The Function of the Negro Cultural College

Abstract

There are, it seems to me, two general approaches to the question, What is the function of the cultural college for Negroes? Each leads to a distinctive answer. Nor are these two answers wholly compatible. The first might be designated as the racial. Looking at the Negro in America today it seems apparent to many, and to me among the many, that the hope for a satisfactory adjustment of his life in the United States lies not in the developing of a separate Negro minority group discrete from the rest of American life, but in his integration with that life, as complete an integration as possible. To discuss this point would carry us far beyond the length and aside from the theme of this paper. Suffice it to recall two salient realities in the situation. First, Negroes, wrenched from African tribal ties and scattered through European colonies and their descendant states are by generations and in many cases centuries of cultural heritage European, not African, in their whole outlook and customs; thousands of them also are more European than African even in physical heritage. Second, Negroes constitute a little less than one-tenth the population of the United States and are scattered broadcast among the white population. Group separateness would involve dual institutions, one set for whites and one for Negroes, a heavy economic burden on both races and one which experience and logic both show would lead almost inevitably to inferior institutions for the minority group. The developing of a separate minority group, therefore, would involve the acceptance of a permanently inferior status on a pattern similar to that of the whites but stratified at a lower level in a species of caste system, a situation which offers little of promise from the Negro, the American, or the Christian view point. Integration into American life, for all the difficulties and the generations undoubtedly involved in its achievement, offers a hope of preserving the best embodiment of our American traditions of democracy, opportunity for individual development, and Christian valuation of human personality. It involves no cultural tour de force, as Negroes and white Americans already follow a common culture pattern save where the heritage of slavery or the tendency to segregation warps them at points. If this be the case, the fact that the Negro has been in the past regarded as of inferior ability and has been actually in an inferior status, civilly, politically, economically, and socially, points clearly to the necessity of making every possible effort to equalize his opportunity with that of white people, enabling him at the earliest moment to meet the white American on his own ground, in his own type of culture, as an equal. Granting these premises it becomes clear that college education for Negro students patterned upon that of the whites, should be made available. As fast as possible Negroes should obtain entry into previously exclusively white colleges, but as any realistic view