Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Lynchings in Delaware/Why Dr. Issa was Really Arrested and Fired from Delaware State University


 
 
Langston Hughes' essay he wrote in 1934 in the Crisis Magazine (41 Aug.). He stated among other things that Black Colleges were doing their best to "produce Spineless Uncle Toms, uninformed, and full of mental and moral evasions."

"Cowards From The Colleges" (about HBCU's )*

"To me it seems that the day must come when we will not be proud of our Jim Crow centers built on the money docile and lying beggars have kidded white people into contributing. The day must come when we will not say that a college is a great college because it has a few beautiful buildings, and a half dowen Ph.D.'s on a faculty that is afraid to open its mouth though a lynching occurs at the college gates, or the wages of Negro workers in the community go down to zero!
...

Frankly, I see no hope for a new spirit today in the majority of the Negro schools of the South unless the students themselves put it there. Although there exists on all campuses, a distinct cleavage between the younger and older members of the faculties, almost everywhere the younger teachers, knowing well the existing evils, are as yet too afraid of their jobs to speak out, or to dare attempt to reform campus conditions. They content themselves by writing home to mama and by whispering to sympathetic visitors from a distance how they hate teaching under such conditions.

Meanwhile, more power to those brave and progressive students who strike against mid-Victiorian morals and the suppression of free thought and action! More power to the Ishmael Florys, and the Denmark Vesey Forum (student protesters) and the Howard undergraduates who picket the Senate's Jim Crow dining rooms--for unless we develop more and ever more such young men and women on our campuses as an antidote to the docile dignity of the meek professors and well-paid presidents who now run our institutions, American Negroes in the future had best look to the unlettered for their leaders, and expect only COWARDS FROM THE COLLEGES."