Chapter 1 Howard University Making the Campus into a Base for Social Action

Pursuing Truth

In the first part of the 1960s, Howard students took on prominent leadership roles across the American South. Some of the most significant events associated with the student wing of the civil rights movement—from the sit-ins and the freedom rides to rent strikes and community boycotts—included Howard students.4 While deeply committed to the civil rights struggle, the same student activists remained connected to Howard. Indeed, they saw that connection as strategic to their civil rights work. Howard student activists believed the university—located just south of the Mason–Dixon Line, between the struggle against de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North—could serve as a key hub of the student wing of the civil rights movement and its direct-action efforts. With this vision in mind, Howard student activists formed NAG, an affiliated campus group of SNCC. The primary reasons for seeking institutional recognition as a student organization were practical and political. First, institutional recognition would enable the students to access student government funds and utilize campus spaces for meetings. Such access would provide financial support for student efforts while also creating an intellectual respite space for planning between civil rights actions. Second, institutional recognition as a student organization would enable the group to use Howard to recruit students into political action, whether it be the Northern or Southern civil rights struggles.

When students formed NAG, they were optimistic about the leadership and vision of Howard President James Nabrit, believing Howard officials would support efforts to link the university to the civil rights struggle. As a respected civil rights attorney, Nabrit stood out among university presidents, especially those at Black institutions, for defending the civil liberties of students. In 1961, Nabrit’s administration publicly supported NAG’s efforts to organize Project Awareness.5 The NAG project brought Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin to debate the civil rights struggle. The Nabrit administration allowed NAG students to promote the event on campus and use Howard’s Cramton Auditorium to hold the debate. Nabrit’s support for the project, Stokely Carmichael wrote, “enhanced the reputation of Howard as a source of leadership in the struggle for human rights,” especially the Black struggle for freedom in the United States.6 It seemed, at least early on, that NAG and Howard leaders agreed on the goal of Project Awareness, which was to “help liberate the minds of students.”7 Indeed, as Nabrit explained after attending the event, “this discussion has been a very thrilling experience because Howard is dedicated to the task of making young people think.”8 Nabrit’s enthusiastic support was not all that surprising. The educational logic of Project Awareness—a debate between two prominent Black intellectuals—aligned closely with his vision of Howard University. Nabrit believed deeply that the university’s primary role was to encourage debate and free inquiry. Central to Nabrit’s ideal was a commitment to an orthodox conception of institutional neutrality. “The pursuit of learning,” he argued, “must be free from the biases of race, religion, nationality, politics, and all else which would obstruct its functions as a center of intellectual activity.”9

The administration’s support of NAG’s efforts, such as Project Awareness, proved to be the exception rather than the rule. When it came to institutional recognition of NAG, Nabrit and the dean of student activities, Carl Anderson, denied every request. The public reason for denying institutional recognition was based on an existing university policy that prevented student organizations from using the campus as a base for social action. The policy aligned with Nabrit’s philosophy of the university. Interpreting students’ civil rights actions as a form of engaging in politics Nabrit believed support for such actions would obstruct the functions of the university. The problem with Nabrit’s argument—or at least what students saw as the tension within it—was that the policy itself was political. Johnson, the pre­decessor to Nabrit, had initially created the policy in response to the first sit-ins led by Pauli Murray and other Howard students in 1942. The reasoning was not for Johnson’s personal politics, even if they tended to be conservative. Rather, Johnson developed the strategy as a method of deflecting further congressional oversight rather than as a deliberate attempt to mitigate student efforts on campus.10

Nabrit employed this same strategy. In his view, NAG’s appeal ignored institutional realities, particularly the prevailing economic arrangements that made Howard University possible. In the 1960s, funding for the university was processed through the Health, Education, and Welfare agency, which also meant that Howard’s budget, including for student organizations, was under supervisory review of congressional members. Johnson sought to protect the financial solvency of Howard, even if it meant a more constrained Black politics on campus. Nabrit’s administration largely built on this strategy. In the first part of the 1960s, with the sit-ins and freedom rides capturing national attention, congressional leaders—especially those coming from Southern states or those near the Mason–Dixon Line—called on Nabrit to control student efforts in the civil rights struggle. Nabrit was especially concerned because Howard’s federal appropriations increased significantly in the years that the sit-ins and freedom rides captured national attention. In 1959, Howard received $5,498,000 in federal appropriations. Two years later, in 1961, those appropriations jumped to $12,010,000.11 By strategically denying institutional recognition of NAG based on the policy of social action, Nabrit was able to argue at congressional budgetary hearings that the organizations leading the sit-ins and other forms of direct action were not associated with Howard University.12

University leaders developed a secondary argument—one that also had an associated political strategy—for denying institutional recognition of NAG. Publicly, Anderson used the financial constraint framework for denying recognition of NAG. Dependency on and oversight by the federal government, Anderson argued, meant the university could not use the funds to support NAG and related student efforts in a movement that directly challenged federal and state laws. Privately, Anderson believed that recognition would also constrain the radical potential of NAG. Given the university’s constraint, Anderson argued that NAG students should desire the opposite: to be unaffiliated with the university. He argued “that the strength [of the movement] remained in being outside of the institution, not inside the institution.”13 In Anderson’s view, the “outside” work of NAG and “inside” intellectual work on campus was a beneficial arrangement to student efforts in the civil rights struggle. The university provided the means for intellectual exploration, while NAG, as an unaffiliated organization, could provide a separate space that enabled students to move ideas into action off campus.14

