Roy Innes vs. Roy Wilkins
Hill, Norman
THE DEBATE between Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis over demands by Negro students for separate black studies departments has major implications. The question they are arguing is whether separatism...
...If the University had not been split into two units, the UFCT would now be the bargaining agent for the entire University...
...THE DEBATE between Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis over demands by Negro students for separate black studies departments has major implications...
...And there is little ground for compromise...
...These student demands are legitimate...
...During the early sixties he was National Program Director of CORE...
...Under these conditions the walls of segregation become pathetically protective...
...In this regard, I commend the proposal of the Harvard faculty committee to offer a degree in Afro-American Studies that will be open to all students...
...They are the marginal men of the academic world who are viewed by the professoriate as nothing more...
...Many Negroes with a college degree are leaving academia for well-paying jobs in industry and government...
...Vincent Harding, a Negro historian, has noted that opportunities in the North are taking the best black students and professors away from the South, thus depressNorman Hill has been active for many years inthe struggle for Negro rights...
...Black students, who have been brutalized in the past by inferior segregated education, are now being put into the same classrooms with whites and told to match up...
...It is this fact that makes unrealistic student demands for separate black studies departments staffed by black teachers...
...he then worked in the Civil Rights Department ofthe AFL-CIO, and is now Associate Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute...
...They tend to be invisible to the tenured faculty and the Legislative Conference alike...
...The demand for racial justice on the part of American Negroesis balanced by an almost equal psychological reality of the fear of the removal of racial barriers...
...Their sense of pride and dignity will come after they have achieved this competence, not before...
...The growth of the UFCT coincided with the rapid expansion of the University, and it gained its greatest support in the community colleges which were expanding at a faster rate than the rest of the University...
...There are now 400,000 black undergraduates representing about 6 per cent of the college population...
...And this cannot happen within a separatist context which, especially because of the lack of enough competent black professors, will mean that inferior teachers will be giving black students an inferior education so that they can then go out into the world and get inferior jobs...
...The first, which is largely political and sociological, involves a dramatic increase in the numbers of black college students as a result of the breakdown of Jim Crow...
...The lecturers were predisposed to be sympathetic to the UFCT, if only because it was the one organization that paid any attention to them...
...The UFCT's opponent was the Legislative Conference, an old organization of faculty members that in the past had functioned primarily as a lobby...
...With "friends" like these, black people need no enemies...
...And they seek to establish new myths to replace the old...
...Let me emphasize that I whole-heartedly support black studies...
...it has been mostly neglected or distorted in the past...
...Kenneth Clark has brilliantly analyzed the psychological dynamics that are involved here: The walls of segregation are not only humiliating— but given this type of chronic humiliation there develop self-doubt, subtle and flagrant forms of self-hatred, personal and group frustrations, internalized hostility, aggressions, selfdenial, or bombast...
...Moreover, because black students have been subjected to inferior education in the past, they must now demand the very best education that is possible...
...Wm...
...While we should expect the number of black professors to increase during the coming decade, it will not do so dramatically...
...Many of them, I am afraid, are not sure they can...
...Rather, they become an attempt to protect a fragile sense of pride from a threatening outside world by blocking out that world...
...There are some who, out of a sense of guilt as well as a need to identify with the black "revolution," have unthinkingly supported the most intemperate of the black spokesmen...
...In 1946 there were four municipal colleges in the city...
...The second is the psychological reaction of black students to the integrated situation in which they now find themselves...
...The impact of this change has been felt largely by predominantly white universities which have intensified their recruitment efforts...
...Faculty ranks are equated by tradition with supervisory levels in the public school system...
...One answer is that they are striving for pride and dignity, and that they are trying to destroy the racial myths that have distorted the image of the black man, both in his own mind and in the minds of white people...
...Since it shares many characteristics with other pub licly-supported institutions, the results have more than local significance...
...If it is, not only will Negro history continue to be distorted— this time by black people with their own racial and political axes to grind—but a new and tragic chapter shall be written into it...
...Within them the subjugated individuals need not meet the tests of free and open competition— need not expose vulnerable egos to single standards of competence...
...But there is a sociological reality which students have yet to confront...
...Consequently, physical facilities have not kept step with enrollment: classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories, library space, office space, clerical assistance for the faculty—all are in short supply...
