Negro Colleges

By all the logic of integration, the South's struggling Negro colleges should soon fade away, and Negroes (still only 3% of U.S. college enrollment) should flock to integrated campuses. Yet no such thing is happening; the shift is socially and academically too formidable for most young Negroes. Southern Negro colleges still educate two-thirds of all Negro collegians, and Negro colleges will survive for years to come. And they have only one possible direction to go--up.

Last week in Miami the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools gave them a hard shove in that direction. The South's accrediting agency had previously rated white colleges as "A" or out, and Negro colleges as "A," "B" or "C"--allowing Negro colleges to be both approved and mediocre. Now, all Southern campuses will be on the same standard, giving 65 Negro colleges full and equal responsibility for excellence. Last week 33 won accreditation, 24 will get a second chance, and eight were banished. Among the castoffs: both public Negro campuses in Alabama, a state that refuses to give such colleges more than pittance appropriations.

Prevailing Poverty. How good are even good Negro colleges? Few can fault the quality of what are probably the top three schools. Washington, D.C.'s Howard is justifiably called "the world's greatest Negro university" (TIME, July 18, 1960). Nashville's Fisk, the South's first A-rated Negro campus (in 1929), has a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, a good library, an endowment of $7,000,000. Atlanta's Morehouse is a highly selective producer of Negro leaders; its President Benjamin Mays is perhaps the best-known Negro educator in the U.S. Not far behind these three are Alabama's Tuskegee, where Botanist George Washington Carver did his work, and Virginia's Hampton Institute, the nation's most richly endowed ($19 million) private Negro college.

Beyond these, quality gets spotty. Of the South's 16 Negro land-grant colleges, not one has an accredited engineering school. No state-run Negro college has a dental or medical school; only one offers a Ph.D., and that in education. It is a measure of the prevailing poverty that all 32 members of the United Negro College Fund, the top private campuses, have as their collective goal this year some $2,250,000--less than any single Ivy League campus rakes in every year.

Waiting for God. "The philanthropic dollar can go farther and get more in Negro education than anywhere else," says one harried college president. The gauge of what money can do--and how much more is needed--lies in the record of Negro colleges striving for full accreditation. A study of one group of 48 showed that in a decade they boosted faculty Ph.D.s by 140% (though only to a total 819). Five years ago another group of 28 private colleges had a total endowment income of $2,620,000, including one school with only $52. Last year they hit $3,540,249, and no school reported income less than $12,000. The totals may be small, but the average percentage rise (35%) is promising.

Against such progress is the fate of many a lesser Negro college, launched by church groups to fill a complete absence of Negro education in certain areas. As for money, the churches often assumed that "God will take care of it." Typical is two-year Butler College in Tyler, Texas, which hit a peak of 500 students in the early 1950s. Now it is down to 80 students, a faculty of nine and no endowment. Last spring the Baptist-related school lost accreditation, and its survival is indeed up to God.

In Mississippi, only one Negro campus (Tougaloo Southern Christian) is accredited, and the dismal state of Jackson's J. P. Campbell College sums up the problem. Campbell's shabby plant is no match for the average Northern high school. For its 300 mostly country-raised students, Campbell boasts a library of 3,000 books. It operates on a budget of $131,000, about half provided by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For the rest, says President Robert M. Stevens, "we just have to do a lot of hustlin'." Now gifts are vanishing. Campbell is solidly behind civil rights agitation in the nearby town of McComb. Says Stevens wryly: "I could raise half a million in no time if we suddenly began promoting the idea of segregation."

Crash Mission. Even if a school has money, it usually hungers for qualified students. At Texas Southern University, for example, 90% of the freshmen have to take remedial math or English or both. Half the freshman class of 1,000 drops out, and only about one-fourth lasts to graduation. About half the graduates of Negro colleges become schoolteachers. So goes the vicious circle: poor teachers turning out poor students, who then become poor teachers turning out poor students.

Breaking the circle is all the harder because in one sense academic poverty is an attraction. Negro students do not flock to integrated campuses even when legally free to do so. They know the competition and avoid it. Nothing would please the better colleges more than first-rate competition on their own campuses. Last week they heartily agreed with new President William H. McEniry Jr. of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools as he laid out the urgent job for Negro colleges. "You and only you," said he, "are in a position to speak to millions of Negroes in the United States who have not escaped the apathy, the loss of vision, the dread resignation before harsh circumstances that mark the walking wounded in a 300-year battle for freedom and full citizenship."

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