Abstract
Similar to the hostility that greeted their racial brethren when they migrated to majority white urban centers throughout the twentieth century, a poisonous white backlash hit African American students when they entered HWCUs in the mid-1960s. Higher education may have desegregated, but many of the new African Americans still felt excluded, removed from the academic, social, and cultural milieu of the campus with few (if any) relevant courses or social and cultural outlets, particularly at nonurban HWCUs. “A solitary man, a foreigner in a strange land” was the language used by Stan Herring, the vice president of the Association of Black Collegians (ABC) at Gannon-U (PA) in November 1968; a student at St. Andrews Presbyterian (NC) used the phrase “a rat in a maze.” At Lawrence-U (WI) “you are alone—stranded in the middle of white culture,” said an unnamed student. “This university is an oasis in the desert, surrounded by vultures who are only waiting to pick up a crumb, a smell, a taste, and a feel of black nitty-gritty substance,” wrote the Afro-American Students Association at U-Iowa in May 1968. Meanwhile, a few Michigan Tech students in an “alien white atmosphere” felt that the black student had two choices: “give up his black identity or perish.”1
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Notes
Jerrold Wimbish Roy, “Student Activism and the Historically Black University: Hampton Institute and Howard University, 1960–1972” (PhD. diss, Harvard University, 2000), pp. 60–67.
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© 2012 Ibram H. Rogers
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Kendi, I.X. (2012). “Shuddering in a Paroxysm of Black Power”: A Narrative Overview of the Black Campus Movement. In: The Black Campus Movement. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016508_6
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