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FREEDOMWAYS
FOURTH QUARTER 1968
course, for dating companions, for relief from the extremes of either rigid social exclusion on some campuses or from suffocating, and ofttimes artificial, social inclusion on others, usually led the black students into some type of more or less formal companionship. Such was the origin of the Negro Greek letter organizations. Alpha Phi Alpha, the first such group, came into existence as a social gathering of more or less lonely and isolated black young men at Cornell University. As groupings of black students, these fraternities and sororities were not unconcerned with the needs of black students, but because they were essentially mere imitations of the goodtimes- oriented white fraternities and sororities, they envisioned themselves primarily as "fun" organizations which thrived on exclusiveness, snobbery and uselessness. The white fraternities exhausted their energies in inter-fraternal competitiveness rather than in seeking changes in university performance or in the student-university relationship, and the black Greeks were generally content to follow a similar pattern.
  Black students who rejected or were denied affiliation with the Greek organizations, and those at campuses where their numbers were so minimal as to preclude black Greek organizations, either lived in near isolation or embraced integration on whatever terms it could be found, frequently going to the extreme of pretending to ignore the presence of other black students in an effort to demonstrate to whites the extent of their loss of race consciousness.
How, then, does one account for this sudden and drastic reversal of the manner in which the black students view themselves? What lies behind the wave of black student confrontations which became so widespread a phenomenon of the past school year?
  The answers are to be found both in the new temper which is sweeping black Americans generally, as well as in the new overall mood of college students. The supine, apathetic college student of the pre and post-war era has largely disappeared, or at least he is being overshadowed by a new breed of student who looks at the society with a critical eye and is willing to challenge those things which he thinks are wrong. The dissident white students, post-war babies who were reared in relative prosperity and who cut their teeth on the civil rights struggle and the anti-war movement-only to find the sources of power unresponsive and paternalistic-find protest against established authority a proper and normal part of their daily life.

Much of this experience applies as well to black students, especially
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