Coming up on the A Building, HBCUs tended to focus as much on moral uplifts. These schools were havens of black political conservatism, even as there, of course was a legacy of black radicalism.
And that was part of the reason that I got expelled from school my junior year, because when we locked up the board of trustees in that building.
Wait a minute, The A Building, Episode six, The Aftermath.
The Maroon Tiger is the official student newspaper Morehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia. It has served as a platform for student journalism, activism, and intellectual discourse for decades.
The publication dates back to the early twentieth century, evolving over the years into a respected source of news, opinions, and cultural commentary. It has played a key role in shaping student perspectives on social justice, politics, and the black experience in America. Many notable Morehouse alumni have contributed to or been influenced by the paper.
Initially founded in eighteen ninety eight as The Athenium, the publication served both Morehouse College and Spelman Seminary. By the nineteen twenties, it was a joint venture edited by students from both institutions. In nineteen twenty five, Morehouse students rebranded the newspaper as The Maroon Tiger, focusing more closely on the Moorhouse community. In nineteen forty seven, a young undergrad Gate wrote a piece for The Maroon Tiger that would
go far beyond the walls Moorehouse College. The article was called The Purpose of Education. The author Martin Luther King Jimior.
As I engage in the so called bull sessions around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the brethren think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation, so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end. It seems to me that education has a twofold function to perform in the life of a man
and in society. One is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve, with increasing facility, the legitimate goals of his life.
Here, at only eighteen years old, doctor King speaks with the wisdom of a man much older, he speaks about the global advantage of education. He wanted Black Americas to think about the college experience far beyond the benefits of money or prestige.
Doctor King, even as a college freshman, understood the value of knowledge. His article would continue.
Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for oneself is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so called educated people do
not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the cheap aims of education. Education must enable one to sift in weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to
think intensively and to think critically. That education, which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but with no morals.
The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but with no morals. We hear echoes of these words in the letter from a Birmingham jail, and that I have a dreamed speech at the March on Washington just sixteen years later, Doctor King was speaking about the power of education. Doctor King was a Morehouse man. Here's more from doctor Lomax, president and CEO of the United Ingo College Fund and former president of Dullard University.
I watched my grandson go from the sidelines of observer in his early career at Morehouse to full embrace of the notion that he was on a journey to become a more house man. And you know, when he had that mantle placed on him, he was not going to do anything, nor were his classmates going to do anything
to diminish the power and significance of that moment. One of the things that I think is so powerful about Black colleges is, yes, they are places where you get certifications and credentials and you get a diploma, but what you also do is you you begin to understand what is your place in the world, and your place in the world is in many ways defined by that institution
that is giving you those certifications and diplomas. So it's a richer and fuller experience than I think some people have who just think of college as a place where.
You get the approval that will get you a job someplace.
This is this is really education for life and for how you live your life, and not just education for a career.
However, after the locke in the punishments came down hard and swift. Several students were expelled or placed on probation. Many of the seniors who participated that day were not allowed to participate in commencement ceremonies. The idea of resistance that was so important to being a morehouseman was suddenly weaponized against the students.
To be young, gifted, and black in the late sixties carried a certain responsibility. If you were fortunate enough to go to a school at Morehouse, expectations were high, and the expectations were high from your family, The expectations were high from your community. Therefore, the idea of using an opportunity for resistance was downright and practical. So the irony of receiving an education of resistance while being taught to conform at the same time was truly at the heart
of this lock in. Two worlds, A generation and pedagogy were colliding.
Leading up to the lock in in nineteen sixty eight, the articles of the Maroon's Tiger grew angrier and more militant. For lack of a better word, the student population was frustrated with the middle of the world political stance of Morehouse College. They want to be at the center of the black intellectual landscape. This was the perfect opportunity for morehousemen to step forward. They did so and were punished for it.
King's words on education connecting multi generation on diaspora through the Black experience in America. Education historically has been directly connected to the most brutal forms of institutionalized racism. During slavery, it was a capital offense for a slave to know how to read.
The gift of reading was far too powerful for anyone whose sole purpose was servitude. Abolitionist Frederick Douglas connected his freedom to his mental liberation far before his physical liberation. Douglas writes in his groundbreaking autobiography narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas, an American slave, written by himself. It was critical for the publisher to highlight that Douglas wrote the book himself, as most slave narratives were dictated to white authors.
The more I.
Read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them and no other life than a band of successful robbers who left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land, reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. That this very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read, had already come to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish.
As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no latter upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking.
It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in everything. It was ever present to torment me with
a sense of wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.
For Frederick Douglas, reading would provide him with the tools to understand the true evil of slavery. An effective slave has no critical thinking skills, no basis to understand the depth of the evil. King starts on education echo this idea. For racism to truly take an effective shape, the disenfranchised must feel like they deserve it. These ideas were beaten into American slaves.
Education is the first step in any resistance movement. Douglas continues, I.
Have often been utterly astonished since I came to the North to find persons who could speak of singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such as my experience, I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express
my happiness. Crying for joy and singing for joy were alike uncommon to me. While in the jaws of slavery, the singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness as the singing of a slave. The songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
Welcome back to the a building.
The oral tradition of education of blackness runs a generational line of progress. This progress requires forward motion and history.
Lessons on inside the Actors Studio. Morehouse alum Samuel L. Jackson talks about his educational path to Morehouse.
What high school did you go to? Riverside High?
It was a very nurturing kind of school.
We had minor violence. Where did you decide to go to college? I ended up at Morehouse College. What was your major?
I went to school as a marine biology major.
And did you change your major?
I was taking a public speaking class and Mr Guthrie or Doctor Guthrie, was doing a production of Three Penny Opera and didn't have enough guys the audition, and he offered us extra credit for doing the play. And I went to the audition that night and they were doing a photo session that night and all these girls sitting around in like garter belts and and bustier's and I was like, this is not gonna this is all right.
Yeah. During this conversation, he speaks about the disconnect between the educated classes was in the black community in a way that only Sam Jackson can well.
Morehouses sort of an elitist school in a way. The first thing I did when I got there, as soon as my mom dropped me off and left, I saw a basketball court. When I was on my way down to the campus. I actually went up the street and used my fake ID. I bought a quarter beer. I went over to the basketball court and I started playing ball with these guys. And I played ball with him, and I hung out with him and robbed Morehouse students
with him for about two semesters. And that was part of the reason that I got expelled from school my junior year, because when we locked up the board of trustees in that building, wait a minute.
Like many African Americans with the opportunity to attend college, Sam felt conflicted or perhaps isolated by the large institutional walls of higher education. As a young man, he felt more comfortable in the local barbershops than the Atlanta projects. This was an easier transition than the educational expectations of Morehouse.
The tension can be traced to the growing educated class in the black community and the enhanced poverty in urban centers around the country. These cities would burn to the ground after the death of Martin Luther King junior. We would see similar unrest after the murder of George Floyd in twenty twenty.
Before writing his best selling book How to Be an Anti Racist Doctor, Ebram x Kindy spoke about campus activism on black campuses in the nineteen sixties.
At historically white colleges before the Black Campus movement, practically all of the professors, administrators, and staff were white. The coursework covered Europeans and white Americans, and racist traditions were innumerable across the nation. At black colleges or HBCUs, even though practically all of the students were black, these schools encouraged their students through their curricula, policies, and programs to assimilate or accommodate to the politics, culture, and values of
white America. Until the nineteen twenties, most of the HBCU presidents were white. Until the nineteen sixties, most of the trustees at black colleges were white. Black cultural and political nationalism was usually sunned and habitually dumped on the edges of these campuses. They were rarely courses on the black experience. As I stated earlier, the administrative paternalism toward the students
was overwhelming and intoxicating. Non academic rules were innumerable. Hpcus tended to focus as much on moral uplifts due to the perceived low moral acumen of blacks, as they did on intellectual development. These schools were havens of black political conservatism, even as there, of course was a legacy of black radicalism.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, WB the Boys, the nation's leading black academic, called on college educlated blacks, whom he called the talent attempt to lead Black America. It was a daunting charge for people rising out of one of the most politically and culturally conformist meleeus in
American society at the time. Before du Bois passed away on the eve of the March from Washington in nineteen sixty three, multiple decades of studying these college students had caused him to note that they were simply only interested in leading themselves. He said, and I quote, they proposed to make money and spend it as they please.
This last comment is critical to this discussion. W. E. B. Du Bois, whom may be considered to be the godfather of Black American academics, was disappointed with the educated African American class at the end of his life. In his mind, they pursued education only for commerce.
We speak to professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, doctor Elia Davis, just.
The year of nineteen sixty nine articles from the Maroon Tiger. Their critiques, more often than not, are about the administration and how they believe the administration to be culpable in creating a certain type of morehouse graduate buying into the system, quailing certain radical views.
And this is represented by a Gloucester Yes.
Because he's president. Yeah, he's president. Yeah, time he's president. So in nineteen sixty nine is directly at him. He's the president. And some deans, you know, dean of students here and their academic dean they bring up every now and again, but he's the administration. Article after article they're constantly saying, like I told you before. One article, the guy says, I don't know who I am. You know, I wake him in the morning, I look in the mirror,
or he'll talk about his classes. He says, I go to class. Some of these professors are so idealistic. They're trying to make us idealistic, but they fail to understand the radical nature of.
Being in the US.
They go on and on about being radical. You're not radical enough. You're trying to make me complacent. YadA, YadA, YadA.
It's interesting.
At the end of the article, He then says, well, I'm not trying to indict more House. It's still a good education, but these other things are problematic.
This idea makes King's purpose of education article even more impactful. Doctor King was no stranger to higher education. He was a third generation Morehouse man. His father and grandfather had both been educated on the legendary campus. Despite that, Doctor King had a populous attitude towards education. He wanted the space of HBCUs to nurture the minds of the educated class, and not just the wallets.
These ideas came to a collision in the nineteen sixties at.
Morehouse Welcome Back to the A Building.
The primary tension between doctor King and Malcolm X was based on class. Malcolm was also the son of a preacher, but his father was murdered when he was a child and his mother was committed to a state on mental institution. He grew up on the streets and ended up in prison. The Nation of Islam helped him try his life around. He was an autodidactic student who read hundreds of books
behind bars. Once he left prison, he worked for the Nation in grassroots recruitment efforts for young men on the streets. Of Harlem.
By contrast, doctor King, also the son of a preacher, was a gifted orator. An educated man, he grew up in a stable home and family. His middle class values were evident in his preaching and his approach to civil rights. In a cruel irony, both men would end up giving up their lives to the civil rights movement at thirty nine years old.
For the lock in. The students wanted to find ways to remove the arbitrary barriers of education. One Spelman educator played a key role in the locke in at Morehouse. He heard his name before, doctor Abdul Kalimat when our research began. I saw a picture of him during the locke in standing on a balcony holding a megaphone, and I thought to myself, we have to speak to this man.
Here is social activist doctor Abdul Kalamat talking to Hans and myself about his role as a negotiator between the board and the students, along with Warmer Spellman, educator Ab Spellman.
I remember that Ab and I were in constant communication. He was in the room as well, and tea boy Arthur Ross, Diana Ross's brother was there.
Was he a student and more rest of the time. Okay, okay, and was involved in the lock in.
Yeah, he was an activist, but he didn't he wasn't really militant until he had visited a relative in I think it was Birmingham. He had a confrontation and the police knocked her down or something, but he came back you know, black power, you know, that was on his lips. There was this transformation. The board meeting was in Hardness Hall, in this conference room, they were feeling very superior. Well,
what is it that you all have to say? And that's when we started talking about our view that the university should be consolidated as a university and developed, and that the black community should have more assertive control over what was happening there. So there were really two points. The lack of empathy with what we were trying to do. We were really feeling our energy, you know, and so
we were very assertive about our views. The Morehouse students were gathering outside that moment, that picture that was in Ebony I think or wherever it was. When I was speaking to the Morehouse students that had gathered, basically the orientation was they had to liberate their president. Marrill Merrill Lynch was there, and of course we took that as an opportunity to confront power, you know, and you know, what right do you have to be here, you know
over us. We were confronting him with what we thought was the alternative future, alternative beyond him, you know, and that has, you know, its strengths and its weaknesses, and it's gains and its losses. So there was a social gathering of the sort of black middle class and I was invited, and they had arranged at this social occasion for me to have a sit down with Gloucester.
This is before or after the after after, okay.
So we sat down and had a conversation that was closer to this understanding that what his position was, what my position was, in a non confrontational way, and we were both sitting down having a cocktail, you know, and having a just sitting off to the side.
They had arranged it.
In other words, a black middle class had that double position. On the one hand, they went along with power to put them out, but at night they wanted to embrace these young people and protect them. You fight your battles under you know, the conditions that where you find yourself.
So did you find that to be a productive conversation with Gloucester.
Yes, and I felt I could use it as evidence against him.
Same lore, Same lore.
Yeah.
What do you mean by that, Well, I mean, in other words, the the the accommodation people were willing to make for the reforms they could get was too high a price that I was willing to pay at that moment.
It's a choice you have to make in the context of the struggle. Yes, sir, because I mean, you look, my biggest concern at this moment of the Palestinians, why did they agree? Why did hamosen them agree with the twenty point plan. Well, first of all, they didn't agree with the twenty point plan. They agreed with the first part of it. Why because genocide was happening. Yeah, just like Black lives matter. I mean, how many times can you just be in the street, you know, getting into
police's face. You better start talking to your mama and your grandmama, your auntie and the bus driver and who's ever delivering the mail, And you know, those are the people that are going to make change. It's everybody. We can't just act like young people or ideological people or the political activists. We are the helpers. We are the servants of the masses of people, and at those rare moments like in the sixties during the civil rights movement, and it was decades built up before that happen.
You know. Yeah, the mood at this time can be underplayed. Here, Just like today, there was growing unrest and real anger at the injustice in the world. Malcolm and Martin's brutal assassinations were still part of the student's mindset and emotions.
Friday April eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine, one day before the lock in front page of The Maroon Tiger, a headline reads campaign sixty nine to save a Dying Moorhouse.
Is that I promised to improve the conditions of Morehouse.
Time again, this sounds familiar. In Part four of our series, we discussed the student uprising at Howard University in twenty twenty one over poor housing conditions a student services. However, in Morehouse they had the same issues. The article will continue.
However, this year's emphasis on rats and roaches and better dining hall hours has shifted to a secondary position. This year, the painters for Public Office are bringing up such issues as the sustainability of curriculum, with an understanding of the forces that shaped students' destinies. Equal representation and decision making committees made up of administration, faculty, and staff, and encouraging unity, not isolation from the neighboring community.
What we see here is the direct struggle that Sam Jackson was experiencing while at Morehouse. The boys wanted more community and connection from educated black students. Doctor King wanted the experience to be more than money and elitism. These students felt angry and isolated. The article continues.
To Save a Dying Morehouse is the slogan for the campaign nineteen sixty nine to Save a Dying Moorhouse.
The lock in and subsequent expulsions would make national news. The term militants would be used like a slur in the headlines April twenty fourth, nineteen sixty nine the Atlanta Constitution headline Moorhouse cancels concessions.
The Morehouse College Board of Trustees Wednesday rescinded the agreements it made with a group of students who imprisoned the board in a college building for twenty nine hours last week, but the chairman of the Board of Trustees pledged to stand by another set of agreements worked out during the lock in with the Morehouse Student Government Association and remained committed to amnesty for the students who barricaded the trustees
and Harkness Hall. Charles Merrill of Boston, the board chairman, said Wednesday a telephone poll of the trustees had produced the decision to nullify the agreements because they had been granted under duress and because only a minority of the twenty four member board had voted for the concessions to the group that occupied the hall. Merrill added that the band of students and faculty members who held the trustees captive had no cause whatsoever to say it represented the
Morehouse student body. Merrill said he did not want to establish the precedent that anybody with enough power could seize control of our trustees meeting and put the screws to them. The Morehouse Trustees, Meryll said, were influenced by fear of a police rate on the building that would have resulted in their being physically threatened. Some of the students occupying the building carry cans of aerosol deodorant that could have been used to blind them, Meryl said.
In the wake of the lock in, news spread far and wide television newspapers covered the event, and none of them were complimentary about the students who conducted the lock in.
Last week, our cameras weren't permitted on this floor. Students were in control. Today it's a different story. The students at Morehouse College have some definite thoughts about what happened here last week. They questioned the tactics used, not the motives. So far, nothing concrete has come from the lock up of the board of trustees last week, but for now, the issue before the students is to keep their college president on the job.
The president of Morehouse Alumniasciation has urged the college's board trustees stake firm disciplinary measures against student militants who locked the trustees in the administration building over most of the weekend.
Nobody involved can claim ignorance anymore to what has.
Gone down Atlanta, Georgia. The president of Morehouse College's student government says a militant minority of the predominantly black school has made bomb threats and intimidated other students.
In relationship to doctor Gloucester. The students, having essence, given him a voter confidence when they voted not to accept his resignation.
Now the circumstances surrounding my resignation are very complex, and I am still considering what the best course of action is.
Fifteen black militants have been expelled from predominantly Negro Morehouse College by locking the board of trustees in its own meeting room and forcing agreements to a list of demands.
I personally feel that doctor Gloucester has tried to make certain changes, and that only been in office two years, that these changes just unfortunately having to come aback little too slowly.
Atlanta, Georgia, a majority of Morehouse College trustees, the chairman said Wednesday, has repudiated two concessions wrung from some of the trustees last week while they were held prisoner by a band of student militants militancy.
This became the new fear of the US government. These expelled students were now exposed to the worst of American forces.
The FBI and the civil rights movement are intrinsically connected. In our next episode, we will explore how and why next time on the A.
Building under Hoover's time, You've got this kind of communist scare. Bombs are going off, riots in the street. What's going on now in college? Campuses as a government, we're not accepting free speech. Am I a fan of violence?
No?
Have I worked cases against Hamas a proven terrorist organization? Absolutely, they are cold blooded evil. Have I seen any evidence that the people Corbitt grabbed by master men on campus are Hamas?
No?
I haven't, so I worry that we're you know, we're going back. We're going back.
The A Building is produced by Imagine Audio for iHeart Podcasts. It is written and hosted by me Hans Charles and my co host menelec La Mumba.
It is executive produced by Carl Welker and Nathan Kloke, me Menelik Lamomba and Hans Charles.
Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts ar Katrina Norville and Nikki Torre. Marketing lead is David Wasserman.
It is produced, directed, and edited by Nathan Fernarra, with producer John Asanti, Sound design and music by Alloy.
Trax, and special thanks to April Ryan, Doctor, Elia Davis, Kim vc Ada, Bobby Know and James Early. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review The A Building on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.