A Du Boisian Proposal for Persistently White Colleges

Abstract

In a 1933 speech titled The Field and Function of Negro College, W.E.B. Du Bois calls for his audience at Fisk University to develop the sort of Negro university which will emancipate not simply black folk of United States, but those white folk who in their effort to suppress Negroes have killed their own culture?men who in their desperate effort to replace equality with caste and to build inordinate wealth on a foundation of abject poverty have succeeded in killing democracy, art, and religion (Du Bois 1975, 99). Du Bois's call rests upon view that education can actively contribute to creation of a more just society. Specifically, African American education, if undertaken in right way, can challenge racism both through its direct im pact on Black students and through its indirect effects on racist whites. Such positive effects could result even though public and private were legally segregated at time?even though, in many parts of country, all-Black were absolutely only educational institutions open to Blacks.1 Despite monstrous reasons that led to existence of all-Black colleges, despite their involuntary nature, Du Bois argued that these colleges could put their ra cial homogeneity to work for liberation of Black people. Du Bois utilized a version of identity politics to redefine segregated space of Black college as a staging ground for Black liberation. Writing in 1960, near end of his life, Du Bois expressed amazement at progress Blacks had made in desegregating schools, and predicted that number of schools which do not discriminate against colored people ... is go ing to increase slowly in present, but rapidly in future until long before year 2000, there will be no school segregation on basis of race (152). Wary of price desegregation might exact on Black culture and life, Du Bois nonetheless felt cautiously optimistic that it would at least be achieved.2 During course of his life, both at times of segregation and at times and in places in which integration was supposedly taking place, Du Bois argued that