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BLUES FOR NEGRO COLLEGE     DENT

strations against segregated public facilities in the late fifties and early sixties were immediately suppressed. In the state schools, whose lifeline is a racist southern legislature, the suppression was much more blatant, complete with mass dismissals, and in the case of Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., charges brought by the school itself against demonstration leaders. In the private colleges, many of which suffered considerable loss of their most talented students to the freedom movement, no strong suppression of student demonstrations was forthcoming, but no strong support, at least in public, either. Those few schools, like Fisk in Nashville and Tougaloo near Jackson, which became havens for student movement activity, have now cooled down such activity.
 
Despite the understandable historical reasons for fear of controversy on the black campus, the continuance of it has been a detrimental factor in the development of the schools. Controversy, debate, conflict-all are essential in a free world of ideas. As an educational institution in the fullest sense, any school afraid of controversy and conflict is not worth its salt.

fear of positive racial identity

Most of this section applies to the liberal arts colleges particularly because they had some choice about what they would become. The state land-grant colleges are, for the most part, boxed into a more confining position. 

To understand the ideological problems of the liberal arts colleges we must again examine the nineteenth century origins of the schools. The purpose of the missionary spirit was not to accept the validity of black culture, but to bring a "culture" to the black masses. A strong challenge to this theory by black educators would not only have constituted a dangerous political attack against white southern society, but a revolutionary attack on the subtle paternalism-racism of the northern whites who were the key sources of support.

Unfortunately, but understandably, such an attack by Negro college leaders never developed. What did develop was a growing alliance and identification with an emerging black bourgeoisie whose aims where to achieve economic security and social status within the confines of Negro life at the cost of identification with black masses and involvement in the fight against white racism. In fact, the Negro college became an almost necessary stepping-stone for middle class status. 
The black middle class, as it began to emerge in numbers, often copied the white middle class to the point of absurdity, accepting

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