III: Black Renaissance
Lincoln University
At the height of the Negro Renaissance, I was a student at Lincoln University, spending my week-ends and holidays in New York. Lincoln is a college and theological seminary primarily for men of color, although white students may attend, too, if they wish. It was established in 1854, by John Miller Dickey, a Presbyterian minister in Oxford, Pennsylvania, because there was then no college in the North especially for Negro youth, and he felt that there should be one.
“A race enlightened in the knowledge of God will eventually be free,” he preached. “Kindle the lamp of religious knowledge. It will surely light them to an everlasting position among the people of the earth.”
Lincoln is located in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, forty miles from Philadelphia through the Quaker country on the highroad heading toward the Maryland border and Jim Crow. In spring, its campus is beautiful and green and there are tall old trees everywhere, and from its dormitory windows a view of farm lands for miles around is to be seen. Down the campus road a piece there is a tiny village of a dozen houses, with a general store and a railroad station. Four miles away by train or road is Oxford.
I liked Lincoln very much. But just as I like America and still find certain things wrong with it, so I found several things wrong with Lincoln. When I first went there, it had an all-white faculty teaching an all-Negro student body. And, other than the football coach, no Negro had ever, in all its seventy years, held a professorial position at Lincoln, a college for, as its catalogue states, the training of Negro leaders. There was an unwritten official color line that said no Negro could teach on that faculty. And no one of its alumni had ever been asked to join the Board of Trustees. How then could they be training Negro leaders? That worried me, for surely out of all the Negro leaders they had trained, some one would be capable of serving on the Board of Trustees of the college, or of coming back to the campus as a teacher.
Most of the professors on the faculty were elderly, kind, religious old gentlemen, graduates of Princeton in the ’80’s. Some of them, like Professor Labaree, Professor Wright, and Dean Johnson, were excellent teachers, but others were merely mediocre. And between faculty and students there were practically no social or comradely relations of any kind. From chapel in the morning until classes were over in the afternoon, we saw our teachers only in the classrooms. After that until the next morning they disappeared into their houses bordering the campus, leaving the main yard and the dormitories entirely to the students—which gave student life a certain freedom not enjoyed by most Negro colleges. Indeed, dormitory life was entirely student-controlled—and sometimes highly hilarious.
Hazing was terrific. Incoming freshmen were given the paddling of their lives practically every night, from the opening of classes until the