Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

standards were the methods of selecting
dismissed individuals .
Dr . Nabrit said-all the
people have uniformly said-
"We've used the scholarship
method-we've read in the paper
somewhere, rightly or wrongly,
that these people were in
some way associated with the
disturbance . And that's a scholastic
way to approach the
situation .'
George Hayes, Howard attorney,
assumed a Lawyer Calhoun
demeanor and wailed that "there
has been a suggestion of b-lack
pow-wuh" (delivered in the Baptist
preacher's fire-and-brimstone
tones) . He further insinuated that
I had caused the fires,`' reading a
statement from an article on Howard
I had written in the Washinb
ton Free Press . There I had said of
the administration : "They don't
seem to hear the thunder . . . and
so, the boycott last Wednesday, the
fire next time" (obviously employing
the titles of two well-known
novels about the racial scene) ."'
In a confidential report to his
superior, the associate dean of students,
Carl Anderson, set forth
ludicrous and, needless to say, erroneous
conclusions, based on the
viewing of a film by 30 members of
the staff and two students employed
as spies . The film of a Hershey
hearing had been turned aver
to Howard by a local television
7 0
(Continued /tuna page -16)
station whose white reporter had
gotten into an argument with black
militant students outside the building
and was knocked down and
hospitalized . The trouble with this
was that the Howard investigators
had a film with no sound . Consequently,
they watched Anthony
Gittens, in the room legitimately as
a witness, and Jay Greene, who
sought to bring the militant crowd
under control, and concluded from
that that they were inciting the
crowd to rebellion .
The "confidential" report also
erroneously declared the Black
Power Committee under the control
of SNCC and the Communist
Party and labeled the father of one
student a communist . The report
listed the names of 12 "members of
the Black Power Committee" ; only
one of them was actually a member
. One student who was listed as
a member, Art Goldberg, was
white .
From this kind of evidence an
ad hoc kangaroo disciplinary committee
of 15 faculty officials meted
out punishment (from dismissals
to warnings and dormitory purges)
to 60 students, including Andre
McKissick, daughter of CORE's
Floyd McKissick . Faculty members
dismissed were merely outspoken
faculty members whose contracts
conveniently expired that year.
They had violated the cult of mediocrity
originated in Howard's early
March 1963 NEGRO DIGEST