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BLUES FOR THE NEGRO COLLEGE                                         DENT

  Why is it that the Negro colleges have remained insular and anachronistic as a time when black people are becoming increasingly conscious of the richness and viability of their culture? I think it has to do with a kind of fear, a fear which has been nurtured for several decades. This fear is clothed in many disguises on the black campus; as guile, as pragmatism, as religious and moral training, as "culture," as harsh training for future status as a subjugated people-as in the case of the Southern University administrator who told student demonstrators in 1967, "You talking about the Constitution, well the Constitution stops when you walk through that gate onto this campus." I would like to discuss three ways in which this fear manifests itself.

fear of controversy

It is a fact of history that black people did not, for the most part, found what are known today as the Negro colleges. In almost no case were the early nineteenth century schools funded by black people. There is nothing startling about this. The state schools for Negroes were created by southern legislatures to perpetuate school segregation and further their own interests. A speech by A.A. Gunby, a prominent New Orleans attorney, to the National Educational Association meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota in July,1890 succinctly states these aims:

  "Above all things, education of Negro diminishes, if it does not totally banish, all danger of race conflict and trouble. This is the lesson of actual experience. Dr. Hitchcock, the able president of Straight University in New Orleans, assures me that those students who stay with them until they take a full course and become thorough students never have any trouble with the whites in the communities where they teach, preach, or follow other professions; while on the other hand, those who study six months or a year, and then think they know everything, are almost certain to figure in a race-riot soon after they leave school."

Then Gunby, who was considered a liberal, adds, thoughtfully: 
  "This shows how much more thorough Negro education should be."

Most of what we know today as the private liberal arts colleges (particularly those thirty-two which comprise the United Negro College Fund) were founded by northern white missionary arms of several churches-the Congregational (now United Church of Christ)

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