COMMENTARY We Can't Have It Both Ways! Huel D. Perkins
HUEL PERKINS Have Blacks abandoned the quest for full integration? This Page
MAL GOODE Too many American actions belie our claims to be a just society. Page 25
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To integrate or not to integrate — that is the question. Whether it is nobler to pursue the course of action we have set for ourselves as a race to completely eradicate the "last vestiges of segregation" or allow this country to retreat to its earlier dastardly practices of discrimination based solely upon the accident of color? This paraphrase of Shakespeare is occasioned by the fact that I see signs — not very visible, but signs nevertheless — that Blacks are beginning to grow soft on a stand for integration. A noted columnist wrote recently that perhaps we have been too concerned about integration and that in the face of this clamor and emphasis, the quality of education which Blacks have been receiving has deteriorated. And then there are the avowed "separatists" who contend that Blacks never should have tried to integrate in the first place. Completely disillusioned with the system, they have always held out for complete isolation and autonomy — not unlike the Sutton Griggs novel of 1899 entitled lmperium In Imperio wherein he proposed that Blacks should seize the state of Texas and establish it as their country. And then there was one of my students in the early seventies who had just completed her senior year at a predominantly white high school who vowed that she had tried integration and that it just hadn't worked. To which I replied that she had tried integration for just one year in high school — but that her parents and their parents before them had tried segregation for some 300 years and knew from bitter, spiritdenting, soul-searing experiences that it didn't work. Finally, I suggested to her that she give integration just a bit more of a chance before pronouncing final condemnation — at least half the number of years we were kept in slavery. Blacks, living through these incipient
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years of racial re-alignment, are by no means of one accord as to what we must do "to be saved." Were we better off when only Black teachers taught Black children? Would a completely integrated educational system signal the end to Black "professionals" as we know them today? Does this incredible instinct for survival which some psychologists have noted in Black people extend into the area of formal education? Have Black people been socialized to the extent that they become dysfunctional unless surrounded by persons of similar hues as a support mechanism? While the questions posed above may require time before they are answered conclusively, one fact remains clear in my mind and that is this: the concept of "separate but equal" is a contradiction in terms. Go where you will — search where you may — I defy anyone with rational intelligence to produce an instance of solitary, secluded, disembodied entities possessing an equivalency. They just don't exist. This, it appears to me, was what the struggle was all about. Or maybe I became lost somewhere along the way. Any cataclysmic event has the capacity to redirect the course of history. The French Revolution, for example, forever changed the course of art. World War I spawned a new sense of manhood among American Blacks which was reflected in the writings of the poets and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance. And similarly, the historic Brown vs. the Board of Education changed forever the face of American education. It must be borne in mind that whites did not sue for integration (there are many who wish the word would disappear from the dictionary). It was Black people who became distressingly aware that a dual system of education — such as was extant in America at the time of the Brown decision — robbed young Blacks of the The Sphinx / Summer 1983