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Blues for the Negro College

Thomas C. Dent

Two summers AGO I had the opportunity to spend a few days on the campus of my alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The occasion was a week-long engagement of performances and workshops by the Free Southern Theater for pre-freshmen at the Atlanta University system.
  The entire experience was very interesting, but I would like to relate one particular incident. The Sunday before we were to perform several of us went to eat dinner at Morehouse. When we reached the entrance to the dining hall we were told that the men could not eat unless they were wearing jackets and ties as that was their inviolable rule. I explained to the gentleman taking tickets that we were visitors and not particularly interested in the finer points of a Negro college education- we merely wanted to eat. My protests, of course, were to no avail. We chose to eat elsewhere. 
  This incident stuck in my mind. The man who was enforcing the sacred rule was an elderly gentleman, a retired minister. He had been around the campus in some job or other when I was a student in the early fifties, and had probably been there for decades before my time. The image of this knight and shining armor fiercely protecting something which was probably the only thing he knew, which to him was so firmly connected with Negro college education that it was unshakable and not subject to compromise - this image stuck me as both infuriatingly stupid and, at the same time, hilarious.
  Nothing else that happened during our stay at Morehouse brought me as sharply back to the atmosphere, the feeling of what it was like to be a student there. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this kind of thing was Negro college education, this was the core of it. It has to do with pedagogy of behavior, behavior which in the minds of the educators will make one acceptable to ___

Thomas C. Dent is Director of the Free Southern Theater. His articles and book reviews have been published in FREEDOMWAYS and other periodicals. 

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