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FREEDOMWAYS      FIRST QUARTER 1973

Come, then comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute.

... Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of man; yet murder men everywhere they find them....9

By now it should be obvious to even the least informed that Black people will free themselves from their mental exploiters only after they have firmly decided to do so. Clearly, "no one else can accomplish this task for the race. It must plan and do for itself."10

Black Studies Programs proposed to deal seriously with the education of Black folks. Demands for Black Studies could be heard the length and breadth of the nation after the brutal assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. On campus after campus, North, South, East, and West, this demand for Black Studies was responded to in very hasty fashion. A few schools, failing to act in the spirit of deliberate or revolutionary speed in creating Black Studies programs, were helped along when certain key administrators could no longer dictate or straddle fences on their own volition. The big promise made by Black Studies was that education would be made relevant and meaningful in terms of bringing about change in the interest of Black people.

Black colleges, too, moved to create Black Studies during the vogue of the late 1960's. Long before the cities started burning in the "great society" of the 1960's, Woodson pleaded that the most "inviting field for discovery and invention..., is the Negro himself. . . ."11 Of course, the Black colleges' imitation of white institutions is excelled only by the historical degradation that the government, the church, the economic system, white people generally, have heaped upon Black people. But even so, a Black Studies program on a Black college campus, at least in part, implies that there is far more important business to be engaged in by the college expertise than the exclusive history, conditions and future of Black humanity.

Black studies programs a need for today

In many circles today is the rumor that, like God, Black Studies are dead. For whatever the reasons more than a few pall-bearers seem anxious to bury Black Studies until the next time around. In the eyes of most observers in this wake school, Black Studies are seen far

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 08:58:04