Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

answering ; "Monday. That is if
that's agreeable." It was with him .
Going home! And in a matter of
a few days . Two decades stood between
my alma mater and hometown
and me ; for me, it was a
period of growth, mobility, turbulence
and commitment, and I presumed
it to be not too different
back home . I now lived in the
suburbs of San Francisco Bay
Area in an integrated neighborhood
with my dentist husband and
five children ; we wore the badge
of acceptance for having "made it"
in the good old American free-enterprising,
"mainstream" tradition.
But already my third teenager to
graduate from the local high school
in as many years was saying, "Forget
it . I'm tired of being exotic ; a
museum piece, the social integrator
; I choose a Negro college-one
of those in Nashville." I pointed
out to the young ones the fact that
they could very well be sentimentalizing
the southern situation
since, unlike me, they had not
grown up in a segregated environment
. Still failing to dampen their
enthusiasm, I reminded them that
Nashville was the home that I had
been orphaned from, and not them,
They checked me with, "You
better know it ."
For two years, I had worked as
a part-time instructor in two junior
colleges . One of these was a nearly
all-white suburban tomorrowlandtype
institution ; the other a ghettofringed
urban yesteryear model
with over 2,000 black students .
Having asked myself a few ques-
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969
tions, such as, To whom did I owe
my allegiance? Where were my
teaching skills most needed? Which
situation offered the greater reward
in humanistic rather than materialistic
terms?, even as I noted the
leaded nature of them, I knew the
proper answer. Perhaps I always
knew it, just as most black intellectuals
have known it . Factors
such as the vast difference between
the two plants-both of whom I
supported through taxes-the aura
of academic freedom and exploration
which seemed far more prevalent
in one ; the huge investment in
terms of personal involvement and
extra curricular time which one
demanded in order to meet the
community's needs succeeded in
clouding the real issue . But, I had
already returned the shiny new
key to my office in the suburban
school and was ghetto-bound when
I heard that Fisk was in need of
English teachers, black ones . And,
then, there was Stanford Cameror_'s
exhortation in the May 1967
NEGRO DIGEST, "Come Home
Black Intellectuals- Before It's
Too Late ."
"You Can't Go Home Again,"
seems closer to the truth, according
to my own personal experience.
John O. Killens, writer-in-residence
at Fisk, has identified the
problem of the century and the
main job of the Black Revolution
as that of the "deniggerization of
the world." And when he points
out that minds enslaved with words
must be freed with words, it seems
he offers a direct challenge to black
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