The political reasoning and strategy of Howard leaders divided members of NAG. Anderson’s argument resonated with some NAG activists, especially when interpreted strictly in terms of the political goals of the movement. Geri Gustavo was skeptical of NAG’s efforts to achieve official recognition. A Howard student and member of both NAG and SNCC, Gustavo believed the focus on the institution, especially as a hub for movement building, was misplaced. Gustavo ultimately saw the real work of the civil rights movement—and political consciousness building—to be off campus.15 Echoing the views of Anderson, Gustavo argued that focusing on Howard would limit politics to student life. Fellow NAG and SNCC member Phil Hutchings disagreed. He believed focusing on the university would help build and sustain the civil rights struggle. Hutchings argued that having an official student social organization on campus would “gather new recruits and more students will become politically involved.” Moreover, he believed that the campus offered a natural space to “experiment with new techniques” as part of the civil rights struggle. In connecting NAG to the university, “we do not sacrifice the work now being done in the Washington area,” he further explained; “if anything, we will strengthen it.”16 The strategies of the Nabrit administration and the secondary reasoning of Anderson seemed politically sound, especially given the constraints of Howard University. In a parallel fashion, the differences between Gustavo and Hutchings also concerned political strategy, in particular how best to sustain the student wing of the civil rights movement and whether focusing on the university was politically sound. The division between students and administrators and between students themselves partly came down to disagreements about political strategy, especially as it related to the university’s role in the civil rights struggle.

But there was also a deeper debate that concerned the role of the university as a political institution. The reasoning—whether articulated by academic leaders like Anderson or student activists like Gustavo—rested upon a division between political action and education that ran counter to a core epistemological belief of most NAG members who sought institutional recognition. Howard students in NAG embraced the underlying epistemology of nonviolent direct action, even if they disagreed on the philosophy of nonviolence itself. Satya, or truth, was central to Mohandas Gandhi’s understanding of nonviolence. In Gandhi’s view, knowledge was always partial. Nonviolent actions such as civil disobedience represented a set of experiments that could realize a common truth among its participants.17 Like others of the founding cohort, Howard students participated in nonviolent workshops facilitated by James Lawson, the primary adviser to sit-in leaders and early SNCC members on nonviolent direct action. In his workshops, Lawson translated Gandhi’s conception of truth into the American pragmatic tradition. As he explained, the experience of nonviolent direct action was similar to “being engaged in an experiment where you have to keep figuring out what happened and why, what didn’t happen.”18 The experimental emphasis at the core of nonviolence served as the basis of SNCC and NAG’s conception of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. “Truth,” students declared in outlining the philosophy of SNCC, “comes from being involved, not observation and speculation.”19 Action for NAG students was more than a political appeal; it was a commitment to the pursuit of truth.

When Howard University leaders refused to recognize NAG as a student organization, students interpreted that refusal as a contradiction of not only their political commitments but also the institution’s commitment to education and the pursuit of truth. Indeed, the stated position—that NAG’s actions fell outside the realm of the university’s educational mission—shaped not only the contours of the debates about the role of Howard University in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s but also how Howard University defined the boundaries of what it meant to pursue truth and higher education at a Black elite institution. The institutional salience of this epistemological belief arose at the Gandhi Memorial Lectures sponsored by Howard University. The theme of the conference was “Youth, Non-Violence, and Social Change.” However, students challenged university leaders for sponsoring a conference on nonviolence while denying support for NAG, an organization that was engaged in nonviolent direct action. Indeed, the conference symbolically captured the tension that went to the heart of NAG’s efforts for institutional recognition. For supporters of NAG’s efforts, the conference rested upon the “unrealistic notion that ‘education’ was limited to classrooms.”20

Paralleling disagreements on political strategy and whether to even focus efforts on the university, members of NAG who supported institutional recognition made different arguments for the place of action at Howard University. Carmichael believed the university’s policy contradicted a student’s academic freedom to pursue knowledge. A key flash point was in 1962, when Carmichael and other NAG members organized a solidarity rally for Southern University students expelled by President Felton Clark for their involvement in the sit-in movement. Howard students like Carmichael had a deep connection to Southern University. Dion Diamond, a Howard student and NAG member, visited Southern to speak to the student body, only to be arrested. The purpose of the Howard rally was to bring attention to the violation of students’ academic freedom at Southern University. When students gathered for the solidarity demonstration, the Howard administration responded by ordering the students to disperse. The problem, argued Carmichael, was “not merely one of legality.” Rather, the problem was “the policy of the administration, which has decreed that the university shall not be ‘used as a base for social action.’”21 Carmichael found the policy, in the ways that Nabrit and others used it, confusing. The stated concern by Nabrit was that NAG students, through their political actions, would be speaking on behalf of Howard University. As a prominent student leader within NAG and SNCC, Carmichael found such claims to run counter to his experiences within both organizations. “Howard students who have participated in protest activity have never claimed to speak for the University, only for themselves,” Carmichael wrote, “so there can be no question of the University’s having been ‘used.’”22 Carmichael argued the issue seemed to come down to the perception of association rather than official use of Howard for direct action.

Carmichael also argued that the policy contradicted the position of the student as a political actor. In Carmichael’s view, the university was the logical place at which a student should organize for social action. “The intellectually aware student,” he continued, “quickly perceives the injustices of the system in which he lives and moves to act against them.” As a result, the student “has no other base from which to act than his own campus.” Moreover, Carmichael argued that political activity was vital to a student’s intellectual growth. Turning to the examples of student movements in Hungary, South Korea, Poland, and Spain, Carmichael argued that the movements demonstrated the “inseparability of intellectual ferment and social ferment, of thought and action.”23 The bourgeoning civil rights struggle—in which students like Carmichael took a prominent role—also demonstrated the inseparability of thought and action. In his critique of the university’s response to the 1962 solidarity rally, Carmichael ultimately defended NAG’s actions by taking an orthodox position on academic freedom: the university had no right to impose any regulation on student activities. But he did not advocate for institutional sponsorship of civil rights activism, either. Rather, Carmichael’s views, at least early in his activist career, hedge closely to a traditional conception of the university and that of Nabrit’s—as a space for free inquiry. The only difference was that Carmichael saw civil rights action as an intellectual activity in ways that Nabrit did not.

Carmichael’s defense of NAG—and how he translated the core epistemological belief of civil rights action—was but one argument. The decision by Howard University leaders to limit the activities of NAG—especially its solidarity rally for Southern students—was personal for Ed Brown. The previous year, he had been expelled from Southern University for his role in the sit-in movement in Louisiana. Brown transferred to Howard University in the hopes of finding a more intellectually and politically aware student life. However, he was dismayed by what he interpreted as Howard’s tepid intellectual and political life. He argued that intellectual apathy at Howard was a by-product of Nabrit’s defense of a traditional idea of the university. Despite Nabrit’s public presentation as an advocate for the cause of civil rights, Brown noted that Nabrit regularly avoided “any reference to political activity” on college campuses. Brown argued that this absence was not a surprise. Rather, it reflected the ways Nabrit and other academic leaders imbibed the cultural norms associated with the American university’s development as a liberal institution. “This absence,” Brown explained, “is in perfect agreement with the liberal-democratic assumption that such activity should not be influenced or directed by University policy.” Brown argued further that the lack of such activity was also a reflection of Howard’s particular institutional culture. The tendency of Howard students to show intellectual apathy was an expression of the institution’s prevailing culture that “served as the capstone of the Black Bourgeoise” and as a “factory for the production of job fillers.”24 Brown believed the way to combat the intellectual apathy in the university—and to transform Howard from a university for the Black bourgeoise to an activist institution that serves the Black public—was to make political action a central activity of the university. Doing so would bring about “a revolution in ideas and values” at Howard University.25

If Carmichael’s reasoning hedged closely to a defense of an older idea of the university and Brown sought a radical reimaging of the university, Michael Thelwell charted a middle-ground argument. He wrote that the refusal to recognize NAG touched “upon broader areas of educational philosophy.”26 Although the university exposed students to new ideas, he argued that it also set limits on the application or realization of those ideas. As Thelwell explained, “When the rare flame of deep commitment is kindled, and the student seeks to put into practice, or to proselytize on behalf of, an idea learned in the classroom, the university terrain suddenly appears too confining and conflict with tradition and authority erupts.”27 However, Thelwell argued that activism and formal educational pursuits at the university were not mutually exclusive. Echoing core tenets of SNCC and NAG, Thelwell argued that action was “itself a generative intellectual flame.”28 In providing institutional support for NAG, Thelwell argued, Howard University leaders would be supporting similar education activities common to other political organizations on campus.

Thelwell’s argument stood out for its broader claim and vision about the relationship between action and education. “It is possible for the University,” Thelwell asserted, “to evolve a policy which will enable it to accommodate the new currents stirring in this generation and at the same time to preserve its intuitional goals and integrity.”29 In Thelwell’s argument for institutional recognition of NAG, he noted that students would abide by the rules and regulations of the university, just as members of other organizations on campus did. The purpose of NAG, Thelwell wrote, “shall be to deepen the commitment of Howard University students to the ideals of human equality and to encourage the expression of that commitment by such means as shall be consistent with University policy.”30 Thelwell, in other words, believed that NAG’s commitment to action could be made compatible with university policy and tradition. So too did Howard University leaders. Indeed, while Howard leaders never granted institutional recognition to NAG, they did agree with the broader point made by Thelwell: the university should evolve its educational policy to support the civil rights struggle. They promoted the Community Service Project, in contrast to the political action models that grew out of SNCC, thus setting the tenor for a new disciplining culture at Howard University.

Providing Service

In 1960, when Howard students gathered with other sit-in leaders across the country, they listened in as Ella Baker encouraged students to think of their movement as “bigger than a hamburger.” She wanted the young activists to see the goal of the movement was to end racial segregation and discrimination “not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.” This goal, she underscored, required full-time dedication.31 Howard students Carmichael, Courtland Cox, Charles Cobb, and Cleveland Sellers took this appeal to heart. During the winter and summer months, they became full-time “field secretaries” and began organizing community meetings and voter drives in the rural Deep South. At the core of community organizing was a deep commitment to relationship building and listening. Cobb personified this commitment. Organizing in Ruleville, Mississippi, a rural Delta town that contrasted with Cobb’s upbringing in Massachusetts and Washington, DC, Cobb had to learn to navigate a different social world. “What I had to do in Ruleville,” Cobb explained, “was learn how to listen to people and learn how to speak to people. There was nothing in my experience that taught me how to function in Sunflower County.”32 Cobb’s key word—learn—was also important. Indeed, the relationship building and commitment to listening that were central to the organizing process also contained the seeds of a distinct political philosophy of experiential learning.

Experiential learning functioned on two levels within SNCC’s organizing efforts. The first was a commitment to learning from those in rural Southern communities—the communities most affected and marginalized by the system of Jim Crow. Baker explained to students like Cobb that the process of community was about tapping into the wisdom and knowledge of experience. This focus had deep political salience for Baker. The overemphasis on formal education as a qualification for leadership, she argued, led people who were “not educated” to defer to people who had book learning. The goal of organizing was to empower the politically marginalized to see that they had the knowledge, from experience, for political leadership. The second commitment was to learn from the process of experience. Baker defined the community organizing process as experimental, much like the nonviolent models of education. The organizing projects and the distinct character of certain localities required different approaches. With the help of Septima Clark and Myles Horton from the Highlander Folk School, Baker and SNCC field-workers held regular workshops where students analyzed their experiences to develop new political knowledge about a particular locality or organizing effort.33 Howard students in SNCC came to understand that the community organizing was a learning process that was oriented just as much toward them as young people as it was toward community residents.

Indeed, the experiential learning of community organizing directly challenged the academic culture at Howard. Baker believed that her own political education was rooted in what she learned on the streets and in meeting places and union halls, rather than in her formal training at Shaw. Such experiences informed her skepticism of Black colleges and universities. Baker critiqued Black universities, seeing them as largely conservative institutions because they did not “provide adequate experience for young Negroes to assume initiative and think and act independently.”34 Baker believed that the lack of opportunities to engage with and experience democracy in practice produced a narrow conception of education. She believed the prevailing idea of education across Black higher education primarily served to advance individual professional careers that were accommodated to the system of Jim Crow.In the view of Sellers, the academic culture of Howard University was a direct reflection of this model of education. Transferring from Voorhees, where students were on the front lines of the sit-ins, he assumed that Howard—because of its status as an elite academic institution—would be a hotbed of activism. But he found the university’s student culture to be more class-based and focused on the development of the “professional, white-collar.” It was “a kind of bourgeois campus,” he explained, that taught students “to become part of the status quo.”35 Baker’s philosophy of organizing that became inculcated in SNCC and associated organizations like NAG came to represent a counterpoint to prevailing notions of what it meant to be “educated” in the early 1960s, especially at institutions like Howard University.

But the knowledge, perspective, and relationships gained through organizing work had both epistemological and political limitations. While the process of organizing enabled field-workers to identify particular local conditions to exploit as part of their efforts and taught students value-laden skills and perspectives missing from the regular curriculum of the university, the experiential knowledge itself was limited in helping students understand the larger structural conditions of their work. As part of the organizing efforts, SNCC field-workers set up economic programs to address high unemployment and the lack of economic power among Black residents across the South.36 Yet, SNCC field-workers recognized that many of their self-help projects had very little impact on the economic conditions of Blacks in the South. Many of these same field-workers also lacked a broader knowledge of existing federal programs and other resources that might aid their community projects across the South. The limitations of their community organizing and projects across the South raised larger questions within SNCC concerning the relationship between formal education, expert knowledge, and the experiential knowledge of community organizing.37

Howard Zinn, an adult adviser to SNCC, argued that the issue that SNCC confronted was the gap between its experiential knowledge and the university’s expert knowledge. He believed that SNCC was “unique in that we are in touch with the grass roots of society in a way in which most of these minds in academic pursuits are not.”38 But, Zinn argued, many students within SNCC “feel a loss because there is information we need which is available in the academic world.” In order to develop more effective economic programs, Zinn argued, “We need to enlist some of the best minds around in thought on reorganisation [sic] of society.” Zinn suggested a new model of education that allowed for temporary shifts of study and community organizing. The combination, Zinn believed, constituted a “union of moral commitment, social action, and intellectual inquiry, which education should give.”39 Indeed, in Zinn’s view, SNCC needed to develop a sustained and intentional mechanism that connected knowledge gained through the experience of organizing to knowledge developed in the context of academia. Zinn’s idea became a central goal of SNCC more broadly. “In recruiting potential student leaders from college campuses and sending them to work in rural communities,” students explained in SNCC’s recruitment pamphlet, the organization provided a means “to bridge the gap between the centers of learning and the work-a-day communities.”40

Privy to these discussions and shaped by Zinn’s ideas in SNCC, Howard students Brown, Thelwell, and Bill Mahoney went to work on organizing programs that linked academic research to organizing efforts in the South. They focused their energies on Howard, believing the university, with its existing graduate programs in medicine, social work, and law, represented a vital resource for developing new education programs. Mahoney emphasized the value of having the conference at Howard. “It is imperative at this time that all sections of the community close ranks in this struggle,” and to accomplish this task, he wrote, “we prefer that the conference be held at Howard rather than at one of the white universities in the District.”41 In Brown’s view, the conference was an expression of an existing tradition at Howard. “Howard University,” he wrote, “has a tradition of making its facilities available to programs primarily concerned with the Negro in America.”42 Like Zinn, Howard students in NAG also believed that a formal SNCC-university conference not only reinforced existing traditions but also could model alternative forms of education at Howard. Indeed, the model NAG activists developed sought to flatten the hierarchy typical of academic cultures like Howard. The workshop model treated SNCC field-workers, community representatives, and Howard faculty as equal experts, despite the wide variance in their degrees and backgrounds. Howard faculty and other outside academic researchers were to provide relevant information, while SNCC field-workers and community representatives—those with experiential knowledge of community organizing—would “relate the information to the real situation in the communities they come from.”43

Howard officials supported the conference, albeit in a way that employed the same political strategy and logic associated with the policy on social action. Because neither NAG nor SNCC were recognized student groups, the event was sponsored by a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Like Project Awareness, a SNCC-sponsored conference at Howard was also an expression of the university’s role in providing a space for free speech and deliberation. But Nabrit and other academic leaders also believed the conference connected to the educational mission of Howard. Indeed, the role of Howard was to provide expert knowledge and training in the areas of job training and economic relief and relate the information to SNCC’s community work in Mississippi and other parts of the South. In Nabrit’s view, the conference was a natural extension of its existing disciplinary and expert culture. This is the point that Mahoney made after the completion of the conference. To Dean Evan Crawford, Mahoney wrote, “This event was testimony to Howard University’s continued rededication to its founding principles of training for all youth regardless of race.”44

Even as NAG activists and Howard leaders agreed that the conference aligned with the mission of the university, the conference itself revealed key differences in the cultures of learning in SNCC and at Howard. Mahoney raised two key issues. First, many of the academic experts presented findings that did not match the experiential knowledge of the community. As Mahoney wrote in the conference report, “The speakers who were asked to address themselves to policy questions made some statements contrary to SNCC’s experiences.” Second, the approach to conveying information did not enable SNCC field-workers to connect the research knowledge to the community. While the technical experts “were successful in giving pertinent information,” Mahoney wrote, they were “not successful in directing conversations toward the area of Southern rural problems.”45 On paper, these differences read as largely logistical, but they revealed deeper philosophical differences around the Howard-SNCC partnership. The conference model largely prioritized a technical and expert-led model of service, one in which involvement for the student meant extending university research into the community via data collection and social service. While recognizing the need for expert research, student activists associated with SNCC and NAG critiqued the university’s approach to serving the community for the ways that it marginalized the perspective and knowledge of local residents.

The differences mattered, especially in how Howard developed new institutional programs—and civic culture—in response to the appeals of NAG and SNCC in the first part of the 1960s. Howard leaders and faculty agreed that the conference represented a model for expanding education. The same year that Howard sponsored the SNCC conference, Howard leaders expanded the Community Service Project. Partnering with local churches, the stated mission of the project echoed a core idea of SNCC’s organizing ethos. The purpose, explained Gilbert Lowe, the project director, “was to learn from the residents themselves the problems they considered most important, the services lacking and the residents’ attitudes towards working on these problems.” Moreover, Lowe’s framing drew on the nascent critique of Howard by NAG activists—what he described as the “lack of concern for the communities in which [universities] are located.” But the process of learning from the community took the form of survey research. Lowe translated the ethos of the movement into the value-neutralist logic of the university. Indeed, Lowe argued that the Community Service Project offered a two-tier educational model for other urban universities—what he defined as an “action-research program.” Lowe’s report on the project articulated a particular model of disciplining that served the academic development of the student while also providing direct service to the community. As Lowe explained, the project served as “a training facility for Howard University students” by providing “field work experiences for students in methodology or for subject matter for papers and theses.”46

While Lowe focused on the academic and professional benefits of the project, seeing the work largely as an extension of social science fieldwork, university administrators and outside supporters believed the project represented a way to connect the pursuit of knowledge to value commitments. William Stuart Nelson, the vice president for special projects and a professor of religion at Howard, played a prominent role in the civil rights movement. He served as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. in his development of nonviolent direct action and facilitated nonviolent workshops with student activists in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1960. At Howard, he helped plan the Youth, Non-Violence, and Social Change conference in 1963. Nelson understood that Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence had two sides: civil disobedience and constructive service.47 In his view, the university’s appropriate role within the civil rights struggle was to provide constructive service. He was a staunch supporter of the Community Service Project, seeing it as an expression of his interpretation of nonviolence within the American political context. In 1964, Nelson invited King to meet with students at Howard. Only on campus for a brief afternoon, King focused mainly on the Community Service Project. As reported in the campus newspaper, The Hilltop, King believed the project “united the knowledge of the school with the betterment of the community.”48 University administrators like Lowe and Nelson believed the project fit into the disciplinary culture of the university with its emphasis on research while also providing an outlet for students to participate in the civil rights struggle as an integrated part of their education.

The institutionally supported project seemed to be an expression of Howard’s efforts to reimagine its mode of education to better support the civil rights struggle, especially in the DC area. Indeed, many of the churches affiliated with the project also worked with NAG and SNCC in DC. The survey data was utilized by NAG and SNCC as part of their organizing efforts. Just as importantly, the project was moving students into the community. By 1964, 150 students participated in the project, many of them coming from the Sociology and Anthropology Club, campus sororities and fraternities, and those in social work. Working with Howard faculty, students went door-to-door canvassing, meeting with church members, and observing patterns of the neighborhood. They also provided needed services, volunteering with Big Brother, Big Sister, the Urban Corps, and related organizations that offered educational programming. But direct institutional support for the project came at the same time that NAG students were advocating for recognition on campus. The promotion of the project had the effect of redirecting socially conscious students away from NAG’s efforts to community service and fieldwork that aligned with Howard’s traditional research mission. Indeed, the logic of the Community Service Project approach—with its emphasis on data collection and volunteerism—not only served as the basis of the new disciplining culture at Howard but also marginalized the political philosophy of experiential learning associated with the community organizing work of NAG and SNCC in the first part of the 1960s.

Reimagining a Black University

A new generational cohort of students at Howard in the mid-1960s focused efforts on reforming the university by calling for new service programs in the community. But the change in focus was not simply due to the influence of the institution; it also reflected shifts in the civil rights struggle. The intellectual project of Black Power on campus was both a demand for Black studies and a demand for programs that served the Black community. The most prominent organizational iteration of Black Power in the mid-1960s was the Black Panther Party, an organization that was deeply committed to “service to the people” programs.49 At Howard, the community service ethos of Black Power shaped a generation of activists who sought to carry on the legacy of NAG and SNCC in redefining the political role of the Black university in the civil rights struggle. Starting in 1967, the student assembly at Howard made community service a key element of reforming the university. With the end of the Community Service Project in 1966, the assembly called on the university to open the campus resources to the surrounding community by creating a “training program” in human relations, Black arts and culture, and community action. They emphasized that these efforts must be determined by local community members. “Periodic meetings,” the students explained, must “be held between students and community people being worked with in the programs so that people in the community can determine with which problems they wish Howard University to deal.”50 Even as Howard students focused their appeals on community service, the commitment to service among Black Power advocates still involved an associated commitment to political activism. The emphasis on community action and knowledge was a central component of the nascent vision of a new Black university articulated at Howard’s conference “Toward the Black University.”

Despite students’ appeals and the guiding ethos of the conference, Howard leaders did not provide any new programs that served the Black community. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities, students in social work, law, and medicine boycotted classes in the winter of 1969. They pressed university administrators on the curriculum. Arthur J. Cox, a student in social work and participant in the boycott, argued that many students had come to Howard looking for that “extra something that would help us be more effective in the black community,” but he had never found such opportunities in his coursework or on campus. By the spring, Howard undergraduates joined in the protests, making similar demands for educational relevance and programs for community involvement. What emerged from the spring conference—and its more famous campus strike that fall—was a shared call for new programs that connected university resources to the community. In the open letter and list of demands to Nabrit, key student leaders of the campus protest—Anthony Gittens, Ewart Brown, and Barbara Penn—demanded that “Howard must be made relevant to the black community. The university campus must be made more available to all black people and programs must be instituted to aid the black community in the struggle against oppression.”51

But that shared vision hid different conceptions of community involvement. In Carmichael’s vision of a Black university, one that he articulated at the Toward a Black University Conference, the Howard graduate and former NAG student maintained an emphasis on institutional autonomy while further framing his vision in the context of Black liberation and Third World political struggles. Black Power advocates like Carmichael saw their political task as revealing the ways that the stated claims of universalism in institutions like the university were in fact color-blind claims that masked the prevailing culture of Whiteness. Carmichael argued that the goal of a Black revolution on campus was not to create a “black Harvard.” “The white education system has placed technical development over human development,” Carmichael argued; “we must reverse the system—to put human development over technical development.” He worried that the calls for Black studies and a “Black university” continued to be shaped by prevailing conceptions of White higher education. “We cannot just have Swahili or Afro-American studies taught by the same methodology and ideology as the white system,” Carmichael argued. Like other Black Power advocates within SNCC, he envisioned the Black university as a community-based university, or what fellow activist Ivanhoe Donaldson defined as “an activist oriented institution.”52

Other SNCC and civil rights activists agreed that Howard must redirect its intellectual resources to the Black community. However, their visions largely aligned with the technical and academic character that Carmichael associated with the White university system. Indeed, for some, the concern was less about institutional revolution and more about institutional reform. E. W. Steptoe and Jesse Morris had deep roots in Mississippi and knew the concerns of its Black residents. Steptoe was a farmer who intimately experienced the struggles of Black sharecroppers in the South, and Morris helped form the Poor People’s Corporation, a self-help organization that provided loans and technical assistance to Black residents seeking to start cooperative businesses. Steptoe and Morris advocated technical aid and research that would help advance the economy of rural agricultural communities in the South.53 Their vision was largely a land grant extension service model that would connect expert and academic research to economic and agricultural programs.

This conception of the Black university’s role in the community resonated with a group of Howard students who formed Students for an Educational Institution (SEI). SEI members disagreed with the focus on Black identity at the institutional level. Vernanders Black, the cochairman of the organization, worried that an emphasis on race and Black identity would not fully equip students to live and appropriately engage in a diverse society. Group members also did not see their academic education as Whitewashed. Rather, the purpose of the organization was to improve academic education at Howard and focus on academic research opportunities. Like others at Howard, SEI members sought ways to develop more “academic-community projects.” In contrast to Carmichael and others who believed that a community-based education would challenge and transform notions of knowledge and education, SEI students argued that the task of community projects was to extend university education and knowledge to the community.54

In the aftermath of the strike, Michael Harris, the Howard University Student Association (HUSA) president, started the D.C. Project. Fully funded by HUSA, the D.C. Project was a student-run effort that sought to realize the various calls for a community-based education at Howard. The project served as an institutional compromise, at least among the students. Similarly shaped by appeals to Black Power, Harris echoed a key tenet of Carmichael’s vision. “Howard University,” he explained “should serve another purpose other than preparing people to fill slots in white society.” That purpose, in his view, was to serve as an intellectual resource to the Black community. Indeed, he wrote, Howard should “belong to the black people in Washington, D.C., the black people surrounding the university.”55

What Harris proposed in the D.C. Project synthesized the SNCC elements of experiential learning and the cultural appeal of Black Power with the academic models associated with SEI and the research culture of Howard University. The first goal was to develop community-based research mechanisms that enabled students to determine whether Howard University’s curriculum and research could support community organizations adjacent to campus. Second, based on this research, they envisioned developing programs designed to eliminate “social ills which have plagued the community for so long.” A key component of these two goals was the creation of “community information centers” that made “available information sought by the community and that will serve as a resource of information for Howard University to design new programs and provide needed services.” It also involved a reshaping of university governance that included not only increased student input on institutional decisions but also the input of “community representatives” who engaged with university affairs. The D.C. Project was an attempt by students to create a research and educational model that maintained SNCC’s commitment to community knowledge and Black culture while also developing a service arm that provided research to Black communities in the DC area. In both ways, Harris explained, the project sought to combat the prevailing existence of Howard—what he saw as an “ebony tower of social detachment and philosophical neutrality.”56 The D.C. Project went into full operation in 1969.

One component of the D.C. Project—called the Southeast Community Summer Project—was designed to involve students and faculty in youth and adult education in DC. The project employed a particular model of teaching that took on key characteristics of the experiential learning models of SNCC. Called Operation Zygote, the model started with the particular conditions and situations of the student. The goal, explained Harris, was to “use the environment to teach and give knowledge about the environment.” This commitment allowed for learning to be multidirectional. Area students on the “receiving” end of tutoring services took on key leadership roles in the programing. Tony Stewart, a Howard student and project coordinator, explained that the “majority of the students participating in the program are from the inner city schools, they are, therefore, equipped to attack the problem.” By using the environment and the community experience as a source of knowledge and promoting the leadership of the high school students, the program positioned the professional college student as a learner in the tutoring relationship. At the same time, the college student also brought to the relationship academic and expert knowledge to help contextualize the experiential knowledge of the student. Indeed, at the core of the project was a political critique of the schooling system. Stewart argued that the fact that inner city schools required a tutoring program indicated that “the present approach to inner city education is inadequate.”57

As part of the D.C. Project, students also established community health care and legal aid centers to redirect the research and education in those schools to address community issues. The Center for Clinical Legal Studies combined community organizing with coursework. The combination, students believed, would develop both a student who would be a “legal advocate for the poor” and an “integrated program of legal study in the law of the poor.”58 The center served as a legal arm of civil rights efforts in Augusta, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi, in the late 1960s. Ike Madison, a law student who oversaw the legal clinic, explained the philosophy of the center as an approach that recognized community members’ need not only for legal advisers but also for legal advocates who understood community problems and “the need for the effective combination of all community resources to solve these problems.”59 Other law students went so far as to connect the efforts of the D.C. Project to a complete reframing of what it means to study law and become a lawyer. Les Gaines, a Howard student and president of the Student Bar Association, argued that those enrolled at the law school would be known as “liberators” rather than law students. Gaines explained that, like those participating in the efforts in Alabama and Mississippi, “we’re going where the people are, where ever they’re being oppressed, shot down, and killed.”60 For students like Gaines, community-based work via the Center for Legal Studies was part of the broader movement to remake Howard into a base for preparing students to challenge social and political systems.

The D.C. Project accommodated the varied efforts of Howard students over the course of the 1960s. The project reflected the early appeals for action made by NAG students, albeit in ways that were reflective of the evolving political strategies of the movement. Members of the D.C. Project continued the work of SNCC field-workers in the South, where they led political mobilization efforts in Alabama. The D.C. Project also funded student work with the National Welfare Rights Organization. In 1972, five students helped plan the conference in Miami, based on the theme “People before Politics.” As part of the conference, the students also organized a protest of the Democratic National Convention.61 While the D.C. Project enabled participants to use Howard as a base for organizing students and moving them into political activism. The student-led initiative also accommodated legacies of the Community Service Project. The tutoring program focused on providing tutoring services as well as charity donations to families in the neighborhood. Indeed, for some students, the project’s experiences in the school provided an outlet to connect community service to coursework. As Leonard Harvey explained, the D.C. Project enabled students to “get a chance to apply what they have learned in the classroom to a real working situation.”62 Students thus attempted to create a model of community education that balanced student learning, community service, and political activism. This balance carried on the legacy of SNCC—one in which service was always tied to structural analysis and political struggle.

The rhetoric of the new administration at Howard suggested that the D.C. Project would garner additional institutional support, especially with the emphasis on community service. James E. Cheek, the new president at Howard in 1969, supported the creation of new community programs. “The total resources of this university,” he explained in his inaugural address to students, “will be mobilized to engage the entire spectrum of social problems which have emerged as crises in our national life.” In particular, he hoped to create “new public service activities” and “community programs” to address the issues of social justice. He believed that a university like Howard, with its unique history, required a different position as an institution, one that “cannot stand aloof, morally and neutral and socially passive.”63 Andrew Billingsley, the new vice president of academic affairs at Howard, shared similar views. He believed that the institution was “strategically located to transform American education.” As such, he argued, the institution offered a natural setting to develop what he defined as “liberation techniques,” and the faculty, students, and administration had to work together to “use all available resources of the society to help liberate Black people from oppression outside and dissent within our own community.”64

Even as student activists and university officials aligned on the need for new education programs that both supported Black community needs and extended learning beyond the campus, Cheek and Billingsley tended to support those efforts that prioritized community service over political activism. Indeed, the D.C. Project never received institutional and financial support because it focused on community organizing and political activism in the DC area. Both Cheek and Billingsley used the same logic as Johnson and Nabrit, seeing such direct political activities as both outside the scope of Howard’s mission and a risky activity given the institution’s financial dependency on federal funds. Cheek and Billingsley were also informed by the logic of the new federalism of the Nixon administration. Cheek signed onto the University Year for Action (UYA), an initiative by the Nixon administration that promoted volunteerism among college students. Howard’s participation in the UYA attracted more federal appropriations. Those appropriations also came with further limitations on the type and form of community involvement. Lawrence E. Gary, a social work professor, oversaw the initiative and interpreted volunteer work as a key experience for preprofessional development. Although the UYA shared elements of the D.C. Project, students involved in the UYA were prohibited from participating in political activism. The type of activities allowed to address the UYA’s goal of the “alleviation of poverty” was limited to community service. One of the successful projects, as Gary interpreted, was when student volunteers working in a DC nursery found the school in disrepair and organized a group of students to paint it. Students enriched their education and developed a sense of community concern through their work, but broader questions related to the cause of the disrepair or structural inequalities were marginalized in UYA programming.

The logic of UYA and associated funds also shaped the other community programs started by the Cheek administration. Cheek also provided funding for a Volunteer Assistance Bureau at Howard. Operating under student affairs, Darrah F. Hall, the associate director, used the language of educational relevance and activism to describe the Volunteer Assistance Bureau. “Days of universities as ‘ivory towers’ are almost over. We can no longer isolate ourselves,” she explained. The bureau, she argued, provided students an opportunity “to work towards alleviation of social ills affecting society.”65 The forms of community involvement that the bureau promoted were short-term volunteer opportunities such as the Day in the Community, an effort that recruited student volunteers to clean up trash and litter in the surrounding Cardoza area. Hall connected the volunteer experiences to learning. “A student must be actively involved in his own educational process,” she explained. “The student can greatly enhance his theoretical classroom experience through the theoretical experience gained as a volunteer.” Hall worked with faculty to create alternatives that allowed “volunteer work to take the place of another course requirement.”66 The Volunteer Assistance Bureau encouraged student involvement but in ways that were focused more on charity work, service, and professional development.

With the establishment of the bureau and institutional involvement in UYA, student interest in the D.C. Project waned. In some ways, its demise was the result of student mismanagement. By the spring semester of 1971, HUSA called for a complete reorganization of the D.C. Project. Sam Wallace, the treasurer of HUSA, had found that many of the student coordinators were delinquent and failing to do their work in the community. Other advocates of the project challenged Wallace’s interpretation. They believed its issues resulted from the lack of support from the administration and the development of alternative community programs. D.C. Project staff believed that the university never supported their efforts, either through granting credit or funding. Some staff members noted that when the university began to develop its own programming, such as the Volunteer Assistance Bureau and the UYA, it redirected students away from the D.C. Project and its goals. Students who participated in institution-sponsored programs received five times more in funding and academic credit. As some D.C. Project staff also worried, these “community projects tend to get lost or become institutionalized that they reflect the university’s need rather than that of the Black community.”67

From 1973 to 1975, students held multiple referendums that attempted to revive the D.C. Project. Supported by the HUSA student body in a 1974 vote, the new D.C. Project laid out a set of principles that called on students and university officials to make the resources of Howard more readily available to the Black community. Despite wide-ranging student support, the university administrators attempted to undermine the new program. In 1974, after a summer in which students ran the program, the office of the vice president for student affairs impounded the funds of the D.C. Project. Carl Anderson, who was then the coordinator of the UYA, refused to release the funds to the project, even after a referendum by students that demanded their release. Publicly, he argued that the issue came down to competing interpretations of the referendum in HUSA. Privately, he was skeptical of the project. He noted that the project did not have support from the board of trustees and himself. He also had reservations about the efficacy of the endeavor, believing the project was “too broad in focus and scope.” Moreover, he believed that “the project cannot stand as an independent unit, outside the University.”68 Anderson had changed course. In the mid-1960s, he believed the university should neither support nor be involved in the activities of NAG. By the mid-1970s, the political environment and context had changed. With community involvement now accommodated within the university, any efforts off campus now fell under the rules and regulations of the university, constraining students’ efforts associated with the D.C. Project.

Legacy

Anthony “Mawu” Straker led the effort to revive the D.C. Project, critiquing prevailing university-sponsored community projects in the process. In an editorial for The Hilltop, Mawu captured the fundamental difference between the programs adopted by the university and those that were defunded. He believed most efforts at Howard, especially in response to the activism from 1966 to 1969, tended to only give “lip service” to the needs of the community. But, Mawu emphasized, this was not a result of a broader effort to deflect student efforts. He argued that universities like Howard, dependent upon federal money, faced a dilemma when trying to connect students, education, and activism to community problems. In order for a university like Howard to exist, Mawu argued, it had to “adhere to the systems of this racist nation or be destroyed by political and economical forces of the system.” At the same time, the stated purpose of Howard was to provide requisite skills and education that students could use for Black liberation. This tension put pressure on university officials and the board of trustees to make a choice in terms of what programs they could and could not support. Using Howard as an example, Mawu concluded that “most ‘Black’ institutions of higher learning pretend to be the middle of the road, thus giving lip service and tokenism to the needs and aspirations of the Black communities, while actively campaigning for the systems that oppress them, exploit them, and degrade them.” Mawu’s analysis of Howard’s financial dependency on federal and foundational money reflected the constraints of using the university as a means for political liberation. At its best, at least in Mawu’s view, Howard’s financial dependency meant that the institution could only support elements of social reform.69

Mawu’s analysis of the institution’s financial dependency identified one factor that constrained efforts to reimagine the Black university in the 1960s and 1970s. The other factor was an academic culture, promoted by Howard leaders and reinforced by the student body, that defined Howard as an elite institution for the privileged few of the Black middle class. Ruth Robinson, a longtime Shaw neighborhood resident, negatively viewed Howard University, especially in the 1950s. “Howard University students saw the Negro community in Washington as a poverty-stricken ghetto. They saw our citizens as block boys and mammies,” Robinson explained. As a result of this view, she emphasized that “we saw the students as snobs.”70 Even with the expansion of new volunteer programs, the relationship between Howard and its surrounding community rested upon the same class divide. “Many of our fellow students claim to have the ultimate goal of using their education to help the Black community but after being a part of the ‘Howard mentality,’” Bilal Sunji Ahmaddiyya, a student at Howard, explained, “they refer to their brothers and sisters of the very community they claim to want to provide leadership for as Blockgirls & Blockboys,” a derogatory reference. Ahmaddiyya believed that the academic culture of Howard—even those programs that supported community involvement—reinforced class barriers between privileged Black students and their counterparts in Shaw and the broader DC area.71 The programs supported by academic leaders at Howard University were made to fit the academic culture that defined the university as a space that cultivated a “talented tenth.”

The analytical reflections of Mawu, Robinson, and Ahmaddiyya identified the twin institutional factors that set limits on student efforts at Howard. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, students pushed Howard leaders to rethink both prevailing ideas of education and the role of the Black university in the struggle for civil rights. Academic leaders were supportive of the larger appeals. But, at different stages in this era of mass Black student politics, university leaders at Howard set boundaries as to what were appropriate modes of action both on and off campus. Initially, the focus was on whether the university could directly support the actions of NAG, which included sit-ins, freedom rides, business boycotts, and rent strikes. University leaders denied every request for institutional recognition and support of NAG, reasoning that maintaining an institutional distance from direct action would protect the financial solvency of Howard while ensuring students’ political freedom. The underlying logic was politically realistic, but it also shaped a broader disciplining culture that set limits on other efforts to support students’ engagement in the community and redefine the idea of the Black university.

At the same time, Howard leaders recognized the value of supporting student efforts in the community. In response to the community organizing efforts of SNCC in the mid-1960s and the broader appeals for community action that emerged out of the 1968 campus strike, Howard leaders provided institutional support for a range of new education projects and institutional hubs for community service and involvement among students. The type of programs that academic leaders supported rested upon the same logic used to deny the recognition of NAG, although with different emphases. In the first part of the 1960s, the dean and civil rights activist Nelson interpreted community service as an element of cultivating students’ sense of moral concern and an expression of one component of Gandhian nonviolence. Faculty members like Lowe and Gary interpreted programs like the Community Service Project and UYA as an extension of academic coursework and social science field research. By the 1970s, Cheek’s views largely synthesized both views: the goal of volunteer service was to enhance students’ academic and professional learning while developing students’ sense of moral and social commitment. The efforts of the Cheek administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s—at once promoting alternative community programs while refusing to support the D.C. Project—solidified the new culture of disciplining democracy at Howard University.

Indeed, the financial dependency on federal appropriations and maintenance of Howard as an elite institution disciplined the more expansive vision for a Black democratic university. But the culture of disciplining democracy at Howard was not solely a product of Howard academic leaders seeking to deflect or mitigate student activism, even if the programs primarily resulted in students moving toward community service over political action. A majority of Howard students also adopted the political reality of the university. “All right,” acknowledged one Howard student amid the campus protests, Howard is “‘bourgeoisie’ and not ‘revolutionary,’” but if Howard were to become “revolutionary” and cut ties from the federal government and other White philanthropic outlets, where would students and academic leaders get “$500 million to even replace this school?”72 The political and institutional reality, in other words, shaped students just as much as academic leaders. It also shaped its legacy. Q. T. Jackson was a leading figure in the Howard movement in the late 1960s. As an advocate for the D.C. Project, he maintained a vision of Howard that combined the emphasis on Black thought with Black community action.73 In the late 1970s, as he looked back on the legacy of the Howard campus movement, he noted that “the relationship between Howard and the community has improved tremendously over the years.” But, he emphasized, “we still have a long way to go.”74