Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
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them, there just aren't enough<br />
black scholars to go around!<br />
Although I can appreciate the<br />
current emphasis on blackness, and<br />
the much discussed black university,<br />
I am mighty glad that I didn't<br />
have to wait 70 years for someone<br />
in the late 1960's to teach me to<br />
appreciate being what I amblack!<br />
My mother, unlettered and<br />
untutored, did say many times to<br />
her children, "You are as good as<br />
anybody." This was helpful to me,<br />
although the white world did not<br />
accept my mother's philosophy!<br />
My heroes were black. In my native<br />
South Carolina, fairly often<br />
some <strong>Negro</strong> would come along selling<br />
pictures or pamphlets of a few<br />
<strong>Negro</strong> leaders ; and pictures of Fred<br />
Uouglass, Booker T. Washington,<br />
and Paul Laurence Dunbar hung<br />
on our walls . In my high school<br />
Dean, Special Projects,<br />
~:~-"'c .,~ "~HE emphasis that the<br />
young blacks have<br />
placed upon the dis<br />
covery and promul-<br />
~'" gation of the truth<br />
about the Afro-American community<br />
is refreshing . For so many<br />
years, the vast majority of us have<br />
been in such hot pursuit of the<br />
norms of the majority culture that<br />
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969<br />
~.Jcttrtttc~~ . ~~t°odor<br />
days, Booker T. Washington meant<br />
more to me than George Washington;<br />
Frederick Douglass, the unyielding<br />
<strong>Negro</strong> abolitionist, was<br />
more of a hero to me than William<br />
Lloyd Garrison, the fanatic white<br />
abolitionist . Dunbar as a poet inspired<br />
me more than Longfellow . I<br />
heard about Crispus Attucks and<br />
was thrilled . The <strong>Negro</strong>es in the<br />
South Carolina legislature, during<br />
Reconstruction and in the post-<br />
Reconstruction years, were men<br />
who were held up to us in high<br />
school history classes as being<br />
great men, and not the <strong>Negro</strong>hating<br />
Ben R. Tillman and his<br />
kind . I had identity . The thrust<br />
now is toward black identity and I<br />
have no quarrel with those who<br />
advocate it . Fortunately, I have always<br />
had black identity.<br />
University of Wisconsin<br />
we have-perhaps unwittingly-forsaken<br />
our own identity and assumed<br />
a false super-ego that leaves<br />
us fragmented persons . I say, the<br />
vast majority .<br />
This is by no means<br />
true of all blacks. In 1940-41, I<br />
had to take "<strong>Negro</strong> History" as a<br />
requirement for the A. B. at Virginia<br />
Union University . In 1942-<br />
43, I had to take "<strong>Negro</strong> Litera-<br />
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