Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

2. Many of you have been involved in attempts to recruit us to teach
full-time on northern campuses, urging us to take the 3-to-5 year
appointments which we have been offered . How do you reconcile
this position with the needs of the thousands of black students in the
South? (Though I have no inclination to play the numbers game, it
is important to consider the fact that the black student group
usually numbers less than 100 on most northern campuses, and 400
is an unusually large figure-though it often represents a miniscule
percentage of the total student body . On the other hand, you ask us
to leave campuses with black student populations ranging from 500
to more than 5,000 . )
3. If we really intend to make the search far the Black University more
than good rapping material for a hundred conferences, then where
can we take the best concrete first steps-on a white campus or a
traditionally "Negro" one? Especially when we consider the service
the black university must render to its immediate community, is it
contradictory in the extreme to consider such nation-building service
coming from "black universities" in overwhelmingly white institutions?
4. One former professor at a well-known "Negro" University recently
announced to the world that he will do his black thing from now on
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at a predominantly white school .
He made this decision, he said,
because black schools eventually will be more likely to imitate a
good thing if it happens in a white context first . Without using such
words, other black faculty persons have evidently taken a similar
point of view . How does that way of producing blackness fit into
our rhetoric concerning the needs of the community? Is it really
more imitation that we must have now?
5. Considering our sadly limited resources, can there be more than a
few really excellent programs or institutes in Afro-American Studies
in this country? Is it possible that the recent announcements of the
creation of at least two dozen such programs will lead to even more
dispersion of our black talents, rather than to the consolidation we
so badly need for this period? If only a few such black research and
teaching centers can live with significant integrity, where should they
be developed? Indeed, where will they find nurture during a period
of prolonged struggle?
6. To move to an even more directly personal level, have any of you
considered the possibility that it might make more sense to bring
50 black students to a black-oriented professor in the South than to
take him away from his campus? In other words, have you questioned
your own locations seriously in the light of our need to gather
ourselves together?
March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST