ABSTRACT
The issue was contentious in the black community as early as 1935, when black leaders initiated serious discussion of how to provide equal education for black students, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Thompson of Howard University argued in public in Thompson's Journal. In a provocative piece entitled "Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?" DuBois wrote,
I know that this article will forthwith be interpreted ... as a plea for segregated Negro schools and colleges. It is not .... It is saying in plain English: that a separate Negro school, where children are treated like human beings, trained by teachers of their own race, who know what it means to be black ... is infinitely better than making our boys and girls doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers. (Quoted in Kluger, 1977: 170-172)
And Charles Thompson responded,
Those who argue that the separate school with equal facilities is superior to the mixed school with prejudice should know that the separate school, or separate anything, with equal facilities is a fiction. (Quoted in Kluger, 1977: 170-172)
The disagreement in the black community revolved around three substantive issues. Would integration require or inevitably lead to cultural assimilation? What effect would hostility have on the personal efficacy and academic resilience of black students in desegregated colleges or schools? Would desegregation destroy the public black campuses? The latter was particularly contentious. The black campuses had been indispensable agents of education for generations of African Ameri-
cans, and were a primary institutional pillar in the African-American community, second only to the black chutch.
