Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

was presently engaged in a struggle to get the University of California
(which is committed to erecting some twenty colleges on the Santa Cruz
campus) to devote the seventh college erected to the "teaching of the
Black Experience ." More specifically, they wished the college to be
named the "College of Malcolm X" and be designed to reflect the heritage
of the Afro-American people ; its instructors to be of the Black
Experience ; degrees up to and including the Ph .D . to be awarded in
Afro-American Studies ; and a forum room, open to the people, to be
built in the college as a center for the expression of the finest minds and
talents of the people of color . I was further informed by Bro . Moore
that the drive to obtain public support for the proposed college was
already underway and that he was presently seeking the support of all
Bay Area student groups . My response to the brother had been conditioned
by several months of rather intensive thought and action on
this and other like subjects . Much of this is also worth recalling .
For five years prior to the summer of Bro . Moore's visit, I had been
active in Bay Area black student circles . First at San Francisco City
College, and later at the University of California at Berkeley . Just as it
should have been, we had protested everything at one time or another.
Oppressive campus rules and regulations, meager black faculty, discrimination
in athletics, American involvement in South African apartheid
and in Rhodesia, the Vietnam War, the Draft, discrimination in
admissions policy and the resulting small number of black students, all
earned our contempt and verbal condemnation . There can be no doubt
that all these were outrages before which we had to cry out. But once
we had cried out, we returned to feeling vain and empty . We felt there
had to be more that we could do, but were yet uncertain .
Common
landmarks and mutual outcries would soon bring us to the same neck of
the woods, but at that time we were still trying to define ourselves ; trying
to delimit the scope, magnitude and horror of our circumstances . And
things continued to crumble around us-making our path difficult to
trod . The "Civil Rights Movement" folded, Malcolm was murdered,
and the first "long hot summer" began to whisk away the people we
wanted to save, Then, in 1965, SNCC was reborn black and many of us
found new hope . This development was followed by a noticeable concern
about reaction and some of us began to see what the other thing
was that had to be done . Creative action began to take the place of
reaction . Two Merritt College students (Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
) left their campus and organized the Black Panther Party. The
black students at San Francisco State went into the black community to
organize and recruit .
(They had already begun to develop black cur-
riculum. ) A handful of black students from the University of California
went into East Oakland to work for Mark Comfort, a black radical who
NEGRO DIGEST Morch 1970 13