Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

C.~e~or 3 l /ot~e3-- (Continued from page 4)
the editorial proceeded, as also is the custom, to castigate those activists
who had inspired Harvard to adopt a degree-granting Black Studies
Program . "Harvard's stress an integrating the new field of study-on
terms of equality-into its over-all teaching and research enterprise
effectively answers the efforts to make black studies the ideological
propaganda instrument of separatism that have led to so much divisive
conflict at other institutions," the editorial stated .
The growing number of advocates and supporters of the Black University,
in and outside of white universities, recognize that they have
formidable adversaries in their struggle toward achieving their goal .
They will be condemned as "separatists" and as "neo-segregationists" by
powerful voices dedicated to a brand of "integration" which means, in
effect, the continued subordination of black people and the degradation
of their values and life-styles ; they will be attacked by black men who
either are desperately seeking to hold onto their own waning prestige
within the rapidly evolving community or else are simply playing the
white man's power gamE for personal profit ; and they will be subjected
to all the economic and political pressures which those in power can
bring to bear against those rebels who challenge the status quo and who
threaten to chip away at its foundation . Still, there is evidence that they
will prevail : already a very large percentage of the brightest of the
young black students and professors have thrown their sympathies and,
in many cases, their energies behind the Black University movement ;
and embryonic Black Universities are taking root in several black communities,
notably in Detroit and Chicago .
That there are great problems to be surmounted before the Black
University becomes a living entity there can be no doubt, and several
of the contributors to this issue of NEGRO DIGEST address themselves
candidly to some of the problems .
HOYT W. FULLER
Managing Editor
* Muntu, as described by Janheinz Jahn in his book by that name, is a Bantu
word of inclusive character, having to do with Man as a spiritual being, transcendent,
invested with that most precious quality, humanity, which is a law
unto itself, natural and insuperable, and forever possessed of precedence over
things, order and property.
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969 95