Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
mentarily bolstered (or our minds momentarily deranged) beyond description<br />
. Our black academic forefathers had never known such high<br />
adventure, we thought.<br />
Now, for a variety of reasons, a blessed but painful clarity has begun to<br />
break into our euphoric white visions . We realize now that this situation is<br />
clearly neither a matter for laughter nor for self-gratification . Rather it<br />
seems evident that we were-and are-being tempted to sell out the black<br />
colleges of the South . And it appears no less evident that many of you<br />
were-and are-unwittingly acting as agents in the process, being used by<br />
persons who are not unwitting at all .<br />
What we see in the new black light is that we are being called upon by<br />
the northern administrators (though your voices are often the ones on the<br />
phones) to give our energies, our course outlines, and finally our full-time<br />
talents to these institutions . So, for instance, programs in Afro-American<br />
Studies begin to spring up from the Ithaca to Berkeley, and we are invited<br />
to help staff them all . Again it also appears that northern-based financial<br />
sources are more ready to fund Afro-American Studies in rural Ohio and<br />
upstate New York than in the heart of the black South . This means, of<br />
course, that it is possible for the northern schools in the post-assassination<br />
period to offer salaries sometimes fifty to one hundred per cent higher than<br />
the black schools-to say nothing of space, time, atmosphere and assistance<br />
for research and publishing .<br />
Not only is this happening to us as faculty persons, but we watch as you<br />
count your numbers on the campuses . We hear you demanding more black<br />
company, especially from among the ranks of the brilliant brothers and<br />
sisters on the block, and it becomes clear what this means for us . It means<br />
that recruiters (now often black) from the North move more fully than<br />
ever before into the traditional southern territories of the black schools<br />
and offer fabulous scholarships and other financial aid to the best black<br />
students available . (They also offer, of course, the prestige of their names<br />
to a still prestige-conscious black community . ) When college-bound<br />
brothers and sisters weigh these offers against those of the black schools<br />
(often late-moving black schools) it is understandably hard for them-for<br />
you to resist. Thus the southern colleges face increased deracination on<br />
every level.<br />
By now it should be clear that this southern exposure provides a different<br />
perspective . Therefore, it is not a matter of our begrudging you the<br />
blackness you so sorely need in those bastions of whiteness . Rather it is a<br />
matter of letting you know how it looks to us . For instance, as the white<br />
administrators of the North (and South ) explain their newly discovered<br />
love for black students and faculty, and their sudden conversion to black<br />
studies, we who are the objects of that bulldozing love had to hear more<br />
than the words which are spoken . We think our southern position allotis<br />
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969