Newspapers / Fayetteville State University Student … / Sept. 30, 1981, edition 1 / Page 3
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Page 3 The Voice September 30,1981 Black College Day Students Converge On State Capitol Nearly 5,000 students from the State’s predominantly Black colleges observed Black College Day by marching from Raleigh Memorial auditorium to a rally at the State Capitol Building. The September 28 march and rally were sponsored by the North Carolina Black Student Government Associations (NCBSGA) of which FSU serves as Vice President. FSU and its band led the procession. A welcoming address was delivered to the students by Mr. Ben Ruffin, Special Assistant to the Governor for Minority Affairs. Presidents of NCBSGA also delivered addresses. The North Carolina rally was part of a greater national effort by the Project ’81 Coalition for Black Colleges. Marches and rallies were planned by coalitions in the states where the greatest peril to Black colleges exists: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. No Limits Other Than Self-imposed From The Grassroots The Destruction Of Black Education By Dr. Manning Marable Dr. Manning Marable teaches political economy at Cornell Univer sity’s Africana Studies Center, and is an activist in the National Black In dependent Political Party. "From The Grassroots” appears in over 135 newspapers in the United States and England. This is part one of a two-part series. One of the many promises made by Presidential-hopeful Ronald Reagan early in 1980 was a commitment “to improve and to defend” traditionally Black colleges. Unlike President Carter and independent candidate John An derson, Reagan made substantial over tures to Black educators and ad ministrators at predominately Black Southern institutions. Reagan’s chief Black aide, Art Fletcher, was the for mer director of the United Negro College Fund. The Republican nominee openly embraced the Black College Day demonstration held in Washington, D.C. on September 29, 1980, and charged that “the Carter Administration-in the name of desegregating Black colleges-is forcing them to become schools for training everybody but Blacks.” Reagan also promised to encourage corporations to increase their financial support for Black universities and pledged “to work to increase the share of Title III budget allocated to Black colleges.” Under Carter’s Administration, Black colleges received a smaller per centage of federal funds going to all universities than the Nixon-Ford years. Black educators had denounced Car ter’s intention to desegregate two Black Texas colleges, Southern and Prairie View. By late 1979, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry ex pressed the widely held view among Blacks that Administration officials “are unfamiliar with the historical role of these (traditionally Black) colleges and are indifferent to the vital service they perform.” Given this recent history, many Black college ad ministrators perceived that Reagan’s election would mean a real advance for Black higher educational oppor tunities, despite his economic austerity program and conservative social policies. The Reagan Administration’s first important announcement concerning the fate of Black colleges occured, ap- propiately enough, at Tuskegee In stitute. Institute President Luther Foster had invited Reagan to be the principal speaker at the April 12, 1981 “Founder’s Day” program, marking the one-hundredth anniversary of the Tuskegee Institute. Reagan’s hospitalization forced Vice President George Bush to substitute for the chief executive. Bush did not disappoint his Black audience. Before three thousand people, the Vice President declared that his administration is “absolutely committed to supporting the nation’s civil rights laws and to providing the resources necessary to make those laws work fairly and effectively for all Americans. We are committed to the principle of equal justice under the law.” Interrupted repeatedly by loud applause. Bush promised to pressure public and private sources to grant greater financial support to traditionally Black universities. Bush was silent on whether the Reagan Ad ministration would support the exten sion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But college administrators and local Black elected officials were generally pleased. Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford stated that Bush’s speech was “welcome by all of us who walked across the Ed mund Pettus bridge” in nearby Selma, in the fight for Black equal rights and education. During the spring and summer the Reagan Administration worked aggressively to draft less stringent ter ms for integration within state-funded higher education programs. By mid- August, agreements for Florida, North CaroHna, South Carolina, Missouri, Louisiana, and West Virginia were completed which would leave the old segregation era Black and White in stitutions virtually in tact. In general, the plans ease pressures on the for merly Whites-only systems to hire ad ditional Black faculty and staff, and cutback any additional Black super vision within the governance of state universities. They also include provisions to improve both the academic program and physical facilities available at formerly all-Black colleges. The announcement of the newly relaxed desegregation policies had an immediate impact upon several court cases. Louisiana and Mississippi have consistently refused to alter their dual college systems, and were sued by the Federal Government for failing to enforce Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, barring racial discrimination by federally-supported institutions. The Louisiana case was postponed as state and federal officials were redrafting