It would be very wrong to assume that this individual instruction and this particular course typify education at Morehouse; any exchange program that sent Harvard students to the Morehouse campus would put them in contact with a vital student body and a number of remarkable, exciting teachers. But no matter how reluctantly it is reported, one should not forget that this sociology course does embody an important strain in Negro higher education. The ethos it propounds can be traced directly to Booker T. Washington, who advised in a sermon at Tuskegee Institute:

"We might as well settle down to the uncompromising fact that our people will grow in proportion as we teach them that the way to have the most of Jesus and in a permanent form is to mix with their religion some land, cotton and corn, a house with two or three rooms, and a little bank account. With these interwoved with our religion, there will be a foundation for growth upon which we can build for all time."

Conventionality

According to the text used in the sociology class described above, a happy family consists of people who are "careful with money, conventional regarding religion, morals and politics." Almost reflexively the class endorsed the text's conclusion that unhappy wives have husbands who are "somewhat radical" on these matters.

It occured to no one in the class that he was in fact "somewhat radical" on the most dramatic political question in America today. Nor was it brought out in the subsequent discussion that such an endorsement of conventional mores, if made at a Southern white school, would amount to a segregationists' reaffirmation.

The unwillingness of Morehouse students to challenge the premises of American social and political policy was illustrated during the debate between that college and Harvard on April 4. Harvard took the affirmative side of the question: "should the non-communist nations form an economic community?" Citing Time magazine as an ultimate fiscal authority, the first Crimson speaker said the issue at hand was how to "instill a spirit of capitalistic enterprise in the underdeveloped nations while safeguarding the interests of American investors." The Morehouse debaters agreed with these objectives, and made no references to questions of neo-colonialism; nor did they question the alleged congruity of American interests and those of the underdeveloped nations.

Inside the System

Northern liberals who hope the Negro's life experience will impart a shap sense of injustice and a propensity for social criticism had best revise their estimates. Many of the acknowledged victims in America, whether trade unionists fighting for organizational rights in the thirties, or Negroes demanding civil rights in the sixties, regard themselves as victims of accident, not policy. The belief is that the system works, and the trick is to get inside the system, not to change it.

It is time for liberals to realize that the centuries in the ghetto might impart an equalitarian strain to the emergent Negro middle class, but they might just as likely foster a deep and powerful opportunism. One need only consider the Jewish middle class in New York, a generation removed from the pograms of Eastern Europe, yet vigorously upholding a segregated network of schools and homes. The institutional lip service that Jews pay, to equality through the B'nai B'rith precisely parallels the sanctimonious references to civil rights that free the consciences of Atlanta's Negro middle class.

SNCC

But the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is hardly flattered by lip-service acknowledgement, nor is it bothered by the vicissitudes that have characterized civil rights activity on the twelve pleasant acres of the Morehouse campus. In the summer of 1961, as the first wave of sit-in activity receded, the Committee decided that "if the movement was to have meaning for the millions of degraded, disenfranchised, and exploited Negroes in the Black Belt South, someone would have to take the theories, methods, practices and actualities of direct action and voter registration to them."

SNCC is militantly equalitarian not only in rhetoric but in practice. Its field secretaries seek to break down class barriers in the Negro communities they enter, and to impress upon doctors, teachers, and professionals the need to stand by farmers, laborers and domestics who must also win the vote. Not the drama but the democratic tone of SNCC activism represents a challenge to the black bourgeoisie that has long secured itself privileges in the name of civil rights.

Radicalism

In the SNCC offices, just off Hunter Street, radicalism is not a strange word or concept. A copy of Malraux's Man's Fate lies ostentatiously on a mantel piece, preventing copies of the National Guardian and the Reporter from blowing away in the Georgia breeze. A picture of several field secretaries hangs on the wall, entitled in pencil: "Three who make revolution." Asked to explain that, a member of the office staff smiled: "Well, if we get Eastland beaten someday, that'll be a revolution, won't it?"

At Morehouse and the other colleges in the Atlanta University complex a Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, loosely affiliated with SNCC and composed of student body presidents and representatives, is sustaining day-to-day interest in the equalitarian movement. President Mays is particularly proud of this committee, citing it as proof that Morehouse undergraduates are developing a sense of social responsibility that validates the technical side of their education. Perhaps the spirit of critical education will return to the academic community by the political road it chose in departure.