Northern Universities and Southern Education

The program organized by Yale, Harvard and Columbia for 120 Negro students this summer is an encouraging first step in using northern universities to upgrade southern education. Officials at the three schools hope to increase the number of Negro students going on to graduate school by supplementing the preparation they receive at southern colleges. Stressing humanities and social sciences, the program will enrich summer school courses with special tutorials; it will expose the Negro students to the complicated process of admission at northern graduate schools, and return them to colleges in the south with more ambitious ideas about undergraduate education.

Dean Ford has very rightly warned, however, that the benefits of the program should not be judged by the “statistical jump” in the number of Negroes going on to graduate school this year, or in the immediate future. The current program will only involve only a handful of students, for barely more than eight weeks. Although the southern Negroes will live with students from many other parts of the country, and meet regularly with men who are going through the academic mill, concrete results will not be visible for some time.

In fact, the most important contribution of the present program may be the example it sets for further action by northern universities, rather than its immediate benefits for southern Negroes. The principle of joint action exemplified by this experiment provides in many cases the most effective means for upgrading southern Negro education. By combining resources northern institutions will broaden the impact of their projects.

This program should encourage further joint efforts by northern schools to improve the quality of undergraduate education available to Negroes, and open the doors of graduate schools. Joel Fleishman, the moving force behind this summer’s program, has suggested that Ivy League schools form a “consortium” with other universities, and work through established white institutions in the South to extend more staff fund to Negro colleges. He hopes that the energy and innovation may “rub off” or “ricochet” from North to South in a “cooperative educational exchange.”

This kind of consortium may eventually prove impracticable as a result of opposition from southern universities. But the principle of collective action is a good one, and this summer’s program should inspire more ambitious projects in the future.

—The Harvard Crimson, Monday, March 23, 1966

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Edward Orval Gourdin (1897 – 1966). A graduate of the Harvard class of  1921 (LL.B., 1924), Gourdin was a senior and a star on the University track team when he set the world record in the broad jump. He went on to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics, where he would win a silver in this, his signature event. Eventually he would be appointed a U.S. Attorney (under FDR), and later a judge.

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Chirlane McCary today (far left) with husband Bill de Blasio and children Dante and Chiara.

(Source: Bill de Blasio for Public Advocate)

If you took a women’s studies course during the late 1980s, then you may already be familiar with Chirlane McCray.  Her poem, “I Used to Think,” was included in Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), a staple in both feminist studies and Black studies courses of the late 20th century. Here’s a brief excerpt from McCray’s poem:

[…]

I’ve spent my life as a Black girl

a nappy-headed, no-haired,

fat-lipped,

big-bottomed Black girl

and the poem will surely come out wrong

like me.

And, I don’t want everyone looking at me.

If I could be a cream-colored lovely

with gypsy curls,

someone’s pecan dream and sweet sensation,

I’d be poetry in motion

without saying a word

and wouldn’t have to make sense if I did.

If I were beautiful, I could be angry and cute

instead of an evil, pouting mammy bitch

[…]

–from “I Used to Think,” by Chirlane McCray

Her participation in the Homegirls anthology was not Chirlane McCray’s first or most courageous effort on the part of advancing Black women’s interests and issues. A member of the groundbreaking Combahee River Collective, she was also one of the first (if not the first) African American woman to write openly about lesbianism in a mainstream periodical. Her highly controversial article, “I Am a Lesbian,” appeared in Essence Magazine in 1979, where it sparked an intergroup dialogue around gender and sexuality in Black communities.

Today Chirlane McCray is a marketing executive for Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, but she is still challenging mainstream values and sensibilities, in even broader and more visible arenas. She features prominently in a recent series of campaign ads created in support of her husband, New York City political candidate Bill de Blasio. De Blasio is running for New York City Public Advocate, and the recent advertisements featuring the candidate with his wife and children are the first political ads in anyone’s memory to openly feature and Black-white mixed race couple.

In liberal New York these ads may well have been more of a boon than a distraction, but an article on Ben Smith’s Politico blog notes that even as recently as 2007, only 77% of Americans “approved” of interracial relationships. In 1994, that number was less than 50%. While de Blasio won the Democratic primary (via runoff) in New York, there is a significant likelihood that his campaign strategy (featuring his wife and children freely throughout his campaign) would have dissuaded more candidates that it attracted, had he run in a more conservative region of the country.

But dDe Blasio isn’t running in a more conservative region. He is running in New York; and he has a strong chance of getting elected to this post, which is only a couple of political steps away from becoming the mayor. I say, “Run Bill, Run.” And let this office be only the first step in a career that will take you all the way to Gracie mansion. How thrilling it would be for the greatest city in the world to have the first radical Black feminist as its first lady woman.

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Manhattan Institute Fellow and Former UC Berkeley Linguistics Professor John McWhorter

***

On a recent episode of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, John McWhorter illustrated, once again, how curiously complex (a sometimes contradictory) his perspectives on race really are. Many have called McWhorter a Black conservative, but that is not quite an accurate assessment. In fact, McWhorter’s views on race and racism seem largely inspired by his own experience as a highly-educated Black professional from a middle-class background. For McWhorter, as for many other Black people from similar backgrounds (myself included), racism is a very real part of life — sometimes difficult, somtimes disappointing, sometimes humiliating; but it has never prohibited him from achieving any of his goals.

McWhorter acknowledges the continued existence of racism. But he firmly believes that its impact  has been alleviated significantly enough that it is no longer a major obstacle (certain not the major obstacle) to Black achievement and upward mobility. He express exactly this perspective in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. Our perceptions about the power of racism in our lives are, according to McWhorter, a greater obstacle to Black success than racism itself.

It is through the lens of these beliefs that McWhorter interprets the role of racism in the current climate of crazed and disrespectful opposition to Obama’s attempts to reform healthcare. Consider his comments on a recent episode of the NewsHour roundtable, moderated by Glen Ifill:

GWEN IFILL: How about that, John McWhorter? Is there a subliminal message here? Or is Matt Welch right, that maybe we’re overstating what the source of people’s discontent is?

JOHN MCWHORTER, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute: Well, it’s a difficult issue, and that’s an inherent part of this, that we really can’t know where to draw the line, because we don’t have the psychological tools yet.

But I personally feel that, for example, Joe Wilson would not have yelled the way he did if the president in an alternate universe had become, say, John Edwards. It’s just a — but it’s a gut feeling. We can’t know.

And that’s why I feel that, with all of this — let’s say that racism was a part of it; it’s my gut feeling that it is — we’re at the point where the question is how significant it is. Whatever role racism is playing in all of these criticisms, it’s not going to chase the man out of office. It’s not going to make much of a difference in whether he does or doesn’t get re-elected. And the racism itself is not going to derail health care or anything else.

So my question is not whether racism is involved — I suspect that it is — but exactly what are we talking about and why are we elevating it as if there’s something alarmist about it, when maybe it’s just a rather mundane fact?

GWEN IFILL: So you’re suggesting, John, that there — even if this is racism, even if it’s the worst possible interpretation in people’s actions, it doesn’t really matter that much?

JOHN MCWHORTER: You know, frankly, yeah. I think that there is racism that does matter, but when we’re talking about these kinds of attitudes, these tinctures of feeling that we can’t quite even get a handle on, it seems to me we outlawed legalized discrimination and segregation, and socially we have proscribed open bigotry, and so it’s practically equivalent to pedophilia, and that is fine.

But are we ever going to reach a point when, as human beings, we can eliminate all race-based bias completely? I don’t see it. I don’t know how that would happen. And so what we’re seeing is a rather unfortunate kind of breach of civility. I’m not sure how perfect we can get, and we have so many other things to worry about.

— excerpted from the Online NewsHour transcript for September 16, 2009, at PBS.org.

McWhorter has expressed similar opinions on other news programs, most notably the now-canceled News and Notes radio program on NPR. On one of the episodes of the weekly News and Notes roundtable, McWhorter suggested that African Americans would have to accept that it is quite possible that white people gone about as far as they are able to go in terms of overcoming prejudice, and that things are not even close to perfect, but they are about as good as they are ever going to get, despite the continued existence of individual and institutional racism.

Activist law professor and and fiction writer Derrick Bell shares McWhorter’s belief that racism is a permanent part of U.S. culture; and yet, unlike McWhorter, he still advocates for the continued struggle against its manifestations.  Bell realizes that the likely permanence of racism makes it no less dangerous or problematic. It seems that McWhorter has forgotten (or is unaware) that although racism has not impeded him from reaching his academic and employment goals, racism still negatively impacts many lives, from the people of color who are victims of wrongful incarceration, mortgage redlining, and race-based violence to those white Americans whose failure (or incapacity) to resist the temptation of bigotry leaves them fraught with fear and hatred and distrust.

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Nikole Churchill (center) on the day she made history by becoming the first non-Black woman to be crowned Miss Hampton University. The expressions on the faces of her runners-up seem to suggest that not everyone at this historically Black college  is as enthusiastic about this milestone as the beaming Ms. Churchill.

(Source: The Daily Press)

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I am pleased to introduce the new companion site to this blog, Blackoncampus.org. At present, the site consists of a timeline of Black Milestones in Higher Education, from 1729 to the present. I am adding new entries daily, and I welcome your suggestions.

Eventually I will be adding some other features to the site, include links and a Black Alumni Hall of Fame.

Check it out, and stay tuned for new developments.

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(Source: University of Miami School of Education)

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faculty brat: -noun. Slang. The child of a college professor. Similar to military brat. Also fac brat; fact brat.

1. Awadagin Pratt, classical pianist (his mother, Mildred, is a professor emeritus of social work at Illinois State University where his father, Theodore, was professor of physics).
2. Dave Chappelle, comedian (his father, William was a professor at Antioch college and his mother, Yvonne, was a professor at Howard University and the University of Maryland).
3. Talib Kweli, rapper (his mother, Brenda Green, is a English Professor at Medgar Evers College, and his father is a sociology professor).
4. Kanye West, rapper (his mother, Donda, was an English professor and the chairman of the English Department at Chicago State University).
5. Kathleen Cleaver, law professor and former member of the Black Panther Party (her father was a sociology professor at Wiley College).
6. Kerry Washington, actress (her mother is a professor and consultant).
7. Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen (their mother, Vivian Ayers is an artist, poet, and playwright who has taught at the University of Houston).
8. Jamaal Tatum, former NBA player for the Portland Trailblazers (his father is a professor of art at Lincoln University).
9. Alex Haley, author of Roots (his father was a professor of agriculture at Cornell University).
10. Maynard Jackson, first African American mayor of Atlanta, Georgia (his mother was a professor of French at Spelman College).

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Lincoln University alumni from 1860s and the 1870s.

(Source: Lincoln University Archives)

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The Colored American Magazine was one of the most prominent vehicles for Black intellectual, artistic, and political expression during the first decade of the 20th century. Contributors included:

• Pauline Hopkins
• James D. Corrothers
• William Stanley Braithwaite
• Benjamin Griffith Brawley
• Gertrude Mossell
• T. Thomas Fortune

…and many others.

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