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All too often, such hopes dim soon after matriculation. Militant black students complain that colleges teach nothing to prepare them for coping with everyday ghetto problems like rat control, police hostility and price gouging by white merchants. Worse for black identity, white-oriented courses more or less ignore Negro contributions to American history and culture. While standard history courses extol the white abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, for instance, they seldom mention David Walker, a black abolitionist and one of the first U.S. Negroes to press for equality. If there is a black record in American poetry, politics or science—and there is—U.S. education has rarely studied or taught it.
Out of such frustration comes the clamor for black studies—courses aimed at defining and demonstrating the black role in America. In a recent survey of 185 colleges and universities, Educational Consultant Joseph Colmen found that 23 campuses will offer full-fledged "black" majors by next fall. San Diego State and Stanford already offer bachelor's degrees in Afro-American Studies.
What the students want out of black studies is basically identity—an explanation of blackness, a pride in it, relief and rebirth. Some yearn for knowledge of their African ancestors; others place a greater emphasis on the cultural achievements of the American Negro; almost all are determined that black studies should stress courses directly related to the pressing needs of the black community. Common to many black militants, though, is a pessimism that white faculties will understand what they have in mind. Says Bill Osby, a Cornell graduate student: "Having a black studies program on a white liberal campus may turn out to be almost impossible because the administration and the faculty are just not going to let the program get at the essentials. They will simply let us study black history and wear daishikis while we get ready to work for Xerox or IBM. I'm for a black studies program that helps to destroy white culture in the minds of black people. And going through an intellectual environment is not enough: black studies has got to be an action-oriented program."
Salvaging Stupidity
How militant blacks expect to ignore realities like Xerox and still survive in a technological society is a question to which they obviously have not given much deep thought. As they see it, the priority is self-development through black studies, and toward that end, new courses are now emerging. Among them:
> A sociology course on "The Black Family" taught at Oakland's Merritt College by Melvin Newton, 31, brother of imprisoned Black Panther Co-Founder Huey P. Newton. Newton discusses and then discounts the white concept of the black family as a weak social unit, a notion that is partly based on the relative frequency with which Negro fathers abandon their homes. "The important thing is not to view the stability factor," argues Newton. "The secret of the black family is its ability to survive, its flexibility." In his lectures, Newton attempts to build black pride by accentuating this affirmative view.