Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

not suspect ; rather, the total society
is suspect ; the total academic environment
is suspect . He has
learned his lesson once ; he has
achieved at great odds ; he has
proven it can be done and that he
can do it ; and having accepted the
challenge, he indicates a willingness
to do it again . Success breeds
success : he becomes, by example,
hope for the black student. He
must be kept comfortable in his
blackness in order to impart selfassuredness
to his students .
And, most important, the black
student must want the Black intellectual
back home ; he must make
him feel at ease, must make him
believe in himself and in his decision
to come back where it's at ; the
student must enter a partnership
with the intellectual to start the
wheels of meaningful education
grinding at a new all-time high, a
record-breaking pace Black students
must understand that when
Adam Clayton Powell admonished
the 1966 graduating class at Howard
University to "Seek Audacious
Power," and thereby ushered in
58
the age of black power, he called
for a black renaissance, resdrrected
black creativity in all disciplines,
a rededication toward building
black institutions of splendid
achievement with intellectual excitement,
dynamic creativity, humanistic
idealism . None of these
can be achieved without black
scholars, who have key roles in developing
this idea from dream to
reality . This is a reality with a
future ; it is one which can act as
a serum to cure the diseases which,
wittingly or not, halfhearted integration
attempts have brought to
the black community-intellectual
mediocrity, economic inferiority,
political subservience . Going home
can and should be a beautiful thing .
For, as Adam Clayton Powell
points out, "We are the last revolutionaries
in America-the last
transfusion of freedom into the
bloodstream of democracy . Because
we are, we must mobilize our
wintry discontent to transform the
cold heart and white face of this
nation ."
Sarah Webster Fabio, author of the article, "Going Home," is a poet
and teacher who also was in the forefront of the Black Consciousness
movement in the northern California area . She currently is involved in
a special program at the University of California at Berkeley, exposing
black students to black literature . Mrs . Fabio's poems and articles
have appeared in previous issues of NEGRO DIGEST .
March 1969 NEGRO DIGEST