Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

a new-old nation in the midst of the
world's most "developed" society .
Any university which grew with
integrity out of the ground of our
black experience in America would
have to reflect and bear the creative
agony of that tension-no matter
how great the temptation to
escape it . The life of such an institution
would, in many ways, testify
to the Westernization of our lives,
but if it is to make a major contribution
to its students and their
world, the Western experience cannot
be its most important emphasis
. More than 2,000 colleges and
universities in this country (and
hundreds more in Europe) already
perform that task . Though "predominantly
Negro" institutions
have long imitated such a direction,
those of us who seek to build faithfully
out of the materials of the
Afro-American experience are
called to other paths .
One major strength of a black
university would be its internanationalism,
but its focus would not
follow the style of the scores of
"International Studies" programs
which have burgeoned in American
institutions since the Korean War .
Instead, the uniqueness of our approach
to the world would be
found in our vision through an unashamedly
black-oriented prism . In
the academic program and in a
hundred other less structured ways,
the black university would seek to
explore, celebrate and record the
experiences of the non-Western
world . Because of much that we
3 4
have lived through, our focus
would be upon that segment of the
non-West which has existed under
Western domination for the relatively
brief span of 400 years or
less, and which now shakes the
world with its efforts to wrench
free .
Even within that group our specialty
would rightfully be found
among the peoples of Africa, both
those who remained on the continent
and those who were forced
into the New World through the
diaspora of slavery . This, in a peculiar
way, is our thing, and we
would have no less reason to build
on it in a university setting than
Brandeis has for building on Jewish
Studies, or Minnesota on Immigrant
Studies, or Oklahoma on
studies of the American Indian .
In an article of this length it is
possible only to suggest some of the
directions such a black-oriented internationalism
might take in a university
context, but certain lines are
suggestive of the whole . In the
academic program, one of the most
attractive aspects of this focus
would be comparative, intercultural
studies of many kinds, especially
in the humanities and the
social sciences . For instance, in
music we would try to develop an
understanding of the continuities
and discontinuities among the musical
styles of Africa and those of
its scattered children in the northern
and southern portions of the
black, New World . (The dance and
the drama would present obvious
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST