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FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1968

the people who were "Africans," then "colored," then "Negro," then "Afro-Americans," or "black," the general American public at no time had any serious intention of providing, in private or in public schools, institutions that had the capacity of preparing this population for full citizenship: and the vast majority, in any generation since the founding of the Republic- and even before-never was so prepared. Certainly this is one of the chief reasons why this population has not been able to maintain full citizenship; it had been brutalized, degraded, dehumanized, and uneducated, by every instrument of the culture and society.
 This population has lived, and continues to live, in a crazy-quilt world of unreality; a world where the national slogans- "land of opportunity," "the home of the free," "equality," and "democracy," are unblushingly reiterated, at the same time when they are obviously denied to great masses of the population. 
 Living in such an insane world, it is little wonder that strangely weird controversies are likely to rend the black community, as historically they have flourished in similarly situated minorities. One, in education, has revolved around the future of the Negro college. This institution was born out of the fact that Africans-Colored-Negroes- could find no other place where they could be admitted to a higher education. Now that blacks, however grudgingly can be admitted to a wide variety of other institutions, it is believed by many that the "black" college is obsolete.
 But the new pride in blackness, and in black institutions, has put a new face on this old controversy. The youth at Northwestern University, and at other "integrated" colleges and universities, who have strongly urged their institutions to provide them with separate facilities- dormitories, student unions, curricula-have horrified their elders, who fought during their student days for more mere admission to such facilities. This writer entered the University of Chicago in 1924; no Negro women were then permitted to live in the female dormitories of the University, and only one male, the tennis star, Dick Hudlin, was permitted to live in the University's male dormitories. I find it quite impossible, as an aged veteran of the old systems, to essay an intelligent appraisal of the virtues, or defects, of the current black student response to the collegiate environment. I am only urged, perhaps by my belief in the right to individual choice of modes of behavior, and a basic conviction that the young have more sense than the aged, to believe that the black collegian today is right in what he thinks, and what he does.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 12:22:56 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 20:27:03 Had to add the heading of the page and page number on.