HBCUs: Alex Champion’s Week 4

My on the job education of black history is increasing with every interview. The interviews with every HistoryMakers are all very personal of course but they describe their times almost as much as they describe themselves. I recently evaluated the 2003 interview of a French instructor at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He described his very busy life as he continued working and getting an education but also his time in World War II. His apparent brilliance convinced the army to run him through the Army Specialized Training Program. The best oral history descriptions contain a lot of verified information such as names and dates; upon looking up the ASTP on Wikipedia I saw that prominent men such as Bob Dole, Ed Koch, Mel Brooks, and Gore Vidal went through the program as well. The HistoryMaker himself was reminiscent of Vidal, oddly enough. Upon further verification of his stories I found a biography of the Inspector General of the Army, to whom the HistoryMaker served as executive assistant; it was very surprising to see that a black man in a very white training program in a segregated army personally served an Inspector General from Mississippi. These little bits of history chip away at naïve perspectives.

Every human being is naïve on particular subjects; for me one of them is black culture. I was raised by my black father and white mother in a small town in southern Minnesota. I went received my undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. This was a school that very actively sought diversity and, in its 2001-2002 undergraduate application guide, digitally edited the face of a black student named Diallo Shabazz onto the cover. The school used his image many times for its promotional publications—they owned the image and he did not mind—but this time they used digital trickery to misrepresent a real image.  He eventually won a suit but asked that the money be used for diversity initiatives.

I had an interesting series of conversations with Julieanna Richardson throughout Week 4. One of her main goals for the IMLS grant and one of the several reasons The HistoryMakers exists is to disseminate talented, competent archivists whose interest in black archives will save the black historical record. She expressed this hope to me; I thought she was talking about community archives but instead it was the “HBCUs.” She was mortified to learn that I did not know what those were. How could I not know that? I must have heard them talk about HBCUs in the interviews! Indeed they did, but they called them “historically black colleges.” Despite my black culture naiveté I was familiar with that term and the HistoryMakers never, ever used the acronym. Their college experiences were not abstractions that merited shorthand; it was their own life at Central State, Morehouse, Howard, Virginia Union, and Morgan. Julieanna was raised like I was in a small town in the Midwest but attended an HBCU, which transformed her perspective. Perhaps this fellowship will transform my own as well and I will be compelled to go forth just as she hopes we all will.