The New Black Presidents

Of the nation's 120 Negro colleges, most are in the South and most have traditionally had ministers as presidents--often men of intellectual distinction but with no training as educators. However bombastic in the pulpit, they made a point of being obliging to white authority. They demanded little, and they got little. The result was what Sociologists David Riesman and Christopher Jencks have denounced as "an illfinanced, ill-staffed caricature of white higher education." Lately, reflecting both the new pride and the new competence of the U.S.'s black community, a number of more militant Negro college presidents have risen to power.

All professional educators with substantial records of academic achievement, they are committed to integration but are nonetheless convinced of the permanent need for stronger Negro institutions. Responding to the surge of black consciousness among their students, they have added Negro-oriented courses in history, sociology and psychology, and are determinedly trying to make their schools more relevant to the problems and opportunities facing young blacks today. Outstanding among the new Negro presidents:

sbJAMES E. CHEEK, 36, SHAW UNIVERSITY, Raleigh, N.C. (1,078 students). A militant from way back, Cheek was expelled from one high school for "agitation." As an undergraduate at Shaw, he was nearly fired for leading a student strike against "an indifferent, broken-down faculty" and "Victorian social standards." Thus Cheek is an appropriate president for the campus where the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee got its start in 1960. Says Cheek: "I'm not telling my students to be sweet little nigger boys and girls so they can get a good job."

When Cheek took over in 1963, the Baptist university was virtually bankrupt. He mounted an emergency fund-raising campaign that eventually allowed him to double faculty salaries. Full professors now earn up to $14,000, which is in line with faculty salaries at most private white colleges. Following his conviction that Negro applicants who score low on white-oriented aptitude tests are not necessarily unfit for college, he has relaxed entrance requirements, abandoned rigid grading and allowed students to proceed at their own pace, graduating in anywhere from three to six years. When critics suggest that he is indulging in "bargain basement" education, Cheek retorts: "We had not a thing in the world to lose. We weren't going anywhere at the time."

He has expanded the curriculum to include courses on black culture and his tory, next fall plans to launch a new : School of Urban Sciences to attack the problem of ghettos. Says Cheek: "It is our contention that the urban cri sis, except for air pollution and transportation, is basically a problem of black people." Cheek thinks that it is therefore up to black people to find solutions. Rather than overloading his faculty with Ph.D.s, he would prefer to hire "somebody like Claude Brown," the angry author of Manchild in the Promised Land. He would like to set up a program under which an undergraduate would spend two of his four years at Shaw actually living in a New York City ghetto.

sbVIVIAN W. HENDERSON, 45, CLARK COLLEGE, Atlanta, Ga. (1,006 students). An expert in the game of grantsmanship, with a Ph.D. in economics from Iowa State, Henderson is a man of fearsome energy. He is a longtime consultant to the U.S. Government on Negro affairs, helped develop the federal poverty program, and is chairman of the Task Force on Occupational Training in Private Industry for the U.S. Departments of Labor and Commerce. He has dou bled Clark's budget to $3,000,000 since he became president in 1965.

Like Cheek, Henderson puts a high priority on urban studies, is establishing a Southern Center for Studies in Pub lic Policy with a $25,000 planning grant from the Field Foundation. He is also using grants to pay for an upcoming seminar on the economic development of black ghettos and a program to upgrade Negro college newspapers.

A major problem, as Henderson sees it, is the lingering timidity of his trustees, half of whom are white, and he says he solves it by acting first and telling the board about it later. "I'm the sort of guy who doesn't like to ask people whether I can do something or not. I like to move," he says. Henderson is not so cavalier with the students, the most militant of whom see his finesse with foundations as evidence of Uncle Tomism. Indeed, when students recently challenged the school's rules, he quickly agreed to eliminate restrictions on dress, make class attendance optional and do away with dormitory curfews.

sbGEORGE A. OWENS, 49, TOUGALOO COLLEGE, Tougaloo, Miss. (712 students). The son of a sharecropper, Owens put himself through Tougaloo (one job: chauffeuring the president's wife), earned a master's degree in business administration at Columbia on the G.I. Bill.

He returned to Mississippi and became Tougaloo's business manager, rose to the presidency in 1965. "I took over," says Owens, "at a time when new opportunities for Negroes in American life were really coming about. We knew we had to educate our students for a new day of equal opportunity."

One of his first major moves was to establish a cooperative program with the Ivy League's Brown University that includes the exchange of both students and faculty. Owens has also started a remedial course in reading, writing and speaking that is taken by 25% of the students, and a program that he calls a "poor man's Antioch plan," in which students are helped to find course-related summer jobs, many of them in urban ghettos. His students are making the most of these new opportunities: five years ago, about the only career readily open to Tougaloo's graduates was public school teaching and 80% of them went into it; today only 40% become teachers, while 30% go on to graduate school and an equal number enter Government service.

Southern black colleges have never drawn significant financial support from local whites, Tougaloo least of all as a result of its long and honorable history as a hotbed of civil rights activity. "The police in Jackson have often referred to our students as 'them smart niggers from Tougaloo,' " says Owens, and only two years before he took over the presidency, there was a serious effort in the Mississippi legislature to revoke Tougaloo's charter "in the public interest." Owens has no intention of caving in. Says he: "We could do it the other .way, give in a little, but we'd pay more in human dignity and self-respect. The price is simply too high."

sb NORMAN C. FRANCIS, 37, XAVIER UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA, New Orleans (1,362 students). Francis came to Catholic Xavier as a 17-year-old scholarship student and there he has remained, even working in a Xavier dorm while becoming the first Negro ever to earn a law degree at nearby Loyola. He served in a variety of administrative posts, organized the school's recent $10,000,000 expansion program.

Last June he became Xavier's president, a job that throughout the school's 43-year history had been held by white nuns who fully shared lay-Catholic Francis' own concern for improving educational opportunities for blacks. Francis' declared aim is "to steer students into the mainstream of American life," and he has very little patience for the radical Negroes who would rather go it alone. Students must be taught pride, he admits, but they must also be taught the tools with which to compete. "Math is math," he says. "It's not black math." Fervently preaching involvement with the community, Francis is himself the foremost exemplar sitting on more than half a dozen local committees and com missions. He even owns a small piece of the National Football League's New Orleans Saints.

Francis is particularly proud that, every now and then, some bearded Black Power militant drops by for a chat. Francis feels that he scores points by welcoming him with a Black Power handshake (which Francis learned from his eight-year-old son). In other years, Francis points out, "I'm not sure the Black Power militant would have come in the first place, and second, I don't know if the college president would have felt comfortable talking to him."

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