III: Black Renaissance
Alma Mater
During my senior year—to the neglect of my Greek—I did one other thing besides my novel that interested me greatly. For Professor Labaree’s course in sociology each graduating student had to turn in a paper on some phase of American life. I chose to do a survey of the campus on which I studied. Food, living conditions, social life, academic standards, and race relations between the Negro student body and the white faculty were all to be covered. Menus studied over a period of time as to their dietary value, dormitories checked daily, each student and teacher interviewed on questions vital to the college life—so much material, in fact, that two other students were assigned to help me, once the study was outlined.
There was something I wanted to prove. So I checked on menus and whether or not there were any bedbugs on the beds, simply to get around to that.
During my years at the college I had sat in on many student bull-sessions, and over and over I had heard Lincoln’s own peculiar color line discussed: the fact that there was an all-white faculty for an all-Negro student body. Over and over I heard many students agree that it was better so, that there was something inherently superior in white teachers that Negro teachers did not have. I wanted to prove that the students believing this were wrong, and that Lincoln was fostering—unwittingly, perhaps—an inferiority complex in the very men it wished to train as leaders of the Negro race. I wanted to show that the color line is not good on campus or off.
So I began to gather data on the matter, quite sure that the data would not lie. It didn’t.
My survey showed that sixty-three per cent of the members of the junior and senior classes preferred that Lincoln have an all-white faculty. The reasons given were various: that Lincoln was supported by “white” philanthropy, therefore whites should run the college; that favoritism and unfairness would result on the part of Negro teachers toward the students; that there were not enough Negro teachers available; and that things were all right as they were, so why change? Three students even said they just didn’t like Negroes. Two said they did not believe Negro teachers had the interest of students at heart. Another said members of his own race were not morally capable!
These comments I tabulated carefully. In my paper commenting on the results of my survey, I wrote:
“63% of the members of the upper classes favor for their college a faculty on which there are no Negro professors. And, since I have never heard otherwise, I judge that the faculty of Lincoln University itself supports this attitude. Yet it seems to me the height of absurdity for an institution designed for the training of Negro leadership to support and uphold, on its own grounds, the unfair and discriminatory practices of the American color line. And the fact that 81 members of the Senior and Junior classes at this college can themselves approve of such a situati