Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
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3 .<br />
or more white and one or more black schools could be created<br />
solely for the purposes of recruiting black students . Through some<br />
pooling of funds (mostly yours in the Narth ) , black students<br />
could then be approached with this offer : Here are the funds you<br />
need to go through college. You can use the money to attend (for<br />
example) Morehause, Dillard, Cornell or the University of Illinois .<br />
If you choose a black school we ask only that you agree to spend<br />
one of your years on the predominantly white campus, strengthening<br />
your brothers there. If you choose an overwhelmingly white<br />
school, you will have the privilege of going "home" for a year. In<br />
this way black students could take the money from white schools<br />
and use it in any way they choose . Besides, under the new conditions<br />
now prevailing in both black and white institutions, the exchange<br />
could not help but be fruitful .<br />
The issue of finances is a crucial one, especially as it relates to the<br />
future of black colleges . Some institutions would obviously serve<br />
the cause best if they merged with other schools to create new<br />
strengths and expanded facilities . But even those which remained<br />
need to be enlarged and endowed in ways that black schools have<br />
not known up to now . Why, for instance, should it not be possible<br />
for prestigious northern schools to use their prestige to help obtain<br />
special research grants for certain work which can be done well<br />
only by black scholars? Or why should your more aHiuent northern<br />
institutions not be pressed to make other significant financial<br />
contributions to the life of these schools they now so blithely seek<br />
to rape? The United <strong>Negro</strong> College Fund might be one general<br />
depository . Others can be found. Perhaps an autonomous but well<br />
funded black educatianal foundation ought to be established, with<br />
its single mission the financing of creative ventures in black education<br />
. (This would not exempt the existing white foundations, of<br />
course ; it would simply mean that this black institution would be<br />
able to give all of its time and energies to the task . ) So far it has<br />
been relatively easy to get white institutions to perform certain kinds<br />
of money-producing acts on behalf of black education on their<br />
own campuses . Perhaps the time has come to press them to use<br />
part of their budgets, even sections of their endowment funds, to<br />
help establish such a foundation, or otherwise to make long-term<br />
substantial investments in the black academic institutions . These<br />
would, of course, constitute no more than preliminary steps towards<br />
restitution .<br />
(Certainly it is no accident that such proposals, fit the<br />
pattern of what the former colonizing nations must do to be of<br />
significant assistance to the areas they crippled . )<br />
4. Finally, it is apparent in the current rush to blackness on the part<br />
ly March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST