Headlines, Human Rights, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-U.S.: The Other Ivy League

Ulysses de la Torre

NEW YORK, Feb 21 2005 (IPS) - When the all-black student body of Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University was confronted with the proposal of integrating its all-white faculty in 1928, opinion was starkly divided.

On the one hand, said proponents of the status quo, an all-white faculty took a less intrusive approach to campus social life, thereby giving students greater freedom in their extracurricular activities.

Meanwhile, students favouring integration decried the racial short- sightedness of their classmates.

At the forefront of these opposing movements were two students who would later become household names, not just in black history, but in the history of the nation.

Leading the pro-integration side was the future writer Langston Hughes. Opposing him was a man who, a quarter of a century later, would argue in favour of desegregation before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, and who later became the first black Supreme Court justice: Thurgood Marshall.

The irony of Marshall’s position is not lost in ‘I’ll Find a Way or Make One’ (Amistad Publishing, Nov. 2004), a new book that culminates a four-year research effort by Juan Williams and Dwayne Ashley and pays tribute to North America’s historically black colleges and universities, which the book refers to as HBCUs.

Much like this anecdote, the book demonstrates how intertwined the history of the United States is with the history of the nation’s black colleges and universities, at times to the extent that the two histories are practically inseparable.

”We thought we would talk more about education,” Ashley told IPS. ”And as we got more into this, we found that these institutions contributed to the development of jazz, the development of the Harlem Renaissance with black writers coming out of many of these institutions, and that the whole civil rights movement grew out of historically black colleges.”

The authors provide a wide-ranging look at how the education of African North Americans has evolved, beginning with colonial-era religious indoctrination and taking the reader through the twists and turns of history.

Continuing with accounts of covert reading lessons for slaves in the pre-revolutionary south, it moves to the 1837 founding of Pennsylvania’s Cheyney University as the nation’s first HBCU, to the rise of a black middle class during the 1920s in which black college graduates quadrupled, through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and ends with the 2003 Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action practices at the University of Michigan.

Among the more significant developments the book recalls is a decades- long debate over whether HBCUs should be oriented toward a vocational education or involve more of a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

The scope of this debate was and remains far more national than the 1928 divide at Lincoln University, pitting two figures whose places in U.S. history easily rival those of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall: W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

Washington, a former slave who helped found Tuskegee University in Alabama, was not opposed to a liberal arts education, but argued that vocational training should precede it.

DuBois, an early advocate of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, believed in ”the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the (North) American Negro into a higher civilisation,” according to the book.

The two models of education mostly came about due to the different circumstances into which black people were thrust following the Civil War. In the Deep South, as more and more blacks started farming for themselves, there arose a need for more knowledge about agricultural methods and practices, thus giving rise to the vocational institutions that prevailed in states such as Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

In the southeast United States, the so-called DuBois model was more prevalent, and it was hardly a coincidence that DuBois launched some of his most vocal criticisms while teaching at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University, after merging with Clark College in 1988).

”I think you needed both models. I think both models worked and I think that argument is still going on today,” Ashley said. ”Even when you look at higher education as a whole, the state of Indiana now has a situation where the college education rate is dropping because people can get factory jobs and make fifty or sixty-thousand dollars a year without going to college.”

”So they go to technical schools and they get a certification, and then aren’t motivated to go to college. Most people go to college to get a job, and so if you can get a high-paying job without getting a degree, people don’t want to invest that kind of money or time.”

Not all of the advancement of African North Americans in higher education derived from the most celebrated historical figures, however. The book is packed with anecdotes and accounts of the lesser known, but equally vital roles played by the Freedmen’s Bureau, black fraternities and sororities, the Forten family, the Baptist missionaries Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles and many more.

Despite increasing higher education opportunities for all Americans, however, 108 historically black colleges and universities are still operating, up from 95 at the beginning of World War I.

While the book does not give much attention to today’s relevance of HBCUs, Ashley was quick to point to what these schools provide that cannot be obtained at other universities.

”Many young people would not survive if they went into majority institutions where the classroom sizes are overwhelming, where they don’t see people who look like them who are professors and administrators, because many of them are the first (in their families) to go to college,” he said.

”On the flip side of that are young men and women who are very middle class and upper middle class and they come because they want to be in an environment that is culturally relevant to them.”

Additionally, he said, with many HBCUs now boasting a list of notable alumni far beyond those already discussed in this article, there is now a tradition of success unlike what is found at most other institutions of higher learning.

”I think you would find the same with single sex institutions, with Jewish institutions and with Catholic universities. There’s a sense of tradition in the students when they go to those kinds of campuses that lend to the level of success that one experiences when they are in that kind of environment.”

Dwayne Ashley is president of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund and an alumnus of Wiley College, the oldest black college in Texas. Juan Williams, in addition to being an award-winning journalist, previously authored ‘Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary’.