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165 CHAPTER SIX Student Power and Black Power at the South’s Negro Colleges THE SIT-INS of the early 1960s opened the black campus up to criticism. When the presidents of these institutions responded to the threat or reality of student-led demonstrations by attempting to limit student and faculty involvement , they invited questions about the limits of academic freedom. From this opening grew a more detailed critique of the black college or university. In many respects, this critique resembled the calls for university reform and student power that developed on predominantly white campuses. The South’s black colleges and universities often maintained social rules that were, if anything, more restrictive than those on white campuses. These rules and regulations, along with limits on speech and political activity, often were the first targets for activist black students, just as they were for white students. But the rapid emergence of Black Power in the summer of 1966 modified the direction that activism on black campuses took. “Like a Black Midas’ wand, this movement imbues everything it touches with an ebony hue,” reported Robert Goodman, an instructor at Morehouse College, in 1968. “A discussion of Descartes in Western civ is likely to wind up in heated debate over how Descartes would have analyzed Black Power or whether white philosophers are relevant to Black people anyway.”1 Goodman’s comments provide a window into a period in which scholarly controversies and political turmoil fed off of each other. By the late 1960s, many radical black activists had rejected the philosophy of nonviolence, the usefulness of alliances with white liberals, and the virtue of integration. Instead, they argued for self-defense, the need for black people to form their own institutions, and the virtue of power—which they should take “by any means necessary.” In their 1967 book, Black Power, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc) activist Stokely Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture) and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton argued that the black community should 166 CHAPTER SIX “redefine itself, set forth new values and goals, and organize around them.” Rejecting assimilation into white society as surrender to co-optation by an exploitative white power structure, Carmichael and Hamilton instead contended that black people should identify with Africans and other Third World peoples who struggled against colonial domination. This reconfigured cultural identity would accompany a new political program that emphasized the need to “close ranks,” controlling black institutions and participating in coalitions with other groups, such as white liberals, only when the conditions were right.2 Critics, a group that included not only whites but also moderate and conservative blacks, saw Black Power as counterproductive, violent, and even racist. At the very least, some observers argued, Black Power was a vague rhetorical tool that was short on specific political content. “I contend not only that black power lacks any real value for the civil rights movement, but that its propagation is positively harmful,” declared Bayard Rustin in a 1966 Commentary article that is perhaps the best-known critique of Black Power from within the black community. “It diverts the movement from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces.”3 Black Power took on meaning in specific contexts; in the world of higher education, the movement informed scholars’ efforts to explore the history and culture of African Americans and people of color throughout the world. Above all, Black Power was a cultural movement that sought the psychological liberation of African Americans. Black Power advocates worked to redefine terms. For too long, they believed, white had meant “right,” while black was inferior .4 On individual campuses throughout the South, black students of the late 1960s worked to modify curricula to reflect these developments. But curricular changes were only part of a larger agenda. Student activists on black campuses often wanted their institutions to become actively involved in the drive to liberate and empower African Americans. By the late 1960s, students on the South’s black campuses were asking pointed questions about the racial assumptions that had informed the creation of the institutions that were supposed to be educating them. How could institutions that had been created by whites and that usually still answered to white trustees or politicians possibly serve the needs of the black community? In particular, how could such institutions serve as instruments of black liberation? These questions would have been controversial at any time and...

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