This is a profoundly moving story of Black colleges in Mississippi during a watershed moment in their history. It is also the story of young Americans trying to balance their pursuit of higher education with the parallel struggle for civil rights. Radicalizing the Ebony Tower examines colleges against the backdrop of the black freedom struggle of the middle twentieth century, a highly contentious conflict between state agents determined to protect the racial hierarchy and activists equally determined to cripple white supremacy. Activists demanded that colleges play a central role in the Civil Rights Movement (a distinct challenge to the notion of the ivory tower) while state agents demanded that colleges distance themselves from the black freedom struggle and promised to mete out harsh penalties if they did not. Through the words and deeds of actual participants, this path-breaking study documents how activists ultimately transformed non-political institutions into libratory agents.
What constitutes black studies and where does this discipline stand at the end of the twentieth century? In this wide-ranging and original volume, Manning Marable—one of the leading scholars of African American history—gathers key materials from contemporary thinkers who interrogate the richly diverse content and multiple meanings of the collective experiences of black folk. Here are numerous voices expressing very different political, cultural, and historical views, from black conservatives, to black separatists, to blacks who advocate radical democratic transformation. Here are topics ranging from race and revolution in Cuba, to the crack epidemic in Harlem, to Afrocentrism and its critics. All of these voices, however, are engaged in some aspect of what Marable sees as the essential triad of the black intellectual tradition: describing the reality of black life and experiences, critiquing racism and stereotypes, or proposing positive steps for the empowerment of black people. Highlights from Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Manning Marable debate the role of activism in black studies. John Hope Franklin reflects on his role as chair of the President's race initiative. Cornel West discusses topics that range from the future of the NAACP through the controversies surrounding Louis Farrakhan and black nationalism to the very question of what "race" means. Amiri Baraka lays out strategies for a radical new curriculum in our schools and universities. Marable's introduction provides a thorough overview of the history and current state of black studies in America.
Minutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets." Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of "law and order," with its thinly veiled racial coding. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.
Tells the history of the Morehouse School of Medicine, situating the school in the context of the history of medical education for Blacks and race relations throughout the country. --From publisher description.
BCALA 2023 Nonfiction Award Winner The untold story of a dynamic student movement on one of the nation’s most important historically Black campuses The Tuskegee Institute, one of the nation’s most important historically Black colleges, is primarily known for its World War II pilot training program, a fateful syphilis experiment, and the work of its founder, Booker T. Washington. In The Tuskegee Student Uprising, Brian Jones explores an important yet understudied aspect of the campus’s history: its radical student activism. Drawing upon years of archival research and interviews with former students, professors, and administrators, Brian Jones provides an in-depth account of one of the most dynamic student movements in United States history. The book takes the reader through Tuskegee students’ process of transformation and intellectual awakening as they stepped off campus to make unique contributions to southern movements for democracy and civil rights in the 1960s. In 1966, when one of their classmates was murdered by a white man in an off-campus incident, Tuskegee students began organizing under the banner of Black Power and fought for sweeping curricular and administrative reforms on campus. In 1968, hundreds of students took the Board of Trustees hostage and presented them with demands to transform Tuskegee Institute into a “Black University.” This explosive movement was thwarted by the arrival of the Alabama National Guard and the school’s temporary closure, but the students nevertheless claimed an impressive array of victories. Jones retells these and other events in relation to the broader landscape of social movements in those pivotal years, as well as in connection to the long pattern of dissent and protest within the Tuskegee Institute community, stretching back to the 19th century. A compelling work of scholarship, The Tuskegee Student Uprising is a must-read for anyone interested in student activism and the Black freedom movement.
With significant lessons from the history and evolution of HBCUs, a guide to the strategic conversations all higher education institutions must have to prepare students for a complex world. In Hope and Healing, former Morehouse College president John Silvanus Wilson, Jr. looks to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to examine what it takes not only to survive as a relevant institution of higher education, but to thrive. Wilson draws on pivotal moments in the timelines of HBCUs and the work of past visionaries such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington to yield important perspectives on the future of higher education and the role of HBCUs within it. Wilson documents the strengths of HBCUs, which endure even as factors such as school desegregation, enrollment shifts, and fundraising shortages have deeply affected their operation. These schools have long optimized institutional character, he shows, and he encourages their leaders to similarly optimize institutional capital. Wilson emphasizes the indispensable role of educational finance in keeping schools viable and vital to US education, discussing funding approaches such as targeted endowment strategies, large-scale capital campaigns based in STEM research, and partnerships between schools and the philanthropic community. Wilson’s asset-based framework reveals pathways for all higher education institutions to invest in their long-term futures. Suffused with optimism, the book credits HBCUs as exemplars that consistently demonstrate how all colleges and universities can marshal their institutional resources to shape better citizens, foster civic literacy, and work toward a better tomorrow.
