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FREEDOMWAYS          FIRST QUARTER 1973

United States and we know that his graduation* did not cause the above named universities to be overrun by Blacks in Gowns.  In fact, Russwurm did not graduate from one of the older places, but from Bowdoin College instead.  A major sin of the bigotry practiced in those colleges is that with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania, all of those named were founded by some religious order.  In fact, it seems doubly ironic that two of today's more respectable and "sacred" pre-occupations, religion and higher education, could have been so elitist and ill-responsible in an area so vital to a people's survival.  Of course, we know that before the Civil War, to teach Black people to read and write was a crime in parts of this land.

jim crow, racism remain

So, the role of the Black college in today's society has not really changed from its role of yesteryear.  One hundred years of frustration and battle have not resulted in victory over Jim Crow and racism.  All Black schools and colleges are emergencies from the same back-ground.  Their essential objective throughout has been to develop a leadership for the reclamation and uplift of Black people.  Most of the Black colleges grew out of the smoke and fire of the Civil War, and the patriotic missionary fervor of emancipation.³  But underlying the fundamental aim of all of them was the building of an enlightened leadership, within the race, capable of not only giving guidance to the Black masses but which would also be able to tear down derogatory walls and dogmas which had become hoary with age and tradition.  Institutions such as Fisk (1865), Howard (1867), Morgan State (1867), Wilberforce (1856), Tougaloo (1871) Hampton Institute (1868), Alcorn (1871), Lincoln (1854), Tuskegee Institute (1881), Atlanta University (1865), Morehouse (1867), have many years on the front lines of battle.  Five years from now Jackson State College will celebrate its first 100 years of existence.

Jackson State's year of birth is particularly monumental because it coincides with the infamous compromise of 1877.  In that year even the federal government turned its back on the Black man in the South and that became a very significant national step towards legal segregation in this country.  How remarkable is it to see that as Jackson State prepares to celebrate its centennial and the United States makes


*Editor's note: Russwurm was long thought to be the first Black to graduate from a U.S. college but Edward A. Jones graduated from Amherst College in August 1826, eleven days before Russwurm.  (Horace Mann Bond's "The Negro Scholar and Professional in America" in The American Negro Reference Book, 1966.)

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