Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

ante is formidable is obvious to
anyone who reads the newspapers .
That the change will come is equally
obvious to all but the blind and
the deaf, who really have no business
at all in the crucial task of educating
this new black generation
who well may be our last hope for
sanity and decency in this country .
Some of the changes I speak of
may occur through the following
structures : 1 . Regional organization
; 2 . Shared resources ; 3 . Systematic
and continual faculty and
student exchange, and 4 . Black
humanists and "Specialists in
Blackness .
By regional organization, I mean
several things . The first is the establishment
of honest and creative
relationships with non-academic
black intellectual communities . I
mean the establishment of new and
respectable relationships with the
black non-intellectual communities
. I mean the establishment of
genuine lines of communication between
academic institutions in the
same region, that is, exchange below
the administrative level . This
type of organization is admittedly
difficult, but models do exist . The
Atlanta University center is moving
in this direction .
From this type of regional reorganization
could come more concrete
objectives, shared resources,
both general and human . Let us
NEGRO DIGEST March 1968
take an example of each . First, the
general . By this I mean non-human
resources such as library holdings,
art collections, and the like . I submit
that the average black student
has no real notion of the richness
of the Fisk Negroana collection, or
the Howard library, or the Atlanta
University Negro collections of
books, manuscripts, and paintings .
Fewer students still know anything
of the Schomberg Collection, and
honesty compels me to say that altogether
too few professors know
very much about these collections .
Whose fault is it? Our own . But
fortunately, structures already exist
which could make it possible for
even the smallest, the poorest,
Negro college to will itself to a saving
state of blackness, as I have
suggested its contours above .
If a panel of artists and critics
comparable to the one which set
up the recent exhibit of Afro-
American painting at City College
(New York) could cull the best
and the most representative examples
of African and Afro-American
art which our colleges possess, it
should be a relatively simple matter
to make slides and reproductions
available at a nominal fee
even to these colleges . Both, it
seems to me, lie within the possibility
of a Title III grant . Manuscript
material and other comparatively
rare items could be made available
on microfilm, with provisions made
for print-outs . This is just an obvious
example. A more thorough
going proposition would be the es-
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