Black Colleges: the Desegregation Dilemma

Black Colleges: the Desegregation Deilemma

"You can't have a potential black leader who has been educated with Ivy League illusions about the world." Thus Luther Brown, 21, explained why he turned down a scholarship from Stanford University to attend Howard University, which is predominantly black. Certainly few of today's black leaders have Ivy League illusions: the overwhelming majority of them, as well as of black college graduates as a whole, got their degrees from black institutions.

In Jeopardy. But this may not be true much longer. In spite of the notable recent upgrading of such already fine schools as Howard and Morehouse College, two-thirds of the 800,000 black college students, including many of the brightest, are now attending white institutions. Distinguished black professors have also joined the "brain drain," and as a result, some of the nation's 120 black colleges and universities are in jeopardy. Generally committed to accepting the financially strapped graduates of inadequate secondary schools, they are now hard pressed to enroll more qualified black students, to improve their faculty and to attract precious research grants. The colleges derive a large portion of their income from state and federal grants. Such funding is leveling off, which, because of inflation, means a loss of real income.

A more significant threat is posed, ironically enough, by recent efforts to achieve integration. As a result of a 1973 federal court decision, ten state educational systems were asked to submit plans for desegregating their colleges. Among them are 32 black colleges that face the loss of Government funding if they do not integrate their classrooms.

One of their new problems therefore is how to attract white students. Complains Morehouse President Hugh Gloster: "In a country where foundations and corporations have provided millions of dollars to predominantly white colleges to recruit black students, I know of no black college that has received a large grant providing scholarship money to attract white students."

Various strategies have been worked out. Florida A. & M. uses part of the state funds allotted under its desegregation plan for incentive grants to superior nonblack applicants; 10% of its 5,700 students are now white. Georgia's Savannah State College, Virginia's Norfolk State and North Carolina A. & T. University have successful joint academic programs with nearby predominantly white colleges. Says Savannah State's President Prince Jackson: "We are getting more applications from whites as a result."

The best estimate is that predominantly black colleges are now 5% to 8% white. For the most part, the white students attend for the same reasons as many of the blacks: convenience of location, low tuition, the availability of courses they want and, in some cases, relaxed admissions requirements. More than half the whites, according to a recent survey of 18 black institutions, are transfer students, and the great majority are pleased enough to recommend their new colleges to their friends.

But Jackson thinks too much pressure has been put on black colleges to integrate. Says he: "I do not feel ,the same kind of pressure was put on white institutions to increase the black presence."

Damnable Act. In March the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, a group of more than 100 black college presidents, filed an amicus curiae brief opposing a new demand for stronger desegregation efforts growing out of the 1973 decision. The college presidents oppose strict enforcement of desegregation laws as they apply to black colleges because they believe their colleges are needed for "remedial-type activity" that "cannot cease until black people have, in fact, equal educational opportunity" in elementary and secondary schools. In a more emotional summation of the views of black educators, former Morehouse President Benjamin Elijah Mays declared, "If America allows black colleges to die, it will be the worst kind of discrimination in history. To say that colleges born to serve Negroes are not worthy of surviving now that white colleges accept them will be a damnable act."

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