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FREEDOMWAYS                                            FOURTH QUARTER 1968

American Missionary Association, the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, the Catholic Church, and in a few cases, black arms of the Baptist church and the African Methodist Episcopal. The money for these schools came from the North, first from the philanthropic whites, and in this century from foundations and the federal government. If the attitudes of the white backers of these colleges were not as pointedly paternalistic and racist as Gunby's they were only slightly less so. After all, the object of missionary work has always been to bring civilization to the "heathens"; why go all the way to South America or Africa when there was plenty of work to do uplifting the former slaves in our troublesome South? In hardly any case-at least none that I read of-did black people actually control their own schools. Control is the key work because it implies the power to act in your own best interests at any time you choose.
  It is important to remember that the colleges, both privately funded and state, developed in a southern and national climate extremely hostile to black people and particularly to any indication that increasing educational opportunities would be used to further the interests of a subjugated people by challenging the interests of the white majority and the status quo. Negro college administrators sought to protect their precarious positions by not allowing any spark of opposition to the status quo to grow on their campuses. The prototype of this kind of leader was Booker T. Washington and the tight behavioral and ideological reins by which he governed Tuskegee. It is a sad but, in my opinion, true commentary that as far as Negro education is concerned, the philosophy of Washington still holds predominant, and not the more enquiring philosophy of his great adversary, W.E.B. Du Bois. 
  It is not surprising that there has been an extremely high mortality rate of faculty members and students who chose to challenge, particularly in a public or otherwise demonstrative way, the social and political status quo of the South. The bright, questioning, trouble-making minds were driven away in a hurry.
  This policy has resulted in an unfortunate totalitarianism at most of the schools, exercised by the presidents-a totalitarianism which the presidents often justify in the name of protecting their schools against a hostile white society. The rationalizing of the president in Ellison's brilliant chapter on the Negro college in Invisible Man is a case in point, and this kind of thing still exists, though the pressures and rationalization may be slightly more subtle.
  Given this background, it isn't difficult to see why student demon-

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