Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

make Howard "sixty per cent
white" by 1970, a plan opposed
by virtually every student on
campus . To accomplish this goal
the University had devised an ingenious
program for excluding or/
and removing black students while
attracting white ones . Some professors
were warned by the dean's
office, through departmental chairmen
instructed to "counsel" them,
that their grade distributions should
approximate a normal distribution
(regardless of the caliber of a given
class! ) and specifically should include
a minimum of failing marks .
At the same time, it was decided
to "raise standards" by raising by
200 points the required score on
entrance tests stan~ardized on children
of urban middle-class white
exposure . Many "culturally deprived"
black students would not,
of course, be expected to manage
such a score . White students who
flunked would not need to humiliate
themselves enrolling in a precollege
sequence at Howard ; hence,
a proposed special division for students
who fail the test would invariably
be black . These "subnormals"
would have to spend a year
preparing to enter the new white
Howard . Having failed the test as
individuals, their self-esteem would
further be decimated, for they
would be set apart as failures and
subjected to an ego-mortifying
curriculum .
First, they were to receive a
speech course ( already incorporated
at Howard) frankly calcu-
NEGRO DIGEST Morch 1968
fated to force black students to
"lose their in-group dialects," despite
the fact that President Nabrit
himself has been successful in Supreme
Court presentations in a
classical "Negro dialect ." Such students
also were to be given a course
in reading skills and, simultaneously,
one in masterpieces of world
literature . It goes without saying
that "masterpiece" authors would
be invariably, if not exclusively,
Caucasian. Still another course was
history of Western civilization (not
world civilization, as in the case o :
the masterpieces ) . This curriculum
would say to black students, who
already were failures as individuals,
that they had no ennobling
ancestral roots : their kind had produced
no civilization worthy of
attention, no literary achievements,
and indeed are guilty now of the
wrong mode of speech . It is true,
even now at Howard, within the
normal curriculum, that a liberal
arts student cannot take a course
in Negro history unless he is a
history major .
Anyway, I wrote a letter mocking
the idea of the whitewash program
and the letter appeared in
The Hilltop, the campus newspaper
-the first issue in September of
the centennial year . Immediately, I
came under pressure, losing first a
promotion to chairman of the Division
of Social Sciences and other
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