Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

found at this game, beating their
chests and reading and parroting
Frantz Fanon and Mao-Tse Tung ;
and it is clear now that they cannot
be expected to do much else .
Then there are the grand organizers
. I recently attended a unifying
meeting of the representatives of 19
different groups, each proposing to
have the cure for Howard's ills .
When I finally left the meeting at
midnight they had not managed to
get together on anything other than
the prohibition of campus activity
by any single member-group .
Later, 1 learned that they agreed on
a collective name whose acoustics
formed an African word but they
have done nothing since, whichremember?-is
what they agreedthat
no member-group should do
anything .
This nothingness pervades the
air at Howard, although Steve
Abel, student chairman of the
United Black Peoples Party, appears
to try hard and to mean business
; but he has little or no help ;
and freshman class president
Michael Harris, who has much
promise but has not yet had the
time to lose his faith in the lips and
promises of Howard's administration
and establishment-student
leaders, did stage a sit-in in President
Nabrit's office, protesting
compulsory ROTC . Against Abel's
will, the 100 students were persuaded
by establishment-leaders to
break up the sit-in on the promise
that Nabrit would eliminate compulsory
ROTC . This promise may
7 4
yet be fulfilled, but, in any case, at
best it is a paper victory in more
than one sense of the word .
Understand me, there still are
maybe 10 truly militant students
left at Howard, which would be
enough to detonate the movement
should they ever manage to shake
off the control of the administration's
student flunkies, studentlounge
radicals and other phonies .
Adrienne Manns, editor of the
Hilltop, for example, has done a
brilliant job, along with Anthony
Gittens, chairman of Project
Awareness, in making students
aware . Also, it is said that time
makes more converts than reason,
and it may come to pass that the
next time Nabrit announces his retirement,
Howard students (90 per
cent of whom oppose his administration,
according to a Hilltop survey)
may have the courage to run
him out of town .
As of this writing, the atmosphere
at Howard appears to the
casual visitor to loom thick with
the sickness of a strange and eerie
apathy . Administrators cling to the
erroneous notion that a university
can stand upon guns, cunning and
connivance, unwary, it seems, of
the fact that history is a vengeful
lady and, when once it retaliates,
can be a vicious executioner . Students
and professors walk around
virtually wrapped in a cautious
trance, as if ready to run at the
sound of "boo ." Some wear the
faces of grinning mummies, hucklebucking
no less in mock glee in and
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST