During the sixties, even before students on white campuses demonstrated
against the Vietnam War, students on black campuses raised the issue of whether
their institutions of higher learning were "relevant" to the needs of the black
community. In the forefront of this movement was Howard University in
Washington, D.C., then known as the "Harvard for blacks." |
In 1968, two months before Martin Luther King's assassination, students seized
the administration building in a dispute over the right of the campus newspaper
to criticize the policies of the university president. The demands soon
widened. Students demanded that the university establish a department of
Afro-American history and culture. They wanted a black university president
appointed. And they wanted courses which allowed them to reach out into the
working class community around Howard.
The students were largely successful in their demands, and the Howard
University takeover became a metaphor for black students who sought to succeed
in the white man's world on their own terms.
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who remembers watching this PBS film during
the summer after he graduated from high school, says that seeing this
documentary made him aware that there was a community of black student
activists. It was a community, he says, of which he aspired to be a part.
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