THE nation's increasingly militant black students last week were admonished by a black man who has spent most of his life trying to advance the cause of his race. Speaking at the annual corporate meeting of the N.A.A.C.P., Executive Director Roy Wilkins warned that students demanding separate, all-black departments of study on the nation's campuses are really seeking "what are, patently, Jim Crow schools." Though many black students consider Wilkins a tame, white man's Negro, his argument had a practical ring that was aimed at the moderates. Since the students are going to live in what is basically a white world, said Wilkins, "they had better learn what the white boys are learning." It was "simple suicide," he added, for the black minority to talk of "separatism and going it alone." Demands for separate dormitories and classrooms, moreover, would unquestionably lead to court action over the legality of using tax funds for such purposes.
Wilkins' warning reflected the growing gap between black moderates on the campus and the aggressive policies of their more militant Negro brothers—and it came at a time when U.S. higher education seemed to be the victim of an artfully orchestrated conspiracy of disruption. At campus after campus, militant black students slammed down lists of nonnegotiable demands on presidential desks, threatening to shut down colleges that would not comply and organizing protests, picket lines and strikes. San Francisco State was near paralysis after 73 days of a strike called by the college's Black Students Union. The militants were also out in force at Brandeis, the University of Minnesota and San Fernando Valley State College, at Wittenberg University in Ohio, Queens College in New York and Swarthmore. In deference to the sudden death last week of Swarthmore's president, Dr. Courtney C. Smith, 52, Afro-American Students Society members ended their occupation of the admissions office, but indicated that their grievances would still have to be resolved by the college.
Together By Ourselves. The assault on the schools was no conspiracy of black students, despite the similarity of tactics and goals. Negro student associations are as autonomous as their campuses; they have no central organization, and not even a common name. Some of them, in fact, are out-and-out competitors for power. Last week, after attending a stormy meeting of several rival black student groups at U.C.L.A., two black students were shot and killed on campus by unknown assailants.
The groups may call themselves Black Students Unions or Afro-American Associations. Whatever their names, they claim to speak for as many as 90% of the Negroes on their campuses. Some, like the B.S.U. at San Francisco, are run by left-wing militants who are at least as radical as Students for a Democratic Society. Others, like Harvard's Association of African and Afro-American Students, prefer the civilized techniques of negotiation to a formal confrontation with white society.