a settlement based on the North Carolina model. The North Carohna agreement which was approved by Federal District Judge FrankHn Dupree in Raleigh on July 10, after eleven years of litigation, quickly became the basic document for all other Southern states. The plan keeps the dual educational system in tact, and has no provisions which would upgrade or expand master’s or doctoral programs at Black universities. It ignores any quotas for the hiring of minority faculty and staff at North Carolina’s white universities. The plan commits the state to allocate $80 million “to upgrade the physical plants and academic programs” at the Black institutions, and provides some modest affirmative action guarantees to expand the number of Black graduate students in both systems. The plan also forbids the Federal Government from suing North Carolina officials over the agreement for five years. The North Carolina plan was quickly denounced as a return to “separate but equal” by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., by former Carter Administration officials, and by Black alumni organizations from the traditional Black colleges in North Carolina. Leonard L. Haynes, director of the Of- By Davetter Shepard Your brain is a Xerox machine, a Polaroid one-step camera, a Betamax video-tape recorder, a wide-screen Technicolor projector, a thousand IBM computers, plus ten billion miniature microfilm cartridges, all deHcately design in one storage battery, floating in an electrochemical solution. With this virtually untapped and limitless resource, why aren’t we more creative,' inventive, and successful? Laziness, to be sure, is one mental block. Why bother? Fear is another big block. It is too risky for me, and it is not just fear of failure that holds us back. It is more often fear of success. Because we cannot see our potential, we are beaten from the start and so we make the excuse, it is not worth it to succeed. But what we are really saying is, I am not worth the effort. This negative self-esteem, plus a low self- image, resulting from negative at titudes, is the major energy gap preven ting the release of full human ac tualization. In order to feel good physically and to do good in the outer world, you need to get your head together through constructive thinking, not through superficial lip service, nor through one self-awareness cult after another, but by dedicated learning of new, healthy responses to the stimuli of life. In order to get rid of that mental crisis we are facing, we need to make that moment of truth that every winner experience at some time or another in life as the first and most important step in self development; it is understanding how much potential and abundance we have and how little we have done to challenge our mine. It is realizing that each human being on earth is a person with equal rights to fulfill his or her own potential in life. It is understan ding that skin color, birthplace, religious beliefs, sex, financial status. fice for the Advancement of Public Negro Colleges, informed the New York Times that the Reagan Ad ministration “let North Carolina do whatever it wanted to do, thus ab dicating its responsibility to enforce Title VI.” Defenders of the agreement include all five Black chancellors of the state universities, and probably a majority of Black college ad ministrators and officials in the coun try. Clarence Thomas, a Black attor ney from Georgia who was appointed by Reagan as the Department of (See GRASSROOTS, page 7) and intelligence, are not measures of worth or worthiness, it is accepting the fact that every human being is a distin ctly unique individual. Make this moment the moment of truth about yourself. Admit that you have been selling yourself short all your life. Accept the fact that you have the opportunity to experience more en vironmental, physical, and men tal/spiritual abundance than you could use in a thousand lifetimes. Open up your lenses to the possibilities and alternative available in your life. You are the one who has put a limit on your life. Ms. Shepard is a student at FSU. Knocks and $$$ requirements for diplomas Campus Digest News Service It is the college degree for the un- colleged but painfully educated. The University of Hard Knocks, Inc., or UHK, issues diplomas annually to those applicants who haven’t received a college degree, who are successful, and who attest to the belief that education means taking your lumps in the real world. There are between 600 and 700 people out there who hold the degrees. Each has parted with $1(X) for the honor. The founder of the University, James Comstock, officiated at the graduation ceremonies as he has for the past 30 years. The mock university is not without famous supporters. Sen. Barry Gold- water holds a degree and Sen. Jesse Helms who recently received his degree. The ceremonies take place on the campus of Alderson-Broaddus College, a bonafide educational in stitution in PhiUppi, W. Va. This education recognition program began as a joke when Comstock, a graduate of Marshall University in West Virginia was in the newspaper business with an uncolleged friend. His friend was so impressive, Comstock gave him a degree from the school of , hard knocks. The idea grew and prospered. Although UHK might have trouble getting accredited, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone involved. After all, the graduates know they are graduates whether they have the piece of paper or not. Becuase what they have to show for their experience is reflected in UHK’s school colors: black and blue.
Fayetteville State University Student Newspaper
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Sept. 30, 1981, edition 1
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