The Past is Prologue: Attacks on Black academic achievement

Get the Point!

I always have been extremely fascinated by the fact that within 25 years of formal freedom per the Emancipation Proclamation and subsequent 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, that several dozen institutions were founded by free Blacks and/or progressive white missionaries/philanthropists to educate the masses of Black people who, during 256 years of enslavement, knew that even attempting to learn how to read meant a brutal whipping—or summary death at the hands of masters and overseers who wanted to keep them uneducated.

Black men working circa 1888 to finish what would become Graves Hall, the iconic building and logo for Morehouse College, which was founded in 1867.

Pick a Historically Black College or University, and I assure you that it more likely than not was founded during Reconstruction or the Jim Crow era amid overt hostility from the Ku Klux Klan and affiliated degenerates who were dead set upon thwarting Black economic progress. 

Knowing this history, it disappoints me to no end to see that 24 years into the 21st Century, that overt attacks on a broad based liberal arts education have taken root across the country, particularly in the Deep South where the majority of Black people still live—and where HBCU's continue to churn out Black professionals each year. 

Spelman College was founded in 1881; the above Spelman students are participating in an agronomy class on campus around the turn of the (20th) century

If you have followed my writings through the years, then you know that one of my op/ed idols is Dr. George Will, the Princeton educated, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post who has written 16 books and over 6,000 columns during his distinguished career. Now, I do not always agree with Dr. Will's conservative conclusions on the issues of our day, but I truly enjoy his mastery of the King's English. 

George Will

Dr. Will recently participated in a podcast for Higher Education magazine and during the segment, expressed his frustrations with attacks on academia from the MAGA right, and how the elimination of history and English literature courses across the nation only serve to make the next generation of leaders limited in their thinking and problem solving skills. Said Will, “(Today)You can get an English degree from Yale without reading Shakespeare. You can graduate from many American colleges and universities without ever having taken an American history course. I have said over and over again that when I'm dictator of America, the only permissible college major is going to be history. I'm just so tired of having to reinvent the wheel every generation by teaching people the humility that comes from studying history properly taught. Properly taught history says, 'Look at what other people have surmounted.' Instead, today, history teaches arrogance. People read history and say, 'How could they have been so much inferior to me?'" 

Booker T. Washington (center) founded the Tuskegee Institute (University) in 1881 to “lift the veil of ignorance from the masses.” The initial campus buildings, many of which still stand, were built by formerly enslaved Black hands…

Dr. Will wasn't finished, as he took aim at the latest turmoil in academia that has found leaders at Harvard, MIT, and Yale under attack (or removed) due to student support for Hamas (and against Israel) since the October Hamas surprise attacks that led to formal war (and Israeli Defense Forces genocide against Palestinian civilians).

A photo from the 1915 Hampton vs. Howard football game as published in the Crisis Magazine, the official organ of the NAACP. Howard University, founded in 1867, is named for the director of the Freedman's Bureau, Gen. Otis Howard. Hampton Institute (University), Booker T. Washington's alma mater, was founded in 1868.

On censorship or college's weighing in on political hot topics,Will opined, "What we need is a healthy, robust argument about the purpose of a university. For example, the University of Chicago has shown the way, they showed it decades ago with the Kalven Report. Harvard and Yale and all these others have got into terrible trouble, because they haven't taken the right position on Israel's war with Hamas. There is no right position for a university to take! A university should say, as the University of Chicago did in 1967 when students were inflamed about the Vietnam War, the University of Chicago said, 'Nope. We're here not to tell people what to think but how to think.'"

BINGO!

As a lover of English literature, philosophy, Latin, and history since as far back as I can remember, I can attest that all of the books, poems, treatises, and articles that I have read, including Dr. Will's, have helped me to process information in the present, compare it to situations from the past, and to write or articulate solutions in hopes of fomenting a better future. That's why I am so strongly opposed to book bans and any usurpation of free speech because I can learn something even from my ideologically enemies! 

The Florida A&M University (FAMU) Hospital was the only full service hospital to treat Black patients in North Florida and South Georgia during the Jim Crow era. FAMU was founded in 1887, and provided medical services for the Black community from the 1920’s until the above state of the art “separate but equal” facility was constructed in the late 1940’s during the state legislature’s push to stop integration. The FAMU hospital finally closed for service in 1971 when the more modern Tallahassee Memorial Hospital finally integrated—seven years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been signed into law. The above facility is now the Foote-Hillyer Administration building on FAMU’s campus.

Such is also why I find it cringeworthy when highly educated political leaders speak at length about “loving the uneducated,” or actively seek to mute professors and eliminate history and English classes, because it's clear that just like slave masters didn't want their enslaved "property" to be educated because the enslaved would have realized in the clearest terms that their enslavement was a moral wrong, the modern day anti-education political masters desire an ignorant populace because it's far easier to manipulate those who are incapable of deducing that they are being played for fools!

Lest we forget that no matter what the political leaders in your state try to pull with respect to keeping the public in the dark, that just like the character "Good Will Hunting" (Matt Damon) taught over 25 years ago in that Oscar winning classic, anyone can learn anything if they're willing to incur late charges at the public library—or, if I might add, use their smartphones and laptops to broaden their perspectives!