Date of Award

12-1972

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Political Science

First Reader

Dr. Jim Ranchino

Abstract

Booker T. Washington provided for the masses and their economic plight in his thinking, but neglected the cultural-political theory, and the creation of a black intelligentsia. W.E.B. DuBois, on the other hand, directed attention to the intelligentsia, and cultural-political theoretics, but, in his early and most famous approach, failed to provide sufficiently for the masses. Possibly as a consequence of historical circumstances - the location of most blacks of that day in the South and the irreconcilable mores of segregation - neither developed theoretics for invating white colleges.

this was left to the more recent years, when the early advocates of "black studies" sought both the collective elevation of a people, with education of, from, and for the masses, and the training of a mass-minded black conscious middle class. Black studies was to provide a working model and theoretics for both black and white colleges, correcting the "Negro" college's fallacies and seizing equitable power and control at white colleges. Instead of searching merely for equality of education, its premise was: (1) that there can be no equality of education in a racist society; (2) the type of education conceived and perpetrated by the white oppressor is essentially an education for oppression; and (3) black education must be education for liberation, or at least for change. In this respect, it was to prepare black students to become the catalysts for a black cultural revolution. All courses - whether history, literature, or mathematics - would be taught from a revolutionary ideology or perspective. Black education would become the instrument for change.

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