Epilogue: Backlash and Forward Lashes of the Black Campus Movement

Abstract

Malcolm X, the ideological father of the BCM, once reasoned, “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” The BCM pulled out the knife several inches. The new ideals, the new racial constitution gave higher education the tools to fully extract the knife and heal the wounds inflicted by one hundred years of the moralized contraption, standardization of exclusion, normalized mask of whiteness, and ladder altruism. Forty years have passed since the demise of the BCM. Has the knife been fully removed? Have the wounds healed? Has higher education racially advanced? Are we making progress?¹