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Carter G. Woodson's
"The Mis-Education of the Negro"
Revisited: Black Colleges, Black Studies

E. C. FOSTER

FORTY YEARS ago Carter G. Woodson authored a very timely book, The Mis-Education of the Negro.  Examining the applicability of the Black man's formal education to such important areas as politics, economics, religion, in addition to education, Woodson argued convincingly that the Negro is thoroughly misguided in these areas and that at no time in the country's history had creditable effort been put forth, at any level, to educate Black people properly.  Addressing himself to the practice in Higher Education during a time when disfranchisement of Black citizens was at its peak.  Woodson tells how in spite of the awesome need of expert legal advice white universities barred Blacks from entering their racist Law Schools.  To Woodson, one of the ironies of mankind has been the fact that the education of Blacks, "the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them..."¹ Keeping this in mind, then, one should not find today's art of mis-educating Black people anything but in the truest of American tradition.

In the May 1972 issue of The Black Scholar, Nathan Hare recalls that originally the major premises of "Black studies were: 1) that there can be no equality of education in a racist society; 2) the type of education conceived and perpetrated by the white oppressor is essentially an education for oppression; and 3) black education must be education for liberation, or at least for change." In a pragmatic way, according to Hare, Black Studies was to "prepare black students to become the catalysts for a black cultural revolution.  All courses-whether history, literature, or mathematics-would be taught from a revolutionary ideology or perspective.  Black education would be-come the instrument for change."²

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E. C. Foster is director, Institute for The Study of History, Life and Culture of Black People, Jackson State College, Mississippi.

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