BROTHER TO BROTHER
From Morehouse to Here
TWO ALUMNI ON HOW THEIR MOREHOUSE JOURNEY SHAPED THEIR FUTURE SELVES BY VANN R. NEWKIRK II ’10 Co-chief scribe of Seven Scribes, excerpts from an article titled “I’m a black activist. Here’s what people get wrong about Black Lives Matter,” in Vox Media, August 31, 2015
BY DONOVAN X. RAMSEY ’11 Demos Emerging Voices Fellow, excerpts from an articled titled “Black Colleges Become Sanctuaries After Ferguson” in the National Journal, Sept. 10, 2015
“I learned much of what I know about the civil rights movement at Morehouse College. An extraordinary campus, on a hill in Atlanta, Morehouse was where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond and other notable architects of the civil rights movement once studied under the tutelage of titans like Benjamin Elijah Mays. It’s where, in 2006, I enrolled with similar hopes. “Like most historically black colleges and universities, Morehouse is still heavy with the spirit of the civil rights movement that it helped birth; to attend any of these institutions is to surround ‘Morehouse is oneself with ghosts of the struggle. Six years ago, while heavy with the still a student at Morehouse, I took a class dedicated spirit of the civil to bringing in speakers every week to lecture us on that rights movement movement. “I felt those ghosts most strongly in that classroom. that it helped “… My work is writing about the rich history of black birth’ America. That work has led me to understand that movement history, like all of black history, is a history of iterations. It is jazz, it is a history of a people finding chords from another time and putting them together into something new that works for the challenges of the present. It is learning from Bond, from Young, from Martin, from Baker, from Fannie Lou Hamer, from Diane Nash, from James Baldwin, and also learning from Netta Elzie, from Patrisse Cullors, from DeRay McKesson, from Jesse Jackson, from Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is synthesis, and it is a beautiful and elegant whole.”
“…In a society that desperately wants to be post-racial, many ask if HBCUs are still relevant. It’s this sentiment that perhaps has allowed for a mass divestment from HBCUs in the 21st century. In fact, despite the continued and very evident need for HBCUs in educating black students, the federal government has been slowly chipping away at funding in recent years. “Indeed, I have never felt more secure as a black man than I did as a student on Morehouse’s campus. As the nation’s only institution of higher education founded to serve ‘My blackness did not us, it is a rare space where black men are not render me suspicious vulnerable because of their blackness. or scary. I could inhabit “On the contrary, at Morehouse and other every square inch of HBCUs, black men and women are protec-ted— my six-foot, 200-pound by a campus police force no less. On campus— body without risking and for the first time in my life—I was free to my life.’ run full speed without causing alarm. I raised my voice in public, asserted myself without inciting panic. My blackness did not render me suspicious or scary. I could inhabit every square inch of my six-foot, 200-pound body without risking my life. “HBCUs are rare American institutions in that they are maintained for the affirmation, advancement and protection of black life. In a society in which young black people, men and women, have their lives cut short every day by incarceration and violence—state or otherwise—the schools are sanctuaries from a world at war with black bodies. “
MOREHOUSE MAGAZINE
36 FALL 2015