Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

that the school, which has produced
half the country's black doctors,
a good percentage of its black
lawyers, Senator Edward Brooke,
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall, and Washington's mayor,
Walter Washington, was not going
to tolerate anything revolutionary
happening to "General Howard's
University," as one student called
it, and laughed .
Lynch looked up from his papermarking
again . "The trustees didn't
have to tell us tfiat . The conference
was not designed to have Howard
become the Black University ."
Invitations to the conference
stated precisely what the conference
was designed for :
46
"The concept of a Black University
is revolutionary. It emerges
out of the frustrations of black
students, educators, activist and
community leaders who recognize
that the present institutions of
higher learning have no relevance
to the total black community and
who realize the contradictions of
allowing themselves to be accultured
into a society which debilitates
black people . . .
Our responsibility as conference
participants is to define the structure
and mechanics of that university
."
On Wednesday, in a two-hour
keynote speech, Stokely Carmichael
told the delegates they were
going to have to "quit talking and
start acting ." But the conferees had
come from as far away as Califor-
nia to talk, so they broke into small
workshops and met in classrooms
and houses in the community and
read poetry and prose and listened
to jazz and talked .
The range of subjects was too
wide to summarize well . In short,
every aspect imaginable was dealt
with-financial, international, political,
curricular, artistic, athletic,
technological, environmental, structural,
agricultural, musical, clerical .
There were 75 workshops digging
out the answers to some of the
thousands of questions that had to
be answered .
A Howard co-ed, tall, thin, very
attractive, recalled that some of the
most beautiful people in the world
were in town for that weekend .
Lynch complained, however, that
only about five percent of the Howard
student body participated . This
figure seemed surprisingly low to
some of the outsiders who were
there that weekend . But it was hard
to tell the participants from the
students who were simply making
their regular rounds to classes in
the same buildings .
Lynch said he took it upon himself
to close the workshop sessions
to representatives of the white
press . He said he was trying to
avoid the danger of misrepresentation
and sensationalism . But others
say it was more a group decision
which was, in part, motivated by
the planners' belief that black people
at this stage talk more freely
when there are no white people
present, which meant that some
March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST