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FREEDOMWAYS
FOURTH QUARTER 1968

doctorate at Harvard University, and begin an illustrious and voluminous career of contributing articles and books on Africa to the scholarly press. He is now regarded as an outstanding Africanist; is a tenure member of the Harvard University faculty, and has been an advisor for the newly organized Afro-American student groups at Harvard, and in other eastern universities.
Kilson completed his work at Lincoln University, magna cum laude. I think the best thing Kilson did, while a student at Lincoln University, was to publish (mimeographed), and circulate among his schoolmates, an "Open Letter," in which he took them to task for their lack of serious attention to their studies. Kilson pointed out to his fellows, that they could not afford the luxury of being Joe College. Lincoln students, in that day, were likely to behave as if they were He reminded them that they had, in all likelihood, been educated in inferior elementary, and high schools; that they had not been derived from the middle-class, and upper middle-class, world of the typical white collegian. Nor were they destined to operate as adults in such a social milieu. In short, instead of the horseplaying, roistering, brawling, fraternity idiocies that characterized their day-by-day life, they needed to study; and to study hard.
While this document did not endear Kilson to his schoolmates, I recall it here, because the message is a good one, in connection with the subject of the teaching and study of African, and Afro-American history, by and to, the present generation of "black militants." All of us, in the field, have in us the accumulated deficiencies for learning that our world, and our schools have imposed upon us. We need black history; we need Afro-American history; we need and desperately, the first-class student who has acquired the arduous disciplines of study, and of scholarship. The present generation of black collegians is far superior, I think, to my college generation of the early 1920's, and to Kilson's, of the early fifties, in its insight, in its motivations, in its aspirations, and in its habits.
Yet this present generation is one that still bears the scars of an inferior formal education, and limiting motivations and habits imparted by the world in which we have grown up. Whatever is to be studied, we need to study it well, superbly well. This means hard work.

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