Viewing page 97 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BLUES FOR NEGRO COLLEGE     DENT

to the stage of repudiate his ungrateful predecessor. Paul Robeson is an excellent case in point.

With values in such a state we can easily see why little attention was given to black culture in the Negro college. Why teach the worthless, what one is escaping from? Why teach the useless? Why teach Bessie Smith along with Bach? Bessie Smith won't get you anywhere in white America. Why teach Frederick Douglass along with Abraham Lincoln? Douglass is hopelessly outdates while everyone knows Lincoln freed us. Why teach Langston Hughes along with Robert Frost in freshman English? Everyone knows Negro poetry isn't worth much. Why read Du Bois? White America doesn't respect the views of Du Bois. And so on.

The Brown decision of 1954 did not change this situation. The aim of the United Negro College Fund colleges became, after Brown, a vague sort of eventual integration, meaning, one supposes, they would shed whatever black heritages they did have, becoming, just good colleges which everyone, white and black, would attend. The name Negro Colleges lost favor, and the schools began calling themselves "Predominately Negro Colleges," (producing, one supposes, the Predominantly Negro graduate). The Predominantly Negro colleges moved rapidly in the fifties and sixties toward what I would describe as a non-racism. When Christopher Jencks and David Riesman published their controversial study "The American Negro College" in the Harvard Educational Review (Vol. 37, No. 1, 1967) they states that:
"...all colleges, black or white, should do far more than they now do to build part of their curriculum on the world of their students outside the classroom, that is, on the actual culture from which the students come."
I wholeheartedly agree. But President Emeritus Benjamin Mays of Morehouse, in one of four rebuttals by Negro college administrators commented:
"If they mean that Negro colleges should emphasize Negro history more and do more to help Negroes in the communities where the colleges exist, no one would or could disagree. But when they assume that the Negro has a distinct, unmixed culture of his own, they are not convincing."
Then Mays asks:
"Are Negroes not Americans? What is this culture from which Negro students come and for which they are headed?"
It's hard to believe.

391