...The UFCT president, Israel Kugler, himself a community college professor, is uniquely fitted to understand his colleagues' problems...
...Yet these demands for "identity" begin to mean something entirely different once they take on a separatist character...
...Since the Conference does not define itself as a union, except in a purely formal sense, it would seem that professors are still far from ready for unionization...
...The one exception is salaries, which are among the best in the nation...
...Murray Hausknech+ IN DECEMBER 1968, shortly after the last strike of New York's United Federation of Teachers ended, its sister union, the United Federation of College Teachers, entered a collective bargaining election at the City University of New York...
...In turn, the union was predisposed to attend to them by something more than simply the dictates of organizing strategy...
...Of the other allies there are those who have always been for segregation and others who see separatism as a means of satisfying some blacks without having to spend the money that will be needed if all blacks are to get an excellent education...
...There are simply not enough Negro professors to go around, nor will there be in the foreseeable future...
...It will be a chapter replete with echoes of past injustices, and it will tell the story of how the civil rights movement was destroyed before it could achieve for black people the equality which they had so long been denied...
...Many Negro students who will not permit themselves to be judged by "white" standards may be saying, "I am afraid that if judged by those standards I shall prove incompetent...
...this figure exceeds by 100,000 the projection made by the Census Bureau two years ago...
...Separatism, in this sense, is a defensive reaction to the shock of integration...
...and when the UFT organized the high school teachers, the college professors enjoyed one of the most profitable free rides in the history of unionism...
...Negro professors in particular have been recruited by Northern schools to meet student demands for black faculty members...
...ARE black students making such demands in the first place...
...But black students must meet those standards, in law and physics as well as in "black studies," if they are to get decent jobs and substantially improve their economic condition...
...Like other public universities, the City University exists in a state of chronic financial crisis...
...The lecturers' salaries are absurdly low, and their status is indicated by a former president who referred to them as "the fluid bottom...
...The UFCT won easily in the first unit, but it was only after a run-off election that it lost to the Conference in the other unit...
...In this respect, I think these efforts are altogether praiseworthy...
...The history of the Negro in America is an extraordinarily relevant study for all Americans...
...It is a history both magnificent and tragic, and one can only be COMMENTS AND OPINIONS come wiser from studying it...
...For this election, the University had been split into two units by the supervising state agency: one made up of part-time faculty, the other of tenured teachers...
...They staff the colleges' large evening sessions, and without them the day sessions would be in serious trouble...
...However, only 15 per cent of the tenured faculty chose the third alternative of no collective bargaining agent, and the UFCT's showing was far better than most observers had expected...
...A word about the white allies of the black separatists...
...But if Wilkins is correct in opposing a black "version of segregation and Jim Crow," then not only must the civil rights movement stay alive if Negro Americans are to have equality, but the separatists must be criticized (and, as Wilkins proposes, fought in the courts) for commiting an injustice against the black community...
...What I fear is that black studies may be made a pretext for separatism...
...There should be more black professors in the universities just as there should be more black students...
...Ironically, these efforts to advance Negro education have hurt Negro colleges in the South where half of the nation's black undergraduates still attend school...
...Black people, I should think, have had enough of "separate but equal" to know that it must always be a form of degradation...
...They no longer represent an assertion of pride and the destruction of myths...
...In the absence of collective bargaining, though, the University has not provided some fringe benefits won by the UFT for its constituency...
...Since then these four have grown to seven, plus a college of police science, a two-year upper-level college, six community colleges (with a seventh scheduled to open in September), a medical school affiliate, a social work school, and a graduate center...
...These whites, secure in their comforts and careers but "oppressed" by ennui, are wishing for a kind of revolution-by-proxy...
...Those benefiting minimally from the increase in salaries are the lecturers, the non-tenured and largely part-time staff drawn mainly from the graduate-student population of the city...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ing the level of education there...
...The question they are arguing is whether separatism is a condition that black Americans should desire and, in fact, struggle to achieve...
...If the answer is "yes," as Innis would have it, then in his own words "the civil rights movement is dead...
...Last year only 0.78 per cent of all Ph.D.'s awarded went to blacks, which is slightly less than the previous year...
...The debate takes place within the context of two related but contradictory movements...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
