Students: Black Pride

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Exterminate or Prostitute? College Negroes nonetheless feel schizophrenic about their climb out of the ghettos into the white world. Somewhat bitterly, a member of Northwestern's new Kappa Alpha Psi Negro fraternity concedes that his goals are "pretty honkie-oriented—the corporation game, suburbia, upper middle—the works." At Wisconsin, Junior Clarence Brown takes a calmer view. "To better yourself is the first thing," he says. "Then you may be able to help others some day." But Graduate Student Brown McGhee scoffs: "Let me tell you how it is, baby. When I get out, I have two choices—to exterminate the white man or to prostitute myself to the white man. I haven't decided what I'll do."

The new mood is also sweeping U.S. Negro colleges, where coeds increasingly show up for class in African-style dress. Administrators at these schools—most of which are in the South—are increasingly under student fire for appearing to cooperate with local white leaders. "Even among the apathetic students, there's a feeling that they are not going to find solutions with white people any more," says George McMillan, a white journalism teacher at Clark College. "There is more sense of blackness," agrees Spelman College Senior Eulalia Harris, a Negro, "and more desire to make the black community stronger rather than integrate."

"Close It Down." Students at Negro colleges are bitterly resentful of their own lack of campus freedom. Dillard students recently boycotted Sunday vesper services simply because they were compulsory. At Washington's Howard University, even though retiring President James M. Nabrit Jr., 67, praised "the spirit of revolt" at a convocation, more than 100 students walked out to protest his dismissal of 23 faculty and student activists this summer. The militant students cheered Sociology Professor Nathan Hare's declaration that "you got to close this place down."

Although Negro students by and large reject Detroit-style rioting as deplorable, they are willing to use the threat of violence to gain their campus goals. At no school has that threat proved more effective than at California's San Jose State College (enrollment: 23,000), where a mere 60 Negro students last month threatened to burn the campus down unless discrimination against them was stopped. The students' leader, Sociology Teacher Harry Edwards, a towering (6 ft. 8 in.) former San Jose basketball star, contended that Negro students could not find decent housing in San Jose, Negro athletes on road trips were assigned rooms by race, and white fraternities banned Negroes.

San Jose President Robert D. Clark immediately ordered public hearings on all the charges. As counterthreats against Edwards' life mounted, he canceled a football game that Edwards had promised to disrupt. Clark then conceded that the charges were valid, ordered prompt steps to correct the conditions. "The first step is rational debate," explained the triumphant Edwards, "but the biggest single lever we had is the threat of violence." The new Negro mood means that few college administrators can be confident that the new academic year will be nonviolent.