominantly
Negro" and simply declare
themselves to be black people,
working especially for the good of
black people, though excluding no
one because of color or ethnic
origin, their mission being to capitalize
on the unique importance of
the black experience to this country
and to the world . If we were
honest with ourselves, and if national
spokesmen for cultural pluralism
were serious, then presi-
24
dents would have no fear of losing
financial and moral support . Indeed,
the Federal Government and
private industry in such a case
should have no qualms at all about
paying some interest on that great
invisible national debt, the vast
backlog of salary which they owe
us for almost 400 years of economic
exploitation .
But this is too much to hope for,
and too naive, since recent pronouncements
by some of our presidents
indicate their determination
to die the white death, while others
indicate an unfortunate confusion
of a personal revulsion for extremes
of pigmentation with the
legitimate concern which black students
have with the ultimate purpose
of liberal education-freedom
through self-knowledge . The recourse,
then, must lie in the willto-blackness
of the faculty and the
students . When this will becomes
strong enough, when it becomes
informed, in all senses of the word,
with SOUL, when it reaches the
saturation point (or better still,
when it reaches critical mass), it
will demand institutional restructuring-in
faculty, in general resources,
and in acknowledged aims .
Some of these changes may take
place comparatively rapidly and
thoroughly in a few strategic institutions
; in others they may not occur
at all . In some, to pursue a
figure, the energy will be harnessed
for the good of all ; in others, the
result may well be destructive social
explosion . That the resist-
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST