The Unfamiliar Campus Southern Negro Students

...Not long ago I was present at a conversation between a young student rebel and the venerable social philosopher Horace Kallen...

...Education extends to the knowledge one acquires by being both student and teacher in the real world—without the help of required reading lists...

...from Barnard College, then joined the Special Human Relations Staff of the National Student YWCA to work with white and Negro Southern college students...

...Note: Staughton Lynd teaches history at Spelman College in Atlanta...

...My dear," the philosopher responded, "what is an institution...

...This is simultaneously attractive and repulsive...

...The movement for Southern Negro students is an alternative education, a different kind of career: it is the closest America has come to Paul Goodman's "anti-college," where students learn because they want to, learn in order to do, and discover who they are...

...This summer the staff reached a high, of 190 workers...

...When students survive in their non-academic college lives by threading their way through a maze of inflexible regulations, they will also be inclined to believe that knowledge has already been fixed and can be found in the assigned text...

...On March of this year I went to the court house to register to vote and things was swell until one day three weeks ago I was in the field chopping cotton, a big Negro man hear me talking about voting and he started to talk loud and say that I was the cause of him not having the job he used to have, that them people and that voting mess was messing things up for him, to go over to Greenwood and tell them niggers that he had had freedom and to just let the people alone...

...His academic life, following the pattern of his whole life in a society full of danger for him, has been directed by parents and teachers fearful above all of mistakes...

...Thus SNCC launched its first voter registration drive in Walthall, Pike, and Amite counties in Mississippi...

...you forget that it is a corporation...

...As I surveyed the revolution from an academic height in New York in 1962 it occurred to me that anything revolutionary North or South was bound to raise my citizenship status...

...As of 1963, SNCC had initiated and participated in direct action campaigns in fifty-four cities in thirteen Southern states...

...But we'll never turn back, no, we'll never turn back Until we've all been freed and we have equality...

...By treating its students as boys rather than as men, the Negro college produces men who will consent to be treated as "boys...

...The remarks of the administrator and the student help to explain why the Negro college is both the most stifling and the most exciting educational setting in the United States today...

...SNCC affidavit from Mississippi, July 29, 1963.] When a Negro student becomes committed to the revolution, he learns that there is little value in theoretical study if he is not free to use his knowledge on the outside...

...The courage and vitality of the Southern student movement attracts...

...When a professor was fired at Savannah State in spring 1963, students withdrew from the college in droves despite "back to class" orders from the State Board of Regents...

...Atlanta University, where W. E. B. DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction...

...But the typical Northerner is likely to be wholly unaware of the other 114 predominantly Negro colleges such as Lincoln University, where Nkrumah went to college...

...They may be vaguely aware of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and of Fisk University in Nashville...

...and this, too, is part of the penny-pinching, the acceptance of second-best, the restricted horizons, which poverty produces...

...It managed to bring out a bit of soul rhythm through spirituals and the blues and jazz, but only recently have we begun to translate for outsiders what it means to walk all over God's heaven in a golden robe, or for all of God's children to have shoes...

...After the Freedom Rides in 1961 it became clear that something more should be done to alleviate the fears of Southern Negroes...

...The Negro sub-culture as well as physical grime were ruthlessly expunged...

...Funds have been provided from various sources to make it possible for fifteen SNCC staff members to return to college this year...

...Instead of providing a breathing-space in which the youngster might explore his identity and gird his loins in an atmosphere of freedom, the Negro college too often reproduces the coercions of the larger society in a context the more stringent because small and easily-controlled...

...Political pressure on the state-supported Negro college is equally bald...

...Of course, the adviser's comment was a jest: yet it illustrates the gravitational pull which grips even the most adventurous graduate students and turns them into academic organization men...

...In the same years that Dewey and James revolutionized Northern education with the gospel of spontaneous, unfolding, individualized activity, Washington fastened on Negro education a single purpose: to create standard human products externally acceptable to a whitedominated world...

...But the fact is that there is a new spirit among Negro young people which will no more tolerate paternalism in the college than it will continue to accept segregation in the larger community...

...in the summary expulsion which student or faculty dissenters may expect...

...The most revolutionary sounds flow through an office at 8 Raymond Street in Atlanta, headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...

...Others are preparating to return to school...

...The events leading to the present revolution began long before the advent of segregation, a late nineteenth century phenomenon...

...The dark passionate young lady and the calm white-haired sage understood each other perfectly...

...We have walked through the shadows of death, We had to walk all by ourselves...

...Describing itself on ceremonial occasions as a "family" but very ready in private to stress that the student is financially beholden to the institution, the Negro college still strives, like the company town, to control all aspects of the life of its dependents...

...The student told of administration arguments that education was a "privilege not a right," and that "loyalty to the institution" was the first duty of teacher and student...

...But so thoroughly have the values of the oppressor been internalized, so rigorously do Negro administrators implement the white man's view that a young Negro's every move must be watched and guided if he is ever to amount to anything, that today the excitement in Negro college life comes from off the campus while the campus stifles and holds back...

...or when one realizes the equally deep fears of those who feel they must defend the system at any cost...

...When students have to lie to evade the surveillance of ubiquitous matrons, they will cheat on examinations as well...

...Now we must keep from crawling back under its warmth...

...There is a lot to be heard, but not particularly on the campuses...

...Much of the mediocrity is the direct result of external pressure, financial and political...

...the president, deferential to donors, unctuous in chapel, overbearing to students...

...The laboratory facilities and specialized courses which a modern education in the sciences requires are generally lacking...

...SNCC workers went to Albany, Georgia, in October...

...Even for those less indigent Negro families who of course provide a disproportionate part of Negro college students, a 1960 study by the United States Civil Rights Commission revealed that accessibility, "in the sense of proximity to home and lesser cost," is the most important reason given by students for attending Southern Negro colleges...

...My biggest surprise when I began to teach at a Negro college was to find that the same students who had no fear of defying governors and policemen were so meek and mild in confronting their own college administrations...

...The boss man did not say nothing to me but then that night his wife told me that there was no more cotton to chop and that they did not need me and my children anymore...

...The College "Where we differ," the administrator said, "is that you think a college should be a democracy...

...It was more like the dawn of our recognition...

...The deadness, the stifling, the burden of Southern history press most heavily on the Southern Negro college...

...The Movement I looked over Jordan on the Eve of swinging low And beheld the blood of the lamb...

...Thus the movement is transforming the college...

...It happened one afternoon when I arrived in Jackson, weary after a long ride from Nashville, to find myself in the company of Camus, Baldwin, Ellison, Faulkner...

...He who doubts the persistence of the Washington imprint on Negro college education need only reread the opening chapters of The Invisible Man, based on Ralph Ellison's experience at Tuskegee in the 1930s...

...Miss Yancy is now Campus Coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...

...Because of inadequate guidance and counseling, these students frequently are not aware of alternatives when they choose the nearby Negro college...

...Planning certainly began in the minds of Nat Turner, Denmark Veasey, and in those of most of our black grandfathers...

...Generations of cultural deprivation have trained the Negro student, in Baldwin's words, not to aspire to excellence but "to make peace with mediocrity...

...You see ..:' They talked on, and as I listened I felt a renewal of hope for America...

...At Tuskegee Institute, which he headed from 1881 until his death in 1915, Washington created a regime whose spirit was not only in loco parentis but very definitely also in loco Caucasiensis...

...Work-study projects have recently been instituted at Tougaloo College and Miles College to relieve the tension experienced by some students between action and academics...

...Some students work during summer breaks from school...

...The Committee was originally formed to coordinate activities among protest groups...

...One understands, of course, why the teachers hesitate to come...

...Beittel, president of Tougaloo, calls "an internship in practical citizenship," will permit students to work on a voter registration project and attend special civil rights seminars for one year, and will provide funds to cover the cost of their tuition for the following year...

...Cut off from the larger society, recruiting faculty and staff from recent graduates or the graduates of similar schools, these colleges tend to perpetuate a style of administration which may have been necessary for survival in 1900 but is grotesquely inappropriate in 1963...

...The administrators of Negro colleges defend the tight ships which they run by referring to the small-town rural backgrounds of many students, and to the desires of parents...

...After living in the North all my life, it seemed like a good idea to spend a little time looking and listening...

...In the following article, Mr...

...The State of Georgia, in which one out of every three inhabitants is Negro, last year spent $39,800,000 on college education for whites and $2,500,000 on college education for Negroes...

...If teachers who support student grievances are denounced as outside agitators, if petitions for campus freedoms are met with scholarship cancellations and expulsions, the students are educated to see the off-campus and on-campus struggles as a single movement...

...There are, however, many supplements to institutional learning...

...If my own experience before going South to teach in a Negro college is typical, graduate students in the North know next to nothing about the world of Negro education...

...The at...

...This is where one comes to realize what it takes to raise the percentage of registered Negro voters in Leflore County, Mississippi above one per cent...

...finally the students, eager to succeed on the terms agreed to by parents, teachers, and the mass media, but obscurely aware that some larger possibility is thereby being forfeited...

...This program, which Dr...

...Alabama State and Albany State, seed-beds of the Montgomery and Albany Movements...

...South Carolina had a barbed wire fence erected around South Carolina State College at Orangeburg to separate it from nearby Claflin College after State students participated in protest demonstrations...

...En route I stopped at a number of campuses in the South...

...traction comes from the richness of the experience of meeting people in the course of a voter registration project, or when one goes North to interpret the movement...

...The movement is encouraging its members to meet the challenges confronting them...

...This is a paradox when one reflects that the larger Southern society is in the last analysis responsible for the deficiencies of the Negro college and that life on the campus should be at least somewhat more free than life on the segregated streets...

...the intellectual deadness of what Mencken called "the Sahara of the Bozart" repels...

...Students have often had to defy their own administrations in order to participate in off-campus demonstrations...

...Would a doctor take an oath to his hospital, or to his patient...

...By maintaining a repressive social atmosphere, the college accentuates the obstacles to academic learning...

...The cloak of invisibility has been dropped...

...When one president referred to student demonstrators as "vicious hoodlums" and expelled them, the student body called on the administrator en masse and circled his home at night with lighted candles until he was willing to speak with them...

...No Negro colleges appear there...

...The student wrote: "To be a Negro in America is a perpetual wonder and bewilderment...

...This is where one is certain to hear the news when students in Americus, Georgia are charged with attempt to incite insurrection (and face possible death sentences) for trying to get people registered to vote...

...This ignorance is one more indication that separate education for the Negro has not been equal...

...Being Negro already, it could not drop much lower...

...On the Negro college campus there are likely to be few student organizations, no bookstore, a bare semblance of an independent newspaper...

...Kallen recalled how during the worst of the McCarthy years the trustees of the New School had drawn a curtain over an Orozco mural in the lobby...

...the patronizing white trustee, anxious to be sure his money is well spent...

...The boss man was in the field and heard him talking to me...

...And it could happen any place where SNCC is in action...

...The repulsion comes with realizing the depths of fear which the system of segregation has instilled in the people one is trying to persuade to register...

...Their educations range from what one gets in a Mississippi Negro high school to Masters programs at Harvard...

...Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, closed down entirely after student demonstrations reached a high point in 1961...

...Lynd is primarily responsible for the section on "The College" and Miss Yancy for the section on "The Movement...

...Paternalism shows itself in the largely prescribed curriculum...

...Coming from elementary and high schools where the textbooks were often discards from the white schools and the teachers often had no preparation in the subjects they taught, the Negro student entering college may never have had an exciting teacher...

...When in social life emphasis is laid on external correctness and the avoidance of mistakes, the willingness to explore and take risks in the classroom will be discouraged, too...

...By November 16 students, feeling that the problems of the day should take precedence over immediately earning a college degree, volunteered to take a year or more from school to work in the hard-core areas of the South...

...Bennett, Hampton, Dillard, Tougaloo, Spelman, and many more...

...We made a special effort," Washington tells, "to teach the students the meaning of Christmas, and to give them lessons in its proper observance": this, to the creators of the spirituals...

...I don't think that he knew I had been down to register...

...In the Mississippi Delta, where the annual income of Negro families is little more than $1000 a year, one study showed that because of the necessity for all members of the family to chop cotton, 70 per cent of the Negro population twenty-five years and over had not completed seventh grade...

...SNCC evolved out of the sit-in movement which began on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina...

...It seemed to me that if the movement in the South remained strong, Negroes all over the nation would soon get the message...

...I could not help being impressed when I stumbled wearily over stacks of paperbacks in a Freedom House in Mississippi...

...The tenure of independentminded teachers at such institutions is inevitably precarious...

...This is not to say that the value of higher education has decreased for students in SNCC...

...in the absurdly restrictive social regulations...

...That the Tuskegee program included more manual labor than progressive education ever dreamed of only added irony to tragedy...

...The wonder is that, emerging from this smothering subculture, the incoming freshman so often has a glint in his eye and a hope for graduate school...

...Tuskegee students built their school buildings partly because they were poor, and partly—as Washington made quite clear in his Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) —because they were intended to become docile manual laborers and domestic servants for white employers...

...Many if not most incoming freshmen are unable to express themselves effectively on paper...

...If he is bright, he probably spent the last two years of high school running administrative errands rather than forging ahead of his classmates intellectually...

...At another school, indignant students "sat down" in the auditorium until the trustees investigated their grievances...

...So I decided to join the ranks of the rebellious, and prepared to move to Atlanta...

...Though schools like Miles College in Birmingham and Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi, are breaking free from this pattern, the Booker Washington tradition is dominant in most Southern Negro colleges...

...Yet the cultural isolation of the Southern Negro college is in good measure shared by its white counterparts: Ralph McGill has called the poverty of Southern education a "wound draining away the strength of the region...

...By its own attitude, the college administration transfers the question of freedom onto the campus...

...When as a graduate student I faced the decision of where to work, the vocational counselor of the department advised us only to select schools which appeared in the football scores of the sports section of The New York Times...

...The men and women of SNCC are a breed unto themselves...

...Their fund of general information is astonishingly meager: the same, very bright student who wrote of the "perpetual wonder and bewilderment" thought that the Battle of Lexington took place in Lexington, Kentucky...

...The setting and the cast will be found all over the South: the beautiful fragrant campus with its imposing buildings...

...The Negro college president who receives his funds from a white Board of Regents is the quintessential Uncle Tom: Booker T. Washington was the prototype...

...This is no abstraction...

...In his autobiography Up from Slavery, Washington tells proudly of checking each incoming student to make sure he had a toothbrush, and observing students as they left chapel to make sure all buttons were in place...

...What more conclusive criticism could there be of American higher education than the fact that so few products of the best universities come to the South to teach, and that no university or foundation has yet seen fit to finance properly even the bare chronological recording of the Southern student movement...

...For those who see the movement as a means of broadening their horizons, the decision to leave school and work in it is an easy one...

...The summer of 1963 has been called everything from the summer of our discontent to the second American Revolution...

...But mediocrity in the Southern Negro college involves more than external pressures and unavoidable deprivations...

...The academic freedom crisis in the South which C. Vann Woodward reported last year in Harper's is, once more, serious in all Southern institutions but especially so in those predominatly Negro...

...North Carolina A. and T., four of whose students staged the first sit-in...

...Somehow the nature of the plan has always been held in secret...

...They are increasing its value, making it worth something...

...Albany State College expelled students for taking part in civil rights demonstrations during Christmas vacation...